Jan 1, 2010

Betsey Brown | Critical Overview

Shange began her literary career as a poet and performer. Strongly influenced by jazz, she sometimes performed improvisational poetry at bars in New York and San Francisco. One such piece, a collection of twenty poems performed with dance and music by a group of seven women, impressed a New York theater director so much that he worked with Shange to develop it into an off- Broadway production in 1975. For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf quickly became a controversial sensation. The “choreopoem,” as Shange terms this experimental work, was...