"Speakin Arms" and Dancing Bodies in Ntozake Shange

This article considers ideas of embodiment and theatricality in Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbox is enuf, which was originally conceived as a series of spoken-word poems. The production’s move to the stage signifies an almost-complete rewriting: the conversion from poem to performance presents the literal embodiment of a preexisting text, and, at least to some extent, the sublimation of language by body. This essay argues that Shange creates a theatre of the physical, and, in particular, a theatre that insists upon—depends upon—the primacy of its only constant: the black female body.