When it comes to activism and the arts, it’s hard to think of anyone more suitable than d’bi.young anitafrika. The author of 12 plays, seven albums and four poetry collections, they embody, create and teach decolonial performance praxis on a global scale.
The third presenter in our annual Lehan Family Activism & the Arts Series, d’bi.young anitafrika is a self-described “multi-hyphenic artist” — they are an award-winning poet-playwright-performer, director-dramaturge and activist-scholar. In addition to being a sessional instructor with UVic’s Theatre department, they currently serve as lead faculty for training programs at Soulpepper and Obsidian theatre companies, and at universities globally such as Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance and London South Bank University in the UK. Most recently awarded a $242,500 theatre archives grant, d’bi.young’s groundbreaking PhD research addresses fundamental research gaps in Black womxn’s theatre.
“The central idea in all of that work is, how I can support myself and the people I’m in community with in liberating ourselves?” they explain. “And then the second question is, what is liberation? My work is about creating the container to have that conversation with all practitioners. I’m most interested in creating an environment where we can be in circle with each other, investigating what it means to be liberated, emancipated. What resources and tools do we have available to us, and what do we have to create?”
In their Feb 25 talk, d’bi will connect their performance practice to the Anitafrika Method, exploring how they “decoliberate” — embodying liberation through decolonial action — in personhood, practice and pedagogy through theatre.
“My work is rooted in the African philosophy of Ubuntu,” they explain. “Essentially, Ubuntu means ‘I am, because you are, because we are’ — it’s quite simple and extremely complex at the same time. It points to the connectivity and symbiosis and interdependence of our existence, not only with each other as human beings, but with everything that exists on the planet.”
The Anitafrika Method — a nurturant Black-queer-feminist pedagogy of transformation — offers global arts practitioners an intersectional framework of knowing, doing and being.
Raised in activism
Born and raised in Jamaica by dub poetry pioneer Anita Stewart, d’bi came to Canada at 15 and was ushered into Toronto’s vibrant community of Jamaican Canadian artists / activists / educators / scholars.
“Art, poetry and theater for the liberation of people is a philosophical perspective that was a part of my foundational formative years,” they explain. “When I moved to Canada, I was introduced to communities here that were working on similar ideas, but also working with Indigenous people and disabled communities. Linking this anti-oppressive philosophy together was not difficult.”
But, after enrolling at Soulpepper Theatre Academy, they were disappointed to discover that their training would predominantly be in the tradition of the Western canon. “At the time it one of the top theater academies in the country . . . but teaching us about anybody else was not a priority,” d’bi recalls. “I was really quite surprised and disappointed and actually decided to resign— which, looking back on it now, was some serious radical action!”
Even more radical was their next decision: to start their own theatre school. “I was a talented, intelligent artist interested in learning about art from a global perspective but there was nowhere for me to go, so I decided to establish a training program that would center not only the practitioner but also the idea of world theater. And in doing that, I started working on a training methodology that has now evolved into what I call a ‘critical dub pedagogy’ that I developed throughout the world.”
