kurious

KM Fikes is an award-winning playwright and '23-'24 Folger Shakespeare Institute Artistic Research Fellow. Albeit the self-described inkDweller prefers to be known for content over reception. If locating what classification or 'kind' assists, then Intersectional Absurdist is likely preferred. Likely. Although partial to the faux moniker, if answering to 'Intersectional Absurdist' might stifle Fikes' oeuvre, then PLAYwright may well suffice. Fikes' first play was penned months prior to graduating cum laude from the University of Southern California - under the endearing as enduring mentorship of 'Doc', the late Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland (1944-2006), Broadway-traversed and Pulitzer-nominated for Up from the Mississippi Delta (From Prostitute to PhD). Fikes' debut, Oolong Tea Room: A Poeplay, covered both coasts with readings at Los Angeles' Fountain Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, and NY's groundbreaking Public Theatre. As a participant in the advanced theatre workshop, Fikes' second play, A Bedspring Bouncing, was read during Los Angeles Theatre Centre's Wordsmiths. Chosen as a Walt Disney|abc TV Daytime Writing fellow, KM Fikes found her tenure enlightening. She became increasingly intrigued by the passionate following of the serial or 'soap' genre - notably by demographics oft ignored by the programming's creators. Although their identities/experiences were underrepresented 'on air', these dedicated viewers could be found commiserating - quite creatively - in on-line message boards. Fikes found their critique tempting muse. With a sophistication exceeding 'network' assumption, this audience deserved a genre worthy of their ruminations. Fikes tweaked 'soap', named for the laundry detergent sponsorship of the initial serials to migrate from radio to television. Now with a web presence - and modernity - KM Fikes responded with a CorkOpera™ for cosmopolitan foodies. PAIRING, set in fictional wine country, is a failing 'CorkOpera™' that stirs the ire of an eclectic Message Boardramady at http://theboardtv.com/. An ardent - as absurdist - believer in deconstructing normative narrative forms, KM Fikes invented...or perhaps 'unearthed' her phantom hybrid verse, Elizabonics™, penning an epic poem, High Cotton, in the surreal exercise. In Three Groovements. Fertile for fresh vocabulary like the bard-of-bards some four-hundred years prior to Fikes' inception, Shakespeare's characteristic melancholy became a play...ground for 'watermeloncholy'. The concept of H2Omeloncholy spurred exploration of the proposed phenomena - or alleged existential 'state' - in current events that comprise the pastiche known as pop culture. A blog felt apropos, https://h2omeloncholy.blogspot.com/. An innovative approach, however, to this 'novel' form of documentation drove an ever-forward Fikes. With cultural critique ad nauseam wherein 'character' is literally 'counted' - by a blue bird, Fikes wondered if the gods of nuance hummed the rhythmic blues. If so, blogging already seemed somehow past ripe for unique engagement. And by "unique", Fikes meant (theatrically) 'absurd'. Why not approach - or crumple - electronic text as a kinda 'page'-performance art? Meanwhile, High Cotton, the epic poem inspiring H2Omeloncholy, was honored in 2016 with a Black Swan Lab at Ashland's esteemed Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Ingratiated as enthused, KM Fikes' inkwell enjoys the '5S' treatment of  PAIRING's imagined glass - half-full: see, swirl, sniff, sip, n' savor… 

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All due props, dap, n' a chorus of snaps unto Professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw: esquire, scholar, civil rights' advocate, and philosopher/visionary vocabulist.  Her insight and consequent inception of the term "INTERSECTIONALity" voices an indispensable Venn-diagramming of structural power dynamics for more holistic agency thru lived experiencing of All. A reverent linked-pause to observe the scholar's own definition... For Fikes, critical creative - tempted to twirl scepter of a social justice 'jester' - the Sisyphean choreography to interpret quotidian 'quirks' leans into an absurdist bent that spies unwittingly generous fodder from 'the order' maintenance with dire reliance upon its own irrationality - untold - in its 'blocking' for the 'staging' of these odd hierarchical 'happenings'. 

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