by Courtenay Nearburg

Laurie Carlos is not a star. She is not famous, but her work is. By reinterpreting the presentation of drama, incorporating dance, poetry and music into theatrics, she moved outside contemporary American theatre, then surrounded it to overcome. Her first commercial success, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide..., moved from off-Broadway in 1975 to an immensely popular Broadway run from 1976 to 1978, winning an Obie Award in '76 and the Tony Award in both '76 and '77. For Colored Girls was conceived in a bar by Carlos and Ntozaki Shange, who worked with jazz, text and movement, to create a new vernacular in theatre, a language and text that Carlos calls her own.

Born and raised on New York's Lower East Side, Carlos was the product of show business parents: her mother a dancer and her father a drummer. In her recent piece for FronteraFest '97, The Cooking Show and How the Monkey Dances, Carlos explores her relationships to her family, her teachers, her neighbors and the city itself as she takes the grandmotherly role of cooking a healthy meal for the audience as she tells stories and discusses current events like the O.J. Simpson trials. "I invite the audience into my kitchen. It's improvisational work, using excerpts from The Monkey Dances. The reference to self is incorporated in the cooking," Carlos explains.

As she dices and mixes, tales unfold of her grandparents in Alabama and her daughter's refusal to eat meat; and the recipe is spiced up with assorted memories related through songs, dances, and poetry. Carlos moves from the table with innocent grace, reverting from the grandmother to the Monkey child, stirring up the emotions with her delightful repertoire of characterizations that never leave the realm of who Laurie Carlos really is. A child swinging her arms carelessly as she botches an old Negro spiritual she learned in grade school metamorphisizes into a gospel diva giving it her gut-busting best. The self-effacing grandmother gives way to the struggling single mother, then to the sensual jazz poet. And then, you eat.

Carlos devoted herself to performance from an early age. A stout middle-aged woman, she has an ebulliant charm that envelopes her audience as if into her arms. Watching her parents' dreams wither and die as the pressures of raising a family closed in on them, Carlos persevered through the birth of her own daughter while working as a belly-dancer, as a stripper, in a shoe store, and so on. "They were defeated by what the word 'artist' means. It plagues my family to this day. My daughter has a CD out now and it's called 'Walter T. Smith,' after my father," she says.

She was supporting herself as a performer by the age of 18, determined that she would make a living presenting new works. She is insistent about working with new writers, always breaking ground. For Colored Girls was an experimental project, putting seven black women on stage with no costumes and no set -- at first because they couldn't afford them -- and with the backing of musicians Oliver Lake and the World Saxophone Quartet, including Julius Hemphill and David Murray. "It was an immense success in legitimizing the form. No one had done this before. It was outside the black stereotypes that were so common in theatre," says Carlos.

"I never met up with institutionalized racism. I knew it when I saw it, visiting my grandparents in the South. But in New York, I was a black American. It was completely integrated in the projects. Everyone was from someplace else," Carlos says, describing her childhood and her interpretation of her own role in American theatre. "I want to discuss the stories about my historical roots and what is true about me as a world person."

"I discovered that the voice that I wanted to work in was feasible and perhaps commercially viable," Carlos says. "The text is autobiographical, spoken word with choreographed dance and movement. There were seven black women and we were multi-racial, multi-ethnic. American theatre had set itself up for black female stereotypes and those were the only roles available. We challenged all the stereotypes. No one could make us play maids and hookers and mamas anymore."

In the early '80s, Carlos collaborated with Jessica Haggerdorn and Robbie McCauley and began developing a new piece called Sounds and Motions. By 1982, choreographer Jawole Zoller joined the team and they began creating more performance art, incorporating new vocal techniques that just did not exist in theatre. "I have a clear need to integrate what exists -- I'm not working in a compartmentalized way," she says.

Their performance group, Thought Music, gave birth in 1983 to Urban Bushwomen, a dance company created from text-based work using vocal musical interpretation in the context of movement. With Urban Bushwomen, Carlos perfected the techniques of vocalization in dance with breathing. "I wanted an acting company that moved," she explains. With Thought Music, she performed Teeny Town. She has directed and performed with Urban Bushwomen on such projects as Praise House and Heat and has toured with the company, performing at The Walker Art Center, Jacob's Pillow, The Painted Bride Arts Center, and Montpellier.

"The concept of what it means to be a black American artist is so fucked up. You can't function like that," Carlos emphasizes. "It's important to say black American because the definition of African American is too limiting. We must break out of the confinement."

As an interdisciplinary theatre artist, Carlos has written and directed several performance pieces including White Chocolate, Monkey Dances, Persimmon Peel, Organdy Falsetto, and Nonsectarian Conversations with the Dead. Her works have been seen in New York at the Lincoln Center Outdoors, P.S. 122, The Danspace Project, BACA Downtown and DTW, as well as at The Walker Art Center, Penumbra Theatre, and The National Black Arts Festival. Her collaborations with new artists sustain her career, such as her work with former student and Austinite Daniel Jones on Blood:Shock:Boogie, a piece that premiered in FronteraFest '96.

In 1993, Carlos began working with Movin' Spirits Dance Company as co-artistic director with Marlies Yearby. Her recent work with that company includes Feathers at the Flame, which premiered at the Tribeca Arts Center in December 1995, and That Was Like This, This Was Like That, which was presented by Women and Their Work in Austin in January 1996. "In 1993 and 1994 I found myself reevaluating my own work. I found that I am in a big learning curve," Carlos says.

Her work began to take her to Minneapolis/St. Paul more often starting in 1990, when she and McCauley took Persimmon Peel to Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis. She spent the next year working on the film version of Praise House with Julie Dash in New York, then returned to the Twin Cities to direct The Mojo and the Sayso at the Penumbra Theatre. It was her first time to work with Penumbra Theatre Company, where she now is a Fellow-in-Residence, curating Non-English Speaking Spoken Here, a performance art series in two parts, the "Belafonte Chronicles" and "Audre Lorde Sighs." The series involves the works of Native American, Latino, and Huong peoples in the Twin Cities.

"There's a commonality of what we do know that we need to address. Thus, the multi-ethnic nature of my work. Knowing is not an important thing. There is incredible spiritual reexamination going on globally, especially in the Americas," Carlos says.

Carlos expounds the virtue of theatres creating space for the new work of interdisciplinary artists like Austinites Daniel Alexander Jones and Jason Phelps (Aria Inertia). "The fact that Frontera creates an opportunity for these works to be seen is amazing. Penumbra creates space for new forms. It's amazing," she says.

"I just like to say what I say, do what I do, read the reviews, and keep doing it regardless."

Carlos' career has been spent mostly in the theatre, but she is no stranger to the film industry. At the age of 17, she was in two films, and worked for Belefonte Enterprises as an assistant casting director. Her most recent work was with Shu Lea Chang in 1992, as an actor in Fresh Kill, an independent feature that came out in limited release and now plays in Asia. She also appeared in Public Enemy's music video "911 is a Joke." She formed an acting company in New York that attracted luminaries like Samuel L. Jackson (Pulp Fiction) and his wife LaTonya Richardson, Avis Brown, and Tony Award-winner Ruben Hudson (Seven Guitars).

As an actor, Carlos herself recently received rave reviews for Theodore Ward's Big White Fog at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and for creating the role of BayBay in Shay Youngblood's Talking Bones at Penumbra. Over the course of her career, she received the Obie Award for her portrayal of "lady in blue" in For Colored Girls, a Bessie Award for her work in Heat and another Bessie for White Chocolate.

Carlos directs workshops and leads seminars all over the country, and presented a "Breath as Truth" workshop during her recent stay in Austin as a featured artist in the FronteraFest. In the workshop, she shares techniques she developed over six or seven years to facilitate better performance. "Breath ignites muscular memory. The muscle, bones and skin all contain spirit memory. We use the breath to get inside the muscular memory. It helps the artist facilitate emotional life," Carlos says.