for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf
Fifty years on, For Colored Girls still hits. Ntozake Shange’s 1976 choreopoem arrives at the Yard Theatre with all the love, rage, grief, humour and sisterhood that made it a landmark — and thematically, not nearly as dated as you’d expect.
Upon arrival, the first thing you’ll notice is that there’s nothing on stage. No elaborate set or props to hide behind. Instead, director Diane Page has the women watch one another from the edges, gather, separate and occasionally become silhouettes against the light. When one woman speaks, the others are there to witness her, responding with hums and snaps of assent and giving the individual poems a sense of continuity and collective experience.
It’s a smart choice, particularly given that some previous productions have allowed the individual poems to feel disconnected: a series of turns, not a cohesive work. The 2022 Broadway revival, for example, was praised for its exuberance but also criticised for throwing in so much spectacle and movement that the text occasionally got lost.
Shange coined the term ‘choreopoem’ for this thrilling collision of poetry, music and movement. Her longtime collaborator Dianne McIntyre described the process as responding to the energy and meaning of Shange’s words: everybody thinking in motion, with the boundaries between dancer, actor and singer deliberately blurred.
There are moments at the Yard’s first UK revival in when the movement feels a little too conscious of itself as choreography rather than...
