Eva Doumbia: Food, French, and AfroDiasporic Performance at Spelman College with Professor Aku Kadogo 11.5.2025

November 5, 2025 | Baldwin Burroughs Theatre, Spelman College

Last night, I attended An Evening with Eva Doumbia, a luminous gathering that braided together art, activism, and Afro-diasporic performance at Spelman College’s Baldwin Burroughs Theatre. The event featured Franco-Ivorian-Malian playwright, director, and activist Eva Doumbia, in conversation with Prof. Johanna Montlouis-Gabriel of Emory University, a PhD student translator Luna Larocque, and Prof. Aku Kadogo, Senior Lecturer in Theatre & Performance at Spelman College—and my mentor.

The evening moved fluidly between French and English, with translation functioning as a kind of choreography—slowing, echoing, and amplifying meaning across language and body. Doumbia’s work resists borders; it embodies the sound of migration, the taste of memory, and the pulse of shared survival.

Performance, Food, and Embodiment

One of the most striking dimensions of Doumbia’s practice is her integration of food and cooking into performance. A short video excerpt from her production Autophagies was shown during the event, revealing how she turns the act of preparing and sharing a meal into theatre—a ceremony of relation. Through dance, spoken word, and song, Doumbia uses the kitchen as stage, table as altar, and body as archive.

Watching the clip in the auditorium, the audience could almost smell the simmering spices. It reminded us that sustenance and storytelling are intertwined; that feeding and remembering are both radical acts. For Doumbia, performance is a communal practice—a means of gathering people around the possibility of being nourished by culture, ancestry, and each other.

Black Violence and Creative Resistance

When asked about what fuels her artistic urgency, Doumbia spoke of the violence that shapes Black life globally—the constant negotiation between visibility and erasure. She described how her work emerges from the ache of that violence but refuses to reproduce it. Instead, she creates where laughter, rhythm, and movement become tools of resistance.

The performances that accompanied her words, including readings by Dionna D. Davis, a Suzi Bass–nominated Outstanding Principal Performer, and students carried this duality. Their choral voices transformed pain into collective resonance, underscoring Doumbia’s commitment to art that heals without forgetting.

On Mentorship and Radical Listening

As always, Prof. Aku Kadogo modeled what it means to facilitate with depth and presence. Understanding Kadogo as a global artist whose embodied archive includes performances and teaching all over the world—from her time living and creating in community with Aboriginal artists in Australia to her travels across continents with Ntozake Shange and the cast of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf—her facilitation carried the weight of lived experience. Her stories of these journeys reminded the audience that the Black feminist body is itself an archive, holding traces of movement, collaboration, and creative survival.

Her questions invited Doumbia to reflect on how diasporic theatre can serve as both mirror and map. Kadogo emphasized the power of radical listening—an embodied pedagogy that calls us to be accountable to what we hear and what we feel.

The dialogue between Doumbia and Kadogo felt like a bridge across oceans—two visionary artists weaving histories of movement, migration, and making into a shared future of Black feminist performance.

Translation as Performance

The act of translation—between languages, between bodies—became one of the evening’s most poignant themes. The rhythm of French followed by English was musical, even choreographic. Each pause carried intention, as if the silence between words was also part of the script. Translation, here, was not a task but a practice of care.

Reflections

Doumbia’s theatre asks: What does it mean to gather? To taste memory? To speak across pain and still sing? Her work reminds us that performance, like the archive, is not only about preservation but transformation.

As I left the theatre, I kept thinking about the scent of imagined spices, the echo of song, and the way bodies leaned forward in listening. These are the traces that sustain us.

Radical Archivy and the Living Archive

Within the framework of Radical Archivy, Doumbia’s performance practice becomes a living archive—a repository made of breath, gesture, and shared ritual. Her integration of cooking, choreography, and multilingual text insists that memory does not sit still on a shelf; it moves, tastes, resists, and renews. Like The Radical Archive Project, her work redefines preservation as participation. To witness Doumbia is to remember that archives can feed us—that every act of gathering, every shared meal, every song sung in translation is, in itself, an archival act.

Event sponsored by:

Emory University’s Departments of French and Italian, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Film and Media Studies, and African American Studies, the Institute of African Studies, Spelman College’s Department of Theatre & Performance—with support from Villa Albertine, France–Atlanta, and The Hightower Fund.

📸 Photos and reflections by Dr. shady Radical

🗂️ Partially Archived in The Radical Archive Project (T.R.A.P.) – access the documentation via the archive search tool