Johnson and Rivera-Servera begin by acknowledging their ‘blacktino drag mothers’ Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. This gesture affirms a queer genealogy rooted in queer-of-colour social justice and performance. When they met each other at Northwestern University in 2006, they reveal, they ‘did not know we were kin, except through our queerness’ (p. 2). Their collaboration has since produced two co-edited anthologies, first solo/black/woman in 2014 and now Blacktino Queer Performance.
This collection aims to trace a cartography of previously unpublished performance histories by employing a methodology that goes beyond articulations of identity politics. Throughout, Johnson and Rivera-Servera highlight ruminations and interventions on the fixed categories of blacktino, queer and performance. The term ‘blacktino’ (a combination of Black and Latino) is offered as a framing device that ‘accounts for both interracial subjectivities and social relations’ (p. 2) while simultaneously offering a queer-of-colour critique of theatre and performance studies.
The book is structured in nine ‘parts’. Each part includes a performance text; an essay reflecting on the text, process and performance; and an interview with the creator of the work or someone central to its creation. The contents of each part put into words how theory and embodied practice inform blacktino, queer performance work. The texts, essays and interviews included serve as the first intervention by theatre and performance studies scholars which seek to expand a canon that centres on these intersectional identities and performance forms in all their complexities.
When possible, essays are authored by scholars who have collaborated with artists. This unique perspective frames the practitioners’/scholars’ work as ethnography. Scholars who are not connected as collaborators have been selected for the significant contributions that their work has made to the field of theatre and performance studies, and whose work continues to shape contemporary conversations in the field, such as Sandra L. Richards, Patricia Ybarra and Tavia Nyong'o.
The editors’ investment in boundary blending and breaking is evidenced from the start. In Part 1, Sharon Bridgforth's The love conjure/blues Text Installation (2004) is explored. This genre- and gender-expanding performance employed a jazz aesthetic and considers ‘a range of possibilities of gender expression and sexuality within a rural, Black working class context’ (p. 22). Bridgforth's script is a scaffold from which she conducts the performance. The artist weaves audience response with poetry, installation, multimedia and an ensemble of actors to deliver something that she describes as a ‘living altar’ (p. 81). Bridgforth's performance text is accompanied by Matt Richardson's perspective of an actor who has performed with Bridgforth on multiple occasions.
Part 4 examines the performances of Javier Cardona, who engages multimedia and ensemble work to explore and critique masculinity, specifically in his piece Ah mén. In his interview with scholar Jossianna Arroyo, Cardona states, ‘I am a package of intermixed and tangled things in constant flow’ (p. 279). His words here in English were translated from Spanish by Rivera-Servera. Though the editors undoubtedly had to consider the size of the physical finished book and the potential multilingual fluency of the readers, access to the interview in the original language, in place of or in addition to the translation, would have been beneficial.
Chapter 5 considers editor E. Patrick Johnson's Strange Fruit (1999), a poetic, autobiographical, multimedia solo performance that critiques gender binaries. In his interview Johnson provides an in-depth analysis of the elasticity of the terms ‘queer’ and ‘performance’ (p. 234). Autobiography and multimedia are also foundational in Paul Outlaw's solo play Berserker (2003), a script that employs personal statements made by Jeffrey Dahmer during his court case, as well as statements in The Confessions of Nat Turner, and the words of Essex Hemphill and Samuel Delany to create what scholar Charles I. Nero describes in the accompanying essay as ‘a black gay meditation on interracial desire and blackness disappearing on this battlefield’ (p. 487).
Teatro Luna's devised play Machos (2007) and Jeffrey McCune Jr's play Dancin’ the Downlow (2003) manipulate digital exchanges via email and chat rooms that provide dialogue for an ensemble to articulate the ‘multiplicity of ways masculinity is performed’ (p. 154), specifically in the case of Machos. Both texts exist in conversation with other ensemble texts in the book, including Cuban Hustle (2006) by Cedric Brown, Seens from the Unexpectedness of Love (2014) by Pamela Booker and I Just Love Andy Gibb: A Play in One Act (2016) by Charles Rice-González.
This carefully curated anthology accomplishes its goal of staging a conversation between ‘black and brown performance works and critical traditions’ (p. 3). Blacktino Queer Performance offers its readers the opportunity to participate in a conversation about form, desire, gender and generation, and simultaneously provides a singular, pedagogical tool and resource for scholars, artists and students.
