Improvising Theatrical Jazz in a Queer Time and Space: Aishah Rahman's Unfinished Women Cry in No Man's Land While a Bird Dies in a Gilded Cage

Omi Osun Joni L. Jones finds the relations between queerness and jazz in the concept of theatrical jazz in Theatrical Jazz: Performance, Àṣẹ, and the Power of the Present Moment. By undoing the conventional way of thinking about queerness, Jones unites queerness and jazz in the concept of theatrical jazz and she writes that “the jazz aesthetic in theatre is the spatial, aural, linguistic embodiment of queer, the expression of a self-naming that is consciously and insurgently liminal, unfixed”. Liminality is a key concept in relation to queerness, as she expresses that “liminality is the space of possibility in which people are not bound to the social structures, but are given freedom to conceive, to imagine, to invent, to make”. Liminality becomes “the space of improvisation– invention within a prescribed structure, the making of something that did not exist before”. Aishah Rahman’s Unfinished Women Cry in No Man's Land While a Bird Dies in a Gilded Cage (1977) is a very interesting play to trace the trajectory of theatrical jazz because it uses theatrical jazz to create its own language in a unique form. This article will show that Rahman situates her play in the context of theatrical jazz, which creates a queer time and space, whereby she explores freedom in the form.