Ivorian Koffi Kwahulé has authored some 25 plays that are among the most performed francophone works in Europe. Writing often with jazz music in the background, he seeks to build the kind of “monument to absence” that he believes jazz is: recognizing both its origins and its haunting presence. His play Jaz (1998), reveals a character split between a voice and a musical instrument. In one of his more recent stage pieces, SAMO, A Tribute to Basquiat (2017), he attempts to capture the painterly style of Jean-Michel Basquiat through the word-play, rhythm, and shifts in register of his play text. Judith Miller will focus on these two plays to examine the ways in which Kwahulé inflects questions of theatrical representation and of “identity.”

Judith Miller is Collegiate Professor in the Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture of New York University. She has authored numerous articles on French and Francophone theatre, translated some 20 plays from the French, as well as a novel and a psychoanalytic study; and, while at The University of Wisconsin-Madison, directed over 20 plays in French with her students. Her most recent publications include an anthology of plays, translated into English by herself and Chantal Bilodeau, by Ivorian writer Koffi Kwahulé: Seven Plays of Koffi Kwahulé: In and Out of Africa (Michigan, 2017); a study of the director of the Théâtre du Soleil, Ariane Mnouchkine (Routledge, 2018); and a translation of a novel by Guadeloupian author Gerty Dambury, The Restless (The Feminist Press, 2018).
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This event is free and open to the public thanks to the sponsorship of the HI Performance Research Workshop, the Melodia E. Jones Endowed Chair in French, the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, the Department of Theatre and Dance, the Gender Institute, and the HI Modernisms Research Workshop.