4 Dicembre 2021
SPAZIO MET-BO
Over the past three decades, African Canadian women playwrights have countered the social marginalization and cultural misrepresentation of Black Canadians by creating theatre pieces that explore different manifestations of the African diaspora across time and space. Ranging from spiritual realism to history play, musical comedy, and solo autobiographical performance, their work has questioned simplistic interpretations of multiculturalism, race, and ethnicity in dominant Canadian discourse by articulating, on both page and stage, the specificities of what George Elliott Clarke refers to as the ‘poly-consciousness’ of African Canadians. By glimpsing at the work of Trey Anthony, Lisa Codrington, Lorena Gale, Ahdri Zhina Mandiela, and Djanet Sears, this contribution illustrates how contemporary African Canadian women playwrights recur to performative storytelling to unearth suppressed Black stories, ancestral reminiscences, and personal recollections through bodily acts of remembrance that weave together past and present, memory and matter, the collective and the individual. In their work, theatre is experienced by practitioners and audiences alike as a site of revival, recovery, and recognition of Black Canadian histories, cultures and intraracial diversity, one in which remote and recent, colonial and postcolonial, racist and post racial acts of physical violence, social injustice and symbolic obliteration can be resisted through dramaturgical and performative gestures that foster communal healing, civic awareness, and active citizenship.
