Jennifer Kidwell and Scott Sheppard

Underground Railroad Game is a theatrical duet that uses semiotics and satire to investigate the ingrained narrative around America’s racialized past and present. It is based on creator Scott Sheppard’s childhood experience with a pedagogical tool in which students captured or mobilized slaves, represented by rag dolls, to earn points in an “educational Civil War.” Acknowledging our own bodies as political symbols, we critique the hypocrisy of this objectification by distorting and re-inscribing prevailing signs and tropes.