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Aesthetics Nicola Abram
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Black British
Women’s Theatre
Intersectionality, Archives, Aesthetics
Nicola Abram
Black British Women’s Theatre
Nicola Abram
Cover illustration by Ingrid Pollard, depicting Theatre of Black Women’s play ‘Silhouette’
(1983), featuring Bernardine Evaristo and Patricia Hilaire
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements
I begin with thanks to the various editors and editorial assistants I’ve had
contact with at Palgrave Macmillan over the years, for seeing this book
through from proposal to print: your clear guidance and good-natured
communications smoothed the process and expertly ensured its comple-
tion. And thanks to the reviewers, especially for encouraging the focus on
archival materials: you truly helped to make this book this book. All errors
that remain are of course my own; I am and will ever be learning.
There would be no book at all without the playwrights and practitio-
ners who welcomed me into their homes and workplaces, gave time and
energy to telephone calls, Skype conversations and e-mail exchanges, and
excavated memories and ephemera: SuAndi OBE, Bernardine Evaristo
MBE, Maureen ‘Talibah’ Hawkins, Patricia St. Hilaire, Marjorie James,
Zindika Kamauesi, Michelle Matherson, June Reid, A-dZiko Simba, Hazel
Williams, and Denise Wong. Your pioneering activities gave vigour to
British culture and society, and your generous permission to reproduce
archival materials gives colour and life to the pages that follow. Thanks to
the performers Cindy Afflick, Paulina Deutsch (nee Graham), and Cassi
Moghan (nee Pool) for kindly allowing the use of photographs in which
they feature, and to the photographers and designers of the images
reproduced within: Karl Bartley, Sonia Boyce, John Clube, Desmond Ip,
Heather Marks, Ingrid Pollard, Simon Richardson, Steve Speller, and the
late Similola Coker (represented by her sister Daphne Towry-Coker).
Thanks, too, to Fiona Young of the Tudor Trust for her help in establishing
communications with the Coker family. Special thanks to Ingrid Pollard
for the cover image.
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Reading, whose responses to this work are always illuminating and who
have further shaped my thinking and ways of articulating ideas.
Finally, I want to fix in ink my appreciation of friends and family for
their unwavering support during this project and always. Martin, Sandra,
Richard, and Dick, thank you for reminding me that there’s a world
beyond my work; your generosity and belief have truly sustained me. In
this moment of celebration, I fondly remember those we love who are
sadly no longer with us: Marion, Joyce, and Ted.
Nadya Ali, Helen Bailey, Corinne Heaven, Ben Whitham, and David
Yuratich have walked various parts of this intellectual journey with me,
while Lorraine Briffitt, Rebecca Henry, Abigail MacLeod, and Olivia
Thompson have brought both lessons and refuge. For many happy dis-
tractions—and for not asking about the book too often—I’m grateful to
Hannah Adjei, Sonia Betts, Felicity Cross, Jael Damarsin, Jess Del Rio,
Nikkie Foster, Sean and Liz Green, Mireille Haviland, Molly Hodson,
Victoria Ingram, Vicky Parting, Amanda Schmid-Scott, Emma Scott, Lee
and Nett Smith, Michael, Fiona, Matilda and Arthur Shapland, and Gem
and Chris West. This has been a long project, and it’s a joy to have found
a second family along the way: Phil and Gill, Emily and Chris, Becky, Jay,
Lara and Sophie. And finally, Ben Blackledge: your kindness, strength,
playfulness and insight are astonishing. For knowing me and loving me,
and being you, thank you.
In its own way, this book joins the struggle for justice: Black Lives Matter.
Contents
Zindika161
SuAndi201
Index249
ix
List of Figures
xi
xii List of Figures
Fig. 4 Munirah, Our Bodies Are Our Maps (1990). Simba personal
collection, St. Thomas, Jamaica. Programme. Designed by John
Clube112
Fig. 5 Jheni Arboine, ‘Munirah’ (c.1990). Simba personal collection,
St. Thomas, Jamaica. Promotional photograph. (Left to right:
Hazel Williams, A-dZiko Simba, Maureen ‘Talibah’ Hawkins,
Michelle Matherson) 116
Zindika
Fig. 1 Black Theatre Co-operative, Paper and Stone (1990). Goldsmiths
University of London. Future Histories—Black Performance and
Carnival Archive, Records of Nitro Theatre Company, NTC/
P/T/1/21/2. Flyer 165
Fig. 2 Karl Bartley, ‘Black Theatre Co-operative, Paper and Stone’
(1990). Goldsmiths University of London. Future Histories—
Black Performance and Carnival Archive, Records of Nitro Theatre
Company, NTC/P/T/1/21/4. Publicity photograph. (Left to
right: Catherine Coffey, Susan Lycett, Marcia Rose) 172
Fig. 3 Black Theatre Co-operative, Paper and Stone (1990). Goldsmiths
University of London. Future Histories—Black Performance and
Carnival Archive, Records of Nitro Theatre Company, NTC/
P/T/1/21/5/001. Still from VHS production recording 175
SuAndi
Fig. 1 Black Arts Alliance, Revelations of Black (1987). Making Histories
Visible—Black Archive and Collection, Preston. Flyer 204
Fig. 2 SuAndi, The Story of M (1994). Live Art Development Agency,
London. V0238. Still from VHS production recording 215
Fig. 3 Heather Marks, ‘SuAndi, The Story of M’ (2017). Still from digital
production recording 216
‘Black Woman’
This clipping (Fig. 1) promoting an unnamed artist serves as a suggestive
starting point for a book on black British women’s theatre. It captures
something of the fragile materiality of such histories: the advertisement
was posted in the now defunct listings magazine Black Arts,1 issues of
which have fortunately been preserved as part of the visionary ‘Unfinished
Histories’ project recording the history of alternative theatre in
1960s–1980s’ Britain, directed by archivist and activist Susan Croft.2 The
stories contained in such ephemera are at real risk of being forgotten
unless active care is taken over preservation, access, and interpretation. In
order to correct this cultural amnesia and secure hitherto hidden aspects
of black women’s theatre as a central part of the nation’s creative history,
this book foregrounds unpublished materials—manuscripts, production
recordings, photographs, stage diagrams, technical plans, funder reports,
company records, and correspondence—sourced from archives of various
kinds, from artists’ personal papers to national collections. There is a
wealth of material there to be explored. Yet, such endeavours must also
confront the sombre reality of already unrecoverable loss—just as the
identity of the self-promoting ‘black woman’ in this clipping is not known.
As well as signalling a need for archival research, the advertisement
hints at the aesthetics that characterise black British women’s theatre: this
is an itinerant creative practice, in search of appropriate platforms and ways
to connect with its audiences, energised by new writing rather than relying
Intersectionality
As the author of this advertisement does not identify herself, no more can
be known of her or her craft; she passes unseen in the crowds of history.
And yet the terms that title the advertisement do emphatically impose a
name on her, in upper case and bold type: her corporeal characteristics
become her identity. She appears insofar as she is body. There is a paradox
at play here: the black woman is at once overlooked—that is, unseen—and
overlooked, or hypervisible. This condition is well documented in black
feminist theory, recurring in writings from across the years and on both
sides of the Atlantic. Too often in identity-based campaigns for rights, the
black woman has been made invisible. She occupies, as Heidi Safia Mirza
has observed, the cultural blind spot between ‘a racial discourse, where the
subject is male; and a gendered discourse, where the subject is white;
[and] a class discourse, where race has no place’ (Mirza 1997, p. 4). White
women must take responsibility for the effects of our wilful ‘blindness’ in
producing this ‘invisibility’ (Smith 1978, p. 20). Yet, in a patriarchal soci-
ety stratified by white supremacy, the black woman also is seen—by
INTRODUCTION: INTERSECTIONALITY, ARCHIVES, AESTHETICS 3
simultaneous modes of oppression. She lives what Sara Ahmed calls the
‘violent collisions […] between the racialized and gendered gazes’ (1997,
p. 161); she is, in Moya Bailey’s coinage, uniquely subjected to ‘misogy-
noir’ (2014). If she is seen at all, she is always already ‘overdetermined’
(Spillers 1987, p. 65), twice objectified.
What can theatre offer in response? How can it counter such sedi-
mented oppression? As an embodied art form, drama directly answers to
this corporeal fixation. By controlling the presence of bodies onstage, it
corrects both the problem of objectification and the problem of invisibil-
ity. This makes it an appropriate tool to—to borrow Paul Gilroy’s words—
‘compensat[e] for very specific experiences of unfreedom’ (1993, p. 123).
Black British women have long used performance to reveal and resist
such ‘unfreedom’. The (black, female) performers make themselves visible
to the audience on their own terms: as present in and part of Britain, and
as successful, professional actors. They also assert their subjectivity by
looking back at the audience, taking up what bell hooks calls an ‘opposi-
tional gaze’ (hooks 1992). The mechanics of objectification are thus
reversed, and the audience is brought to account. It is no accident that
many of the practitioners featured in this book literalised this by hosting
post-show discussions, running public workshops, and explicitly framing
their work as educational or consciousness-raising. By combining visual
and verbal modes of representation, theatre invites its audiences both to
look and to listen, and thereby to recognise ourselves in relation to others.
When we do, we are called to new ways of being in the world.
This book focuses on five black British theatre companies and play-
wrights, active from the 1980s through the turn of the millennium, whose
practices creatively contest essentialist ideas of gender and ethnicity.
Though they were not necessarily known to each other, a common idea
emerges in the work of these intersectional artists: a model of identity
through encounter. Theatre and performance are always embodied, of
course, but in the works studied here those bodies function not to guar-
antee a fixed individual identity but as the public site of a subject’s dynamic,
interactional, formation. The dramatic arts are uniquely equipped for this
since performance depends on the relationship between actor and charac-
ter: the performer is identified with the character yet is not identical to her;
the character is other than the performer, yet cannot exist without her.
Theatre wisely teaches us that the subject is not isolated, autonomous, or
pre-existent; rather, she is formed through her interactions with others.
Black British women playwrights and performers have mobilised this
4 N. ABRAM
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