Personhood Practice & Pedagogy in Black Womxn Theatre!

Dr. d'bi.young anitafrika Doctoral Researcher at London South Bank University, UK

Abstract

Personhood, Practice, & Pedagogy in Black Womxn Theatre: A Black Queer Transfeminist Dubography is a critical autoethnography anchored in the Anitafrika Dub Praxis. This thesis investigates how I, and other members of the predominantly English-speaking African-Caribbean-descended community of Black womyn theatre makers in Tkarón:to, North Turtle Island, decoliberate personhood, practice, and pedagogy within concentric kinship circles of femtorship. As a memoir-monograph created by an insider-dubographer, the dissertation: a) charts the herstory and development of  Black womyn’s theatre in North Turtle Island, b) investigates how colonial-historical-systemic harm affects Black womyn theatre practitioners, c) explores how Black womyn metabolise oppression through playmaking, d) identifies performance aesthetics that emerge from Black womyn in theatre; and e) theorises my original methodologies that formulate the Anitafrika Dub Praxis, as an arts-based pedagogical technology—along with other frameworks by Black womyn— for decolonial theatre training. 

This research emerges from my twenty-five-year journey as a dub poet and theatre maker, drawing on qualitative and quantitative data that consists of forty-one semi-structured interviews with Black womyn practitioners, a survey, and archival materials, including Anita Stewart’s unpublished manuscript of collected writings and ahdri zhina mandiela’s 1995 documentary on/stage/black/women. Through Practice-as-Research (PaR), Black feminist epistemology, intersectionality, and Ubuntu philosophy, I discuss how Black womyn use theatre to rupture colonial constructs, catalyse radical paradigm shifts, and enact pedagogies of transformation through performance-based worldbuilding. The research shows how we conjure heterogeneous cultures of criticality through our creativity, while also navigating psycho-emotional and socio-political fissures within our concentric kinship circles. 

This book-length academic study of theatre in North Turtle Island, centred on Black womyn, integrating herstory, Black feminist epistemology, decolonial pedagogy, and PaR, within a unified scholarly framework, is my original contribution to knowledge. Within this contribution, I introduce the Anitafrika Dub Praxis, a decolonial system comprising the Anitafrika Method, Critical Dub Pedagogy, the Three R Process, and Dubography, all of which integrate methodology, performance, and pedagogy. The PaR outcome is an Anitafrika Method Resource Compendium for decolonial theatre training, which includes a Decolonial Praxis Deck, seven Principle Lectures, and an Anitafrika Method Workshop video series. These components are actualised through Circleturgy, Decolonial Somatic Practice, Ensemble Integrity Practice, and Character Adjacency Practice, which support the making of African Dub Theatre’s Biomyth Monodrama and Pantodub. By theorising Black womyn’s theatre, I offer innovative models of decolonial cultural stewardship. Black womyn’s theatre is the embodiment of Ubuntu: “I am because you are because we are.”

Dub Riddims by KennyMuziq