Quotes from work
for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf

for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf

for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf is Ntozake Shange's first work and most acclaimed theater piece, which premiered in 1976. It consists of a series of poetic monologues to be accompanied by dance movements and music, a form Shange coined as the choreopoem. for colored girls... tells the stories of seven women who have suffered oppression in a racist and sexist society.As a choreopoem, the piece is a series of 20 separate poems choreographed to music that weaves interconnected stories of love, empowerment, struggle and loss into a complex representation of sisterhood. The cast consists of seven nameless African-American women only identified by the colors they are assigned. They are the lady in red, lady in orange, lady in yellow, lady in green, lady in blue, lady in brown, and lady in purple. Subjects from rape, abandonment, abortion and domestic violence are tackled. Shange originally wrote the monologues as separate poems in 1974. Her writing style is idiosyncratic and she often uses vernacular language, unique structure, and unorthodox punctuation to emphasize syncopation. Shange wanted to write for colored girls... in a way that mimicked how real women speak so she could draw her readers' focus to the experience of reading and listening.In December 1974, Shange performed the first incarnation of her choreopoem with four other artists at a women's bar outside Berkeley, California. After moving to New York City, she continued work on for colored girls..., which went on to open at the Booth Theatre in 1976, becoming the second play by a black woman to reach Broadway, preceded by Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun in 1959. Shange updated the original choreopoem in 2010, by adding the poem "positive" and referencing the Iraq War and PTSD.


Ntozake Shange photo

“my spirit is too ancient to understand the separation of soul & gender”

Source: for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf

Ntozake Shange photo
Ntozake Shange photo

Similar authors

Ntozake Shange photo
Ntozake Shange 5
Contemporary African American writer and performance artist 1948–2018
Nadine Gordimer photo
Nadine Gordimer 57
South african Nobel-winning writer
Bob Dylan photo
Bob Dylan 523
American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist
Khalil Gibran photo
Khalil Gibran 111
Lebanese artist, poet, and writer
William S. Burroughs photo
William S. Burroughs 110
American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, a…
Andy Warhol photo
Andy Warhol 133
American artist
Muhammad Ali photo
Muhammad Ali 100
African American boxer, philanthropist and activist
Orson Welles photo
Orson Welles 53
American actor, director, writer and producer
Joseph Campbell photo
Joseph Campbell 140
American mythologist, writer and lecturer
Naguib Mahfouz photo
Naguib Mahfouz 7
Egyptian writer