Breaking It Down

Nicole Hodges Persley is an associate professor of American Studies and African and African American Studies at the University of Kansas. She is the a courtesy faculty member of the Department of Theatre & Dance. Hodges Persley is a member of SAG/AFTRA/AEA and Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC). She has performance and directing credits in regional theater, television and film. Notable directing credits include Midnight Black, Rachel, Dutchman, Sunset Baby, and her award winning short films Epiphany and Abishai. She is the author of the forthcoming book Sampling and Remixing Blackness in Hip-hop Theater and Performance. She is the Artistic Director of KC Melting Pot Theatre, Kansas City’s premier Black Theatre company. Hodges Persley the co-founder of Create Ensemble, a digital platform for creative artists of color, and the founder of Black Performance Project, a virtual multimodal maker space.Monica White Ndounou is an associate professor of theater and the 2017-2018 Sony Music Fellow at Dartmouth College. She is the founding Executive Director of The CRAFT Institute and the award-winning author of Shaping the Future of African American Film: Color-Coded Economics and the Story Behind the Numbers. Also an actor, director and member of Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), her notable directing credits include Pass Over, Gem of the Ocean, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. She is a founding member of the National Advisory Committee of The Black Seed, a national strategic plan to create impact and thrivability for Black theater institutions and initiatives. She is an alum of The Black Arts Institute and a co-founder of Create Ensemble, a digital platform for creative artists of color

Persley and Ndounou—accomplished educators, performers, and directors who cofounded CreateEnsemble, a social media platform for artists of color—have written an acting guide specifically for people of the “global majority” (the more than 80 percent of the world’s population that is nonwhite). Focusing on stage audition skills that can easily be applied to screen acting, the authors encourage actors of the global majority (AGM) to treat auditions like job interviews. They provide practical guidance on establishing boundaries, developing a mission statement, increasing emotional vocabulary, creating self-taped auditions, vetting agents and managers, creating résumés, and developing a social media presence. Persley and Ndounou discuss how to handle situations where AGM are asked to read for dehumanizing roles that rely on racial or gender stereotypes; they also make the case that Stanislavski-based techniques, which push performers to disconnect from their emotions and gender and racial identity, can be harmful and limiting for AGM. Everyone involved in the performing arts, from professors to casting directors to actors to students, especially those just starting out, should read this eye-opening work.