Thicker than Water: A Memoir

by Kerry Washington

was determined to pursue a professional life in the arts, but I wanted to use the last two years of college to understand everything about the history of performance and how it operates in the world, as well as the role that performance plays in our everyday lives—how we perform our thoughts, feelings, and identities. I designed an interdisciplinary major for myself titled “Performance Studies,” in which I explored performance in various societies and cultures through both a social science and a fine arts lens. For my thesis show, I defined myself in various ways—as a woman, Black person, daughter, activist—and developed a one-woman piece with a vignette for each aspect of my identity using music, dance, monologue work, and anthropological role play. I performed the show in a black-box theater with the support of fellow students serving in various crew positions in stage management and choreography. I was trying to figure myself out. Performance had become not only my greatest passion but also my way of navigating through life, being who I thought I had to be or who others wanted me to be. It had become so integral to my existence that studying it was my attempt at taking the mask off performance itself, hoping to find myself.