{"id":3411,"date":"2026-10-22T10:50:40","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T09:50:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/salc-making-a-difference\/?p=3411"},"modified":"2026-10-22T10:50:41","modified_gmt":"2026-10-22T09:50:41","slug":"creating-this-years-black-theatre-history-month-exhibition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/salc-making-a-difference\/2026\/10\/22\/creating-this-years-black-theatre-history-month-exhibition\/","title":{"rendered":"Creating this year\u2019s Black Theatre History Month exhibition"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>by Kate Dorney, Head of Drama and Film<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The purpose of the Black Theatre History Month exhibition is to celebrate the long Black presence of Manchester and the\u00a0works and artists who have appeared on its stages.\u00a0The project team gathers data about Black theatre and performance in Manchester from archive listings, newspaper databases and\u00a0word-of-mouth recommendations, collects them all in a spreadsheet and adds sources, images and artifacts to build an object list for the exhibition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This year\u2019s exhibition was influenced by\u00a0two comments from visitors\u00a0to last year\u2019s show.influenced our approach to this year\u2019s exhibition. One person asked why we hadn\u2019t included\u00a0<em>Liberation,\u00a0<\/em>Zodwa Nyoni\u2019s play about the Pan-African Congress at Chorlton-on-Medlock in 1945 (the answer was because the exhibition only went up to 2020).\u00a0Another visitor commented on how effective it was to leave a blank pane of glass\u00a0between each panel to indicate the work that still needed to be done to recognise Black artists\u00a0and this prompted me to think about how we could represent presence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When&nbsp;my co-curator&nbsp;Camille&nbsp;came on board this year,&nbsp;I asked her to consider&nbsp;a number ofdifferent themes that would make sense of us including&nbsp;<em>Liberation<\/em>, one of&nbsp;which&nbsp;was plays set in Manchester. She liked the idea and focussed her research in this area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Liberation<\/em> 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\u00a0African-Americans. Last year\u2019s exhibition\u00a0featured\u00a0a number of\u00a0plays from Caribbean and African American artists that have become important texts or landmark events. One was\u00a0Errol John\u2019s<em>\u00a0Moon on a Rainbow Shawl\u00a0<\/em>(1957), a play set in Port of Spain, Trinidad.\u00a0It\u00a0\u00a0premiered\u00a0in Manchester and\u00a0has\u00a0since\u00a0become a staple of the Black\u00a0British\u00a0theatre repertoire.\u00a0Another\u00a0was Anna<em>\u00a0Lucasta<\/em> (1947), a play with an all-African American cast that came to Manchester\u00a0three\u00a0times in the space of\u00a0two\u00a0years, moving from the Opera House to the much larger Hippodrome.\u00a0The presence of these plays tells us something about the appetite for seeing and appreciating Black theatre artists at work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This year we focussed specifically on plays from Africa (including the British premiere of Wole Soyinka\u2019s\u00a0<em>Death and the\u00a0King\u2019s Horseman<\/em>) and\u00a0African American\u00a0plays, including Lorraine Hansberry\u2019s\u00a0<em>A Raisin in the Sun<\/em>, which like\u00a0<em>Anna Lucasta<\/em>, came to Manchester soon after its Broadway debut and kept coming back.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The second comment, the one about gaps, made me think about how the exhibition could emphasise presence, and that\u2019s the reason for including the names of everyone featured in the exhibition and for having a panel about Black arts leaders.&nbsp;This is ongoing work&nbsp;that I want to add to during the next year so if you have a suggestion or contact you think we should follow&nbsp;up,&nbsp;&nbsp;fill&nbsp;in&nbsp;the survey,&nbsp;or a&nbsp;card and put it in the box&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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\u00a0works and artists who have appeared on its stages.\u00a0The project team gathers data about Black theatre and performance in Manchester from archive listings, newspaper databases and\u00a0word-of-mouth recommendations, collects [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6791,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drama","category-equality-and-diversity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/salc-making-a-difference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/salc-making-a-difference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/salc-making-a-difference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/salc-making-a-difference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6791"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/salc-making-a-difference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3411"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/salc-making-a-difference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3411\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3412,"href":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/salc-making-a-difference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3411\/revisions\/3412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/salc-making-a-difference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/salc-making-a-difference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/salc-making-a-difference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}