Ensemble of women resting together in a sensual collective tableau during Silenced No More.
Silenced No More · Artistic work

For Colored Girls

Sensual, elegant, and revolutionary — a choreopoem of unapologetic women gathering themselves back into life.

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf became the artistic core of Silenced No More in Kenya — not as illustration, but as a field of unapologetic women: revolutionary in feeling, elegant in form, and unafraid of beauty, desire, grief, or speech.

PlaywrightNtozake Shange
Executive ProducerMichael Omoke
DirectorCheryl J. Williams
Artistic frame

This page holds the artistic work itself: the women, the dresses, the color, the breath, the circle, the charge of presence. It does not document the wider intervention around the project. It stays with the stage.

Built around Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem, the production moved through tenderness, flirtation, collapse, self-naming, collective witnessing, and release. The image world was stripped back and sensorial: black space, sculptural blocks, bare feet, and a chromatic cast whose bodies carried the emotional architecture.

What emerged was a language of feminine assembly: sensual without apology, politically awake without turning rigid, revolutionary without losing elegance. Each woman arrived not as background, but as force — color, voice, rhythm, wound, wit, glamour, and will.

Color as identity Barefoot stage energy Choreopoem Feminine assembly Sensual stage language Witnessing Release Color as identity Barefoot stage energy Choreopoem Feminine assembly Sensual stage language Witnessing Release
Scene one

The circle opens

The production begins with the women already holding a world between them — poised, listening, interrupting silence with color, laughter, and ritual attention.

Women in colored dresses rising together in a celebratory circle.
The full ensemble gathered close in a tableau of listening and support.
Scene two

Touch, teasing, recognition

Some of the strongest images come not from speech but from the way the women meet one another physically — palm to palm, smile to smile, body to body — as if memory itself is being passed between them.

Two women in blue and green dresses meeting hand to hand.

The sensuousness of the work is not decorative. It lives in texture, timing, and relation: the softness of fabric, the curve of a shoulder, the confidence of a woman entering her own color, the pleasure of being seen by other women who understand the cost of survival.

The stage remains spare so that gesture can thicken. A lifted arm, a shared glance, a half-smile, an angled hip — these become compositional events.

A woman in green smiling from the side of the stage.
Scene three

Presence in close-up

The production trusted the face. It allowed delight, vulnerability, boldness, and self-possession to arrive without over-explaining themselves.

A woman in yellow laughing in close-up.
A woman in orange making a graceful gesture.
A woman in green speaking with another woman blurred in the foreground.
Scene four

Ensemble heat

The group carries the temperature of the piece: flirtation, joy, release, witnessing, and the dangerous beauty of women refusing to disappear.

The ensemble moving across the stage in colored dresses.
Close dance image of the ensemble in vivid dresses.
Woman in yellow smiling as the group dances around her.
Special photographic credit

Saiba Sehmi

Project Photographer

Saiba Sehmi’s photographic eye holds the production with unusual calm and intimacy. Her images do not simply record stage action; they preserve atmosphere, relation, and the quiet voltage between women before gesture becomes event.

This page carries her presence with intention. The production’s sensual visual memory owes much to the softness, precision, and compositional intelligence of her lens.

Portrait of Saiba Sehmi, project photographer.
Credits

Cast & creative team

The stage ensemble and the women who helped shape the work around it.

Actors

Lady in Brown
Mbeki Mwalimu
Lady in Purple
Nini Wacera
Lady in Blue
Rebecca Langley
Lady in Yellow
Melissa Kiplagat
Lady in Red
Marianne Nungo
Lady in Orange
Wanjiku-Victoria Seest
Lady in Green
Tana Gachoka

Core production

Executive Producer · Artistic Director
Michael Omoke
Director
Cheryl J. Williams
Assistant Producer
Anna Marie B. Skanborg
Director of Logistics
Julisa Rowe
Assistant Logistics
Sakina Mildred
Choreographer
Ondiegi Mathew
Lighting Designer
Charles Stephen
Costume Director
Vicki L. Jones

Visual & communications

Project Photographer
Saiba Sehmi
Social Media
Ramya Sehmi
Graphic Designer
Aïcha E. Haidara
Public Relations
Angela Mutegi
Web Developer
Elisha Ngoma
Women around the work

Extended creative circle

Three women whose work helped frame how the production was seen, carried, and encountered in the world beyond the stage image itself.

Portrait of Ramya Sehmi.

Ramya Sehmi

Social Media

Portrait of Aïcha Haidara.

Aïcha E. Haidara

Graphic Designer

Portrait of Angela Mutegi.

Angela Mutegi

Public Relations