By Guilherme Meletti Yazbek
Presented over two evenings as part of Kelly Strayhorn Theater’s Freshworks program, A Conversation, by multidisciplinary artist LaTrea Derome, unfolded as a modest yet affectively charged work-in-progress. The piece operated through a deliberately simple scenic device—one that placed personal narrative at its center while opening a space of shared address with the audience. What emerged was less a fully resolved performance than a process made visible: an offering grounded in lived experience, carrying both political urgency and a quiet, disarming sincerity.
The work unfolds through a sequence of clearly delineated modes. It opens with a quartet—Derome alongside Savionne Chambers, Calina Womack, and Ethan Gwynn—engaging in a movement vocabulary that at times recalls mime, an impression reinforced by the use of white gloves: gestures that suggest communication without speech, marked by moments of lightness, rhythmic play, and brief bursts of energetic jumps that register as joy in the body. This is followed by an extended section of personal testimony in which Derome remains alone on stage, structured around a simple yet effective scenic device: a stool, a microphone, and a music stand from which he reads. The apparatus itself moves across the stage, subtly marking the passage of time while maintaining a direct, unmediated address to the audience. What becomes evident is a compositional logic based on alternation rather than integration, as movement and speech are presented in succession, each occupying its own distinct space within the work.
The extended testimonial section unfolds as an autobiographical narrative, tracing Derome’s coming of age in relation to his sexuality during his high school and college years. In turning to his own life as primary material, the artist situates personal experience as both a poetic resource and a site of inquiry, sharing it with the audience in a gesture that feels at once intimate and disarmingly direct. What is placed on stage is not only a story, but a process of self-articulation—one shaped by the pressures of navigating Black bisexuality within intersecting frameworks of race, gender, sexuality, and faith. The question of what is expected of a Black man—whether masculinity must align with heterosexuality, or whether non-heterosexual identity is immediately collapsed into a gay identity—emerges as a persistent tension. What surfaces is not a stable position, but the strain of negotiating expectations that operate both externally and internally, as community norms and personal desires come into friction.
This negotiation can be productively read through queer of color theorist José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of disidentification, a strategy through which minoritarian subjects engage dominant cultural logics without fully assimilating to them or opposing them outright. In Derome’s case, this process unfolds not only in relation to heteronormativity but also to the expectations imposed upon non-heterosexual subjects themselves. If he is not heterosexual, he is readily read as gay—an identification he does not inhabit. What emerges, then, is the difficulty of navigating this double bind, a space structured as much by exclusion as by misrecognition. Rather than resolving these tensions, the work dwells within them, foregrounding the ongoing labor of self-definition in a social landscape that demands legibility while denying its terms—a condition in which self-disclosure becomes a constant and exhausting demand.
Following the extended testimonial, the work returns to movement through a sequence of duets in which Derome dances consecutively with each of the performers. This structure—a succession of brief pas de deux—gently unsettles the conventional expectations of partnered dance, as the central figure remains constant while the relational dynamic shifts with each encounter. Rather than establishing a fixed pairing, the choreography proposes a series of transient connections, allowing different modes of proximity, support, and exchange to emerge. Given their short duration, however, these encounters remain partial, suggesting directions that do not fully have time to develop. What appears is less a sustained choreographic exploration than a set of emerging relational possibilities, opening space for multiplicity without yet fully consolidating it as a formal language.
At least from my perspective, what ultimately limits the work’s impact is the degree to which its different modes remain compartmentalized. Movement and speech follow one another but rarely intersect, as if each were operating within its own discrete logic. The result is a structure in which the choreographic and the discursive are clearly articulated, yet insufficiently in dialogue. What might become a site of productive tension—where language and movement complicate or reshape one another—remains largely unrealized. In its current form, the work presents its materials side by side rather than allowing them to collide or interrupt, leaving a sense of potential that has not yet been fully activated.
Seen within the context of Freshworks—a residency program that prioritizes experimentation over finished product—A Conversation reads as a meaningful opening rather than a resolved work. The material is compelling, and the impulse behind it carries both political relevance and genuine affective force. At one point, in the post-show talk, Derome remarks, “I might be a writer,” a statement that quietly signals how the residency process has already begun to generate new artistic directions. What remains is the task of shaping a form capable of sustaining that urgency through greater integration and development. In this sense, the piece resembles a diamond not yet fully cut: its value already perceptible, even as its contours continue to take shape. It is precisely the strength of Kelly Strayhorn Theater’s Freshworks program that such processes can unfold without the immediate pressures of completion or marketability, offering artists the time and space to test, revise, and discover. One leaves with a sense of curiosity—less about what the work is, and more about what it might yet become.
A Conversation, by multidisciplinary artist LaTrea Derome, was presented on May 1 & 2, 2026 at Kelly Strayhorn Theater.
Guilherme is a Brazilian theater practitioner and scholar, currently pursuing a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. www.guilhermeyazbek.com
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