White Privilege

White Privilege is an interactive lecture-performance by Thomas F. DeFrantz, the second in his Talking|Dance series co-commissioned by the American Realness festival and Theater magazine. I perform live sound design for the piece, shaping the sonic environment in real time as DeFrantz navigates between polemic, pedagogy, and participatory dialogue with the audience.

The piece engages white privilege as a discourse — casting the performance space as an opportunity to enlarge care and act differently. DeFrantz opens with rules of engagement, draws on texts from Steve Biko and Peggy McIntosh, and structures the hour-long event around three questions: what does it mean to experience white privilege, how has it been narrated, and what do we do now?

My role is to create and modulate a live soundscape that responds to, inflects, and interferes DeFrantz’s text and the audience’s participation. The performance also incorporates the synthball — the wireless audio/video controller I developed with Rebecca Uliasz — as a participatory sonic interface, extending the piece’s commitment to shared agency into the sonic domain.

White Privilege has toured nationally and internationally since its 2018 premiere at American Realness, with performances in New York, California, Amsterdam, Durham, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. It was conceived alongside the Reckoning with Racism in the American South research series at Duke University and produced by SLIPPAGE Performance + Technology Lab.