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Wednesday • February 13, 2013
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Committed to Cultural Diversity
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Identities
o
f
Color
Past shapes future
for performing artist
C ari H achmann
T he P ortland O bserver
After her mother died, Damans Webb longed to leave New
York where she and her husband had lived for the past 26
years, and return home to her family in Portland, especially
to be close to her 87-year-old father.
Coming back to the old neighborhood things looked
different. “Portland has changed so much since the 1980s,”
said the former Jefferson high school student who moved
east not long after she graduated and has just moved back.
Recently earning her Masters of Fine Arts in contempo
rary performance at the Buddhist-founded Noropa Univer
sity in Boulder, Colo., Webb has perfected an original play
that she is excited and deeply proud to share with the public.
In the production, Webb traces her childhood memories
growing up in a mixed race family in Portland during the pre-
Huxtable era of the Jefferson’s TV characters, in a solo
performance entitled, “The Box Marked Black: Tales from a
Halfrican-American growing up Mulatto.” The play is now
showing though Sunday, Feb. 23 at the Ethos Interstate
Firehouse Cultural Center in north Portland.
With just herself and a giant steamer trunk for props on
stage, Webb uses her body and spoken word to create a life
narrative as achild raised by a white mother and a black father.
A story about race wasn't Webb's original intention when
she began developing the piece from a previous grad school
project.
“This story is my story growing up in a family, and within
that, there is the theme of race, identity and cultural differ
ences,” she said.
Webb says the show is an investigation of memories and
events in her past that have shaped who she is. Research
required asking others, close family members, to unveil her
mother and father's journey as well as her own.
Webb's mother, who is of Finnish origin and bom in
Minnesota, moved to Portland in the 1950s. Her father, bom
in eastern Tennessee to Baptist missionaries moved to
Portland's Montavilla neighborhood in the 1930s.
As a little girl, Webb moved with her family from Portland
to Africa, where her father worked in Tanzania and Bosnia as
a U.S. aid worker for the newly independent governments. It
by
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ar's Webb expresses what it’s like growing up mixed race in her Black History Month performance at the
Ethos Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center in north Portland.
continued
on page 2