INTERVIEW: Eisa Davis’ new piece is about breaking from essentialism
Photo: Eisa Davis is the writer, director and performer of The Essentialisn’t. Photo courtesy of Zayira Ray / Provided by Emily Owens PR with permission.
The Essentialisn’t is a new theatrical work written, directed and performed by Eisa Davis, now playing through Sept. 28 at the HERE Arts Center in New York City. In the piece, Davis explores the theme of essentialism, or “the idea that people can be categorized by an unchanging essence or set of qualities they inherently possess.” In the play, she rejects such a concept, instead preferring the notion that a Black woman’s body doesn’t have to perform for society.
Assisting Davis’ vision for this work is a unique staging that incorporates everything from electronic music to a scene in which she sings underwater, according to press notes.
Recently Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with Davis to learn more about The Essentialisn’t. She is a recipient of the USA Artists Fellowship, Creative Capital Award, AUDELCO, Obie for Sustained Excellence in Performance and Herb Alpert Award in theater, according to her biography. She was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her play Bulrusher. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.
How long have you been working on the show? When did inspiration come?
I have been in the water of this piece since I was commissioned by composer Laura Kaminsky and Symphony Space in 2012. We did a workshop production there in 2013 and another workshop with the Public in 2014. I was playing the music in galleries and at Joe’s Pub. Then the piece took a big shift when the world changed, and my own personal life made the story and aesthetic as it felt untenable to me. It went from a conventional musical to a conceptual art piece. That’s where it has lived since, in workshops at the Armory and Sundance Theater Lab.
It was a Covid-safe installation at Performance Space New York during 2021 — they built the water tank for me. In 2023, I did a super fun and terrifying production at Jack in Brooklyn, and now I’m doing this newfangled version at HERE. The Creative Capital Award I got for it has helped me keep it alive, so it’s been a long time.
And we’re going to record all the music and make an album, publish the text as a book. I’ve wondered if the piece is something that I’m going to do my whole life, or it will tell me when it wants to retire.
Inspiration has come in so many forms and shows up daily. I’ll wake up in the morning and get five ideas. I’ll be in rehearsal, and one of my other collaborators will have a great thought about how to add movement or to shift the timing of a line. When you have limited funding, that makes you very creative. I love that this piece is something that I can do with two cents or a whole mountain of cash because it’s about pure presence.
The piece’s inspirations are multitudinous at this point. Figures from the Harlem Renaissance were early models for characters. Conceptual artists like Adrian Piper and Carrie Mae Weems spark all kinds of ideas for me. Thinkers like Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten animate the piece. Working with my friends, the musicians Justin Hicks and Maya Kronfeld, has been a huge influence and gift. And in 2020, when I was swimming in the ocean and singing, I got the inspiration to create the water tank and sing in it.
Was it always your intention to direct and star in the production as well?
I always wanted to create the piece and star in it, but I prefer having someone else be my director so I can just be an irresponsible artist and focus on the thing, rather than all the work around it! Being a director is the hardest job. The buck stops with you.
How is music interwoven into the evening?
It’s a constant. It’s there as song, as fragment, as motif, as recitatif, as sound, as rhythm, as a theoretical tool, as a connection to ancestral energy, as a taskmaster, as liberation. Music is my absolute center, so this piece is a way of swearing my allegiance, renewing my vows to it.
How does the piece “reject the philosophy of essentialism”?
In so many ways. You can’t decide who people are in advance, and you can’t decide what a night out at a performance space is supposed to provide for you. You have to be open to what’s actually there. It seems so kindergarten, not judging a book by its cover, but in these authoritarian times of heightened state violence, it’s a necessary reminder.
What would you say is the commentary you’re offering on Black womanhood?
Like so many other kinds of identity, be you trans, immigrant or Palestinian, for example, Black women get held up by descriptions and assumptions we didn’t create. So the piece is a way of establishing sovereignty, saying I can make the rules, too, for myself, with an understanding of how history and unconscious systems of discrimination impact me. I can be free. My responsibility as an artist is to be so, and it’s important to stand in that and feel its vulnerability at the same time.
What’s it like to partner with the HERE Arts Center?
I’m always shocked when people support my work, so it was a huge surprise when the new co-directors of HERE asked me to come and play at their house. Kristin Marting, the founder and former artistic director, had been a champion of my work as well, so there’s a continuum. HERE is where I did one of my first plays in New York, a play by David Greenspan, so I love just jumping on the C train, going seven stops and landing at this place that has been a home for me all this time.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Essentialisn’t, written, directed and performed by Eisa Davis, continues through Sept. 28 at the HERE Arts Center in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
