Aria Dean on the Making of a Character

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 255, ‘Performance’

It always annoys me, personally and intellectually, when people talk about characters in movies and novels as embodying this or that value or principle. In the case of my own narrative work, and in the specific case of my play The Color Scheme (2025), I am always stressing out about this, especially when it comes to Black characters – since Black people are so easily and so often conscripted into symbolic operations. I am also obsessed with this because of my interest in the history of film theory and experimental cinema, which have long tangoed with psychoanalysis and problems of realism – problems that also lead to investigating the materiality and structure of cinema and cinematic experience. When I work narratively, whether in film, performance or writing, I am always returning to the question of how to avoid presenting complete ‘characters’, in a literary-psychological sense, and simultaneously avoid creating completely transparent, allegorical characters, in the style of a morality play. When it came to The Color Scheme, this problem revolved not just around dialogue and action, but around the question of the historicity of the characters: The Philosopher and The Poet. I did not want to make the characters in my play exactly historical; that is, I did not want them to be one-to-one representations of historical figures, in this case Alain Locke and Claude McKay. In doing so, they would either become heroes or people. They are either monumentalized themselves or are relatable, and therefore stand-ins for the viewer.

Already inspired by the form of the Platonic dialogue for this play for two actors, I approached writing The Philosopher and The Poet with the idea of ‘conceptual personae’ in mind – a notion introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their book What Is Philosophy? (1991). They write that, in philosophical dialogues, a ‘character’ functions either as ‘the author’s representative’ or as their antagonist, while ‘conceptual personae carry out the movements that describe the author’s plane of immanence, and they play a part in the very creation of the author’s concepts.’ Although their notion of the ‘conceptual persona’ might centre the author more than I’d like – The Philosopher and The Poet do not directly play a role in the creation of my ‘concepts’ – the figures do map the historical-theoretical ground to which my concepts are bound. They absolutely ‘indicate the dangers specific to this plane, the bad perceptions, bad feelings and even negative movements that emerge from it.’ Deleuze and Guattari might have in mind ‘personae’ that are a little more transparent than The Philosopher and The Poet will seem to the audience in their final manifestation; however, in my view, this is simply what happens when you hand a role to a performer. Things thicken.

The ‘conceptual persona’ was also useful in thinking through how to make something with characters and dialogue that is about both ideas and relations – structural and interpersonal. Here, ideas are not mere subtext: they at once make up the actual text and are the conscious occupation of the characters. I’m interested in people who can’t help but talk about ideas and who are attracted to others who do so as well. With this in mind, desire is wholly subtextual to the dialogue, yet it fills the stage and the frame, nearly crowding out the ideas in turn.

I’m interested in people who can’t help but talk about ideas.

The dialogue is inspired by a conversation that occurred between Locke and McKay in Berlin’s Tiergarten in 1923, though we have no record of what was said. In the play, The Philosopher and The Poet discuss aesthetics, form and politics, with nationalism and 19th-century monuments as their access point for questioning politics’ role in emerging modernist artistic practices in the West, and art’s role in the formulation of a Black nationalist or diasporic consciousness. Neither man’s argument will be dazzling to the audience, by today’s standards. In fact, their positions might hardly seem to be ‘positions’ at all, depending on the discourse the viewer is steeped in. You might find The Philosopher’s fuzzy formalism towards a ‘Black aesthetic’ extremely obvious. The same could be said for The Poet’s firm insistence on intra-diasporic cultural-historical differences. We are not meant to be wowed; rather, I hope the viewer is attentive to the fallibility of both positions and the underlying logic of each. The Philosopher and The Poet present two structures for thought, two attempts at method, in – I think – a dialectical relationship, each resting somewhere along the spectrum from liberalism to communism, formalism to realism.

Finally, the formal and political question that knits all this together is the very simple one of how to represent history. It’s an overused and often misused piece of writing, but Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940) has been instructive for this project, especially the section that everyone loves: ‘To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was”. It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger […] In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it.’ So, the play will appear to have an interest in fidelity, in a historical realism. The Siegesallee boulevard that ran through the Tiergarten is arranged as it would have been in 1923, ‘reconstructed’, you might say, in Unreal Engine. The monuments are made from 3D models of the actual marble statues that lined its path, scanned at their present location in the Zitadelle Spandau. They’re presented in their actual, fragmented state (rendered virtually), having been damaged in World War II, subsequently buried underground by the Allied Forces, and ruined by the weather once unearthed. The dialogue, too, could appear to be reconstructed, but it’s actually historical-theoretical fiction. The scenography and the actors speaking the lines are captured by two cameras located in the wings and fed live to a large screen at the back of the stage, coming together to produce the form of illusion that we know as a ‘movie’. This movie’s primary subject is history, I guess, which is also sort of like what its characters hope to be or to become: subjects of history.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 255 with the headline ‘Dramatis Personae’

Aria Dean’s performance ‘The Color Scheme’, co-commissioned with Hartwig Art Foundation, will premiere as part of The Performa 2025 Biennial, New York, until 23 November 

^{Main image: Filip Kostic, The Color Scheme (detail) set design, work in progress, 2025, digital animation still. Courtesy: Aria Dean and Filip Kostic}