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The Dartmouth
July 25, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

Voice artist, poet Diggs comes to Bentley

Combining spoken word, vocal improvisation, digitally manipulated sound and video, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs will perform excerpts from her latest chapbook, a collection of poetry titled “TwERK,” at the Hopkins Center’s Bentley Theater on Friday evening. The poet and sound artist will also lead a Thursday evening workshop in Bentley for students interested in learning how to use the human body as an instrument.

In her performance works, Diggs combines language with different modes of communication, such as music, physical movement and digital manipulation. Many of her poems combine different languages and experiment with form.

Diggs said the inspiration for her work is personal and reflects her upbringing, surrounded by musicians and poets in Harlem.

“Being in an environment that was largely musicians encouraged me to work more with the musicians in a position that was more than being a poet,” Diggs said. “And seeing all these things that come out, whether it’s the personal and the private, the private and the personal, in terms of language, in terms of body language in terms of movement, in terms of exchange -— it informs me, it still does.”

While some writers and performers take colloquial language and slang for granted, Diggs disrupts this thinking, integrating a variety of sounds and languages to create a new kind of communication in her poetry.

Though Diggs said she viewed her first poetry readings at open mic events as simply a chance to share her work with an audience, she described her current readings as purposeful and intimate.

“When I’m doing my own projects, I am constantly negotiating what exactly am I communicating to the audience, to the participants who are sitting down and listening to me and watching me read or do vocal manipulations or instructing them in some sort of audience activity,” she said.

Diggs’s Thursday interactive workshop will encourage students to expand their understanding of language and voice performance, she said. In her own experiments with sound, Diggs has worked with different theories and incorporated natural and artificial sounds.

Diggs has asked workshop participants to bring a poem with at least two languages. Multi-lingual pieces, she said, help press the boundaries of language, a concept she has explored in her work.

Theater professor Maya Winfrey, who helped organize Diggs’s visit to campus, said the artist was chosen to showcase her contributions to vocal experimentation and black theater.

“I would say it will be a night of mystics that will expose the boundaries of language and experiment with human expression,” Winfrey said.

Dondei Dean ’17, who plans to attend Diggs’s Friday performance, said she looked forward to Diggs’s experimentation.

“I think that unlike most art forms, it has a particular way of drawing in the viewer,” she said. “Because it’s not static, like a drawing or a painting, in some ways there’s more for the listener to engage with. The vocal inflections, the gestures, the subtle rhymes and strong phrases — they all contribute.”

Diggs’s performance is part of the theater department’s Voices program, which aims to bring diverse and experimental artists to campus.

Diggs attended Borough of Manhattan Community College and received a master’s degree at New York University. She pursued a master of fine arts degree at the California College of the Arts. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks including “TwERK” and has produced an album, “Televisíon.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction.

Correction appended: April 17, 2014

The initial version of the story misidentified the location of Thursday's workshop, which is Bentley Theater, not Collis Common Ground.