On 28 December 1998, four officers from Riverside Police Department in California shot Tyisha Miller, a 19 year old African American woman, dead.
Miller had been driving with a younger cousin when the car they were travelling in suffered a flat tyre. When the spare was found also to be flat, a passer-by drove Miller’s cousin home to collect their AAA (roadside assistance) card. Miller did not leave the car as she feared it would be stolen. By the time the two of them returned, Miller was unconscious; the engine was still running and all the doors were locked. There was a semi-automatic gun in Miller’s lap.
Concluding that Miller was very ill, one of them called 911 and asked for an ambulance. The call handler, on being told about the gun, called the police. Officers surrounded the car. They stated that, when they were trying to remove the weapon, Miller had sat up and grabbed it, and that they shot her in self-defence.
Miller was shot twelve times.
A later investigation found that Miller had not raised the gun, and was probably unconscious (she was under the influence of GHB) throughout. The officers subsequently retracted their allegation.
The police department’s motto is ‘To protect and to serve.’
Rickerby Hinds’ Dreamscape recreates the events of that night through the fictionalised character of Myeisha Mills and a combination of poetry, dance and beatboxing. Jada Evelyn Ramsey and Josiah Alpher together perform a powerful hip-hop theatre piece, throwing into sharp relief Mills’ vibrant, joyful life and her violent, cruel and unnecessary death.
Mills, now dying, speaks to us from ‘one of those dreams where nothing comes out when you try to scream.’ She tells her story in poetry, addressing the audience as if she were talking to a friend. Dancing around the stage, she’s a ball of energy, hardly able to keep still. In life she loves dancing, boys, Wesley Snipes, Denzel Washington, soul food, softball, music – in other words, she’s a typical 19 year old with a 19 year old’s dreams.
In death, at 19, she’s ‘knocking on heaven’s door.’
Alpher provides the beatbox backing to Ramsey’s verse, while also taking almost all of the other parts in the story. He’s the call handler, the doctor who treats Mills’ teenage scoliosis, and most importantly, the coroner who dispassionately lists the details of each of Mills’ twelve horrific gunshot wounds.
These are fired off like the bullets that caused them, the information preceded each time by a rapid count to the number of the shot, during which Ramsey runs around the stage then stops in mid-action.
And in between the details of each wound, Mills treats us to another vignette of her life. She’s been working on a hip hop dance routine with cousin Tony, a snatch of which she performs with her customary vitality and enthusiasm. She’s going to miss her grandfather’s barbecue, but that doesn’t stop her sounding off about the dreadful bread that inevitably appears alongside all the delicious food. She talks about her ambition to be a cheerleader. There’s a wonderful section about African American women’s hair,
‘Do not touch the hair!’
She talks about her cousin Freddie, who once nearly died from fat embolism syndrome.
But Freddie didn’t die. His mother prayed and prayed and he recovered,
‘I hope Auntie D has prayer power left for me.’
As the bullet count mounts, Mills knows she’s running out of time. Ramsey’s increasingly urgent delivery turns to something far more poignant. Mills asks people to put an extra candle on their birthday cakes for her. She always looked forward to being 20, so let’s pretend she did,
‘Close your eyes and wish that what you’re seeing is a fable.’
By the time the coroner gets to Bullet Wound 12, Mills is no longer simply a victim we’ve heard about on the news. She’s a real person, with a real life. A life taken away by not one bullet but twelve.
When, at the beginning of the play, we hear the sirens approaching, Tony remarks that if Mills has been a white girl she’d have been helped. As it is, the colour of her skin, and the gun culture of her country, have already sealed her fate.
Jada Evelyn Ramsey and Josiah Alpher are excellent actors, turning in outstanding performances in what is a truly shocking, urgent piece of theatre. Dreamscape shines a harsh light on institutionalised racism and gives a powerful voice to a community that is so often stereotyped and silenced, in art as in life.
Dreamscape is at Gilded Balloon at Appleton Tower (Bramley) Venue 140 at 1.30pm every day until 24 August. There is no performance on Monday 11 August.
Please note: Jada Evelyn Ramsey and Josiah Alpher are in this production until 10 August. From 12 August their parts will be taken by Natali Micciche and John ‘Faahz’ Merchant.
