Solo Voices: Performance Art, Dance and Poetry

Abstract

In a 1994 article for black listings magazine Artrage, Bernadine Evaristo highlights Catherine Ugwu’s (then Deputy Director of Live Art at the ICA) conviction that ‘[b]lack theatre may be disappearing in one form but it is reinventing itself as live art’ (Evaristo, 1994, p. 15). Ugwu’s Let’s Get It On: The Politics of Black Performance (1995) is the first book to offer detailed analysis of black live art in Britain. Ugwu argues that ‘[g]rowing numbers of black artists are engaging in live art practice, viewing it as one of the few remaining spaces available to express complex ideas of identity’ (Ugwu, 1995, p. 54). Ugwu highlights the centrality of cathartic testimonials in black women’s solo performance that ‘attempts to engage both the artist and the audience in a process of memorialisation, within which it is hoped some kind of purification will occur’ (61). Significantly, she sees the potential of live art ‘as a critique of the timidity and the undaventurousness of a large amount of the output of black theatre and performance in Britain in recent years’ (82). Similarly, Beth-Sarah Wright argues that black British performance poetry (a generic term that includes dub poetry, jazz poetry and hip-hop or rap poetry) is ‘commonly situated within the arena of struggle and the consequent empowerment of its exponents […].