A BLEXTRAVAGANZA with ReBLACKa and special guests to throw the wildest end of Black History Month in the history of NYC!

Elaine Welteroth, former editor of Teen Vogue opined “BlackIssuesISSUES needs a show on NETFLIX!”

BlackIssuesISSUES is Blackness on spin cycle- wringing out the hashtags inspired by senseless killings, economic despair, marginalization and other ISSUES plaguing Blackness. If only it were that simple. 

Part talk show, part kiki, part erudite bitch fest masquerading as a town hall with all the king’s horses and king’s men trying to put Blackness Black together again, BlackIssuesISSUES is an invitation for an interracial (yes Whites are welcomed!!), intergenerational, intersectional conversation about race. The ISSUES, solutions and possibilities beyond the pain, shame and guilt. 

BlackIssuesISSUES is as much a serenade and celebration of Blackness as it is an indictment of a system and society that is so toxic, it renders Blackness (that once labored on this land ) a burden. Instead of centering whiteness, BlackIssuesISSUES forces us to reckon with identity politics through its anti-climatic and deeply flawed heroine ReBLACKa Finch who flounders her Blackness in profound ways. ReBLACKa’s atrociously fake British accent and grandiose sense of self, finds her attempting to transcend the Blackness she simultaneous covets when convenient. Editor-at-Large of a magazine called  BlackIssuesISSUES, that doesn’t exist, ReBLACKa, like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland frenetically races to win the race war replete in tutus and ruffles "I'm on deadline, I'm on deadline". ReBLACKa Finch is like Andy Warhol meets Ali G if they were allowed to disrupt anti-Blackness with a purple parasol. 

Special guests will include MacArthur and Peabody Award Recipient Majora Carter and more!

BlackIssuesISSUES will be directed by theatrical visionary and Director of The Public Theater’s Mobile Unit, Karen Ann Daniels. 

BlackIssuesISSUES will be featured at SXSW 2020 and will be presented at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge in the spring of 2020. BlackIssuesISSUES presented at Columbia University’s Teachers College, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Weeksville Heritage Center, Afropunk 2019 and debuted at Ars Nova’s ANT FEST 2018. 

New York Magazine heralded that Kanene’s 2005 SITCHAASSDOWN debut at The New York  International Fringe Theater Festival was “21 perfect pitch characters representing the Black experience”. 

Kanene Ayo Holder is an award winning teacher, activist and performer. She received two National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships to study the abolition and suffrage movement in Brooklyn and the legacy of Zora Neale Hurston. She received numerous fellowships and grants in the arts and academia including from the Colin Powell Center for Policy Study, Bard College’s Difference Project, Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, CORO’s Education Leadership Collaborative, Puffin Foundation for Activist Art, Broadway Advocacy Coalition to craft theater with Columbia Law School about mass incarceration and was a Creative Capital finalist. 

She is currently a diversity consultant with Jennifer Brown Consulting and Prospect Hill Foundation. She’s consulted for The New York Times School, Museum of Art and Design, Apollo Theater and is working on her first book Whiteness: Can I Get a Witness.