In a world that treats Black Life as if it’s disposable, Taja Lindley is The Bag Lady, urgently grappling with the current and historical socio-political climate that makes anti-Black policies, practices, and culture possible. The Bag Lady Manifesta is an immersive installation of memory and a participatory performance ritual where audiences are invited to (re)consider what to let go of, and what to remember—individually and collectively. Through dynamic movement, burlesque, text, soundscapes, ritual, and projection, Lindley adorns and activates her Black, queer, female body with trash bags to traverse the dumping grounds and shadow side(s) of herself, the audience, and the United States.
The Bag Lady is the accumulation of discarded lives and abandoned histories reeking havoc on the amnesia, the forgetting, the erasure, and the silencing. Remembering is the responsibility of the living. Are you doing your work? Because an unacknowledged history produces ghosts.
Directed by Tanisha Christie, The Bag Lady Manifesta is inspired by previous iterations of Lindley’s Bag Lady work, including This Ain’t A Eulogy: A Ritual for Re-Membering, and was presented as the culmination of her residency at Dixon Place.
There will be a post-show discussion immediately following the performance.
