Students viewed Angela Davis' life as portrayed in Compagnie L'Héliotrope's production at Rooke. Photo courtesy of Columbia GSAPP via WikiMedia Commons.
By Fang Cieprisz ’26
Staff Writer
Content warning: This article discusses racism, racialized violence, police brutality and murder.
One might not expect a “History of the United States” from a French theater company, but Compagnie L’Héliotrope’s production of “Angela Davis, A History of the United States” did just that this past weekend at Rooke Theater. The one-woman play features a combination of monologues, music and media that provide an insightful look into the life and work of African-American scholar and activist Angela Davis from an international perspective.
The play begins with a video of actress Astrid Bayiha portraying Angela Davis in conversation with a French interviewer about Davis’ feminism in the context of present day. Davis tells the interviewer that her brand of feminism is not limited to solely women’s issues but extends to fighting for all oppressed peoples, an idea that could be described as the play’s thesis statement. When the interviewer questions Davis on violence, especially in the context of George Floyd’s death and its aftermath, the video fades out, and Bayiha takes center stage.
The play is divided into two parts, each centered around the acts of violence that have shaped Davis’ life. When the spotlight first illuminates her, she begins rapping about being wrongfully accused of murder. Through the music, written by composer Blade MC Alimbaye, audiences learn about Jonathan Jackson. Protesting the racist treatment of his imprisoned brother in 1970, Jackson opened fire on a California courthouse with a rifle taken from the Black Panther Party’s weapons cache, which was registered to Angela Davis. Switching to a monologue, Davis describes her time on the run, having to hide her afro and knowing that other light-skinned Black women would be harassed because of her “crime,” before finally being caught and charged with murder and kidnapping.
The second part of the play shows Davis reaching back further into her past, to her education. She recalls studying French at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and visiting France her sophomore year to study French philosophy. While abroad, Davis learned of the 1963 Ku Klux Klan bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, the victims of which she knew personally. According to Columbia Law, after completing her degree in philosophy at Brandeis, Davis attended the University of Frankfurt for graduate school, where she encountered the Karl Marx quote, “The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” This quote, along with her grief over the Birmingham bombing and the 1965 riots against police brutality in Watts, a Black neighborhood in Los Angeles, inspired Davis to return to the United States.
After bridging the two timelines, the screen behind Bayiha lights up again, with images of protests worldwide calling for Davis’ release from prison. Atop of the photos reads the text “Free Angela [Davis]” in various languages. Returning to the topic of her imprisonment, Davis highlights the intersection of her identities, being both Black and a woman, alongside her affiliation with communism, as reasons for her mistreatment at the hands of the judicial system.
She asks the audience: What does it mean to be Black, a woman and a communist? What could three identities and three felony charges add up to? Davis gives us two outcomes; the first, she says, would be the triumph of the white establishment, a life sentence. But the second, more hopeful outcome, was “revolution to the power of three.” Davis envisions a revolution incorporating Black, feminist and communist movements, echoing the sentiment expressed at the beginning of the play, that feminism is not about issues solely faced by women.
At this moment, the images on the screen have changed. Instead of showing the worldwide protests in support of Davis, it depicts images of protesters holding signs that say things like “Justice for Breonna Taylor” or standing defiant against police, all in the same black-and-white color as before.
Director Paul Desveaux explained the choice to convert the current images into black-and-white to demonstrate a coherent story, that today’s struggles can connect back to protests of the ’60s and ’70s. As these images play on the screen, Davis continues to deliver her speech about how her identities intersected in a way that made her a symbol of a movement while at the same time acknowledging that if these events had not happened to her, they would have happened to another woman just like her. The takeaway, it seems, is that a movement’s strength lies not in its leaders, but in the collective.
After viewing the play and learning about Davis’ travels abroad, perhaps the idea of a French history of the United States makes more sense. Before the show, Assistant Professor of Religion Meredith Coleman-Tobias introduced the play as “A French company on American soil — in keeping with Davis’ multi-sited life story,” and spoke about the aftermath of Davis’ release from prison, traveling the world and “extend[ing] the longheld African American and broader diaspora tradition of finding and sustaining allied networks outside of our home countries — encouraging camaraderie neither through proximity nor passport — but rather based within sociopolitical conviction and sheer nerve.”
In an interview, Bayiha agreed with Desveaux that “This story is not only a story of the United States, because yes, we are French. I am French, and I know Angela Davis. I admire her. She’s an international figure, and I think that her fight, her story, in a way, belongs to everybody. … I am also a Black woman, I am also a woman, so I know, and I feel, I had lived, also, not all the things that she lived, but I know what she means, I know it, and I totally agree with her thoughts. … In France, we face a lot of things that are not totally the same [as] here, but in a way we can compare them, because police repression, the violence of the state, the racism of the state, of the society, we can feel it and live it also in France. So it’s not so far, for us. It’s in a way, the same fight even if it is not really the same story.”
Just as Angela Davis attended college in Massachusetts and studied abroad, Mount Holyoke students are all members of a multicultural, international academic community based in Massachusetts. French-American student Elizabeth Murray ’26 said after the performance in French, that not only did she thoroughly enjoy the play, but that “It was also really nice to see a piece in French. It felt like a slice of home. It’s one of the pros of being bilingual that I can enjoy art like this.”
However, the play also resonated with non-French speakers, like Dominique Smith ’26. “As a beginner French speaker, I decided to go to the play to get some extra practice with the language. But instead, I found myself mesmerized by such an amazing take on the life of Angela Davis. From the [musical] beats to the acting, this theatrical performance was both fun and so informative about this important figure in history.”
While for Murray, the play’s multicultural aspect was a way to bring part of her home life here to Mount Holyoke, for Smith, it was a way of broadening her horizons to other cultures. But the play has a resonance at Mount Holyoke not only culturally but historically. In her opening remarks, Professor Coleman-Tobias spoke about Mount Holyoke’s own historical connections to the Black feminist movement as a meeting point of the Combahee River Collective and intellectual home, past and present, to Black feminists such as Barbara Smith and Professor Sarah Stefana Smith — “At moments, Mount Holyoke has been a friend of Black feminist thought,” she said.
Given Mount Holyoke’s connections to both the international community and Black feminism, much can be gleaned from this play. First, a major theme is the tension between thought and action. Davis finds herself torn between studying philosophy and putting it into practice on the ground, eventually situating herself at the University of California Los Angeles’ urban campus and taking on the role of scholar-activist.
People often write off small liberal arts colleges like Mount Holyoke as too insular, particularly due to academia’s tendency to consider issues at the abstract, systemic level without considering the real-world implications. Angela Davis shows that it is possible to combine academia and activism to enact change. Furthermore, Davis’ worldwide resonance demonstrates the importance of global solidarity and allyship.
When asked what she hopes Mount Holyoke students will take away from her play, Bayiha said, “I think it’s very important … to nourish our spirit, our minds. It’s very important to have notions [and] to learn. … Like Angela Davis, I believe also that then, … you have to act. You have to make acts, to transform your thoughts, your mind, into acts. That’s the most important, because the things don’t have to stay in our head. …We need to interconnect each other. Intersectionality. … I believe in that. …You cannot fight for one struggle. You don’t have to choose one struggle. They are all interconnected.”