Title

An Email Interview with Alva Rogers

Authors

Paulette Richards

Files

Description

Actor, writer, and puppeteer Alva Rogers recounts her long-standing interests in theater, and her early performances combining dolls with texts by Zora Neale Hurston and others. Her work as a performance artist led to her role as Eula in the film Daughters of the Dust. She then studied playwriting, musical theater, and history at Brown University, NYU, and Bard College respectively. Rogers’s influences include surrealist painters, magic realism, such writers as Adrienne Kennedy, Ralph Ellison, and Federico Garcia Lorca, and the Gullah/Geechee culture of the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. She uses both dolls and puppets in her non-linear plays, because they “make surreal stories magical and real in ways the human form cannot.” Her co-founding of the Rodeo Caldonia Hi Fidelity Performance Theater, a Black feminist artists’ collective in Brooklyn, has helped create a supportive community for her work.

Publication Date

2019

Keywords

puppetry, performing objects, African American culture

Disciplines

African American Studies | Africana Studies | Arts and Humanities | Other Theatre and Performance Studies | Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies | Theatre and Performance Studies

Recommended Citation

Richards, Paulette, "An Email Interview with Alva Rogers" (2019). Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays. 16.
https://digitalcommons.lib.uconn.edu/ballinst_catalogues/16