black culture
Thomas H. Green
One question springs immediately to mind on hearing that Romesh Ranganathan’s new stand-up show, The Cynic’s Mixtape, is touring: how does he find the time? Ranganathan has overtaken Jack Whitehall as Britain’s most media ubiquitous comic, with a deluge of TV shows and appearances, a column in the Guardian newspaper and even a recent autobiography. However, his TV CV is hit’n’miss, which leads to a second question: can he still cut it in the live arena?In short, yes, he can. With able support from Jake Lambert - who is heckled by that rarest of creatures, a Brighton Brexiteer – Ranganathan is Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The Ailey company is that rare thing – a dance legend that’s even better than you remember. While no one forgets their first encounter with America’s No.1 touring troupe and its unique mix of ballet, modern, jazz, street, and all-round athletic fabulousness, repeat viewings only increase one’s respect. The opening night of Programme C at Sadler’s Wells notched up my own 13th exposure to Revelations, the company’s barn-storming calling card inspired by Ailey’s early experience of segregated rural Texas. And it’s still fresh. Try as I might to spot a pasted-on smile in “Rocka My Soul”, there Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Identity politics has been around for decades. One of the great things about the Bush Theatre in West London is the fact that it not only stages new plays by a diverse range of playwrights, but also successful recent revivals of modern classics such as Winsome Pinnock's Leave Taking and Caryl Phillips's Strange Fruit. Now it is the turn of Scottish poet, novelist and playwright Jackie Kay, with this revival of her 1986 play, Chiaroscuro, presented this time in the exciting form of gig theatre.It's a story about female friendship: although one of its central aims is to question simple Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
There is no equivalent of the Ailey phenomenon. This is a modern dance company with a New York square named after it. It’s a dance company that has performed at the inauguration of two presidents. Its calling card, Revelations, a suite of dances first performed in 1960, is the most-watched modern dance work anywhere, ever.And how could it not be, when the Ailey bills it as a closer at every show? No matter which of three programmes you book to see at Sadler’s Wells, you will get the signature sign-off. It’s half an hour and a bit of kinetic joy drawing on Ailey’s memories of the Baptist Read more ...
joe.muggs
Of all grime's original generation, Kano has a strong claim to being the greatest rhyme-constructor in the old school hip hop sense of dense rhymes packed with multiple meanings. Add movie star looks and a penchant for fur coats in photoshoots and he was most young grime fans' tip for following Dizzee Rascal into the big league. But though he got the major label deal, MOBO awards, Mercury nominations and Damon Albarn collaborations, and though his 2016 Made in the Manor album hit the top ten, he's never quite parlayed that into becoming a breakout superstar, a household name in that Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Emmanuel (Anthony Ofoegbu) runs Three Kings Barbers in London. His assistant, Samuel (Mohammed Mansaray), is the son of his erstwhile business partner, who is currently in jail. Emmanuel is boss, surrogate father and — occasionally — verbal punching bag: Sam is a whizz with the shears and just as cutting with his tongue. It's not just London in which Inua Ellam's riotous play Barber Shop Chronicles — newly transferred to the Roundhouse from the National Theatre — takes place. Scenes in barber shops in Lagos, Accra, Kampala, Harare and Johannesburg intercut the action in London, where Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It’s too darn hot, BoJo is in Downing Street, and we’re all going to Brexit hell – so we might as well sing the blues. Or at least take a night off from the apocalypse to enjoy a virtuoso company singing them for us in this rousing revival of Sheldon Epps’ 1980 musical revue, which showcases jazz greats like Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen. It’s also unfinished business for Susie McKenna, who directed a short run at Hackney Empire back in 2014.Sharon D Clarke once again plays The Lady, whose concise narration sets the scene. We’re in a rundown hotel Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This witty street-smart play about a white-skinned boy born to a mixed-race mother deploys its narrative with the dexterity of a dance. Two performers move backwards and forwards across the stage, switching through different characters, skin colours, genders and generations, as they tell a story of pride, poverty, passion and prejudice.We’re in Camden as the play starts, where it’s, “Really fucking hot. That inside-an-oven hot you only get in a big concrete city.” Playwright and performer Gabriel Bisset-Smith’s vivid humorous language ambushes you from the outset. A police officer from the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As Anthony Joshua’s shock defeat by the unfancied Andy Ruiz Jr suggests, heavyweight boxers ain’t what they used to be. Antoine Fuqua’s sprawling HBO documentary (this was the first of two parts) bangs the point home with its vivid examination of Muhammad Ali, the sport’s all-time greatest exponent, a fighter whose influence stretched way beyond sport into politics, religious faith and racial identity.The boxer formerly known as Cassius Clay was born in Louisville, Kentucky in January 1942. He changed his name after he’d defeated world champion Sonny Liston in 1964 and converted to Islam – Read more ...
Matt Henry
When I first read One Night in Miami, I instantly felt a strong connection to the piece and its story. The fact that Sam Cooke, Malcolm X, Cassius Clay and Jim Brown, four iconic black men at the top of their game in 1964, actually hung out in a Miami motel room on the night that Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston was fascinating to me. I had no idea of this encounter and as I read, I could imagine myself watching as a fly on the wall. Stepping back in time, seeing these icons of the Civil Rights Movement brought to life and imagining their experience of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s hard, and finally fruitless to attempt to describe Okwui Okpokwasili’s Bronx Gothic in conventional terms of genre: combining elements of dance and theatre, this visceral solo performance transcends both. It engages with frantic movement at the same time as nursing a text – an utterance, rather than a narrative – that attains a fervid urgency, a state that demands immersion from the viewer. The concentrated effort of its 80-minute run clearly takes a huge amount out of the Nigerian-American actor-writer: it’s hard to call her just a performer, this is an experience that she lives.Her Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The huge achievement of the last two decades of August Wilson’s life, right up to his death in 2005, was his “American Century Cycle”, in which he charted the African American experience over that time frame decade by decade, its action set largely in the downtown Hill District of Pittsburgh where the playwright grew up.Premiered in 1999, King Hedley II represents the Eighties – the front curtain makes much of it being the beginning of the Reagan years – though Wilson’s concerns go far beyond standard documentary. History in this black neighbourhood extends back a long way, something that Read more ...