Dramatis Personae

Performance: Aria Dean on the challenges of crafting characters in her 2025 Performa commission

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IT ALWAYS ANNOYS ME, personally and intellectually, when people talk about characters in movies and novels as embodying this or that value or principle. In the case of my own narrative work, and in the specific case of my play The Color Scheme (2025), I am always stressing out about this, especially when it comes to Black characters - since Black people are so easily and so often conscripted into symbolic operations. I am also obsessed with this because of my interest in the history of film theory and experimental cinema, which have long tangoed with psychoanalysis and problems of realism - problems that also lead to investigating the materiality and structure of cinema and cinematic experience. When I work narratively, whether in film, performance or writing, I am always returning to the question of how to avoid presenting complete 'characters', in a literary-psychological sense, and simultaneously avoid creating completely transparent, allegorical characters, in the style of a morality play. When it came to The Color Scheme, this problem revolved not just around dialogue and action, but around the question of the historicity of the characters: The Philosopher and The Poet. I did not want to make the characters in my play exactly historical; that is, I did not want them to be one-to-one representations of historical figures, in this case Alain Locke and Claude McKay. In doing so, they would either become heroes or people. They are either monumentalized themselves or are relatable, and therefore stand-ins for the viewer.