Courtesy of Black Futures, In The Eye: A Virtual Black Trans Play by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley
Rosie Elnile and Anthony Simpson-Pike present a showcase of works in progress, featuring contributions from Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley, Tamar Clarke-Brown, Ta-Nia, and Nine Nights.
This summer Rosie Elnile and Anthony Simpson-Pike were commissioned to create a digital theatre space for Black artists. Each artist was given five days to create a scratch piece of work for the new platform Black Futures. This event is an opportunity to showcase some work in progress from the project and continue conversations about the future of Black digital work, people and art.
Black Futures is a digital work-in-progress, conceived and curated by Rosie Elnile and Anthony Simpson-Pike, showcasing artists responding to Black futurity. Black Futurity is about generating new possibilities, cutting through imaginative constraints and imagining outside of the structures created by white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
Programme:
5 – 5:30pm – Live play of Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s video game, commissioned by Black Futures
5:30 – 6:30pm – Q&A hosted by Tamar Clarke-Brown with Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley on archiving the Black Trans experience using technology
6:30 – 7pm – Nine Nights filmed performance featuring Shannen SP, GLOR1A and GAIKA
7 – 7:30pm – ‘An Inconvenient Feeling’, live performance by Nina Bowers.
Join Dr. Tina Flowers for a TED talk as she explores the idea we hold of the earth in our minds. Listen as she delves into the different ways we relate to the natural world throughout time and how this makes us feel.
Tamar Clarke-Brown is a London-based curator, artist, and writer. Currently producing and curating projects with the Arts Technologies team at Serpentine, her interdisciplinary work centres around experimental futurisms, technologies, and diasporic practices. Tamar has worked with institutions including Autograph ABP and NTS Radio and presented at the ICA, South London Gallery, Tate Galleries, Yale School of Art, Somerset House, Kadist (Paris), Bard, and more.
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley uses the forms and imagery of video games to create works that consider ‘what archives have left out and how we can archive now’. Danielle works predominantly in animation, sound, performance and video games to communicate the experiences of being a Black Trans person. Danielle’s practice focuses on recording the lives of Black Trans people, intertwining lived experience with fiction to imaginatively retell Trans stories. Spurred on by a desire to record the ‘History of Trans people both living and past’, their work can often be seen as a Trans archive where Black Trans people are stored for the future. Danielle’s work has been shown at Albright-Knox, David Kordansky, Quad, Arebyte, Science Gallery, MU, the Barbican and Tate.
Nina Bowers is an actor and theatre-maker. She grew up in Canada and has lived in London for the past six years. She graduated from the Acting Collaborative and Devised Theatre course at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in 2017. She has worked with theatres including the Barbican, Shakespeare’s Globe, The Gate, and Theatre Royal Stratford East, and companies including Complicite, Julie Cunningham Company and Dirty Rascals Theatre.
Talia Paulette Oliveras and Nia Farrell, collectively Ta-Nia, a theatre-making duo committed to challenging the limits of theatre to create unapologetically Blk spaces of liberation. As creators and performers, we focus on developing new work that foregrounds identity, collectivity, and celebrations of dreams. Since graduating from NYU Tisch, their work has been presented in Ars Nova’s ANT Fest 2019 and Theatretreffen’s Stückemarkt 2021. Currently, they are members of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab developing new work for Schauspiel Dortmund’s 2022 – 23 season.
Anthony Simpson-Pike is a theatre maker and curator who is currently Associate Director at The Yard Theatre. Recent directorial work includes LAVA at The Bush Theatre.
Rosie Elnile is a theatre maker who mostly works with scenography. She is a recipient of the Jerwood Live work fund.
no. 236848.