by Kate Dorney, Head of Drama and Film
The purpose of the Black Theatre History Month exhibition is to celebrate the long Black presence of Manchester and the works and artists who have appeared on its stages. The project team gathers data about Black theatre and performance in Manchester from archive listings, newspaper databases and word-of-mouth recommendations, collects them all in a spreadsheet and adds sources, images and artifacts to build an object list for the exhibition.
This year’s exhibition was influenced by two comments from visitors to last year’s show.influenced our approach to this year’s exhibition. One person asked why we hadn’t included Liberation, Zodwa Nyoni’s play about the Pan-African Congress at Chorlton-on-Medlock in 1945 (the answer was because the exhibition only went up to 2020). Another visitor commented on how effective it was to leave a blank pane of glass between each panel to indicate the work that still needed to be done to recognise Black artists and this prompted me to think about how we could represent presence.
When my co-curator Camille came on board this year, I asked her to consider a number ofdifferent themes that would make sense of us including Liberation, one of which was plays set in Manchester. She liked the idea and focussed her research in this area.
Liberation also led me to reconsider something I had learned from my earliest research into Black theatre in Manchester, and that was what a cosmopolitan centre of exchange it was, and the long co-presence of people from Africa, the Caribbean and then African-Americans. Last year’s exhibition featured a number of plays from Caribbean and African American artists that have become important texts or landmark events. One was Errol John’s Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (1957), a play set in Port of Spain, Trinidad. It premiered in Manchester and has since become a staple of the Black British theatre repertoire. Another was Anna Lucasta (1947), a play with an all-African American cast that came to Manchester three times in the space of two years, moving from the Opera House to the much larger Hippodrome. The presence of these plays tells us something about the appetite for seeing and appreciating Black theatre artists at work.
This year we focussed specifically on plays from Africa (including the British premiere of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman) and African American plays, including Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, which like Anna Lucasta, came to Manchester soon after its Broadway debut and kept coming back.
The second comment, the one about gaps, made me think about how the exhibition could emphasise presence, and that’s the reason for including the names of everyone featured in the exhibition and for having a panel about Black arts leaders. This is ongoing work that I want to add to during the next year so if you have a suggestion or contact you think we should follow up, fill in the survey, or a card and put it in the box