Bridgerton's Adjoa Andoh talks "To Hear Her Speak" exhibit in DC

Well, welcome back to Fox 5 Weekend Live on this Saturday. I'm Sina Gebra-Abba. There is a fascinating new exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Library exploring the histories of Black women in Shakespearean performance and the representation of Black women in early European art and literature. It's called To Hear Her Speak. Exhibition curator Dr. Patricia Akimi is joining us along with exhibition chair plus acclaimed Shakespearean actor and Bridgerton star Adwoa Aboah joining us as well to tell us all about it hello ladies hi hello hello i mean it's such a pleasure to be chatting with both of you today and when i saw um the website for the for the exhibition it just caught my eye immediately because i feel like it's two notions that people don't always um link in terms of you know the identities of black women and shakespearean works but as this exhibition shows us they are linked so tell us sort of how this idea even came about well it really starts with the um the title for this exhibition To Hear Her Speak which comes from shakespeare's sonnet 130 which is my mistress eyes are nothing like the sun which is lots of people's favorite and it's it's a beautiful poem in which the speaker is describing a woman and it seems kind of clear from the details that this woman might be a black woman but the exhibition is less about that mystery and more about something else that happens in the poem which is that the speaker switches from talking about the way this woman looks to imagining the way that she speaks and the poem is um it's fantasizing about this moment but the reality is we do have over 400 years of black women's voices as they engage with shakespeare and make incredible new work and Angela's career is a testament to that yeah tell us how you got involved I'm sorry go ahead no I'm sorry I was just going to say I do love my Shakespeare I said to Patricia we were walking around the exhibition this morning and I just I find it profoundly moving and I just said if I wish six-year-old me had had an exhibition like this to go to so that I would feel encouraged that stuff that i was already starting to feel about what made me happy as a kid um that i might have had permission to think oh this is actually somewhere where i can be i you know i have role models i have uh you know i have i have examples ahead of me that would say it's okay yes you can be you you can be brown and female and love Shakespeare and get involved in doing Shakespeare And I think, you know, we we love the writer who writes on a heartbeat, who cares about all human beings and this exhibition is it's just a wonderful encouragement to to look at the impact of Shakespeare on the hearts of black women who, you know, go back 400 years. would unlikely to be in a position where one would think well i think you could be a Shakespearean actor um or so to to have this exhibition showing these bold courageous souls who just went but i love it it moves me i want to be i want to be in it is a great encouragement for for all of us be you black or white or anything else or male or female you know um to come along and say what are your dreams how do you want to chase your dreams and and patricia and her research team have just you know they've done the detective work to go back through the records and just get a little sniff of somebody who who who may have been involved whose name we don't know whose history we don't know um so there's a great act of discovery and celebration happening down here at the Folger wow that is so beautiful and uh dr akimi tell us more about that sort of research and sort of scavenging, as she was just mentioning, because I do imagine it's not easy. It certainly isn't. In fact, most libraries and repositories, if you go into the catalog and say, show me everything you've got on Shakespeare and Black women, it's not going to be a lot of hits. So part of our work was to really find other ways of looking, to look into the lives of Black women who we know had some interest or connection with Shakespeare to seek out the objects that helped to tell that story. So one example is Maya Angelou, who in her memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she talks about a deep connection to Sonnet 29, When in Disgrace with Fortune and Men's Eyes. But I don't know if a lot of folks know that she went on to be an avid reader of Shakespeare, a Shakespearean herself and that when she was a professor at Wake Forest she was teaching Shakespeare courses directing student productions of Macbeth and just her deep connection with Shakespeare goes far beyond a single moment in her memoir it was a lifelong pursuit yeah no i did not know that so thank you for sharing that with us and how did you two ladies get connected sort of on this venture well um i am uh Shakespeare anorak i'm Shakespeare nut and um patricia and i had a colleague uh in in common uh uh dr farah kareem cooper who uh who is head who heads up the Folger Shakespeare Library now um and i knew farah from the uk I did the first all-women-of-colour Shakespeare production in the UK. We did Richard II. In fact, there's a little bit of video and there's photographs and all sorts of things in the exhibition. So I got involved with the American Association of Shakespeare Scholars, and then when Farah came here, I was the inaugural director's resident. So I was here earlier this year in Washington and doing all sorts of Shakespeare things, going to schools, teaching kids, doing lectures. We did a performance with John Douglas Thompson of the Scottish play. So all sorts of stuff was going on. So basically, I'm the bad penny that keeps turning up. But I'm chair of this exhibition, so that's why I've come back this time. No, that's amazing. I wanted to share that Angela is also the voice of this exhibition. Oh, yeah. There is a fantastic audio guide accompanying the exhibition. So if you come to the Folger and you listen to the audio guide, I'm afraid you're going to avoid me. The voice of Adelaide. We don't want to. We don't want to avoid you. I'm curious. I mean, both of you are so well versed in Shakespeare and Shakespearean works. I'm curious if there was anything that surprised you sort of in compiling all of this and diving into this exhibit. Absolutely. I think what surprised me was how many of the objects that are in this exhibit came really close to not existing at all. How important it is that we think about how to preserve the objects that tell the stories, particularly of marginalized people, because we are the ones who decide what has value and what has value is the storytelling of the future. that playbill that you showed me this is there's uh there's an image in the exhibition of the playbill in 1821 in New York a production of Richard III an all-black company uh it's the first playbill we know of that has the names of black women as actors starring in a Shakespeare production and that playbill has not been seen for over 50 years we have an image of it but the object itself is missing 1821 wow wow no that's mind-blowing to think of and something that you wouldn't even think exists so yeah it just shows the power and necessity of this exhibition um and speaking of you know how long is it going to be around when can people kind of come down and check it out the exhibition is open through May 2nd and you can learn more about it at folger.edu slash speak and it's on now period okay lovely well thank you ladies so so much this was such a pleasure and and i'm so glad that you've done this and that you've created this and put this out there for people so thank you so much for that as well thank you for having us yes