IN THE PROFESSIONAL ARENA

SHEMAD

Written and Choreographed by Cynthia Oliver

Performed by Cynthia Oliver, Rhetta Aleong, Cynthia Bueschel, Renee Redding-Jones, and Melissa Wynn

Music by Straylight featuring Jason Finkelman, Geoff Gersh, and Charles Cohen

Premiered at Performance Space 122 (New York, NY), 2000

SHEMAD is a full evening choregraphic/performance work that addresses notions of women gone mad. Utilizing Caribbean mythologies behind women who contain immense power over others in their respective communities, I  posit that some diagnoses of “madness” have become a method designed to manage, and contain women’s power and potential in society. This new work problematizes the notion of madness as it has been presumed in our cultures and complicates the way the term has been used within communities of women, men, and larger social constructs in both the Caribbean and the Americas. SHEMAD questions the ways in which categories of speech are employed to determine women who do not “behave” as mad, and tells stories which vocally, physically, and musically embody devices that have been used to “contain” mad women. SHEMAD is an evening-length piece with five, dancing, talking women, live music, beautiful costumes, and of course HIGH DRAMA.