Mojisola Adebayo’s Afriqueer Theatre

Actor, playwright and director Mojisola Adebayo presents three selected script-in-hand extracts, accompanied by visuals, from a range of her Afriqueer (black/queer) plays.

The selected extracts come from her plays, I Stand Corrected, a response to so-called ‘corrective rape’ of lesbians and trans men in collaboration with dance artist Mamela Nyamza; STARS, a fantastical queer Afrofuturist story about an old lady who travels into space in search of her own orgasm; and the Interrogation of Sandra Bland, a verbatim performance as part of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The extracts speak to and resonate with Delfina Foundation’s current exhibition, The Scar, by Noor Afshan Mirza and Brad Bulter, in their shared exploration of patriarchy, the relationship between state violence and violence against women, the representations of women-of-colour, and the merging of theatre and visual art, fact and fantasy, realism and magic.

BIOGRAPHY

Mojisola Adebayo BA (Hons), MA, PhD, FRSL has worked in theatre, radio and television, over the past two decades, performing in over 50 productions, writing, devising and directing over 30 plays and leading countless workshops, worldwide, from Antarctica to Zimbabwe.

Publications include her plays in Mojisola Adebayo: Plays One (Oberon), 48 Minutes for Palestine in Theatre in Pieces (Methuen), The Interrogation of Sandra Bland in Black Lives, Black Words (Oberon), The Theatre for Development Handbook (with John Martin and Manisha Mehta, available through www.pan-arts.net) and several academic chapters. Plays Two (Oberon) is out in 2019.

Mojisola is an Associate Artist with Pan Arts, a Visiting Artist at Rose Bruford College and Goldsmiths and a Lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London. Her next play STARS will be staged in 2019. She is currently writing Wind/Rush for the National Theatre.

Visit Majisola’s website for more about her work.

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