Notes

• Design Talks — Tuesday, September 13 at 7pm,
  with set and costume designer Davoid Boechler.
• Free Lecture Series — Saturday, September 24, at 1pm.
  

the trilogy

word! sound! powah! (part three of the trilogy)

yuh tink you can stop the people?
my granny told me about you.
she prepared me for you.

A storyteller emerges from the darkness. She sings the story of her people, beginning with their hope-filled birth to their decline into destruction and despair. She implores them to wake from their slumber, remember themselves, and return to the land they love.

As she finishes her song, we suddenly find ourselves in a police interrogation room in 1980s Kingston, Jamaica. The brutal Constable Brown relentlessly interrogates a young woman named Benu. He suspects that she is an accomplice in a heinous politically-motivated crime - but he has no proof. All he knows is that Jamaica is in the midst of a tense and hotly contested election campaign that has cost many politicians and supporters their lives, and it's his job to find the culprits.

Benu is not a member of any political party, but the Constable knows her to be a member of an equally troublesome group:

you get involved with these ambitionless rogues who call themselves poets? poets in
solidarity. solidarity. solidarity
against who, against the
upstanding jamaica government.

Benu defends her work as a poet. In her writing, and her work with the poets in solidarity - who meet at a well-known tree on campus - she acknowledges the painful truths of too many Jamaican lives:

yuh realize that you was born into that no choice legacy
that what we talk about at the tree sir
that what we talk about at the tree
nobody can tell you that we did anything else sir
otherwise they would be lying

But Benu isn't telling the whole truth. When the poets in solidarity decide to take their poetry to the street during an election rally, they know they're taking a huge risk.

Another high profile election killing has them all running scared: they know someone must pay. Amidst all the corruption and turmoil, who can stand up for the land they love?

blood.claat (part one of the trilogy)

mugdu sankofa, a fifteen-year-old girl from Kingston, Jamaica, begins her journey into womanhood under the watchful gaze of her granny. With her mother gone to Canada, Mugdu chafes against the limitations imposed on her by her grandmother's generation - even as she looks to her ancestors for strength. Like her mother and grandmother before her, mugdu attempts to embrace her femininity as she navigates the perennial danger that plagues the young women in her family: pregnancy. blood.claat received two Dora awards in 2006.

blood.claat will be performed at 8 p.m. on November 23 and 27, and at 2:30 p.m. on November 26 and December 3, 2011.

benu (part two of the trilogy)

mugdu's daughter sekesu a new mother. Painful memories of her upbringing - her separation from her mother - surface with the pregnancy and birth, and collide with her expectations of motherhood. Can she be the mother she never had? There is hope in her daughter, benu, named after the mythical Egyptian predecessor of the phoenix, which rises from its ashes.

benu will be performed at 8 p.m. on November 29, December 1, and December 3, 2011

Articles

• Straddling the world | d'bi.young craves new spaces
  Xtra, November 03, 2011.
• d'bi.young's THE SANKOFA TRILOGY
  alternavox.net, October 24, 2011.
• d'bi.young anitafrika's website.
• 10 questions: d'bi young anitafrika
  Theatre is Territory Blog. November 23rd, 2007.