Hawthorn

Sketch a day - Day 137/365

I went to see Tambo and Bones at Leeds Playhouse this afternoon. A play by Dave Harris. I am going to be thinking about this show for a really long time to come. A play about so many things regarding race, history, the inherant pain and explotation that black performers have always been exposed to and continue to be exposed to; portraying trauma over and over for white audiences. The complex power dynamics within a performance space and within whiteness’s capitalist/paternalistic/straightworld structures.

There was more.

It was funny and clever and compelling. And I haven't felt the energy shift in a final act of a play, taking us (as a majority white audience) from a place of thought provoked comfort into a place of profound discomfort like this for a very long time.

I could feel the temperature in the room drop like a stone.

It was a lot.

It was a privilege (in all the senses of this word) to see this work.

These are just my initial thoughts /feelings.

The play/performance deserves and will have a much longer gestation for thought and response inside my brain and heart.

Now back at home I spent sometime thinking about all of that while sketching the hawthorn flowers that are exploding across the landscape around Leeds and Bradford right now.

That's the news.