Chesray Dolpha is a storytelling strategist and Tony Award winning stage director who has built a career focusing on activism, storytelling and social justice. She is the founder and executive creative producer of Story Bridge Consultancy and has worked on Broadway, playing a pivotal role in production.
1. Today is International Women’s Day, a moment when we highlight women with great ambition and purpose. As part of this, we would love to showcase your story. Can you share with us a specific ambition or goal you’re currently pursuing, and how you’re taking steps toward it?
One of my specific ambitions or goals is to try and center and uplight queer stories in the storytelling theater industries in New York city and Cape Town. I started my own producing company about two years ago called Story Bridge and the goal is to create storytelling opportunities from queer people of colour who live in the margins or who have marginal experience. My pursuit is queer storytelling spaces that center joy and passion that queer communities bring, without showing the traumatic experiences of queer communities. The steps I am taking towards that is by founding my own company and self producing my pilot season where I’ll be producing a black queer musical, which would be a black queer adaptation of Tempest from Shakespeare through the lens of South African Drag. It was brought to Broadway this February and had a two week residency at Rattlestick theater off Broadway which was a huge accomplishment. I’m also producing a one woman show called Soft Belly which is about accepting bodies that we are born in and this show is accepted into the New York City French Festival. These are the steps I have taken and will continue to take in pursuit of centering queer stories.
2. We talk about “Carry Your Ambition” as a play on words. It is both a literal bag and a symbol of the weight of ambition. In your life, have you ever felt that ambition as a burden, something that drives you but also puts a lot of pressure on you, weighing you down and sometimes making you doubt yourself? If so, how do you navigate that tension?
I never felt like ambition was a burden for me. I’ve always felt that my circumstance and the level of poverty from my upbringing is what felt like a burden. I felt like I carried this weight and economic legacy of not having enough to survive which was not only a burden that was put onto me but I felt my mom and grandmother had to carry. Ambition always came easy to me because ambition was like a love language to my talents and passions. It made me feel like I have this fire burning in me and while I recognise I lived on the Cape Flats and I had all these circumstances, ambition was always a light and flame for me that allowed me to step into my body and talents. I would say poverty and circumstance felt more like a burden. The way I balance this pressure of ambition is I try to create and produce stories that I don’t need an award for because the award is getting to tell these stories in spaces that are non-traditional and in front of non-traditional audiences. I try to make my goals human centered and based in radical progressive storytelling politics. The way I push the tension of ambition is by telling stories that matter, stories of communities that need platforms and making sure I support the humanities of those communities. I also make sure I have safe rehearsal spaces for artists to create beautiful work which contributes to my way of pushing against the tension of ambition.
3. We’ve seen how icons like Margaret Thatcher used color in their outfits to stand out and project power, making a strong statement. In a similar way, how do you use color in your outfits to elevate your confidence, assert your presence, and help you rise above self-doubt as you pursue your ambitions?
I dress with a lot of colour but not as a way to elevate my confidence and to center my ambition but really as a form of expression of how I feel on the inside. I’m an artist and I see the world in colour. Colour makes my world better and brighter and so when I dress in colour it makes me feel more like myself . It makes me feel more Chesray and makes me come into my body clearly. It’s kind of grounded in pleasure activism by Adrienne Maree Brown which talks about reclaiming colour as a way to body queerness but also to help us support personhood and ourselves through this lens of colour. So colour really is just a way for me to not only assert my creativity but to give the world insight into how I feel as an artist and what it means to be an artist. It’s about expression and creating visual languages that people can see across all languages. I do it every day in the theater but even in my everyday life , I try to create this visual language that is progressive and liberal and that really supports my artistry.
Curious to meet the next bold woman in our mini-series Carry Your Ambition? See the full publishing schedule here.
