d'bi.young anitafrika Doctoral Researcher at London South Bank University, UK
Black Womxn Theatre! Decolonising Personhood, Practice & Pedagogy
Abstract
Black Womxn Theatre is a dubography, an autoethnography rooted in critical dub pedagogy, presented as an epic 21 track dub poetry album/treatise and accompanying big book thesis, that investigates how the author and other members of the predominantly African-Caribbean descended community of Black womyn theatre makers in Tkaronto, Northern Turtle Island, decoliberate personhood, practice, and pedagogy (meaning to embody liberation via decolonial action) through concentric kinship circles of femtorship in theatre. As a hybrid memoir-monograph created by an insider-autoethnographer, this thesis a. charts the hxrstory and development of Black womyn’s theatre in Northern Turtle Island, b. investigates how colonial-hxstorical-systemic trauma affects Black womyn theatre practitioners, c. explores how Black womyn embody playmaking to metabolise their experiences of oppression, d. identifies Black feminist aesthetics that recur in theatre by Black womyn, and e. discusses the author’s Anitafrika Method and Critical Dub Pedagogy as Black, queer transfeminist technologies that decolonise theatre training.
Researched through the writer’s reflexive inquiry into their twenty-five-year journey as a dub poet and theatre practitioner, the data consists of semi-structured interviews with forty-one Black womyn theatre makers, a national survey, and performance archives, including ahdri zhina mandiela’s visionary 1995 film on/stage/black/women. Through PaR, Black feminist epistemology, intersectionality and Ubuntu philosophy, the examination reveals how Black womyn theatre makers rupture contestations of their humxnity, catalysing radical paradigm shifts while enacting pedagogies of transformation through worldbuilding within the wider society. The data further elucidates how Black womyn conjure heterogeneous cultures of criticality, courage and communion by means of their creativity, while navigating the psycho-emotional and socio-political fissures and tensions that emerge amongst their kinship cirles.
PaR outcomes include: 1. an unpublished manuscript of the author’s collection of plays 2. an Anitafrika Method resource compendium, and 3. a first year Ensemble Buildiing course centering decolonial performance praxis. In co-creating a world of liberatory theatre that emerges from Black womyn’s arts praxes, these outputs are grounded in the author’s contributions to knowledge: the Anitafrika Method and Critical Dub Pedagogy, accompanied by their rhizomatic offshoots: Biomyth Monodrama, Panto Dub Theatre, Character Adjacency Practice, Decolonial Somatic Practice, Ensemble Integrity Practice, Concentric Kinship Circle, and Circleturgy. Black Womxn Theatre articulates how Black womyn reimagine, recreate and re-engage theatre as a space-place of self-transformation, creative expression and community embodiment. Ubuntu I am because you are because we are…
Music by KennyMuzik