Patrice is playing in Tell Them That I Am Young And Beautiful at the Arcola Theatre in London. Created and performed by Marcello Magni of Complicité, Kathryn Hunter, Patrice Naiambana, David Bartholomew Soroczynski and Kora player Tunde Jegede. See here for details.

The value of diaspora aesthetics flowing from the sensibilities of an international cast is one of the highlights of working on Tell Them That I am Young and Beautiful. Marcello had a wonderful vision to tell as simply as possible seven stories, however the process was far from simple. How do you move from prose on a page to a performance lexicon of movement that for some is not dance but is accompanied by music (cello and kora), storytelling with the structural sensibilities of a written play. From my Africanist perspective what we are doing is African performance with it’s intrinsic inter-disciplinary approach and improvisatory DNA. Then again African performance theatre is almost invisible on the European stage, unless of course it’s transmuted through the sensibilities of Peter Brook or another European. I have learnt a huge amount from working with Marcello who is to my mind a hugely unacknowledged leader of performance in Britain. It’s his openness to cultural difference, work ethic and self-effacing approach as an artist that I value the most. A wonderful teacher who refuses to see himself as such. The run of the mill theatre star today are so far up their narcissistic bums that they cant even approach Marcello’s potential to truly inspire. Tribal Soul’s challenge is to posit a contemporary theatrical statement rooted in classical griot performance, with all the rigour of structure but with the unpredictability of a jazz performance or the transformative fire of a pentecostal church service.

– Patrice

An African reality-docudrama series about The President of The African Diaspora’s efforts to make his nation visible to themselves and to the world. President Alfred Providence Cavalaba, a former refugee himself, decides to establish The Good News Broadcasting Company (GNBC) in order to bring hope to his people and their families by making their lives and good news visible. The President must form a Cabinet of trustworthy men and women and raise funds for his enterprise. The only trouble is The President has lost his memory and the account number to his Swiss bank account.

This is a taste of what we’ve been working on, filmed in The Netherlands during a seminar on decoloniality at Roosevelt Academy, Middeburg.

We welcome your ideas, feedback, critique, and other good ingredients.

If you wish to appear or know of anyone deserving to be on The GOOD NEWS progamme, please contact Lara or Patrice.

Only folk with genuine Good News need step forward.

Welcome to our experimental space which seeks to give you an insight into our creative engine room. We fertilise ideas from Southern Narratives, (HOT) and fuse them into forms of creative transmission with a transparent social transformative functionality (Bauhuas) — Hence HOT HAUS. We are inspired by narratives and peoples that are excluded or silenced by the Colonial Matrix of Power and work quickly with or without funding or the validation of cultural gate keepers, usually very well fed people.

I have found over the last 25 years that Theatre in Britain excludes more than it includes despite the good intentions of diversity policies and cultural agenda makers. Why wait another 25 years to be included? And included into what exactly? So rather than trying to force sections of society to imbibe the theatrical sensibilities of the few, why not decolonise and dismantle the idea of Theatre by exploring pluriversal visions of story telling, taking Stories to any space, any where, any time? So we continually create Laboratories in multiple spaces where ideas and craft may be fertilised. Is this not merely Workshopping by another name? Well no, we are not working to go shopping! Our imperatives are rooted in the gaping loud silences weeping from the Colonial Wound. Spaces for listening and sharing are urgently required. Where do people of exile heritages go to practice or share story or craft practices, how do we share ancestral memory and understand how culture evolves? The Colonial Matrix of Power in five hundred years of engagement with ‘OTHERS’ has yet to produce an African Performance Art Academy, for instance, so Black Actors are just that ‘Black’. There are no Intercultural Performing Academies, not in England, yet. You cannot study Fanon or Said in secondary school. So when liberals speak of Inclusivity and letting ‘the Other’ speak no-one has the slightest idea of how to do it, except through the image and sensibilities of the well fed few.

The Diaspora Space is our playground — it is a rich space to practice listening and sharing — here are some of the games we have been playing recently.

Patrice Naiambana
African Performer-Conceptualist