DE
TACH
MENT

PART I

Writer, Performer, Producer & Co-Director: Trae Harris
Co-Director: Sonia Malfa
Composer: Amanda Jones

PART II

Writer, Performer, Producer: Trae Harris
Director, Producer: Sonia Malfa
Composer: Amanda Jones

Detachment is an embodied exploration of the ritual of letting go. Through a deeply personal yet universally resonant lens, this performance interrogates the emotional, spiritual, and cultural attachments women, particularly Black women, have to hair. It is an invitation to witness and reflect on the ways in which we tether ourselves to materiality through the physical and how we might reclaim our autonomy through the act of release.

For Black women, hair has long been a site of both reverence and regulation—politicized, contested, and laden with meaning. Building on bell hooks' work on representation and the politics of looking, Detachment considers who defines beauty, who authors identity, and how Black women navigate visibility within systems that have historically sought to control both image and self.

Drawing on Patricia Hill Collins' scholarship on Black feminist thought, the performance understands hair as more than an aesthetic choice. It becomes a site where histories of resistance and self definition converge, revealing the intimate ways structural power is lived through the body.

Influenced by the work of Tina M. Campt and Deborah Willis on Black visual culture, photography, and the politics of Black representation, Detachment approaches the body as an archive, a place that
remembers and keeps score. Hair, like the image, carries histories that exceed the individual, preserving memory while exposing the tensions between visibility and autonomy.

But  what happens when we relinquish it? What is revealed in the act of surrendering the strands that have served as a tether between self and world? Detachment asks these questions through a performance ritual. The cutting of hair moves beyond an aesthetic choice; it is a ceremonial act of liberation, a severing of ties not only to societal expectations but to internalized constraints. It is a reckoning with selfhood beyond the physical, an excavation of what remains when the external markers of identity are stripped away.

Each  aspect of this performance invites the spectator into their own process of interrogation: What attachments do we hold on to out of habit or fear? What does it mean to release and redefine oneself outside of the structures that have shaped us? Whether it is the tangible shedding of hair or the unseen unraveling of ego, Detachment is a meditation on what it means to let go and, in doing so, to reclaim something we didn’t evn know we were missing.