An ‘Invalid perspective’ of what it can mean to be online, disabled and laughing, 'Masque On' was initially conceived as an attempt to ‘create jokes in which debilitated people were not the butt’. The result is a joyful and incisive series of comedic shorts that draw on the principles of Black radical traditions and disability justice to explore what we hide in “ability". Created, written, performed, illustrated, animated, researched, recorded and edited by Joselia Rebekah Hughes. Musical direction, scoring and sound design by Akeema-Zane.
Joselia Rebekah Hughes is a working-poor, disabled, Afro-Caribbean-descended writer, editor, teaching artist, and access worker dwelling in The Bronx. She lives with Sickle Cell disease and ADHD. Her practice implores the impossible calculus of black, disabled, immigrant inspiration confronting and resisting inexhaustible matrices of multifocal systemic neglect. She works through designations of power and relation as prepositional directives. She theorizes alongside a budding concept of ability-making as an under-examined afterlife of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Implementing wordplay, mischief, improvisation, divination, performance, oral tradition, Black abstraction, black study, and archetypes of the Fool and clowns, she questions acute and subtle societal perceptions and values of class, race, citizenship, chronic illness, Madness, ability, and debility. She is a rising second-year writing student at Bard MFA.