Shaping Black Canadian Theatre

Djanet Sears: 

Othello: Don't you see? That's exactly my point. You the black feminist position as I experience it in this relationship, leaves me feeling unrecognized as a man. The message is: “black men are poor fathers, poor partners, or both.” Black women wear the pants that black men were prevented from wearing. I believe in tradition, you don't respect me. Black women are more concerned with their careers than their husbands. There was a time when women felt satisfied. No, no, honored, being a balance to their spouse at home, supporting the family, playing her role.

Billie: Which women? I mean, which women are you referring to?

Leticia Ridley: Welcome to Daughters of Lorraine, a podcast from your friendly neighborhood Black feminists exploring the legacies, present, and futures of black theatre. We are your hosts, Leticia Ridley

Jordan Ealey: and Jordan Ealey. This is a podcast produced for HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. And on it, we discuss Black theatre history, conduct interviews with local, national, and international Black theatre artists, scholars, and practitioners, and discuss plays by black playwrights that have our minds buzzing.

Leticia: Djanet Sears is an award-winning playwright and director and has several acting nominations to her credit for both stage and screen. She's the recipient of the Stratford Festival's 2004 Timothy Finley Award, and Canada's highest literary honor for dramatic writing, the 1998 Governor General's Literary Award. She is the playwright and director of the multiple Dora Award-winning production of Harlem Duet, which was workshopped at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre in New York City, where Djanet was the international artist-in-residence in 1996. Her other honors include the 1998 Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award, the Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award, the Harry Jerome Award for Excellence in the Culture Industries, and a Phenomenal Woman of the Arts award.

Jordan: Her most recent work for the stage, The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God was shortlisted for a 2004 Trillium Book Award and enjoyed a six-month run in the fall and winter of 2003 and 2004 as part of the Mirvish production season. Her other plays include Africa Solo, Who Killed Katie Ross, and Double Trouble. Djanet is a driving force behind the Afro-Canadian Playwrights Festival and a founding member of the Obsidian Theatre Company. She's also the editor of Testifyin’: Contemporary African-Canadian Drama, volumes one and two, which are the first anthologies of plays by playwrights of African descent in Canada. On today's episode, we had a chance to interview Djanet and hear all about her unique approach to dramaturgy, and we get schooled on what Black theatre is in Canada.

What a treat to hear your words from you on this podcast. It's incredible. I just cannot thank you enough for agreeing to come and talk with us today. So I think that we like to start off with a little bit of a warm-up question, a little something to whet the whistle, if you will, before we get into the deeper stuff. So share with us your story, how did you get involved with theatre? What made you decide that theatre was an effective or compelling medium for you to be able to express yourself in?

Djanet: I wish there was one thing and I could shrink it down to one story. My relationship with theatre started a very long time ago. I remember, I was born and grew up in the sixties and the seventies, and I was born in England, and I remember I was playing outside in the backyard with my sister and my mother's screaming from the window, "Colored people on television! Colored people on television!" And it's something I actually spoke about in another play, because we were colored people in the sixties and we were Black people or people of African descent. And I went upstairs and there was Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte and Carmen Jones. But the character that really just engaged me was Pearl Bailey. There's a song called “Beat Out that Rhythm on a Drum,” and I felt whatever she was doing, I wanted to do that, I needed to do that.

And at first, I thought that meant acting. And so I tried to get involved in plays. And in England there weren't a lot of opportunities. I was working-class British, my father was taking night school, my mother was working, so there was not a lot of extra curricular stuff, but some friends and I did start a girl acapella band that, we called ourselves The Groovatrons after Michael Jackson, I think a cartoon. The animals or the mice had their own band and they were called The Groovatrons. So we borrowed that name and would sing and we would sing in classrooms. And then eventually, the teachers started to ask us to speak at assemblies or to sing at assemblies. And assemblies in England were in the morning. The whole school gathers and sings hymns and has announcements and other things, and we began to be included in that.

And people asked us to sing at churches or at events. And so my relationship with the theatre starts there. And when at fifteen, my family moved to Canada and I went to a new school and people asked me, well, why don't you join a club, after school activities, etc. What are you interested in? Theatre is one of the options. And I joined the theatre society and I think that they did a play. I don't remember the name of the play, but I remember I had this huge monologue and it was the first time that I had performed as an actor. And the experience, the feeling, the feeling, it was a feeling of one, one being relating to a text, telling a story, being another character, but being myself and seeing myself be this other character, tell the story. And so I felt like there was a broadening of my sense of being.

I could tell where the audience was, I could tell where I had to go. I had this text and I was still me enjoying it. So there was this layered experience and I just thought, oh, I have to do more of this. I think that's where it began. And when we eventually moved back out east to Toronto and Oakville, there wasn't a theatre club or a theatre society, so a group of nerds and I started our own and we directed our own stuff and did tiny little festivals. There was a main stage show that actually none of us would be included in except for in the chorus. And even we were the ones in the drama class. We were the ones writing our own plays, directing our own plays. There was one year they did My Fair Lady, the musical adaptation of Pygmalion, and, of course, I could sing and I had the best British accent.

Jordan: You're Eliza!

Djanet: I knew I was Eliza! I was not cast in any role. I was not cast and I didn't fit the role. So it was so interesting. And so when I was in drama class, I had a great teacher and she said to me that if I was really interested that she'd bring someone in to talk to me, a professional actor she knew and she brought the actor in. And then I said I wanted to audition for post-secondary theatre schools or universities with theatre programs. And she was helping me prepare my monologues. And I think one of the first pieces, she gave me a monologue, the big Beneatha monologue from A Raisin in the Sun. So I read the monologue, love the monologue, I read the book and realized this was the first piece of literature by a Black author I have ever read. I was seventeen. This story, we are familiar with the story of A Raisin in the Sun. So it tells a story of a working class family on the south side of Chicago trying to purchase a home in the suburbs.

I lived in the suburbs, my family had owned their own home from as far back as I can recall. And yet this story spoke to me, about me, in ways I had never experienced before in literature. So I really credit Lorraine with being the springboard, and she propelled me on this journey to create, produce, develop, and promote stories by people of African descent.

Leticia: I love that. As everybody on the podcast know, A Raisin in the Sun is my favorite play of all the time, of all time. So any chance that I get to say that, I always say that. And for very similar reasons that you are articulating for us on the podcast, I think she is just such a brilliant writer and I think about all the other things she would've created if she just had more time. Oh, don't get me started.

So again, our name is Daughters of Lorraine for a reason, even though I didn't come up with the name, Jordan came up with the name, but we definitely celebrate Lorraine Hansberry here and thank you for sharing all the sort of pressure points of coming to theatre and the sort of influences that you were taking along with your journey. And in experiencing your work and reading your work, you have a very unique dramaturgical structure. You're blending rhythm, music, verse, movement to tell your stories, which comes from folks of African descent all across the world, right? It's baked into our sort of storytelling apparatus.

Djanet: It really is.

Leticia: So can you talk about the significance of blending these things and how did you craft this writing and performing style? Did you have some artistic influences that were informing this blending that happens in so much of your work?

Djanet: I can analyze it in retrospect, but at the time, music is definitely a part of every play I'm involved with. It plays an important role. I think that Afrika Solo, the notion of music and theatre kind of combines that. That was one of the first plays I had published. And I remember in the eighties, I traveled to Africa, West Africa, Central Africa, and East Africa, and I spent about eleven months traveling and it changed my life and I wanted to find a way to express what I had experienced. I was also, so Afrika Solo is a piece of autobiography, and I take that, I borrow that phrase from bell hooks who adapted that phrase from Audre Lorde. Biomythography is her phrase. And so I took real events and I mythologize them, made a story of them. So some of them are not real, but I've taken the basis of something that's real and then dramatize them, mythologize them.

And one of the things that I want to connect that to is when I was in Benin, there was a border closing. So it was hard, in West Africa. I was going overland. And so I'd hoped to go from Togo, Benin to Nigeria to Cameroon through to Central African Republic at the time. And there was a border closing. So I spent a lot of time in Benin and I actually got to see some theatre by some of the African people there. And I met some people, I'm not sure what particular group they were from, but anyway, they took me to this traditional performance. It was on quite a big scale, I would say the space, the arena held maybe a thousand, two thousand people. So it was a big deal. And this was all told in a local language.

And so I didn't understand the text, but from what I observed, there was a storyteller or pray singer, there were dancers, dancing parts of the story or dancing while the praise singer was telling the story, there were musicians playing with the dancers and with the praise singer, storyteller. And it felt like the dance, the music, the movement and the dancing and the storytelling, the text were all a part. Sometimes they played alone or told the story alone or sometimes together or sometimes in parts, they shared parts. And I thought, this is a theatrical form that I'm unfamiliar with, but I really want to incorporate it into my own practice. I'm unfamiliar with it. When I say I'm unfamiliar with it, it's not quite true. Something in it was quite familiar to me. And it felt like it spoke to a place where dance and storytelling and music are not actually separate, don't have to be separate categories.

They can share in the telling of the story. And so that was in Afrika Solo, you see the music and the integration of storytelling in that. But in a play that I wrote called The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God, the title is adapted from George Bernard Shaw's The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God. I remember reading that piece at university and it was a short story, and I thought, “oh my God, George Bernard Shaw, another god of the theatre like Shakespeare, he's written about a Black girl, he's written about me, where am I?” And reading that and realizing, oh, this piece is not about the Black girl, it's about all the other people. She was a cipher for all these other white people sharing the story.

And so the title is a kind of reactionary co-opting of this title about, and I make this play about a Black girl, but in that play, The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God, actually… people thought I was cray cray, really crazy. There are twenty-five people in the play and there's an acting ensemble who's joined by a movement and sound ensemble, and I call that a living set. And so the entire play is told on a kind of blank empty stage with the locations and the worlds being created and sounded out by the chorus of ancestors. And all the people are ancestors to the people, the actual main characters in the story. And what I mean is the play takes place in front of a creek, a river. And so at a certain point, the chorus is on the river, becomes the river.

They dance the river as the text is going on, they're singing the river. The music that myself and my co-composer, Alejandra Nuñez, we created, was a kind of a vocalese where people wouldn't sing words unless they were part of the main story and part of a church event or something. But they would sound out the river. They would sound out the river, they would sound out the other locations. And we based this sound on something particular. Alejandra is a percussionist by training. And one of the things that she came up with is: what if we can deconstruct a percussion? Because we'd been trying different things, we try and what [does] African Canadian music sound like? And we'd come up with something, and that sounds like I'm in the South. We'd come up with something when we're not in the Caribbean, we'd come up with something else.

How does this locate us in Canada, in this particular place? And so one of the things that looked to, when we looked at all African diasporic music, music, most of it could be related to drums like the blues in its relationship to drums or rhythmic patterns. And so we took particular rhythmic pattern, deconstructed it, and started to create harmonies around it. And you sort of go, what are you talking about? So for instance, if I have a group of twelve people and part of them are singing [Djanet sings]. The other part are singing, counterpoint singing.

Another group is singing, [Djanet sings] And so if all of this is layered and coming on top of each other, it's this kind of organic, and I call it Canadian because we created it here vocally. That is a sound score for the play. And these same characters that create, that express the sound score actually create the locations. They create the river, they create the forest. And we really had to look at movement and look at, or how do we create a hospital? There's a scene in a hospital, how do we create a hospital with people? So the things we have is people in chairs, and we created the entire play out of people, chairs, sound and movement.

Jordan: Oh my gosh.

Djanet: That's what Africa has influenced the work. And in terms of Harlem Duet, similar but different. There I really looked at, in terms of the dramaturgy, I was writing things in a certain way and had to really understand what was I writing, what was this, why was this so different from this?

Is this from a different play? Is this a different story? And really had to question myself until I came across this really, really interesting book. It's called The Blues Aesthetic, and it's by Richard J. Powell. And it's a book, it's a book about the blues and its influence on art. So all of the books you can't really see and the audience can't see, I apologize in advance, but the book looks at art and applies blues aesthetic values and elements to artist works from Romare Bearden, artists of the Harlem Renaissance. And I was really interested in what this was. I grew up in traditional Western ideas of what a play is, what a good play is. And this seemed to support something that I recognized. I don't know if it's true, recognized was going on in Harlem Duet in its earlier stages. And so when you take apart the blues and when you deconstruct the blues into its elements and how it can be used in art as a form, there's call and response.

There's repetition, syncopation, fragmentation, there are solos, polyrhythmic improvisation, percussive melodies, hollers, scatters, ring shouts. And so Harlem Duet, in retrospect, I see it as twelve-bar blues and twelve-bar blues usually have three lines. And the three lines I see as reflecting the three time periods. Harlem Duet is the story of Billie, Othello's first wife, and we meet them as we enter the world of the play. Their relationship has disintegrated. And however, we meet two other characters who are called him and her, she and him, but say always Othello, that word sneaks out because he's always called Othello by her. And so if it's a twelve-bar blues and with three lines, the first line is an articulation. Usually in the twelve-bar blues, it's three lines.

The first line is kind of like an articulation of concern. The second line is a kind of repetition, but it's augmented. And they call that the worrying line. And then the third line is the resolution, which is often not a resolution at all. And so I felt that this kind of structure reflected something fundamental in the story that I was trying to tell. And so those are how those things evolved in me.

Jordan: Yeah. What you're saying, one thing that I, and people in the podcast will know, I talk about this probably too much, is I'm a scholar of black musical theatre. That is one of my focuses, specifically the way that black women have written and composed music theatre. So what you're describing when it's right at my alley, I'm like, yes, because of rhythms, uh-huh, syncopation, give me those good music words, but also that it's so outside of a structure of, for example, your work is not going to be a anthology of musicals because they have such a very specific, like this is what a libretto looks like. This is what a score is, and this is what, where's your “I Want” song? Where's your charm song? Where's the torch song? Where's all the... And so it's really interesting to hear you describe the musicality and rhythm of your work, not just how it breaks convention, because in some ways it's following a different convention, right?

A convention that's set by an African aesthetic. So we're not even centering the white aesthetic by thinking that it's even answering anything. And also that, as a dramaturg, I'm so compelled by the way that you are being driven by the question of the story and the question of the location and saying, this is what's specific. What's going to place us in Canada? What's going to place us in this time? What does the river sound like? But the river in Canada, right, versus the river in Atlanta or the river in San Diego. I'm just naming these places because where we're from, or the river in Rochester where I'm located now, there's something so interesting about how your work is also responding to that question. And if we can keep on Afrika Solo for a little bit, which is just such a beautiful piece of work. And it reminds me of a quote that I was at a dissertation defense a couple of weeks ago, and one of the readers said that “there's no solo in Black performance.”

And it made, that kept coming back up when I was reading your play where it's like in a one world, this is a solo show that you're just one story, one journey. But it also is so much about the diasporic experience. And so because so much of this particular show comes from your experience of going to the African continent, you said Benin, correct, and learning so much about, yes, the history and culture of this specific place, but also about yourself that isn't reflected in this play. How do you then create the distance needed to both be a writer that's crafting the story and also be the performer that's telling it for audiences? How do you navigate that relationship between intimacy and distance that I feel like is very needed in solo performance?

Djanet: I like what you said about solo performances and solo performance, and it's true, that's a solo show, but there are actually three people in the cast. And so it's very interesting how something allowed me at the time to break those rules, those bounds. I'm trying to, looking at the how do you create that distance? I think I try and do something similar when I'm directing my own work. Because I remember at the time I was playing myself, I was thinking, well, what the hell? I have to make her into a character. She has to be a character because me on the stage is just every day, pedantic, boring. And so that was part of the mythologizing of her. I use a part of myself and kind of amplified that part, the part of myself that the storyteller wanted the character to learn about her internalized biases about Africa that she'd learned and how she unpacks that as she goes along, and how she can actually take what she's learned and continue on in her life.

So this journey of self-discovery she goes on was the center mark, but I had to make her into something, not me, even though I thought I had a handle on what postmodernism was, and I thought, I'm going to name her Djanet, because I'm not pretending not to be me, and I'm going to name that character myself. And in the play, there's a name change from Janet to Djanet, and one spelled with a J, one spelled D-J-A-N-E-T. So I kind of wanted to play with the notion of, you know I wrote the play, you know I'm up here. This is something central to me, so let's not hide. Although in retrospect, I'm not sure how successful that was. Nevertheless, she's a character and I had to make her less than what I considered myself. She's a bit, she's definitely African Canadian, but she's got a bit of valley girl thing going on. She's a little, things that people will have tweaked on to a long time ago. She's a little slow. She gets there.

So I had to really make her someone that I could play. Otherwise, I'd just be reading. And similarly, when I'm directing my own work, I have to have a distance because I know stuff that I haven't even articulated. So I have to spend a fair deal of time analyzing the work so I can articulate it to my creative team. I don't know how to design sets, I don't know. And so I have to come up with the central ideas, a central action, the visuals, the visual narrative that I see. I have to share all of those with my design team so that they can take those ideas and make the best version of that to design the set for them. I want to take the ideas and design as they are compelled. So again, a bit of a distance, and it just takes, for me, it takes time. And it took time. It took time.

Leticia: That makes sense. And I think what another sort of compelling component of your work is how it's so historically rooted in research, specifically in Black historical events, which I like, especially in Harlem Duet, where the stage directions place us, like Jordan was saying, in a specific time and location, there are certain sounds playing that we know what's happening outside of the walls of this apartment, for example, which I find really, really sort of compelling as we're sort of thinking about the conversation you're putting up against with Shakespeare and specifically the Black Shakespeare play Othello, which that history is a little precarious, but somehow it gets tied up in the one thing that—

Jordan: Then it's going on right now.

Leticia: It's literally going on right now.

Jordan: On Broadway.

Leticia: On Broadway. And it's selling very well, right? And there's multiple adaptations of it. My favorite, O, the basketball Othello.

Djanet/Jordan: (overlapping dialogue) Oh, wow!

Leticia: It's a very old, I think it's Mekhi Pfeiffer, and it's all—

Jordan: Very old? It's the nineties.

Leticia: Oh my God. Well, I don't know why it feels old, but it's all about Othello set in high school

Jordan:(overlapping) ‘Cause we're old now.

Djanet: No. When you guys come up the nineties, that was yesterday for me. So…not old. Okay, lovely. I've got to find that. And for those of us who've grown up studying theatre, Shakespeare is the theatre God. We learned that this is good writing, this is good storytelling. These are important subject. And of course, very much like my search for The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her search of God by George Bernard Shaw, Othello is always the Black actor. And I remember one looking at it and think, well, actually, there's no role for me. There can be, I can play Desdemona's hand servant, but then I'd have to be married to Iago. But then again, that play to me, I had a very strong reaction that I felt that I could not express at the time. Now, I feel free to say Othello is not Othello's play. Othello is Iago's play.

Leticia: Ding ding ding.

Djanet: And so I was, during the time, this came to the forefront inside of me after studying, and I remember being enthralled with the Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas hearings, and there was an article in the newspaper that said, “Othello Comes to Washington.” I thought, oh, I thought… it was about a congressman who had read Othello in protest of Anita Hill of the whole hearing. He took Othello and read from it as a protest. But the idea that I had first thought that title referred to stayed with me. And then come years later, there's the O.J Simpson's trial, and that's when I heard about the name of the clinical condition called the Othello Syndrome, which is mortal jealousy. It's a clinical condition. Othello has these mythic proportions, none of them are written by black people. And so I'm thinking, who is Othello to me? Is he in my community? Do I know him? Do I know people like him? Who would he be today?

And I said, yeah, I know him. And that's how I started to write. I started to write about Othello, and out of this exploration came, this woman's voice, told me this story, and that's where I found his first wife Billie, and her name is Sybil. And I take that name from Shakespeare's text because there's text, there's a whole mystery of the handkerchief, the handkerchief that he says in act one. He says, there's magic in the web of it. And the handkerchief, the subplot of Othello can be the handkerchief, but a handkerchief in the first act, Othello says it was given to his mother, by a Sybil. And a Sybil is an Egyptian Sybil, a prophetess.

But in act five, he says, the handkerchief was given to his mother by his father. And I went, oh, inconsistency. They don't teach him that in theatre school. It's this lovely little hole from which a conceit took place. What happens? It reminded me there's a little bit of a Medea there. She sends this dress. Well, what happens if the malice in the web of the handkerchief, because everybody in Shakespeare's play who touches the handkerchief, even touches it comes to some sort of harm. And so I wonder if that malice in the handkerchief who's put there by a Sybil and that Sybil is Billie, but where time does not line up chronologically. So in the play, the play is told in three time periods, the pre emancipation proclamation in the beginning of the Civil War, the 1920s to Renaissance, and in the contemporary era. And in the contemporary era, they live on the corner of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Boulevards.

And I just wanted these ideas to kind of all sauté, in all together. And the same way in our lives that the past is the present, I wanted the past and the present to push and affect the story. And the research I was doing was, as I was saying, the blues aesthetic. I was really thinking about, I also was thinking about, I was reading a lot of bell hooks at that time too, just amazed that someone was writing things that I was thinking, expanding in ways I couldn't conceive of on things that I was just considering. And I remember in particular, what is that book? Talking Back, Talking Back, just the right to speak and not being silenced. And so there are things that I found that a lot of Black women who I was close to, we would talk about quietly, not in fixed company. And so the story, in an ideal world where everyone is equal, why are some people more preferred than others?

How does race supremacy, white supremacy end up in my bedroom, in my bed?

What does that mean? So starting to look at it, not just conceptually or theoretically, but how does race supremacy, white supremacy end up in my bedroom, in my bed? Seeped into every part of the world. And so in that play, we start off in this Black world, and by the end of the play, she ends up in a white room because in a way, the play's looking at what four hundred years of racism does to the psyche of individuals, there, I'm not even including the microaggressions. I'm talking about what does growing up under this, how do I have these structures about Western culture in my head, actually, I've ingested without really considering. And when I look at it, how do I get them out? How do I identify them? And what about people who aren't considering how this structure that we've ingested influence their choices?

Leticia: Yeah, I love that. And we are big fans of bell hooks. Love her work. One of my colleagues and good friend Khalid Yahya Long, he is a dean now at Howard, always used to call me, said that I favored bell hooks, so he called me the “bell hooks of theatre.”

Djanet: Yes.

Leticia: Yes. You know what it was? It's the cheeks. I think it's the cheeks.

Djanet: Yes. I think it was the shape of the face.

Leticia: So I just thought that was funny. But I want to transition a bit because to me and Jordan's own admission, we are very much newcomers of trying to explore Black theatre outside of the United States, right? Because so much of our matriculation in theatre has been through the context of the United States and Black theatre there. Can you offer us a bit of what is Black theatre in Canada? What's the current state and what's your hopes for it?

Djanet: It's a big question, and I don't know if I can truly reduce it enough to a response. It could have its own section. I remember doing research into Black Canadian theatre and so much, this is why your program is so important. Documenting, we were here, is so important and there's not a lot of documentation. And so one of the things that I found, I remember in an introduction to a collection that I wrote called Testifyin’: Contemporary, African Canadian Drama, Volume One. I heard in the research for that, I found out that there were theatres in Toronto. There were theatre companies in Toronto, Black theatre companies. They were probably amateur and they were doing Shakespeare. There was a Black theatre, and I'm trying to just find the name. Oh yes, here it is. It's an advertisement in the Toronto Mirror, the 9th of February 1849, that noted a group would perform three nights on 20th and 22nd of February, and they would be presenting Venice Preserved by Thomas Otway. And this group was called, they have a great name. Oh, what is their name?

I'm so sorry. Give me a second, Horizon's name in the caption, second performance. Oh yes, sorry. It's right at the top, the Colored Young Men's Amateur Theatrical Society, Society Nine. So I think that's the tip of the iceberg of the kind of stuff that was going on that's not really been documented. We didn't document it and it wasn't documented by others. So there were just, you have to keep searching for evidence. We were here. I also found out, because I was doing the introduction for testifying, that there were protests against Minstrelsy coming from the States to Toronto. The Black community got together in 1850 and in the 1850s to protest this coming to Toronto. So we've been here doing theatre for a long time.

And what's the difference between amateur and professional, professionals get paid? You're still doing theatre, and there's been theatre here. The oldest theatre in, the oldest Black theatre in Canada is Black Theatre Workshop. It is, I think about sixty years old now. It's in Montreal—Black Theatre Workshop. But I'm also a founder, one of the founding members of Obsidian Theatre here. It's a Black theatre company that we founded in 2000. In fact, the company opened with The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God. Everyone thought we were crazy. We were very fortunate. It was really widely received and went on for a six-month run. But there are also a lot of playwrights here, in a way, because I was involved as a director, as an actor, as a writer, there's a kind of bridge between Black theatre and mainstream white theatre here that I felt like I would toggle between.

And I felt that. I remember I started this festival, the Afro-Canadian Playwrights Festival that would gather every three years, playwrights from across the country to celebrate, to promote their work, to give production workshops, to have performance selection salons where we'd have food and people would perform excerpts of their new work. We would have readings, and we would also have a conference type. We would have conference type sessions that took place in the morning. So it was really rich. The reason I organized this was out of pure selfishness. There's a sense sometimes, and especially as a writer, there's a sense that you are alone in this. I know, I knew I wasn't. And so gathering in the last iteration we had was I think 2006. I'm actually in the process of planning one for 2027 and with a new volume, volume three of Testifying, I'm co-editing that with Signy Lynch, who's a colleague of ours at University of Toronto.

But in terms of the playwrights, in the last iteration, we had maybe a hundred playwrights from across the country, from Nunavut to Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Cape Breton to Vancouver, Sheryl Fogo, who's in Alberta. We had people from Manitoba. And Blackness is so diverse in terms of where we all, not only where we come from, but our belief systems, how we grew up, our approaches, the ways we write, our aesthetics. And so Testifying was, the first Testifying volume one was published, I think in 2000, maybe it was 2003, 2000. And in 2000, that was the first collection of, it was the first anthology of Black playwrights in this country, 2000! 2000! And I think that I wanted to create something in that book that in that anthology where not only were the plays included, but also we invite scholars to write scholarly, short scholarly essays that introduce each play. And so it's not only a document, it's not only documenting, but it's also giving people clues on how to enter the work and where to look, a springboard for further study.

The playwrights are diverse and our roots, R-O-O-T-S, and our routes here, R-O-U-T-E-S are vast. But there's something that I see in the work, something that 99 percent of the self, 99 percent of the time I see myself there, I see a reflection, I see a mirror. So the playwrights that exist include Debbie Anita Africa Young, a wonderful extraordinary playwright and theatre practitioner and scholar. I think at this point right now, she's defending her thesis, her PhD thesis in London, England. Audrey Zena Mandiella is also a playwright and theatremaker, both Audrey Zina Mandela and Debbie Anita Africa Young. They work in a kind of theatre they call dub theatre based on dub poetry. So they're also poets and their work is beautiful. There's also Walter Borden, beautiful lyrical playwright. He's written a play, The Last Epistle of Tightrope Time where he looks at the journey. I think it's also a piece of autobiography, and I think he looks at the development of a character through time and through...

He looks at a Black queer man who was trying to do theatre from the sixties to the present. There's George Elliot Clarke, who's a scholar and also a playwright, and also librettist. There's Maxine Bailey and Sharon M. Lewis, who are included in the first volume, a wonderful playwright and scholar called M. NourbeSe Philip. Andrew Moody is a playwright and a director.

Austin Clarke is a well-known novelist in Canada and the Caribbean, but he also wrote plays, and I included one of his plays in an anthology. Rachel Matumbo is, I would've called her an emerging playwright, but she's written a number of plays now. And one of the newer playwrights, Akosua Amo-Adem, wrote her first play that I directed a few months ago. Joseph Pearce wrote a play called Shakespeare's Nig. Meghan Swaby is another playwright. Andrea Scott is another playwright. Lisa Codrington is another playwright. One of the most successful plays that was written here was Da Kink in My Hair by Trey Anthony. So she is also a playwright. And as I said, there were a hundred in 2006, so there are many more, and apologies to names I have forgotten, but we're writing and we're trying to make sure our stories are included in the chorus of stories of humans that come out of this country.

Jordan: Oh, my­—I could listen to you talk all day, and I'm like, I'm glad we're going to have a transcript. Like we write it down. I got homework to do. I got to read some plays. I got to learn some stuff.

Leticia: Yes.

Jordan: So thank you so much, Djanet, for stopping by Daughters of Lorraine. This has been such an absolute pleasure to talk to you, to hear about your work, and also just to give listeners a taste, just a small taste of all the incredible Black theatre that is happening in Canada, and we are so looking forward to including more voices from outside of the United States in our season. So thank you for kicking that off for us. So what's next for you in terms of projects or how can people keep up with you if they want to follow your work?

Djanet: What's next for me is I have had a play I've been working on for about fifteen years.

Jordan: There's always that one.

Djanet: I am serious, and I have not been ready to release it, and now is the time. So I'm going to be tentative title is Rac(e)ing, R-A-C-[E]-I-N-G, and I will probably be workshopping it this summer.

Leticia: Can't wait.

Jordan: Can't wait.

Leticia: Can't wait. Thank you so much.

Djanet: Thank you so, so much. My sisters.

Leticia: Yes, yes. I love that. Thank you all.

Jordan: You my cousin on my mama's side.

Leticia: Thank you all for listening. We will see you on our next episode of Daughters of Lorraine. Bye-bye. This has been another episode of Daughters of Lorraine. We're your hosts, Leticia Ridley.

Jordan: And Jordan Ealey. We'll see you on our next episode. You definitely won't want to miss it. In the meantime, if you're looking to connect with us, please follow us on Instagram at DOLorraine Pod, P-O-D. You can also email us at [email protected] for further contact.

Leticia: Our theme music is composed by Enza Bamba, the Daughters of Lorraine podcast is supported by HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. It's available on iTunes, Spotify, and howlround.com. If you're looking for the podcast on iTunes or Spotify, you'll want to search and subscribe to Daughters of Lorraine podcast.

Jordan: If you loved this podcast, post a rating and write a review on those platforms. This helps other people find us. You can also find a transcript for this episode along with a lot of other progressive and disruptive content on Howlround.com. Have an idea for exciting podcast, essay, or TV event the theatre community needs to hear? Visit howlround.com and submit your ideas to the Commons.