Putting Black futures on centre stage
Black theatre students offer their responses to theatre project
One of the biggest theatre projects of the pandemic era in Canada, “21 Black Futures,” is a partnership between Obsidian Theatre and CBC Arts showcasing 63 Black Canadian actors, directors and playwrights, and answering the question: “What is the future of Blackness?”
The project is the brainchild of Obsidian’s new artistic director, Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu, to celebrate the company’s 21st anniversary. The 21, 10-minute-long pieces in “21 Black Futures” rolled out on CBC Gem during Black History Month and feature some of the most foundational names in Canadian Black theatre — including Djanet Sears and Philip Akin — alongside the next generation of leaders, like Soulpepper artistic director Weyni Mengesha and filmmaker Charles Officer.
The stories they tell range from dystopian worlds where a “White Supremacist Island” exists, to intimate reckonings with family history, to afrofuturistic space-scapes. They’ve reverberated widely across the Canadian theatre community at large, but especially with emerging Black creators.
A companion program, called “Seeding the Future,” gives a platform to a selection of responses from Black theatre students. The partnership, sponsored by York University’s department of theatre and Brock University’s department of dramatic arts, put out a call to Black university-aged students to offer responses to the “21 Black Futures” plays. The response was overwhelming: more than 60 students applied to be part of “Seeding the Future.” (Both authors of this story were involved in the adjudication of the applicants.)
The 21 participants chosen are from across Canada and beyond, and their forms of response are wide-ranging — from poetry and songs to spoken word and more traditional written reviews. They are supported by three Black mentors: York University PhD student Signy Lynch, writer and critic Jordy Kieto, and actor and writer Omari Newton.
We spoke to four out of the seven participants in the first round of responses about the plays they viewed and their pieces. All seven responses (paired with Season 1 of “21 Black Futures”) are available online now at CBC Arts, with the second and third rounds published on that site on March 1 and 8.
Speaking about “21 Black Futures,” Tindyebwa Otu said “the future of Black theatre is not one thing. It is not just an increase in Black representation. It is profoundly diverse and multi-faceted, it is multi-generational and it commands attention.”
One “Seeding the Future” participant — isi bhakhomen — was similarly inspired to apply to the project.
“Instead of hoping that a queer, nonbinary, Latinx, Nigerian, Afro-Peruvian, Black femme theatre kid applied, I decided that it was imperative that I give myself the space to be the voice that I craved to see in the world,” they told the Star.
Bhakhomen was raised in Toronto but is now in their third year at the National Theatre School in Montreal. They responded to Amanda Parris’s monodrama “The Death News,” directed by Officer and featuring Lovell Adams-Gray, with an Instagram video. Bhakhomen enlisted a fellow acting student, Espoir Segbeaya, to perform their writing, which describes key moments in Adams-Gray’s performance, as well as their emotional and physical reaction to the play’s themes: the televised broadcasting of Black deaths and an imagined future in which Black individuals can have the final say in how their life story is told.
“(Segbeaya and I) had a twohour conversation about how the piece connected to our own experience as young Black people … I wrote down the sensations I felt, I kept track of the visual components that I found powerful, I wrote down the moments that really hit me and then I created my poem with those elements in mind.
“We only had a few days to put it all together. But I think that’s what made the process so much fun,” bhakhomen said. “We saw ourselves in Dante Cooper’s story (the character played by Adams-Gray). ‘The Death News’ reminded me that these broadcasted murders have wounded me. It put Black humanity at the centre. I never want to forget that.”
Emily Radcliffe, a third-year student in arts and business at the University of Waterloo, is originally from Stoney Creek. She responded to Peace Akintade’s play “Madness With Rocks,” an allegorical piece set 100 years in the future in which a warrior played by Dion Johnstone discovers a rock that is all that remains of the African continent (Jamie Robinson is the director).
Radcliffe’s response to “Madness With Rocks” is the song “The Boulder and I,” which she wrote, performed and recorded herself, mixing multiple tracks of her own voice. She found the cue to her response in the text of the play: “There was one line in the piece that says, ‘Words were so fleeting, we put them in song.’ So I was like, it’s ready for me …
“I was just going around my house, trying to play with words that fit the feeling of being in the position that the play’s character was in … what that feeling of isolation would be like, but still having that burden of colonial oppression, just holding that alone.”
Radcliffe’s lyrics are written in the voice of the play’s protagonist — “I feel the weight of my wounds pulling me deeper into the sand/Feel like I should just die with our stories in hand” — but she discovered that articulating these ideas touched something personal in her.
“I’ve been holding onto a lot of anger,” said Radcliffe. “I really tried to think about the grander population of Black individuals who go through this … not necessarily being the last one in their tribe setting in Africa, but in their workplaces … I thought about that current feeling of, in our realm of things, the pain of unacknowledged racism and oppression and how, even when you try to bring it up, it’s dismissed or pushed under the rug.”
Teri Blades is a second-year theatre student at Bishop’s University in Sherbrooke, Que. She’s studying remotely from Barbados this year. Blades was nervous initially to apply to “Seeding the Future” because she is not Canadian, “but I thought about it some more and I said, ‘Well, as an international student who really wants to work in Canada, when I finish with school, I am the future.’ ”
Her “21 Black Futures” play is “The Sender” by Cheryl Foggo, directed by Leah-Simone Bowen. In it, the character Cil, played by Amanda Cordner, works in a call centre for a global racism-elimination project and encounters difficulties while trying to send a person to White Supremacist Island.
Blades wrote her response as a poem, presented on Instagram. “If you read the poem and then you watch the play side by side, you can tell that each stanza is a response to a particular moment,” Blades said.
There’s a particularly striking passage in her poem when only one line appears on the Instagram screen: “And then, it turns to me.”
“When I saw the play, the moment where she (Cordner) turns to the camera and the screen exudes this blue colour, that struck me really hard. I said, ‘Oh, I’m the one being talked to now,’ ” said Blades. “So when I structured the Instagram post I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if I made it to convey the same kind of emotion to people who were reading it?’ ”
Director Bowen responded to Blades’ poem on Instagram with “OMG” and two flame emojis, and the further comment “Beautiful words here.”
Playwright Foggo wrote, “This beautiful and knowing response means more to me than you can know,” with a black arm-flexing emoji.
“Seeing their responses and knowing that they love it, I felt wow, it was fairly cool. Wow. OK,” said Blades.
Cassandra Henry is a fifthyear student at Toronto’s York University, and had the challenge of responding to a piece largely told through American Sign Language with subtitles. Fortunately, though intimidated at first, she had the knowledge to meet the piece on its own terms; she already took a university course in ASL.
“I knew from the beginning I wanted to use ASL, I viewed it as essential,” she said, and she later decided to also include captions in her Instagram video response. “It was difficult to learn, but I didn’t want to respond to a piece that communicated to its viewers in ASL/ BASL (Black American Sign Language) and make it less accessible to the audience. I wanted to include everyone.”
Henry’s piece responds to “Beyere” by Shauntay Grant, translated into ASL and performed by Guyanese-Canadian Deaflympic track and field champion Natasha “Courage” Bacchus (directed by Lisa Karen Cox), which tackles intergenerational knowledge, passing down traditions, and the power of food and physical bodies in holding those cultural traditions. Henry took those themes and, again, looked to the future.
“Human evolution is dependent upon change. Our huntergatherer ancestors weren’t voguing all those years ago, and one day we might end up in a position where we have to take up a practice that our ancestors did in the past to survive,” she said.
“I came to a place where I wanted to celebrate the joy and the pride that we do have in our community, even though people try to undermine that or take it away from us.”
That’s pretty clear when, in her piece, Henry signs a future response from a Black child when asked who they are: “Honey, I’m everything!”
You can find all of the student responses collected at cbc.ca/ arts. “21 Black Futures” can be streamed at cbc.ca/arts and on CBC Gem.
“Instead of hoping that a queer, nonbinary, Latinx, Nigerian, Afro-Peruvian, Black femme theatre kid applied, I decided … to be the voice that I craved to see in the world.”
ISI BHAKHOMEN
“SEEDING” PARTICIPANT
Karen Fricker and Carly Maga are
Toronto-based theatre critics and freelance contributors for the Star. Follow Karen on Twitter: @KarenFricker2. Follow Carly on Twitter: @RadioMaga