Ifa Bayeza
Ifa Bayeza
Ifa Bayeza is a playwright, producer, and conceptual theater artist. She wrote the play The Ballad of Emmett Till, which earned her the Edgar Award for Best Play in 2009. She is the sister of Ntozake Shange, and directed Shange's A Photograph: Lovers in Motion, which was a part of the Negro Ensemble Company's 2015 Year of the Woman Play Reading Series in New York City.
"How do I treat this character, given my sensitivity toward being a woman and then my ire being a black person — trying to balance those two?...And as an artist, really wanting to be generous of spirit with all of the characters so that I treat them with humanity and with understanding — to be empathetic without being sympathetic?"
"Language shifts with each character and with time. We were so close that it was difficult to see the end result. A part of it was looking at sound, how sound and language traveled with people through time."
"Because we might not get to truth, we might not get to justice…As, certainly, neither of those really emerged in this saga. But if we as humanity can get to a position of benevolence — which is a greater understanding of one another, empathy for one another, and forgiveness — then thats another beginning."
"Sound is the connecting energy to our African past. When thrown into the Middle Passage and the babble of languages, then given this foreign language, English, that had to be learned by ear in this foreign land, Africans, even though they spoke different languages, found a connection and an umbrella culture emerging from the different ethnic groups thrown together by the brutal rubric of enslavement."
