Alva Rogers is an American playwright, composer, actor, vocalist, and arts educator. She is known for the use of dolls and puppetry in interdisciplinary work. Rogers performed in the role of Eula Peazant in Julie Dash's 1991 filmDaughters of the Dust. and was a vocalist in the New York City alternative rock band Band of Susans.
Rogers has been a part of numerous notable artist collaborations. From 1985 to 1989, she was a founding member of Rodeo Caldonia, a black women's art collective formed in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Fort Greene that included fellow artists Lorna Simpson, Chakaia Booker and Sandye Wilson among others. With Lisa Jones, also a member of Rodeo Caldonia, she wrote a series of radio plays--Aunt Aida's Hand, Stained, and Ethnic Cleansing --for New American Radio on National Public Radio. In 2015 Greg Tate facilitated a panel discussion with Rogers and Lisa Jones about Rodeo Caldonia in the 2011 film Brooklyn Boheme. Alva Rogers and her work with Rodeo Caldonia was included in the 2017 Brooklyn Museum exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–1985 curated by Rujeko Hockley and Catherine Morris. During Robert Colescott's 1989 exhibition at the New Museum Rogers was featured in Black to the Future: Alva Rogers in Performance, a public program that unpacked the issues in Colescott's work. The program was curated by Kellie Jones.
Puppetry
With puppeteer Heather Henson and the composer Bruce Monroe, she created three musicals: nightbathing, mermaid, and Sunday (performed Off-Off-Broadway as part of the New Works Now! series at the Public Theater. Rogers also created audio recordings for Whitfield Lovell's work Whispers from the Walls.
In 1988 Rogers played Doris Witherspoon in Spike Lee's film, School Daze about intra-racial prejudice in HBCU academia. It was an early film for most of the actors and most of the stars and crew were African American. The film co-starred Lawrence Fishburne, Giancarlo Esposito, Tisha Campbell, Ossie Davis and Kadeem Hardison amongst others.
''Daughters of the Dust''
In 1991 Rogers appeared in Julie Dash's film Daughters of the Dust. The film took place in 1902 about a matriarchal family during the Great Migration. Eula, Rogers' character, is raped by a white man and the fear of lynching gives her family no recourse to investigate her pregnancy. The film has been noted to have influenced Beyonce's 2016 album Lemonade.
“Daughters was a major aesthetic leap forward for black cinema in that it did not mimic Hollywood storytelling but drew on European art house films, African traditions and created its own idiosyncratic style,” said Nelson George, filmmaker.
Rogers appeared as herself in the film Brooklyn Boheme, which documented the New Black Arts Movement in Fort Greene in the 1980s and 1990s. She is featured in Kerry James Marshall's film The Doppler Incident and was a frequent subject in the photographs of Lorna Simpson.
