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Can you be Black and not perform?
This is the question of The Essentialisn’t, a conceptual art installation with award-winning writer and performer Eisa Davis singing for her life in a tank of water, or at the piano in a pasture of hair. A transatlantic undrowning which moves from enslavement through the Harlem Renaissance into the diasporic present, the piece interrogates the racial imaginary with an embrace of interiority and innovation, making space for an uncommodified Black feminine practice of sovereignty and liberation.
Eisa Davis is a writer, composer, and performer. A recipient of a USA Artists Fellowship, Creative Capital Award, an AUDELCO, an Obie for Sustained Excellence in Performance, and the Herb Alpert Award in Theater, Eisa was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her play Bulrusher. Along with her thirteen full-length stageworks, she has written for television, recorded two albums of original music, Something Else and Tinctures, and directed a short film, Remembrance. Notable performance work includes Kindred, Mare of Easttown, The Wire, Kings, The Essentialisn’t, the musical of The Secret Life of Bees, and Passing Strange. An alumnus of New Dramatists, Eisa has received residencies, awards, and fellowships from Sundance Theater Lab, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Helen Merrill Foundation, the Van Lier and Mellon Foundations, and Cave Canem. Eisa lives in Brooklyn, NY.