World Collective, Raymond Sawyer’s Afro-Ameri-
can Dance Company, West Coast Dance Works,
and her own company, which was then called For
Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide. In
1975, Shange moved to New York, where Joseph
Papp’s Public Theater produced for colored girls
who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is
enuf. The play achieved phenomenal success and
was only the second play by an African-Ameri-
can woman to reach Broadway (the first being
LORRAINE HANSBERRY’s RAISIN IN THE SUN, which
opened on Broadway in 1958). Shange’s play won
an Obie and the Outer Critics Circle award and
was nominated for Emmy, Grammy, and Tony
awards.
The success of for colored girls is due in part to
Shange’s innovated combination of poetry, music,
and dance and to its deliberately minimalist stage
setting. The play is structured as a series of 20
monologues performed by seven women dressed
in Shange’s personal interpretation of the colors of
the rainbow, with the addition of brown to sym-
bolize the earth. This groundbreaking choreopoem
explores the personal and political implications of
race and gender in the late 20th century. Central
to the play’s movement is the poet/playwright’s in-
sistence on the inextricability of body/voice/spirit.
Part of her project is to redeem stigmatized femi-
ninity, to subvert patriarchal values.
In his analysis of Shange’s invention and treat-
ment of the choreopoem, Kimberly Benston as-
serts the primary features of Shange’s ethnic and
gendered approach to theater and modern dance:
Most distinctive in relation to the canons of
modernist dance is Shange’s sensuous, cere-
bral, and political amalgamations of word,
movement, gesture, and music, which insists
on a modal relation between private and pub-
lic expression. Shange insists not merely on
dancing the ethnic body but on ‘strutting’ it
in a social arena that is rife with multiple ver-
nacular habits, attitudes and sonorities. (87)Shange’s own statement of her orientation to a
vernacular aesthetic echoes John Coltrane’s modal
approach to jazz:
The freedom to move in space, to demand of
my own sweat a perfection that continually be
approached, though never known, waz poem to
me... [D]ance... insisted that everything Af-
rican, everything halfway colloquial, a grimace,
a strut, an arched back over a yawn, waz mine. I
moved what waz my unconscious knowledge of
being in a colored woman’s body to my known
everydayness. (for colored girls, xi)Shange’s preface to for colored girls simulta-
neously traces the play’s production history and
expands upon Shange’s poetics of the shape, di-
rection, and philosophical trajectory of African-
American theater. Like Paul Carter Harrison and a
host of others associated with theater in the black
vernacular, Shange is concerned always with a
crystallization of nommo, the sacred word. Benston
likens her poetics to a manifesto and argues that
“Shange’s Preface emerges as one of the most tex-
tured theater manifestos of the era, surely its most
dazzling synthesis of historical, political, affective,
and pragmatic criteria for a revolutionary mode of
African-American dramatic performance” (83).
Since the premiere of colored girls, Shange has
gone on to publish poetry, fiction, and essays.
Nappy Edges (1978), Shange’s second poetry col-
lection, continues the poet’s idiosyncratic ap-
proach to sound and sense, delineating something
of her autobiography but also, and perhaps more
important, the spiritual autobiography of the black
nation. In the preface, which shares the spirit of
LANGSTON HUGHES’s “The Negro Artist and the Ra-
cial Mountain” and Paul Carter Harrison’s “Black
Theatre in the African Continuum: Word/Song as
Method,” Shange provides an explanation of her
poetics, of the performative affinities as well as
the distinctions between contemporary African-
American poets and musicians, particularly mod-
ern and contemporary musicians of all musical
genres. In the tradition of her African-American
literary forebears, Shange is not afraid to re-create
Western forms and traditions.
Shange’s most recent adult fiction is the novel
Liliane: Resurrection of the Daughter (1994) and
a collection of essays on Third World cuisine and
culture, If I Can Cook, You Know God Can (1999).Shange, Ntozake 459