by Constance Jaquay

Love Is & Will Always Be 

In times when systems fracture, and values feel unstable, Love rises to be the only organic matter that can’t be tainted.  

1.

On the deathbed of her mother, she sits. In over forty years, it’s the first time they’ve held hands. They cling to one another as though their bodies can reverse time. 

He holds her face in the palm of his hands. He lifts her head towards him and whispers in her ear: I love you forever. Her left hand covers his right hand  // she replies, pressing her face deeper into his palm. 

2. 

In between uterine contractions and cervical dilations, she pushes life from her body. Her mind traces and tracks what it took to get to this moment. She remembers the first time she met her husband. How young/bold they were. She’d never imagine thirteen years would go by_together. A nurse hands her a crying baby; as she holds her little girl in her arms, her heart morphs // she begins to realize, as her mother was, that she is now a mother too. 

3. 

It felt as though she’d been crying for years. Weeks turned into months, and it seems she has only just begun to find her rhythm again. He was her first gift. They had grown up together. In many ways, it felt as though her dog Dingus was her soul manifested as an animal. For months, he seemed to have stopped playing, as though he was living only to survive. It was time she realized she must let him go. That his pain wasnot her pain, and it wasn’t fair to keep him alive. She felt as though shed been kicked in the gut over and over again. She never imagined she would be burying her first baby. 

As life does, it reminds us of the fragility of what it means to be human. 

In moments of passing and in moments of new life, in holding on and in letting go, one thing remains untouched:

Death comes for us all. What lingers and sticks is what the heart held. What endures is that we dared to love, long after one is gone.

Love Is & Will Always Be

by Constance Jaquay

There were days throughout the end of 2023 and the entire 2024 where I couldn’t move, days when my body felt like it had forgotten itself. I cried for weeks on and off. I felt stuck. I had forgotten how to move in my body. I had to re-learn how each body part worked.

It took time. 

It took intentional healing. 

It took remembering how to live inside my own skin again.

Slowly, I found my way back.
Courage, I learned, isn’t fearlessness.
It’s learning to move through fear |
fear of the unknown,
fear of lost dreams,
fear that an idea may never manifest.

Thirteen years of making work with little funding or support had finally caught up with me. The exhaustion had affected my nervous system; it was bone-deep. For a moment, it felt impossible to continue as an independent artist.

In 2024, I realized Theatre Roscius needed to slow down to understand how it wanted to evolve. After twelve original theatre & performace art works, four short films on Super 8, digital, and 16mm; four original physical scripts; my first exhibition; a new compilation of experimental pocket plays; two installations; numerous physical photography collections and two new sculpture series built from natural materials, it was clear I had earned rest and I took Tricia Hersey’s call to Black women to rest and reset as church. I felt I had earned the space to imagine the next chapter, and to act later.

In the midst of this self renovation, I fought to hold on to the voice I had spent years building. I felt it was violated at times and challenged by others. I had to sit with myself, it took long, lonely hours, until I found my authentic voice again. I had to listen to all the voices that lived within my head…and then I remembered: Alyson Mead. 

I think about Alyson Mead often. We met during the early LAFPI Sam French days; she took me to lunch when I needed it most. Being an outlier in a city where it feels like everyone already knows everyone was difficult. She told me I would find my tribe, that my artistic voice would sharpen with time, but that the road would be hard. She was right. 

Those first years after school were shadowed by hard times and scary nights, making work no one might ever see. Somehow, naivety, immaturity, and obsession with the work outweighed any sense of my reality. I kept going. 

Then I found love, and my partner stepped in as unexpected support, taking on roles he never anticipated, and somehow we’ve made new work every year since 2013. And though I didn’t find “my tribe” in the way Alyson spoke of or how I imagined, Instead, I found with time something else: an international constellation of support that has been unexpected, powerful, and sustaining.

Time heals.
Not gently, but truthfully.

Life bends, breaks, and reshapes us. And if you keep going, despite disappointments, despite violence, despite the impossible, you eventually meet the support you prayed for years before. I don’t know what would have happened without the emergence of residencies, fellowships, and grants. Maybe I would have continued self-producing. Maybe I would have walked away. Maybe I would have collapsed into a grief that swallowed me whole. But the “what ifs” are dead ends. What matters is this: time keeps moving. And we must too. Keep loving, keep empathy at the center, keep faith alive, and keep walking towards the light even on the darkest of days. 

And 2025 arrived like a whirlwind.
The last three years // the work, the political climate, the loss of life around the world // left my nervous system frayed. Sudan’s famine, Palestine’s devastation, Ukraine’s fight for survival, Lebanon on the brink… the world still feels unbearably heavy.

The past few years have been unimaginable, but I am excited for the now and the future. I believe there is always light inside darkness. I believe that moving toward hope changes the frequency of the universe. I believe theatre and performance shift the world, that every piece made in grace and with care transforms a small corner of our collective ugliness into something more beautiful.

“It’s funny the things you remember and the things you don’t.”
— Karen, All About Eve

—Constance Jaquay Strickland—

I turned another year older / 

life is clearer, not easier, yet I feel brave and bolder.

Although time has brought blessings, I can’t help but hold my breath as I pray for the mothers who huddle and hold hungry babies in their arms in the midst of rubble. 

As I walk through this unfamiliar Italian town, I hold my head high |  I remember I’m the first of our matriarchal line on my mother’s side to leave the country: 

I hear my grandmother’s voice in my ear__remember / we’re Black and we’re proud….so I keep moving.

During dinner, it begins to rain in Genoa. The wind blows remarkably heavy; it starts to speak / 

I wonder if I am the only one who can hear our ancestors whispering?

It’s 3am and I’m still awake. Naked, I lay down in this bed that is not mine on top of a vintage mattress. How many before me have laid their head down in this same spot, staring out into the darkness // dreaming of a future that may not come. 

I drift. I allow my eyes to close. Allowing my body to find a sense of renewal | I  give control to the darkness as the Medeterrian Sea sings me to sleep.

As I enter a new realm, I hear her voice:

What if we slowed down and healed?

By Constance Jaquay Strickland

For over a decade, I have carved out a path as an artist outside the confines of predominantly white institutions, white power, white leadership, and colonized spaces. I didn’t adjust myself to fit into a reality that was inorganic to finding my voice; for that reason, I have existed as an outlier. As an artist, I’ve only ever wanted to make honest work, push perception, and honor the trajectory of my ideas. I never believed white validation was the only path to legitimacy. I’ve never needed anyone to name me. I have named myself.

Viola Davis recently spoke about her time at Juilliard, where she was trained to be a “perfect white actress” but wasn’t prepared for the roles she would be offered as a Black woman. She articulated how this training created a profound disconnect between her education and professional opportunities. While at Juilliard, she was tasked with proving her range through exclusively white work, yet upon graduation, she found herself primarily considered for Black roles—roles for which she was sometimes deemed “not Black enough.” This contradiction left her in what she described as a “quagmire,” struggling to understand how to authentically use herself as the canvas for her art. Her story resonated deeply with me—not because I shared that particular journey, but because I actively chose a different one. While she navigated the overwhelming white gaze of elite training, I stepped away from the university pipeline entirely.

I never transferred from community college to a university due to financial reasons, and I did not want to continue a path into a predominantly white institution after a disturbing experience I had during theatre school. I discovered I could not risk continuing on a path that would have trained me to be “perfect” by their standards. Instead, I stayed in the trenches. I fought my way through unknown spaces that didn’t center whiteness as the ideal, and in doing so, I found myself. I found my voice—not the one that institutions try to sand down, but one that is whole, complex, and rooted in ancestral memory.

Yes, that decision isolated me. It is the origin point of my refusal to be named, shaped, or reduced. It made the road harder, longer, perhaps even less defined. Yet, that solitude gave me the room to experiment, to bend genres, to reimagine what theatre could be, not what I was taught it to be. I have always had a strong presence, a voice that can come off as too strong, too aggressive, too loud, too much. Outside of the confines of white academia, I was allowed to be all those things without apology. And in being “too much,” I became whole.

As stated, my journey has not been without trauma, but I do not write it as pity or sensationalism. It has been a source of energy and fuel. I think back to my time at LACC, where a classmate was experiencing domestic abuse, and when I stood up in defense of her, I was labeled the aggressor. The man I stood against, a white male, was upheld by faculty, given an opportunity to work on and off campus under the mentorship of a respected teacher. He would later bring a gun onto campus, locking down the entire theatre program. During this time, I learned the brutal truth of how white male violence is upheld, white femininity is protected, and how easily Black women are vilified when they speak up. I took what I felt was a horrible injustice to the district school board, and I won.

Of course, as things go, I was invited back into the program to attend the Kennedy Center Theatre Festival and was able to complete my program on my terms. This emotional and wild period, I learned what radical support could look like—what true allyship is, how people show up for you, and who shows up for you when it matters. That was a turning point. That was when I began to understand how faith and resilience begin to carry you forward even through hard times.

I now understand that this so-called detour was the path and not just a detour—but a design. My not transferring to a university was a spiritual redirection. My refusal to mold myself into the image of what white institutions deemed worthy was an act of preservation—and rebellion. It gave me my life’s work. It gave me back to myself. It also revealed the cost of allyship, the danger of speaking truth in spaces that reward silence, and the violent consequences of white institutional negligence.

I think of Tonya Pinkins’ 2020 article, Why I’m Fed Up with Performative Activism from White and Black Theatremakers. I was late in noticing that this occurs on many levels in many ways from Black and white theatremakers. I never wanted to be in a gang, tribe, or club that excluded others or left others behind. I became an artist for that exact opposite reason. Yet, I’ve seen bullies exist on both sides of the race card. I’ve seen gatekeepers. I’ve seen white people who produce Black artists feel as though they are making change, but rather, they are still upholding a colonized system. I’ve seen Black people just be happy to be seen and acknowledged by PWIs or white people that they walk in exclusion and delusion.

To believe in the unseen. To make energy visible. To trust that invisible forces reveal themselves in tangible ways. I know this as faith. Faith from loved ones. Faith in oneself. This, to me, is hope. Faith in my ancestors. Faith in those who offered small yeses, unexpected support, or quiet encouragement when I needed it most to push through and continue in the work.

Recent and past experiences have stretched me as an artist—some lessons hard, all necessary. I’ve had to piece myself back together and keep moving forward. Most importantly, I’ve come to never ask for anything I couldn’t imagine first. The first ten years, I sustained my practice through the support of my partner, my family, and odd gigs. I remained untethered to academic institutions, moving instead through intuition, will, and lineage. Over time, I found—if not a tribe—a constellation. Artists working beyond a category. Collaborators creating on a high frequency that feels ancestral, cellular, infinite.

I know for sure that anything is possible. I know that the well runs deep. I know that I make work because I have to, and I love it, and I would do it with no funding, no support, and alone. However, over the last two years, I have been blessed to slowly receive funding that allows the work to live longer. Yet, before there was even a glimmer of support, I was creating work. These days, I carry joy, hope, fear, rage, and devotion in equal measure. These are my source materials. The work is my inheritance.

This year, as I step into new chapters as an independent artist running a small experimental theatre company: a two-week residency with the Six Viewpoints Institute at Salisbury University working on my new solo, A Study on the Weight of Blackness (Unveils) The Resilience of Being Black, which will continue for anther two weeks at BASE in Seattle, a special performance of mercy: An Ode to Black Women’s Labor supported by WEHO Arts and New York’s Arts Outside is a reminder that work we start may not always live how we expect it to and finally the season will end with a month-long writing residency in Genoa, Italy, where I’ll be assembling my first collection of physical plays, or “pocket plays.” This path has allowed me to expand upon my voice in an authentic way I never expected but always imagined. For that, I thank the ancestors.

I write this twelve years in, closer than ever to naming myself. Right now, as a transdisciplinary artist, my voice feels clearer and stronger. A voice that refuses capture. A body in motion. This road has never been easy—but it’s mine. And that, too, is power.

“To name ourselves rather than be named we must first see ourselves. For some of us this will not be easy. So long unmirrored in our true selves, we may have forgotten how we look. Nevertheless, we can’t theorize in a void, we must have evidence. And we—I speak only for black women here—have barely begun to articulate our life experience . . . It is slow and it is painful. For at the end of every path we take, we find a body that is always already colonized.”

~Lorraine O’ Grady

by Constance Strickland

I didn’t know where to begin. How do you speak of someone you love who has crossed over into the next realm? How do you honor a life that touched you so deeply, even if your time together was far too quick?

After forty days it still feels fresh even if the state, country, and the world have seemed to move on. There is this huge hole left in the city that will not be so easily healed for many not only lost their homes but family members as well. We lost Ms. Pat to the Eaton fire that destroyed not only her home but 9,413 homes, businesses, and tons of special buildings across Altadena and Pasadena.

I loved Ms. Pat from the very first moment our paths crossed. She was a tall, bold force of nature—unapologetically honest and refreshingly direct, even when the truth stung. Witty, clever, and laced with delicious sarcasm, she possessed a refined taste in everything from art to life itself. Ms. Pat was fiercely original; she lived by her own thoughts, beliefs, and ideals, never swayed by the crowd.

I was just a young girl navigating my second or third year in L.A. when I first met her in the LACC costume shop, a sacred space where dreams and chaos mingled under the watchful eye of theatre legend Naila Aladdin-Sanders. There, amidst costumes and endless creative energy, Ms. Pat wasn’t just a teacher—she was a mentor, a friend, a guiding light. In that vibrant, often wild space, she wore many hats: mother, auntie, and steward of time. With a heart full of compassion, she fed us when our bodies needed it—she nourished our souls. Whether it was slipping a little cash into our hands, offering a ride, or simply sharing her wisdom, every act was delivered with precision, intention, and unconditional love.

Our conversations were endless and free, spanning theatre, art, fashion, her husband Tom, history, and the power of books. In a new city where meaningful connection can be rare, I found in Ms. Pat a kindred spirit—someone who made intellectual exploration feel like a grand adventure. I absorbed every word, and every idea, knowing I was in the presence of a woman who truly understood the beauty of learning and living boldly. When she spoke you listened.

There were times in theatre school when life threatened to break me—when eviction loomed, my belongings became a makeshift set on the school’s main stage, and homelessness felt inevitable. In those moments, Ms. Pat was my sanctuary. She took me under her wing: first finding me an apartment, then furnishing it with the warmth and coziness of home. When a roommate’s behavior turned dangerous in the dead of night, I called her, and without hesitation, she scooped me up, brought me safely to her home, and gave me refuge. For over a year, I lived with Ms. Pat in Altadena, sharing in both our struggles and our triumphs. Through every hardship, she was a constant beacon of unconditional love, fueling my courage and nurturing my passion for the arts.

Ms. Pat was the light in our darkest times—a fearless advocate for every artist caught between dreams and the unknown. I wish with every fiber of my being, that I could have saved her, just as she saved me so many times over. I hope she knows how deeply she was loved, how fiercely she was respected, and how her legacy will forever guide our hearts and minds. The memories of our time together are etched in my bones, inspiring me to be as audacious, as bold, and as unyielding in my truth as she was.

In remembering Ms. Patricia Diann McKenna, I honor not just a teacher, but an indomitable spirit—a woman who lived, loved, and dared to be unapologetically herself. Ms. Pat was here.

Grief, healing, white female violence
shattered mirrors, tainted vows.
She’s reminded hard questions require slow answers. 

The woman sits with herself.
Grief lingers, she lets it live, lets it transform.

To sit with herself demands time, stillness, silence.
She studies old relationships—
professional, personal—
and releases what no longer serves her.
The heavy bricks that once drowned her every step,
now lay buried.

Instead of stuffing her face with food, she cannot name —she fuels herself with knowledge. Research, rest, reading,
recovering from the seen and unseen.
It becomes easier, lighter,
to release what does not sustain.

She allows grief to become a friendly foe.
She laments—– wails until her body crumples and warps– until she can no longer move, until stillness takes hold.

The storm passes,
Now able to breathe she welcomes the new season. 

The aromatic smell of fall florets frees her mind from any fears.
The air of a new season greets her, filling her lungs with courage.

She inhales the fresh air.

She lets grief live and shift.
She turned generations of white female violence into art.
She freed herself from the weight of desperate, toxic ties.

To recoup, to sit with, to examine eleven years in the work

To perform in various mediums that feed the work. 

She remembers she can fly.

She reclaims her time.
She remembers her power.
She reclaims her voice.

Time. A welcoming friend no longer feared.

She now welcomes him with open arms—-

an open portal that freezes and flows.

by Constance Strickland

In between the acts of routine and a hard-lined schedule, my body becomes numb. I hold a series of thoughts that refuse to reveal moments of clarity. The body cannot find rest and the mind roams. To quiet the noise she writes, she goes back in time, for her body holds onto what she can’t understand.

These days I whisper hard to hear truths.

I alter time so my eyes bear witness to hidden atrocities.

Daringly, I move through space holding and releasing the stories of exiled women.

To the brave souls occupying space in Sudan, Palestine, and Ukraine:

It may seem as though your fight for a free life goes unnoticed, misunderstood, or not heard at all. Yet, we see you fighting, we hear your piercing cries for freedom that ring as loudly as church bells on Sunday morning.

These days I dream of running the 8,397 miles to Sudan, walking the 6,414 miles to Ukraine

Or crawling the 7,562 miles into Palestine to hold hands with those faces who go unseen.

I see the bloody face of an old woman shouting out her husband’s name.

I hear the howling cries of the mother holding the remains of her daughter as blood runs down the crowded street.

These days I hold onto the voice of the little girl who stands in rubble as she talks into a camera about her hopes and dreams for the future of her country.

I pray for the woman dancing in the streets holding the ‘Free Palestine’ cardboard poster proudly above her head.

I understand having less, fearing tomorrow, and surviving today.

Tonight I do not light a candle in memory of those who have passed.

I shall not shed a tear for the unspoken names whose bodies go unclaimed.

Instead, I’ll write, create, and move to remember your profound ability to continue toward the light.

____________

‘Quay’ she called with her soft melodious voice bringing familiar comfort.

I knew Her right away //

This delicate yet statuesque woman of bold proportions…

her smooth skin as clear as the midnight sky.

She—the woman whose hands had rubbed my back while soothing my soul night after night |

days not so long ago.

Me—A woman child still in need of her mother’s touch.

A woman child still needing to hear her mother’s patio chime laughter.

Her She Me //

Mother

Daughter

Strangers.

Or perhaps

long-

lost friends

_________

*A note from within:

Finding the work is living between trust and letting go.