The Work
2023–PRESENT
THE CHANGER
& THE CHANGED
“The artist has been calling me. The artist wants to heal and explore. Wants me to dance with my swords.”
Narratives capture our experiences and tell the story of what happened. Beyond the story of what happened is a sacred space that holds the lessons: the story of why it happened, why it's important and what it means. The realm of ancestral wisdom and myth. THE CHANGER & THE CHANGED invokes this space. As a career retrospective and performance memoir of Dazié Grego’s life, the work calls on the ancestors, contemplates the spiritual and creates a personal mythology populated with sacred sculptural artifacts by Derrick Miller-Handley. THE CHANGER & THE CHANGED takes a journey through time, tracing the contours of Dazié’s life experiences to uncover what meaning might lie inside the vessel of change.
BEHIND THE WORK—Drawing inspiration from the mythological construct of the hero’s journey, a nine month dialogue was forged between Dazié’s writing + performance and concepts of sacred space, ritual and sacred objects. Derrick conceived and facilitated the ritualized creation of these deeply personal objects: a ceremonial mask representing The Artist spirit; “death masks” captured from lifecasts contemplating the ancestors, death, and rebirth of self; shields depicting Dazié’s journey and formed from over 30 years of Dazié’s journals; hand lettered glyphs inspired by African diasporic art that make Dazié’s writing visible and ubiquitous in this sacred space.
Written and performed by Dazié Grego. Art direction, production, sculpture and visual art by Derrick Miller-Handley. Original music by Dazié Grego.
Features performances by Keiva Lei Cadena and Nyree Young a.k.a. Ngaire
Featured in the 2023 National Queer Arts Festival with the generous support of Queer Cultural Center, East Bay Community Foundation, Zellerbach Foundation and Theater Bay Area.
2021
THE 45th
“Things have got to change. But first, you’ve got to get MAD! You’ve got to say ‘I am mad as hell, and I am not going to take this anymore.’”
THE 45TH is a docudrama created and conceived by Dazié Grego that weaves personally conducted interviews, found text, and curated performances into a virtual theatrical event. THE 45TH reveals how BLACK people have contemplated, confronted, made sense of, and been changed by the 45th President of the United States.
BEHIND THE WORK—A community of Bay Area artists and performers were called in to breathe life into THE 45Th. Some contributed original pieces of work while others offered interpretations of found text and interviews conducted with BLACK folks. Visual imagery for THE 45TH was created by Shanon Prasad and developed collaboratively with Dazié and Derrick Miller-Handley, generating a collection of arresting imagery to promote the show.
Created and curated by Dazié Grego.
Features Perfromances by: jose e. abad, Charles Peeples III, Dazié Grego, Derrick Miller-Handley, Kiersten Gray, Joyce Lee, Gabriel Christian, Nazelah Jamison, Jasmine Williams, Beyond Deep Productions, Phaedra Tillery, Blackberri, Desiree Rogers, Mateo Smith, Rashad Prigden, Kamu Abayomi, Chris Babingui, Kiazi Malonga, Rakeem Richards, and Ajai Wilborn.
Features visual art by Shanon Prasad, visual art direction by Derrick Miller-Handley and music by Dazié Grego and Juba Kalamka.
Featured in the 2021 National Queer Arts Festival and the 2021 San Francisco International Arts Festival
2016–2019
NIGGA-Roo
“Born of cotton wombs. Softly whipped to coffin. Nappy hair to prune in hopes to stop the laughin’. Blistered foot is doomed to walk another day. Uneducated tongue, careful what you say.”
NIGGA-ROO is a performance based inquiry into BLACK identity. This Solo work surveys and dissects BLACKness as an original and necessary social construct. NIGGA-ROO brings black-caricature, blackface, enslavement of BLACK bodies and the proliferation of the word “nigga” in popular culture into direct confrontation with the BLACK self. Spoken word, movement and monologue converse with projected imagery and video to disarm and disrupt a world view of what BLACKness is.
BEHIND THE WORK—NIGGA-ROO evolved over several years as a call and response between Dazié Grego’s writing + performance and the visual world Derrick Miller-Handley would create. The writing came first. In response to the earliest drafts of the script, Derrick developed an abstracted and metaphorical visual language to meet the intensity and pace of the writing. A figure/ground motif implies a co-dependent relationship between BLACKness and whiteness while the flattening of race into stark black and white contrast suggests the mechanism by which one’s humanity is flattened by notions of race. A nameless character, all black, taunts and provokes this flattening—appearing as fully dimensional and confrontational in still and video form. In response, Dazié developed a relationship to this imagery and character on-stage, generating original vignettes and imagery through performance.
Written and performed by Dazié Grego. Art direction, videograpahy, photography and graphic art by Derrick Miller-Handley. Original music by Dazié Grego.
Voted Best of Finge at the 2017 San Francisco Fringe Festival
Artwork featured in the 2015 NYCxDesign Pratt Design Shows
2010–2019
Am I A man
“A real man knows that sexuality isn’t a choice. It’s a reality. Now, my dick is good but it ain’t no magic wand that’s going to make you want me. Is it that you want me?”
Introduced declaritively as I AM A MAN in 2010 and reframed as an inquiry in the 2019 reprise, AM I A MAN is Dazié Grego’s first full-length solo show. The work brings focus to the ways QUEER men of color claim and hold their masculinity. Through original characters, movement and monologue AM I A MAN maintains a core identity based in manhood while disrupting and bending heteronormative ideologies around what it actually means to be a man.
BEHIND THE WORK—AM I A MAN was first developed as I AM A MAN while Dazié Grego and Derrick Miller-Handley shared an apartment in Oakland, CA. Conversations about current events, incidents of homophobia in their neighborhood, identity, masculinity, sexuality and race inspired a desire to connect the urgency of civil rights era declarations of BLACK manhood with a contemporary declaration of BLACK and QUEER manhood. The iconic “I AM A MAN” protest poster inspired the name of the show and promotional imagery. This visual dialogue between that icon of protest and the show evolved over the years, settling on a literal restructuring of the iconic declaration as an inquiry and renaming of the show to “AM I A MAN.”
Written and performed by Dazié Grego. Visual art direction and visual art by Derrick Miller-Handley.
Featured in the 2019 Frigid Fringe Festival
