Welcome to My Blog

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Artist Statement

Hello, my name is d'bi.young anitafrika and welcome to my Blog. For the past decade I have been diligently crafting a framework, a praxis, a method, an approach to artistic training & human development that is grounded in integrity, intersectionality, feminism, love & the awareness of the complexities of oppression & how we proliferate it. Hundreds of artists & people globally, have co-created the growth of the Anitafrika Method by participating in my National & International Artist Residencies through ongoing workshops at the Anitafrika Dub Theatre followed by Yemoya, followed by The Watah School & Theatre & now the Anitafrika Retreat Centre. The world has been my lab. The feedback I have received from these artists & change-makers is that the method works as not only a tool for social change but also as a new Integrity-Based model for artistic training & development. As I reflect on the choices I made over a decade ago to preserve my own artistic integrity & to embark on a sacred journey of finding myself which resulted in finding the Anitafrika Method, I thank the ancestors for their ever-present guidance. I hope that as we find our way through the fog of the present moment, we will embrace new systems of artistic training & development that rupture old systems of oppression. - d'bi.young anitafrika

Current & Upcoming Interests

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d'bi.young anitafrika

d’bi.young is a playwright-performer, director-dramaturge and activist-educator, who creates, embodies and teaches decolonial performance praxis. Culminating their PhD in Black womyn’s theatre at London South Bank University (LSBU), their research centres on the epistemological, ontological, cosmological, ethical, aesthetic and somatic emancipation of the oppressed self, through theatre making. d’bi.young developed the Anitafrika Method—a nurturant Black-queer-feminist pedagogy of transformation—offering arts practitioners globally, an intersectional framework of knowing, doing and being. A widely anthologised Siminovitch Playwright Prize finalist, three-time Dora award winner, and founding Artistic Director of Watah Theatre, Spolrusie Press and Ubuntu Decolonial Arts Centre in Costa Rica, d’bi.young has authored twelve plays, seven albums, and four poetry collections. Currently, d’bi.young serves as lead faculty in Soulpepper and Obsidian's theatre training programs and as a lecturer in theatre at the University of Victoria, BC, where they guide practitioners in developing new approaches to theatre-making through Critical Dub Pedagogy.