It’s time to go back down in the Valley!
This Friday marks the premiere of the highly anticipated second season of STARZ’s hit drama series P-Valley. Set in the hot and steamy world of stripping located in the even hotter and steamier state of Mississippi, P-Valley quickly amassed a fanbase thanks to its sexy cast and its tackling of issues like sex worker rights and challenges, poverty, domestic violence, gentrification, queerness and more.
Katori Hall stands with the stars of P-Valley, (L-R) Nicco Annan, Elarica Johnson, Brandee Evans, Shannon Thornton, and J. Alphonse Nicholson at the P-Valley Premiere in LA
Rodin Eckenroth / Stringer
One person who wasn’t surprised by the show’s immediate success is its creator Katori Hall. “I had an inkling,” Hall tells xoNecole. “If the show had an opportunity to be seen, that it actually would take flight.”
Hall first got the idea for P-Valley in 2009, inspired by her frequent trips to strip clubs in the south and her brief time taking pole dancing classes. “My own experience with strip clubs and that class collided in my brain,” Hall says. “And it made me want to do a lot more research about the women who are dancers and just learn more about their lives.”
Hall initially conceived the idea for P-Valley as a play. The Pulitzer Prize and Olivier Award winner and two-time Tony Award nominee have been thriving in the medium since 2009. “Stripping is such a theatrical experience,” Hall explains. “I grew up down south, I grew up going to clubs. So I was really impressed and inspired by the show of stripping.” Once she saw her characters come to life on stage, however, she realized she wanted to explore them for a longer period of time than a stage play allows. “I want my characters to participate in more than just this story,” Hall says.“There’s so many other stories that I want to tell with these characters.”
Much of the success of the show comes from the vibrancy of the characters such as the flamboyant strip club madam of the Pynk, Uncle Clifford (Nicco Annan). Hall credits her family for providing the inspiration for those characters. “Uncle Clifford is actually a fusion of my real Uncle Clifford and my mom and my dad,” Hall says. “I just wanted to create this very gender-fluid character who was very feminine and masculine in equal measure.” Other characters she says like the Pynk’s OG star stripper Mercedes (Brandee Evans) or the Pynk’s fastest rising star Miss Mississippi (Shannon Thornton) are amalgamations of women she’s met in the strip clubs and also her older sisters.
As the youngest of four girls, Hall says that her parents were “tired” by the time it came to raising her, so she says that she was given the space to explore her creative interests more. “From the time I was itty, itty, bitty, I was writing in my journals and creating plays with my dolls,” Halls says. “I knew that I was destined to put words down on paper and create characters and worlds.”
When she attended college at Columbia University, she initially pursued theater as an actress. However, it was the dearth of meaty roles for Black women in her theater program that led to her wanting to create her own roles for herself and for other women that Hall says “look like myself.” It was through creating her own stories and characters that Hall realized the sort of power she was able to possess over her career.
Katori Hall and Megan Thee Stallion at the P-Valley Premiere in Los Angeles
Araya Doheny / Stringer
Hall says that she is committed to writing stories that center the Black female experience, stories about survival, and stories about the underdog. By setting P- Valley in a strip club, she allowed her to use that space as a metaphor. “Oftentime within a strip club there are moments of liberation and then there are moments of exploitation,” Hall says.
We see it all and more in the latest season, including more music from Lil Murda (J. Alphonse Nicholson) and even a track by Megan Thee Stallion. At the Los Angeles premiere of P-Valley on Thursday, Hall took the stage to tease what we can expect in season two of her hit show: “It’s deeper, it’s darker, and it’s 1000% better.”
RELATED
Sooner than later, you may feel drained, depleted, and resentful due to unmet needs and boundary violations.
When your needs aren’t met, you will serve someone else's standards while neglecting your own. This is why it is so vital that we take inventory of our relationships and assess if they are relationships that honor our needs, our boundaries, and our truth.
1. You allow yourself to build more intimacy in your relationships.
Im Free Stephen Colbert GIF by The Late Show With Stephen ColbertGiphyIntimacy is the heart of a healthy relationship. When we understand our partners, we build intimacy with them. Vulnerability is a conduit for emotional intimacy in safe relationships. Our relationships thrive when we feel emotionally connected and supported by our loved ones.
Nevertheless, a healthy relationship does not mean a perfect relationship, and sometimes we need to assess and address what's working in our relationships and what may need some fine-tuning. When we are open to learning, growing, and developing deeper bonds with our loved ones, we invite them to preserve our relationship through open dialogue centered around honesty, love, respect, and safety.
2. You are choosing yourself and are being honest with yourself.
When you consider spring cleaning your relationships, you offer yourself a token of love. You are communicating that YOU matter, and your feelings, energy, and the overall health of your relationships matter. Spring cleaning your relationships allows you to be there for yourself.
When we choose ourselves, we advocate for ourselves.
So many of us are starting to realize that we have every right to advocate for ourselves, even if the environment we grew up in did not support our emotional or physical well-being.
Now that we can advocate for ourselves as adults, we get to choose our relationships, not from a place of obligation or fear but from a place of reciprocity, love, and respect.
3. It can help you to get clear on things you may have suppressed.
Michelle GIF by The BacheloretteGiphySuppression happens when we actively push uncomfortable thoughts and feelings out of our minds. When something painful happens, and we are left with no resolve, we can suppress how we truly feel as an act of self-preservation for the relationship.
Nevertheless, with honesty also comes vulnerability with yourself. Maybe you have been unhappy in certain relationships for a while, but it was too painful to address, or maybe you have been suppressing how you feel because that is what is expected of you in your relationships.
Although concealing your feelings may protect you from experiencing them, keep in mind that the body stores all of our emotions. There can be serious long-term side effects of emotional suppression, such as physical ailments linked to autoimmune disease.
Our mind, body, and heart are all interconnected, so assessing your relationships through spring cleaning not only improves your overall wellness but can also prevent anxiety, depression, and other chronic illnesses.
4. You can reflect on how you’re showing up in your relationships.
This one is my favorite! Spring cleaning your relationships gives you an opportunity to see yourself more clearly. If you are going through an imaginary checklist of what everyone in your life is doing wrong, you may be a part of the problem. Spring cleaning your relationships is not about what everyone else is doing wrong; it’s about accountability.
Take this time to reflect on how you show up in your relationships.
Are you kind and respectful to your loved ones? Do you honor their boundaries? What can you do to improve? How can you become a better listener? A better communicator?
Use this time to put a flashlight on your heart and take inventory of the places you love people from. Relationships are co-created, meaning both people play a role in the dynamic. Assess your role in your relationships and be the change you want to see.
5. Setting boundaries will reveal the health of your relationships.
Family Vacation Fox GIF by GrandfatheredGiphyNedra Tawwab, the author of Setting Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself, defines boundaries as a "verbal or an action that you communicate to someone to feel safe, secure, and supported in a relationship." As we are spring-cleaning our relationships, it’s imperative that we check in with our boundaries.
As humans, we are forever evolving, growing, and changing. As we grow, the boundaries that worked for us ten years ago may no longer serve us today. This is why it is important that we communicate our boundaries as they change. People cannot read our minds, and it is unfair to expect them to, no matter how much you think they should just “know” you.
All relationships need boundaries because people need to know how we want to be treated. In healthy relationships, boundaries are honored, and differences are respected. In unhealthy relationships, boundaries are constantly violated and not taken seriously.
When you learn to set healthy boundaries and you start communicating them through your season of spring cleaning, allow your boundaries to reveal the health of your relationships. This may come with a sigh of relief, or this may come with immense grief, but I once heard someone say, “Struggling with the truth is much better than being comforted by a lie.”
Let your relationships reveal themselves to you so you can form healthier bonds, repair broken bonds, or release connections that no longer serve you.
Let’s make things inbox official! Sign up for the xoNecole newsletter for love, wellness, career, and exclusive content delivered straight to your inbox.
Feature image by dragana991/ Getty Images
Originally published on March 24, 2023