Optional reading soundtrack: ‘Nina’ by Electric Fields (Inma, 2016)
What’s free to me? It’s just a feeling. It’s just a feeling. It’s like how do you tell somebody how it feels to be in love? How are you going to tell anybody who has not been in love how it feels to be in love? You cannot do it to save your life. You can describe things, but you can’t tell them. But you know it when it happens. That’s what I mean by free. I’ve had a couple times on stage when I really felt free and that’s something else. That’s really something else! I’ll tell you what freedom is to me: NO FEAR! I mean really, no fear. If I could have that half of my life. No fear! Lots of children have no fear. That’s the only way I can describe it. That’s not all of it, but it’s something to really, really feel. Like a new way of seeing. Like a new way of seeing something.
– Nina Simone (1968)
I first heard these words—spoken by the legendary American singer Nina Simone in a 1968 interview—not from their primary source, but sung as the lyrics in a 2016 song—Nina—by the Australian electronic/pop band Electric Fields. Helmed by Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara singer Zaachariaha Fielding, Electric Fields have lit up the Australian music scene with their fusion of shimmering, melodic pop, and invocations of Australian First Nations cultural stories, strength, and sovereignty. Their music sparks with an energy that transposes the vast and complex histories of Australia’s First Peoples into euphoric, reflective moments that infuse the dancing bodies for whom they perform and play. I heard them for the first time at a queer dance party in Sydney.
Nina Simone’s words, inseparable from her lifelong struggle as a civil rights advocate, reverberate powerfully with the different definitions of “freedom” that might be considered by Black and white people in a contemporary colonial world. Freedom from the kind of fear that emanates from the violence and oppression of white, patriarchal institutions. The fear that seeps from government policies and corporate power structures directly into people’s bodies, memories, and hearts. What would it mean to be free of such fear? What would that feel like? What would it enable? I’m not African American or Indigenous Australian, but I’m a queer man of color, and I think that’s what I go to those parties for: to find out what that might feel like.
Recasting of Nina Simone’s words to Electric Fields’ melodies reignites a flame of conversation that not only touches on the civil rights movements of the 1960s and present-day struggles for First Nations sovereignty, but that stretches backwards and forwards through time and considers the battles of all racially oppressed peoples to find sovereign self-expression in the face of a monolithic and opposing cultural power. Perhaps this Imagined Theatre is the one that keeps that flame bright and strong, across generations, borders, cultures, and barriers. Perhaps it’s this Theatre that might finally fan that flame into a firestorm, strong and fierce and pure enough to burn down those old outmoded ideas of race and the power structures they serve. Let them fall away. And there we will be, dancing in the ashes.
Optional reading soundtrack: “SYM” by Kano (Hoodies All Summer, 2019). “SYM” (Suck Your Mum) is the closing track from British Grime-pioneer Kano’s sixth and latest album release Hoodies All Summer. On Friday November 8, 2019, Kano took to the stage to perform “SYM” live on Later… with Jools Holland, which was broadcast on BBC Two.
When I listen to the final track on Hoodies All Summer, I imagine myself sitting in between the ‘Sunday Best’ piano accompaniment pulling me into the pews of the church of Grime, and the choir of gospel singers bobbing side to side like bottles in an ocean, harmonizing one of the finest cusses with finesse – “Suck your mum.” At the altar, I see Kano and his perfectly-fitted suit, standing in all his vindication and protest and beaming at the worn-out congregation while wearing a contagious smirk across his face that tells us he’s tired too, and he sings, “Suck your mother and dad.”
This is a non-negotiable call-and-response to all of Britain’s terrors, and an ode on behalf of all of the children of the empire. ‘SYM’ feels like the Harvest of Sunday’s church; the one integral service that knits together all elements of lost faith, making you remember what it felt like to believe in something wholeheartedly and wanting to spread the good word unto others, or the one scripture you come back to because it’s the only one you know off by heart, or the prayer you turn to when the rock and the hard place form an allyship.
From Pardners and Windrush to the school-to-prison pipeline and slavery, Kano builds a climax of “fuck you’s” to the legacy of British colonial ruling, and when we sway with him, we sway in solidarity, in understanding, in equal and justified anger and acrimony and fire and burning and burning and burning. The people that sit on the rooftops of anti-Blackness, the ones that have been dancing on the graves of Black bodies for generations, sway with us at the beginning. And then they stop. How betrayed they must feel to bop to the beat of this severe beating down; how hurt they must feel that this is to them and not for them, even though they consider themselves the anomaly. Even though they’re the good ones. This, at its core, is theatre at its finest. These onion-shaped stories that unpeel themselves to reveal layers of conflict and secret languages and joy only a couple of people will understand. This is what I consider to be the bricks and mortar of theatre that Black communities across the diaspora have created for centuries.
My Imagined Theatre is one that acts as an accountability partner—one that speaks truth to hardship and authenticity to bullshit on any podium or soapbox that can be made with what we have and with no permission needed from ‘The Man’ and his son. This doesn’t mean stripping the art of its entertainment values—I’m sure the plenty of people gleefully singing “suck your mother and dad” at the top of their lungs were having a grand old time before reaching for the second line and wiping the nervous sweat from the top of their foreheads. Those are the moments I live for; the duality of theatre.
If this is my understanding of theatre, then it is impossible for theatre to exist within the binaries of institution-led kudos and structures. If I am to think of what I know theatre to be, I can map this evolution in the oral traditions, musical translations, and poetic tellings of my ancestors, and perhaps the purpose of my Imagined Theatre is to come back to the source; back to where we started and where those before me have already stood. Binding performance to stages with proscenium arches or large auditoriums with tiered seating is the inevitable death of theatre, and the lackluster thinking that something as radically expressive as theatre could be whittled down to the boundaries of white institutionalism is not only a mockery of the legacy of performance Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities have embodied for millennia across the globe, but also an undermining of how much these communities have done, can do, and will continue to do outside of the institutional definition of ‘culture.’
When reimagining the framing of theatre, particularly within the context of Blackness across the diaspora, I think of the oral, musical, and movement-based rituals of performance that have been handed down over generations. Not all of these forms and performances exist for everyone. There are codes, secret alleyways, and hidden dialects that speak directly to the few about the many; about modes of survival; about translating our documentation for future generations; about what it means to be our full selves, all day, every day. The Imagined Theatre that exists in this world isn’t one that blindly and untruthfully pretends to speak in a non-existent universal language, but rather implicitly states in its ethos that language is to be shared and spoken genuinely and with legitimacy, and those who are meant to hear it, will.
To be able to imagine should hold a power of freedom beyond expectation and present realities. Instead, the imagination has been capitalised as a bartering tool to dictate who defines culture and who culture belongs to—who is allowed to imagine and have those imaginings exist without being gaslit, undervalued, and undercut. Despite this, what I continue to learn is that Black cultures—in all their hues, impacts, and differences—carry the art and life of performance and theatre in their bones, and Kano teaches me that the Imagined Theatre I wish to form holds true and fearless work that comes from the freedom and validity of the imagination, ourselves, and our communities.
So, if I want to tell Britain to “Suck Your Mum,” I can. And I will.