It is a rarified calling to be a writer; to use language to wring meaning from the confusion of one’s own experience. It is an even rarer destiny to write for the stage; a fundamentally three-dimensional and collaborative relationship to written storytelling, quite literally creating life. My practice as a dramatist approaches dramatic storytelling from an Africanist lens: writing work dealing with African continental and diasporic concerns, affairs and themes — centering African storytelling methodologies, ideologies and technologies.
In my research on indigenous African drama, I encountered Gerene L. Freeman for Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute; “The Role of the African Playwright as Griot.” Freeman illustrates the societal function of the playwright as “griot” (traditional West African storyteller): spokesperson, observer, historian, reporter, conscience-of-society and designer-of-standards-values-and-direction-of-society. Freeman further outlines the call to this duty and the spiritual ramifications should one fail to carry out such work with rigorous integrity. These principles reflect the posture I assume as a storyteller; honorably recording the perspective of my political, social, economic and physical environment and the spiritual standard I am held to in this work. My dramatic storytelling work goes beyond the stage and is expressed in my role as a cultural worker, organizer, researcher and visionary.
My process includes elements of anthropology and scientific experimentation and is heavily informed by travel. Through various artistic programs, I’ve spent extended periods living in global black communities in Latin America, South Africa, Ghana, Senegal and Liberia immersing in culture, reading the rhythms, patterns and textures of the people to enrich and inform my dramatic writing – a true descendant of artists, Zora Neale Hurston and Kathrine Dunham. As black artists, our homogeneously eurocentric dramatic arts education limits the potential power of our work and practice. I have founded Africa Ensemble to center Africanist dramatic arts methodology; provide African/diasporic dialect classes, movement systems, play structures and performance methodology. AE develops and produces original, underproduced and obscure Africanist works. Ultimately I will translate our work into scholarly writings that will be used in university drama programs.
In the text, Radical Black Theatre in The New Deal on the Federal Theatre Project, Kate Dossett cracks open the concept of black performance community asserting that our understanding of who makes theatrical work actually needs expansion. That the theatre community is beyond the performers, writer, director; she encourages us to think about all the hands that mold a play including the audience, technicians, designers, carpenters and the community it exists within and for. She even goes further, broadening our idea of audience to: yes, folks in the seats but also: the folks for whom the work was imagined and the folks who imagine themselves in the work. It is in this spirit I am designing the architecture of this cross-continental arts infrastructure. Through my artistic development strategy practice, I am mapping an ecosystem that stands on arts education, creates resource pathways and fosters community between West Africa and New York City.
“New days are upon us and the plays we do and the ways we do them should be informed by our consciousness of the art and economics of 1935…. The theater must become conscious of the implications of the changing social order, or the changing social order will ignore, and rightly, the implications of the theatre.”
– Hallie Flanagan, American theatre producer