suspension

For the students of Climb & Succeed Charter Academy, a high school in a dystopian near future, the slightest defiance is met with riot-gear-clad security who patrol the halls informed by an AI bot. Armed and ready with each student’s protocols, she deploys harrowing new disciplinary codes that take ‘in-school suspension’ (ISS) to a haunting extreme. In search of their mysteriously missing sister and guided by a mystic teaching artist, Voltaire & Yansa learn to wield their ancestral magic and black girl badassery to combat the harrowing militarization of public education.

Director: Margo Hall

Dramaturg: Lisa Evans

Producers: Ellen Gavin and Melinda White

Kristiana Rae Colón

Kristiana Rae Colón is a poet, playwright, actor, educator, Cave Canem Fellow, creator of #BlackSexMatters and co-director of the #LetUsBreathe Collective. She was awarded 2017 Best Black Playwright by The Black Mall.

Her work has been produced in the US at Oracle Productions, Jackalope Theater, and The Flea, and in London at Arcola Theater. Awards include the Arizona Theatre Company’s 2014 National Latino Playwriting Award. Polarity Ensemble Theater’s Dionysos Festival of New Work. She toured the UK with her collection of poems promised instruments, winner of the inaugural Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize and published by Northwestern University Press.

Kristiana is an alum of the Goodman Theater’s Playwrights Unit where she developed florissant & canfield, an epic reimagining of the Ferguson protests, which was featured in the 2016 Hedgebrook Women Playwrights Festival. She is a resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists and one half of the brother/sister hip-hop duo April Fools. She appeared on the fifth season of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. Kristiana’s writing, producing, and organizing work to radically reimagine power structures, our complicity in them, and visions for liberation.

“Everyone wants to be a Black girl but nobody wants black girls. suspension twerks at the intersection of hashtag blackgirlmagic and the oxymoronic disposability of Black girlhood. Endemically silenced, invisibilized, kidnapped, murdered, institutionalized, and policed, Black girls create culture at a headswimming pace, and while their daily innovations are stolen, repackaged, and sold back to them, their bodies remain in constant peril. suspension is a dystopian ode to that dizzying double dutch dance. An Afrofuturist love letter to the possibilities for rebellion.”

– Kristiana Rae Colón