Jayda Jones
Major: Theatre / Digital Technology and Emerging Media
Biography: Homegrown from the projects of southwestern PA, Jayda Jones (she/her) is a synergistic creative multimedia artist keen on offering equitable and safe spaces for collaboration, empathy, and experimentation in her work. Fascinated by the complexities of the human psyche intersected with explorations of subverting our subjective realities through philosophy and digital technology, Jayda is dedicated to telling stories that shatter monolithic perceptions of Black and Brown bodies in society.
Project Title: IS GOD IS written by Aleshea Harris, Directed by Jayda Jones
Faculty Mentor: Terrence I Mosley, Department of Theatre
Abstract:
IS GOD IS
Written by Aleshea Harris
Directed by Jayda Jones
Fordham Theatre Directing Program
This piece is important to the Fordham community because it features black bodies and experiences dismantling and eradicating all code-switching, internalized anti-Blackness, and suppression of powerful emotions in mainstream society’s comfort. It devolves into the pertinent exploration of the intersectionality of race and social/class structures with the misogynoir, or the specific marginalization of Black women in America.
Aleshea Harris explores the ancient, the modern, the tragic, the mythic, and the epic in her darkly comedic, tragic, and unapologetic play, Is God Is. The play is about two abandoned twin sisters who’ve paved their way through the foster system and life with visible burns and scars. Having gone through raising themselves and one another, they find out that their parents are not only alive but that their father’s vengeance is what sparked the fire that almost killed them. With their mother craving vengeance on her deathbed, will they fulfill her dying wish by killing their only other biological parent?
Through college, this play healed my relationship with myself as I grew to understand it and its commentary on respectability politics, and implement its lessons of personal freedom into my own life. This play helped me to deal with both that and my identity based on my environment, and reclaim my own experiences and power. Black women everywhere, especially at Fordham, deserve and need to see themselves represented authentically and vulnerably in this art.