MANIFEST ACTIVISM: A conversation with actor Billie Krishawn
Photos by: Billie Krishawn | www.BillieKrishawn.com
Five days ahead of the March on Washington, Literary Manager Chelsea Radigan sat down with The Till Trilogy’s Billie Krishawn to talk all things summer of 2020; from elementary school playground activism, to finding moments of lightness and rest while documenting an uprising via photojournalism. The full interview is detailed below.
Let’s start with the serious stuff - who is on your team for the apocalypse?
BK: Like, I can get anybody in the world!? I would have to say: Harriet Tubman. You know, some assistance on that front would be super, super awesome. Let’s see, I’ll take...Michelle Obama. I’ll take The Rock. Gotta have some physical protection in the midst of all of this! Yeah, that’s a pretty solid team.
Where is the place you feel most safe?
BK: In whatever my creative space is. And that’s not in a public sense, that’s more in an introspective sense. I feel most comfortable when it’s my art by myself. I’m still hypercritical about where I should be, where I’m not yet. I still kind of cringe when I’m presenting my art in a formal way to others, because I know there’s so much further that I want to go with it. But while creating in my own spaces, it really does feel just endless. It feels like I’m in a space that has no top, but it’s bright and it’s just continuous in any direction I turn.
Can you tell us two truths and a lie?
BK: I have never left the country. I have a passport. And I’d like to go to grad school for visual arts.
How would you describe the role that protest has played in your life? What about in the present?
BK: I’d definitely say that protest was one of the ways in which I’d been introduced to activism. And that’s because when Blockbuster was a thing, my brother and I were always able to get a DVD each time we went - sorry, no DVDs then, that was VHS (haha!) - I would always swap out Selma, Lord, Selma and Ruby Bridges. Those were the two movies, and I remember my parents would be like, “don’t you want to try something else? Maybe try something new this time?” but those would be the two movies, religiously. I think I was fortunate enough to watch movies with two young Black female leads, which is rare even now, but since I watched it so young, that showed me that I can fight for things if I want to, and like, in a good way. And I also had a picture of Harriet Tubman above my bed when I was little, and I used to listen to an audio set of her biography and it was narrated, so, that’s acting.
And at school they wanted to remove this, it was kind of like a hamster wheel that you try to keep up on, from the playground, so I started a petition. This was in elementary school. I went from classroom to classroom trying to get people to sign this petition to bring it back. And it never happened; but, it seems like that made me realize how important it was to speak up.
I think for me then and for me now, I realize that we deserve respect, we deserve rights...but at the end of the day, it’s not always going to be granted. And when it’s not, if we can and when we can, speaking up and fighting for the things that are owed to us is really important. And it’s possible. It takes a long time sometimes, but it’s possible.
Walk us through your decision to pick up a camera and document what you were witnessing in DC this summer.
BK: So, I’m a Taurus; that’s a May birthday. At this point we were March, April, May, three months into quarantine. And you know, the first month I kinda refused to participate in anything, because I was like, “the world’s gonna open up next month, I wanna make sure that I’m available,” (haha). And the second month was like, participating in nothing because, “the world is shut down and everything has been taken from me...I’m just gonna eat.” And I definitely did. And the third month is like things start to clear, my birthday is coming, and I’m thinking, “okay whether this world returns as we know it or not, what do you want? What are some things you can get a hold of, and what are some things you can plan for that you don’t normally have the time to plan for?” And I thought, “well if I could have anything, I’d love to be able to go to grad school for visual art,” and I reached out --
Aha, so that one was true!
BK: Oh yes, haha. Woops!
I went about getting a camera to be able to work my way into grad school. It was a literal gift.
And then maybe two or three weeks later, the events of George Floyd happened. And I wasn’t sure when I heard about the protests that Friday if I was going to go out. Because I protested often, and I stopped protesting in 2016 after Eric Garner, because I realized that some protests were being held by police officers, the very same thing we were trying to fight against. I was torn. I wasn’t exactly sure that that was the route I should go. And then I went on the social medias, and I was seeing thing after thing after thing, and all of a sudden I was like, “I need to go, and I need to go now.” And I did.
(Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images)
That night was the first night that I got tear gassed. It was the first night that I had ever been shot at by police with rubber bullets, and I hadn’t even thought to bring my camera because I just needed to take action. And the next morning, I thought, “I’ve never in my life seen my city in this way, I wonder what it looks like in the morning, I wonder what it looks like now.” So, I went out the next morning with my camera around 8 or 9am, and I went to take pictures of the aftermath. I realized I needed to go out early because if I go out too late, not only was it difficult because they started to blockade all of the streets around The White House, but they had also already begun the erasure process.
This day I was out there around 6:30am. I would go by myself, and as protection I would wear full body clothes, always a headwrap, and put my camera in my pocket to have it film live on Instagram, just in case something happened. And this day, I was so shocked; the first day there were police officers and military personnel, but on this day, at 6:30am it’s the homeless community that are there, myself and maybe two TV channels that are getting set up, and I was shocked because I couldn’t even, I was seeing, what do you call it - not gear, but military wear that I had never seen before in my life. And I asked them who they were and they refused to answer me. After that, I saw them unloading from a charter bus more of these people with weapons that I couldn’t describe. So, I made a video on Instagram and I explained what was happening and it quickly began to get thousands and thousands of views, and some were asking me to post photos, and it was from the social medias, real time, where I was learning what the weapons were, like, one was a grenade launcher. And I was learning from the people who had been watching and following, and from that day on, people began sharing the photos, beginning to send more information, and it became this thing that was larger, and I realized that I had to keep going. It started off as, “I need to do something inside of this quarantine,” and it ended up being deep in the movement.
I was talking with a former colleague yesterday - shoutout to Kristen Jackson - about Adrienne Maree Brown’s Pleasure Activism. One section that really stood out to me was a conversation with Dallas Goldtooth of The 1491’s about the dogma of “hardness” that artivists face, and are often oppressed and/or discredited by. You, Billie, have to be one of the warmest, most open, and loving people I’ve met in the DC community, even within the container of a 5-minute audition, so I immediately thought of you in relationship to this question. Do you feel that tension of an assumed requirement that activism excludes pleasure, laughter, or even love?
BK: Well it’s tough because I think that’s one thing that the Black community has been charged with on a larger scale, is that there can’t be room for softness, or for laughter, or for joy, and I think that’s one of the main issues that is perpetuating the police brutality; that concept that as Black people, we are somehow exempt from pain, exempt from emotions, exempt from sadness and mistakes. Exempt from justice. Exempt from the law. For some reason there’s a gap there, and I feel this personally, because in the video that I posted that I mentioned, at 6:30am, I was really emotional, I was so taken aback, I was lost and confused, and thinking about what I had experienced the previous days and getting really scared for what was waiting for us. I was tearing up in the video, and the video has maybe 230-something comments, and one I saw, in the mix of everything, said, “if she can’t take the heat, then get out of the kitchen.” And I had to explain that like, “I can! First of all, and that’s why I’m here. That’s why you see me in this video at 6:30am explaining what’s happening.” But the fact of the matter is, in the midst of doing this, I can also have emotion. Because Black people have emotions, the people at the forefront have emotions. And that’s the thing, that’s a part of the process. I feel like we have been tasked with being strong and perseverance, and that’s true, but also we have emotions that we’ve waited until we’ve gotten into our personal spaces to deal with. But we should have room to handle them the same way as everybody else.
And in regards to joy, I mean we gotta think about the movements prior. There was a reason there were so many protest songs, there was a reason there were so many Negro spirituals, if we’re taking it prior to the Civil Rights Movement - that was joy, that was sitting inside of ourselves. Joy is being able to see some of these faces that I recognize and love so dearly in the protests, and elbow tap because we’re in the middle of a quarantine. Smile underneath my mask and raise my fist next to them and chant whatever the chant is. That is the joy inside of these moments. And quite literally, it’s important that we sit inside of it and find the moments of joy, because there is a lot of hurt, there is a lot of pain inside of this movement. And we will get swallowed up by it. It’s a lot to take.
I remember I wasn’t sleeping much the first week of everything, I wasn’t eating much, and in my dreams I would hear, it sounds so cliche, but in the dreams I would hear yelling and chanting, and sometimes I would just cry out of nowhere. Always at home. For the most part I was really good at keeping it at home. I remember going to Oluwatoyin [Salau’s] memorial in Adams Morgan and I walked expecting just a memorial for Oluwatoyin, but when I saw all of the photos of people I couldn’t name, let alone the photos I had never seen in my life of women who had experienced injustice, who had been killed by police brutality...I had to take a moment of pause to put my mask down because breathing in a mask, I learned, after being tear gassed and having milk on my mask, is not easy. So I had to take tear breaks. But in order to do that work, we have to find joy. I will say that I wasn’t giving myself leverage to take those breaks and find that joy, and my body caught up to me, and it was like, “you’re going to do this.” So, I understand the idea, but it’s a dangerous concept to believe that in a fight we can’t experience joy. If anything, we must in order to fight, because if we don’t experience joy and lightness in other moments, if we don’t allow ourselves softness, we will never be able to push forward in a long term way. And this fight is long term.
What rest strategies have served you this summer?
BK: Sleep. I do sleep a lot more these days. It has been a little different because I’ve had some life transitions and I haven’t been able to be out physically on the street as much. It’s a different kind of overload or need for rest when you’re not marching ten miles.. On a regular day, in the real world/pre-quarantine world, I was never really a big TV watcher, not really having TVs in my room or anything. But that’s been something that I go to when I come home and I need to decompress or I’m experiencing something. I do a lot of work, and I’m like, “okay, you deserve a break.” I may go to Kim’s Convenience and rest and recharge, a fresh slate, a cleansing of the palette.
Will you be at Friday’s March on Washington?
BK: I want to be there. If this had been at the beginning of everything, I absolutely would have been like, “yes, I’m going out tonight, I’m going out tomorrow, I’m going out Thursday and I’ll be there Friday.” Right now it’s a matter of me trying to figure out exactly how to be inside the movement in a way that’s physically safe for the person I’m living with, and also where I’m still contributing. And trying to remind myself of that same thing I’ve been trying to push to others who couldn’t be out in the streets, that it doesn’t matter how you’re participating, it matters that you are participating. I really do want to be out there Friday, and I want to be out there tonight for Jacob Blake. I want to be out there. How out there, or what my out there will be able to look like, I’m not exactly sure yet.
Tell us about your experience with THE TILL TRILOGY team. Y’all were well on your way to opening one of the most epic, 3-part stories our community has seen. How has the play, your relationships within it to fellow actors, creatives, or your own character, and the history of the piece, evolved?
BK: First of all, the team is amazing. I fell in love, I really, really fell deep for theatre, I finally felt connected to theatre, when I read For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf by Ntozake Shange in high school. I had always been into poetry, and to read a script that wasn’t so text-plain made me realize that there’s poetry inside of every play. And that’s what I fell in love with.
And then fast-forward to somebody who is in the same family: Ifa writes in a similar, brilliantly poetic way, where it’s so different, so heartfelt, and defies the structures of what text ought to be. And that’s where there’s a tapping into. So Ifa’s writing, Ifa’s skillset, Ifa’s words, Ifa’s rhythm, that definitely is a thing I am super in love with and would never turn down an opportunity to interact with.
And Talvin, going back to high school, I stage managed a show that he was devising with the seniors at the time, when Barack Obama was getting elected, so that process was my first time working with him, and I thought we powered in that process, and I loved his style. Fast-forward ten years later, when I’m auditioning for this show and I’m smiling at him from cheek to cheek, and he’s like, “I don’t know you…please start the monologue”. And then halfway through the monologue, I hear “...oh my god!” And I was like, “yes!!!” So, that’s a soft spot. The majority of the cast, I had already worked with on other projects and loved so dearly. The rest of the cast that’s new to me, I also love so dearly. Such a ridiculously talented group. The choreographer, Sandi, is ridiculously talented. The whole team. Such a joy to create with. It’s also a team who takes care. That’s been difficult to navigate because there’s a lot of emotions wrapped up in it. Sometimes there are moments where I’m like, “okay, Mamie is too intense right now. For the sake of my spirit, let me set Mamie aside just to get through this moment, and I’ll bring her back later.” And then getting the time to do that, and then reading this monologue as Billie, and finding that too much because of everything that's happening right now in 2020. So, the process, I mean, even then it held a tender spot. I’d say right now it kinda hurts to pick up the text of any of the trilogy, because it’s something that is not, or was not able to be, just yet. And I’m really curious to see what it will be like when we all get a chance to reconvene, knowing that we’ve just gone through the uprising that we’ve gone through. And hopefully with a little more rights and respect than we did when we entered the process.
How crucial is it that we get back to the theatre? Does the theatre have a civic function anymore?
BK: I think any art has a civic function in 2020. For me, everything happening right now should be a reminder, or a wakeup call, that it’s less about theatre and it’s more about the art, you know? I feel like pre-quarantine we were definitely reaching a point where shows were just being made because shows were being made. “Well this is a good show, let’s add it to the season.” Or, “this is a hit.” And I think what’s happening with the world as a whole, and in America specifically, as Black folk, is that the uprising we’re experiencing now should show us that more than just theatre, it should be about the why of what’s being created, and how it can help. I say that because in quarantine, I think what we’ve seen is art being made, not theatre. What’s been helpful is the art, not theatre. I think there is a civic duty to any art that’s happening, and I think theatre could be helpful if it is aligned with the things that push art. And when you see it through the lens of art vs. theatre, we’re able to acknowledge that one of the main components of art being made is: the artist. And a lot of times in theatre, artists can be secondary. It’s more about the money that’s being made, the production value. Sometimes the artists inside of these productions aren’t being taken care of properly, and it’s only by fueling those artists that the art will be allowed to continue. We’re seeing playwrights being commissioned just to write, we’re seeing theatre actors at home just acting in ways that fill their spirits, and there's a shift that’s happening. And I hope when the world does open up again, I hope the theatre doesn’t forget that and the importance of the artist.
Yes, please. What are you manifesting for 2021?
BK: I love that word, I love manifesting. I am manifesting freedom. And freedom as in, freedom for myself, freedom to be happy and be sad, the freedom to travel, and move about the world. Freedom to create how I want to create without providing myself with strict guidelines. Freedom for my people; and that’s freedom for women to be able to exist without dimming down our womanhood in order to stay safe. Freedom for nonbinary folk and the transgender community to be free as they move about the world as well. Freedom for everybody to experience the theatre world inside of safety.
I’d love to manifest more of my art being circulated. I’d love to manifest more photojournalism work. And I’d love to manifest financial freedom, because it will allow me to help more, create more, provide more. Reach out more. Not because money creates happiness, but money does add to freedom. And my freedom helps get everybody free.
How can we support you right now?
BK: First, the easy way is funding. If anybody ever wants to send funding, that’s the monetary bit. If anybody has any arts supplies they don’t need, that’s always a great way to support. If anybody has any hotel toiletries that they happen to collect, that is a way of supporting me, because I can continue my work creating homeless kits. And on a larger scale, if anybody would like to support in a personal way, I think they can either 1) say every morning one thing that they’re grateful for, and 2) have tough conversations. Leaving room to hear somebody when they’re talking, hear somebody out when they’ve addressed something, really hear and listen and engage, without a detriment of self. Be willing and open to have those conversations, even with people we don’t already agree with, because that’s the only way we’re gonna have change. Start one tough conversation that will lead to clarity that you haven’t had yet.
I’m launching a project called The SoSu Series, which is a project that I hope will get a bit more justice for women and nonbinary folk in the theatre world. And that will be starting this Wednesday [the 26th], so supporting that project on Wednesdays on DC Theatre Scene’s page.
Alright, what was the lie?
BK: I haven’t left the states yet. Wait, that was the truth, haha! The lie is that I don’t have a passport, and therefore...that is why I haven’t left the states yet.
Thank you so much, Billie. What haven’t we covered?
BK: I wanna say that I’m grateful. One thing that isn’t talked about a whole bunch is the good things that we have seen, the truth we have seen. I think there was this narrative of us being rioters, and looters, and violent, and hostile, but really, if you ever spent any time out there, you’d see - first of all, protests are one of the most sanitary environments I’ve ever spent time in. Between everybody wearing face masks properly, everyone is always handing out hand sanitizer. There’s always someone there handing out water, with Mom Notes sometimes. It’s important to remember the humanity in that too. We are just people trying to fight for justice and there’s so much love inside of it. And I want to say thank you to everybody. Thank you for the strides we have made. Thank you for speaking up. While we still have so much further to go, there’s still a lot to be grateful for, and I’m grateful to everybody for the work they’ve done thus far.
If you’d like to support Billie and her work you may do so in the following ways:
Venmo: @BillieKrishawn Paypal: Billie Krishawn Cashapp: $HuggingisHealing
www.BillieKrishawn.com