Artist credit: Ericka Heidrick

Gender, Race, and Class. That was the name of my Introduction to Women's Studies course at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. These three markers are often viewed as the chief identity categories feminist theory and performance are attempting to explore. However Lenelle Moise, a self-identified "hyphenated pomosexual poet," moves beyond antiquated euphemisms such as "the personal is political" in her performance art, not only to politicize her bicultural Haitian-American, Black feminist lesbian identity, but also to problematize the notion that identity can be reduced to such clever categories. Postmodern to the core, Lenelle's performances ooze with sensuality, humor, adept political insight and physical virtuosity. She is a storyteller, performer and activist in one. And as I discovered reading poetry on her website lenellemoise.com, she is even a visual artist.

Although Lenelle just earned an MFA in Playwriting from Smith College in 2004, she has already received critical acclaim as a screenwriter. She co-wrote Sexual Dependency, Bolivian director's Rodrigo Bellott's first feature-length 2003 film exploring the U.S. media's impact on "Third World" youth and African American encounters with immigrant peoples. Interweaving a variety of protagonists' stories through one American underwear ad in Bolivia, the film won the International Film Critics' Award at the Locamo International Film Festival (Switzerland) and although available on DVD, has also been re-released in such independent movie theatres as New York City's Two Boots Pioneer Theatre and Rose Cinemas at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).

I had the opportunity to see Lenelle live, performing her solo show, Womb-Words, Thirsting, at the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance. Lenelle's performances titillate the senses through their poetry, erotic physical expression and audience interaction. Lenelle is truly captivating to watch perform. She sings; she dances; but most importantly, she really knows how to engage her audiences in her work, no small feat when performing for American audiences conditioned for passive spectatorship. She invites her audiences to talk back to her, drawing on the African American performance tradition of call and response. Lenelle feels that it is vital to have permission to speak before a group and instructs us that when she says "KRIK?" asking us in Creole if we want to hear a story, we must respond with "KRAK!" confirming that indeed we do. We must give Lenelle permission to proceed.

Lenelle unabashedly makes eye contact with her audiences, letting them know that not only is she aware that she is being seen by them but that there is no fourth wall. As an audience member, one is as much a part of the performance as the performer. The spectator is also being spectated. For Lenelle, her commitment to performer and audience interaction is a byproduct of her African American history. She laughs during our post-performance interview, telling me, "I find that the Black folks I grew up around... they talked back to the TV. There was never any doubt that they had the right to say, 'No. Don't open that door. The monster is behind that door!' The character on the TV couldn't hear them but they knew there was a relationship there that was real, that they could break that wall. They could be present with the performance.' " In Western culture, "The audience listens quietly [and when I'm done] claps. And I'm trying to really interrupt that."

When watching Lenelle, one cannot help but feel that she has been performing on a stage her entire life. Unsurprisingly, Lenelle claims that art found her early, in the shape of her godfather, a poet. "When I was five year old," she reports, he "started harassing me, saying 'here's a pad of paper. Now, you go write.' And I would just write to him. And that's how I learned poetry. It was not only about writing it, but about reciting it. That's what made it complete for my godfather. And for me." In her teens, Lenelle had a desire to rap. Although she "didn't see many young women rappers happening," she was surrounded by a lot of singing. Raised as a Seventh Day Adventist, Lenelle spent a lot of time in church, which Lenelle says, "was always theatre."

However, Lenelle contests the Western notion that art should be separate from everyday living. "You know," she tells me, "what Americans call art really, in Haitian culture, is just what you do." She cites her mother as an example, remembering how when her mother "is really pissed off, she doesn't say anything. She doesn't say 'I'm pissed off.' She starts singing some old spiritual. And you can hear all the anger and all the nuance in the song she's singing. Art is life."

Lenelle's performances effortlessly meld autobiography, myth, and social commentary into what Lenelle defines as "autobiofiction." Lenelle contests the notion that memory can ever approximate a singular truth of what has passed. She says, "I don't think memory is real. It's just a game we play with ourselves. It's something we have to hold onto to feel sane." For Lenelle, people "remember our lives in retrospect. When you're looking back on something with all the knowledge you have now, you, you know, color it a bit." The act of telling a story is as much an act of picking what version of a story to tell as it is about the story itself. "It's the one that I choose to remember. It's the one I choose to share with you. There are probably alternatives."

Although Lenelle's performance style incorporates a variety of theatrical traditions, her devising process is complicated. "I always start with something and then it evolves… Right now, for example, I'm speaking to you, my hands are out, and I'm expressing. It's all happening at the same time… Sometimes I might just start a phrase of movement." Lenelle cites a dance-theatre section of Womb-Words about Emmett Till as an example. When developing the piece, "I just needed to do the movement and let that come and let that find itself and be articulated fully before I could speak the text that I already knew. It's a negotiation."

Heavily influenced by Brecht but believing in the power of first person storytelling, Lenelle concludes, "the first thing we can do as political people is to just value our personal lives. And to articulate and express because politics is about community. It's about connection, you know. It's about the ways in which we are linked. And how do I know that I am linked to you if I don't tell you my story and you don't tell me yours?" She asks me, earnestly, "How do we begin a conversation about some sort of macro dynamic if we don't have that interpersonal dynamic flowing?"

Postscript

I had the opportunity to follow-up with Lenelle a few days after our interview, and I felt compelled to share her thoughts not only because they further articulate eloquently her notions of how her own life can simultaneously serve as vehicles for art and social activism, but also because they are her words, her truth. Lenelle told me about her visit to the Brooklyn Museum to see a retrospective on artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, someone she says she "would really love to interview" because he refuses "to make art using only a paint brush, paint and canvas. He did use those things, of course, but he integrated the force of his fingers, sometimes his blood. He painted on helmets, window frames and wood." Like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lenelle Moise makes art because she has to, because the world she sees and the niche she has carved out for herself demand that she comment on what is going on around her.

Lenelle concludes her follow-up e-mail with her thoughts on the Third Wave movement and postmodernism. She says that the two have taught us, "We are never either/or but often some funky negotiation of both. It's my job as a genre-b(l)ending artist to learn everything I can about each form that interests me and then to trust that knowledge and express. It's not so much a 'jack of all trades, master of none' thing; rather, I aspire to be a master of fusion. Why should we be separatists in our political and artistic expression?"

Every time Lenelle performs, she starts a dialogue with her audiences. In Womb-Words, as in her poetry, her visual art or her films, she asks her audiences a variety of questions. Although she is genuinely interested to hear their answers, her goal is for people to question their own experiences and question what Lenelle is proposing through her body and her words. "I guess that's the simple way to say it," she concludes. I just want audiences to "be present with the presentation."