Fatherland
Co-Presented by Stages
Houston Cinema Arts Society and Stages co-present a month-long free virtual run of Houston-based actress and playwright Candice D'Meza's Fatherland. The link to view will be emailed after registering.
In Celebration of Haitian Heritage Month
Fatherland, the multimedia one-woman show by Candice D’Meza, is a deeply vulnerable exploration into the grief that comes from disconnection: disconnection from family, from culture, from homelands. Using memoir texts written by D’Meza while planning her absent Haitian father’s funeral, the recorded performance combines with a full-length visual film directed by Houston native Nate Edwards (the co-director of Houston rapper Tobe Ngiwe’s music videos). A merging of Haitian spirituality, song, dance, and theatrical performance, the show acts as a container for a collective grief ritual—whereby audiences are invited to participate, alongside the artist, in a ritual designed to honor the lives of our ancestors and acknowledge the complicated legacies of our personal stories.
| Country, Year | United States, 2021 |
|---|---|
| Director | Eboni Bell, Nate Edwards |
| Writer | Candice D'Meza |
| Cast | Candice D'Meza |
| Language | English |
| Runtime | 54 MINS, SECS |
| Event Type | Performance |
Special Guests
Candice D'Meza
Candice D’Meza (B.A. Black Studies; MPA) is an actor, playwright, multi-disciplinary artist and mother of two based in Houston, Texas. A proud member of the Actors’ Equity Association, she has been called one of the “Seven Young Houston Theater Actors To Watch” and awarded the 2018 Best Utility Player Award by the Houston Press. Social practice in nature, her projects manifest as participatory theatre performance, workshops, and audio-visual installation. Her artistry aims to activate the public space for the reclamation and repatriation of self through song, dance, theatrical performance, audio-visual installation, diary/memoir, and film. Her work explores themes related to identity, African spiritual technologies of connection, land and water. One such project currently in development ,“Fatherland: A Recursive Memoir Mythology Play”, grant funded by the City of Houston, is an audiovisual immersive performance that serves as a community grief ritual for all those who have lost an emotional or physical homeland—by force or by fate.
Currently, her creative writing work explores the uses of fantasy and imagination as a radical liberatory practice. Her ongoing series of liberatory micro-plays, “30 Ways To Get Free”, uses speculative fiction, sci-fi, and afro-futurism to imagine liberated Blackness across the expanse of time. Some of these microplays have been published by The Acentos Review, and are to be filmed and streamed as a part of Catastrophic Theater’s 2020-2021 theater season.