Taking Space -‘Queer’ Black Bodies in Popular Performance (in person)

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Cultural theorist Stuart Hall, in critiquing the black British experience, called for the need to recognise ‘the extraordinary diversity of subjective positions, social experiences and cultural identities which compose the category ‘Black’’. For Hall, people of the global majority must actively recognise and celebrate the plurality of their identity rather than conform to a single narrative.This talk explores Black British popular performance, highlighting the performances of a number of Black British artists such as the collective, Cocoa Butter Cabaret who epitomise Hall’s statement. Their creative process consciously foregrounds ‘queer Black bodies on stage’ through the cabaret/revue aesthetic as they seek to refashion and subvert conceptions of black British identity. They seek to deconstruct simplistic categorisations and racist signifying systems through playful, transgressive queer and camp’ constructions of gender-variant identities. Cocoa Butter’s performances are informed by and emerge from multiple historic forms and contemporary styles, engaging audiences through a mixture of lip-syncing, burlesque, torch song, acrobatic aerial performance, spoken word, beat box poetry and ensemble set pieces. This hybridity highlights the ‘constructed nature’ of identity, showcasing their, resistant visions, which highlight ‘difference’, as Audre Lorde pronounced, as a dynamic, regenerating human force which is enriching rather than threatening.

Speaker:

Dr David Linton is Head of Acting and programme leader for the BA (Hons) Acting degree. He is a performer and theatre practitioner whose research explores issues of resistance, adaptation and exchange. This focuses on participatory arts practice, black British performance and pre-modern theatre forms and their contemporary applications specifically mask/minstrelsy, pantomime, bursleque/neo burlesque, cabaret, pierrot, hip hop theatre and revue. As a founder member of Prussia Lane production company, a co-operative of of performers, writers, filmmakers, designers and dancers his work is engaged in the exploration of interdisciplinary approaches in the creation and realisation of performance projects. He was a core scholar of the Musical Theatre and All that Jazz network funded from the Arts and Humanities Research Council working with an international group of scholars, exchanging ideas about connections between musical theatre and Jazz in dialogue with practitioners and industry workers, developing new approaches and practices. He is committed to creative learning and equality of opportunity and as a member of British Actors Equity was elected by his fellow actors onto Equity's equalities committee. He is the author of Nation and Race in West End Revue 1910-1930 (2021) and co -editor of Popular Musical Theatre in London and Berlin 1890-1939 (2014).

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