BLACK PERFORMANCE LAB began as a five-week studio project open to ICTheatre’s BA1 and BA2 Musical Theatre and Acting for the 21st Century students, introducing Black and Afrocentric approaches to theatre-making and performance.

this project was dedicated to Black History Month 2022, designed as a collaborative space co-constructed by the needs and interests of the students.

the ethos of BLACK PERFORMANCE LAB centres on Black cultural values and modes of expression as significant contributors to theatre & performance, and the company of training professionals at ICTheatre Brighton explored ways to think about how performance can be used to think about race, ethnicity, culture, and Blackness within a British context.

this project is grounded in works including Thomas F. DeFrantz & Anita Gonzalez’ Black Performance Theory, Dr Sharrell D. Luckett & Tia M. Shaffer’s Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches, Amy Mihyang Ginther’s Stages of Reckoning: Antiracist and Decolonial Actor Training, and Paul Carter Harrison’s Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora.

“I found it really important and interesting to learn about the different [performance] techniques that came from Black practitioners and the Afro-centric methods and I will 100% take this with me for the rest of my time training and working as an actor.”

— student reflection