Yogma

Yogma (2018-2019)

Created, starring and written by: Karla Huffman

What do you do when your job requires you to be perfectly balanced but the culture of the workplace is not?

“In the midst of the storms life has to offer, what keeps you sane? Am I fighting the waves, or will I naturally flow with them to keep my sanity?”

Black women in the wellness field are constantly asking this question. Yoga, specifically, is a massive industry that offers incredible benefits to people facing the stress of surviving multiple systems of oppression. But the field is overwhelmingly white, leading many Black women to face barriers to entry and advancement, alongside micro- and macro-aggressions, which can exacerbate stress that yoga is designed to alleviate. The irony! 

Karla Huffman’s Yogma explores this tension in her dramedy series that explores a Black woman yoga teacher trying to raise her profile. In season one, she is teaching classes of mostly Black women who come to get for her unapologetically Black spin on yoga, including integrating trap music. Season two sees that practice growing tremendously. As someone who actually teaches yoga in Chicago, Karla could fill large rooms with people looking to take her classes, so she didn’t need “extras” – she just asked her students if she could film for her series. Season two sees her dreaming of a promotion and health insurance, but will this come to pass? Will she, as her character says, be able to “live the life of a carefree Black girl”?

The season two pilot ends with, not for now:

“Now the bills are piling up. I need health insurance, and it would be nice to not eat a pasta meal every night. I would keep it at just that: a dream.”

Yogma is based on real life. 

“Yogma came from my frustration as a yoga teacher,” Karla said in an interview. Her experience before making the show was marked by meanness, catty behavior, and getting passed over for promotions, in a field dominated by white women. 

The sincerity of her story allowed Karla to attract unlikely supporters, most notably Patton Oswalt.

“Patton promoted the hell out of us from beginning to end,” Karla said. He even gave them money, earning the credit of executive producer.

Karla also eventually worked with Lululemon to promote the show as an official ambassador of the brand, and she pitched a version of the show at the storied New York Television Festival. 

Karla ended up becoming one of the hardest-working and reliable producers for the OTV platform. She produced OTV co-founder Elijah McKinnon’s Good Enough and season three of their cooking show Two Queens in a Kitchen, along with several shorts and pilots that went on to do quite well on the festival circuit and for the creators, including Atra Asdou’s Renee, Priya Mohanty’s FOBia, and Stephanie Jeter, Derek McPhatter and Tim Maupin’s HIVE (executive produced by Lilly Wachowski). She also created her own instructional yoga series, Forward Momentum, helping add some wellness to OTV’s library. 

Today, Karla is continuing to push herself and working on developing her own creative voice after years of supporting other creators. 

Watch Yogma on OTV!

Seeds

Seeds (2018)

Created, starring and written by: Deja Harrell

If being a twentysomething is awkward for (almost) everyone, is it more so for Black women?

That’s one question Deja Harrell asks in Seeds. In the show, four very different friends navigate the inevitable insecurity of being young Black women defying “respectability” out of joy or necessity: trying to jog to stay in shape but ending up smoking weed, stealing tampons because they’re overpriced, and drinking during the day. 

“I wanted to show that Black women are nowhere near perfect….I wanted to be honest about that” Deja said. “I just wanted to see really young black girls who don't know anything. And show how funny that could be to not know anything, but still know a lot at the same time! What it's like to question the world around you.”

In many ways Seeds follows in a lineage of television sitcoms about Black women’s friendship and solidarity, starting with Living Single and moving on to Girlfriends and Insecure. But watching Seeds we are reminded that those series are products of a specific industrial context: broadcast and cable television, with its rules, norms, and expectations for how women and Black people should be represented. These women are more grown-up, closer to being the productive citizens that capitalism expects of all people, but a burden Black women carry in a unique way as they navigate racism and misogyny on top of the inequality we all endure. Because Living Single and Girlfriends were funded by advertisers marketing to productive viewers, they towed the line of respectability. Insecure goes farther, but, perhaps because of each character’s age and status, still avoids some of the messiness more common to real life. 

The show isn’t all antics and games, however. Seeds clearly represents the serious side of intersectionality, how being a Black woman means not separating race and gender but feeling how both are intertwined. 

In the fourth episode, “Hollys and Hoteps,” the friends are at a bar and confronted with how white women and Black men fail to understand this. 

Beth (Dionne Addai) is hit on by a Black man who’s attitude changes she reveals she’s queer:

“How’s a king supposed to rule his kingdom if his queen’s not by his side to hold him down? I’m telling you feminists and homosexuals are the demise of the Black community.”

Meanwhile Danielle (Adia Alli) is confronted with a white woman, Kelly (Kate Cornelius), who thinks she understands Danielle’s experience simply because she’s dating a Black man.

“We go through a lot,” Danielle says. 

“I know!’ Kelly retorts. 

“You don’t know!” Danielle insists.

Deja intentionally wanted to show, through both humor and drama, the specificity of Black women’s experiences. 

“There are points where I’m critiquing feminism and I’m critiquing the Black community….And the best way to do that is through satire…. I felt that comedy was the best way to do that because everybody understands comedy,” she said. 

Seeds feels unabashedly unapologetic in its embrace of vulnerability and complexity. The result is the series is incredibly funny. Having screened the show in front of hundreds of people in Chicago, I saw how much joy and pleasure audiences took from watching the series. I could hear people laughing in deep recognition, as if saying: this is me but I’ve never seen it onscreen before!

Watch Seeds on OTV!

Triggers

Triggers (2017)

Created, written, directed, produced and filmed by: K. Marshall Green

Triggers is a visual poem, a letter to Black girls and women surviving domestic and state violence, told through cinematic collage, jazz, performance, and the lyricism of scholar and filmmaker Marshall Green.

The film must be seen to be understood. It has so many layers it defies simple description. Bookended by someone writing a letter to their younger self, Triggers takes viewers on a 10-minute journey through the story of Marissa Alexander, a Black woman from Jacksonville sentenced to 20 years for firing a warning shot in an altercation with her husband (in the end, she served three years). 

Green starts the piece by dramatizing this moment, imagining the layers of psychological, physical, and technological conflict and harm that could have produced these multiple layers of violence. 

“We don’t want to call the cops. We know what cops do!”

Overlaying this poetic drama are three Black queer and trans performance artists - scholars Julian Kevon Glover and Mlondi Zondi with Anna Martine Whitehead – who seem to represent some of the characters in the story, except without conforming to gendered expectations. 

Our expectations that we are seeing an artistic dramatization of one event is challenged, however, when Green’s lyrics suggest this scene recalls his own childhood:

I was triggered

I prayed for that woman

I prayed for that man

I prayed for that baby 

I cried for that baby

I was that baby

Protesting the abuse of a father on a mother

…

I went back

Watched

Witnessed

War

In Home

Home

In War

Protest

Still

I feel weak

Small

Shifting the focus to his own subjectivity allows Green to ask more difficult questions about how Black people have few good options for justice amid the violence of the state and gender binary. 

“I still feel guilty that the prayer I prayed for my father was prison…I believe the relationship we have with the state is an abusive one.”

The complex, unresolved, constantly shifting feelings of pain, love, and a desire for justice are beautifully embodied by the unpredictable, discordant, variously smooth and rigid performances by Glover, Zondi and Whitehead, shifting between elegant vogue femme performance and post/modern dance. Their movements are accented by the jazz score, which vacillates between discordance and harmoniousness. 

While we don’t get resolution, Green softens this disharmony toward the end by asking “what justice look like?” To conclude the piece, he sings (after narrating most of the film in spoken word):

A little black girl dreams in poems to poems to her mother

A little black dreams in prayers to her father, and he answers back

A little black girl dreams in songs to her self, sweetest thing I’ve never known

Here we are confronted with the suggestion that Green, our narrator with a smooth upper baritone, was the little Black girl caught in the drama amidst violent gendered relations structured by various ideological apparatuses. 

In writing a letter to the little Black girl he was as the transmasculine person he now is, Green shows, through creative practice, his theory of trans*. Writing about an earlier film, and ethnography of trans and gender nonconforming masculine of center people, Green writes that “Trans* is a multidirectional, unpredetermined set of embodied motions that are affect and are affected by structures of governmentality” (Black Camera 192). 

One way to decenter linear narratives is through collaboration, which Triggers embodies through dialogic production with onscreen performers and offscreen musician. It is perhaps as much their narrative as Green’s. There is an improvisational feeling to how they move and how the music sounds, which shows it represents clearly what Green has theorized about Trans* as “unpredetermined movement:”

“There is a master narrative of transition that begins with the transgender subject’s articulation of being trapped in the wrong body. This entrapment can only be conquered through a move to the opposite gender. This master narrative of transition has made it more difficult to know transition as a state to be in, as a state to be studied, rather than a marker for what is between two distinct gender embodiments. The transition is an operation to be completed so that eventually the subject will no longer be in a state of becoming but rather, they will have arrived at home in the right body. Instead of reproducing this narrative, I ask about the multifaceted ways that people assume the category Trans*” (Black Camera 191).

Elsewhere, Green has explicitly drawn connections between this understanding of transness and Black feminism, which explains why he begins his story with Marissa Alexander. Understanding the project of Black feminism as unthinking the gender binary, by showing how racialized people disrupt or are excluded from its privilege and norms, opens up space to think about Black feminism as a fundamentally queer and trans project, something others like Lamonda Stalling, C. Riley Snorton, Che Gossett and others have also theorized:

“Are we able to hold the stories of both CeCe McDonald, Marissa Alexander, and Kye Peterson under this inclusive Black Queer Feminist framing? I seek a Black feminist praxis that can hold all of these people, but in order for that to be the case we may have to disentangle ourselves from a reliance on ‘woman’ and instead think through the ways in which femininity and masculinity are moving in and across all kinds of bodies” (Souls 442)

Watch Triggers on OTV!

Bibliography: 

“The Essential I/Eye in We: A Black TransFeminist Approach to Ethnographic Film.” Black Camera 6, no. 2 (2015): 187–200. https://doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.6.2.187.

“Where Black Feminist Thought and Trans* Feminism Meet: A Conversation.” Souls 19, no. 4 (2017): 438–54.

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