
Wednesday 29th June
Soft start at 18:30 BST with a presentation starting at 19:00 BST via Zoom
Book on bit.ly/qm2906o
Family Tree: it’s a play, a performance, a ritual, about human farming, farming humans, soil and the soul, seeds and cells, selling cells in prison cells prizing open, dividing, multiplying, multi-million incisions, incarcerations, extractions and experimentations – woman-child-man, in the lab, on the slab, in the land, the plantation womb and bred’ren bred for bread, planting and planning escape from living-dead, plotting from the plot to the pot but for the dread of night doctors, organ raiders, head drillers, cigarette smoking cowboys, cops with hands in pockets and the Klu Klux Klan; it’s about cancer and capital, capitalism as cancer, cervical carcinoma in chicken culture (and the culture of chicken), compost and re-composition, giving of veins given in vain, philosophizing the threshold of black pain, inhospitable hospitals, monitored monetary mortuaries, eugenic medical obscenities, Mississippi appendectomies and the bad blood between us at Tuskegee, not-to-mention sugar addiction affliction, disease dis-ease, fibroids, obesity, HIV, vitamin D-deficiency, genes in jeans and cotton fields, cotton buds, cotton sheets and the unremembered history of gynaecology, implements’ implications, dissecting dissections, fertilizing fertility slash secret sterilizations, speculums, scalpels, swabs of women slaves, taking us right up to today, corona virus and giving-a-fuck-or-not about climate change. It’s about shaking the plastic money tree and out-falling Covid-19 onto a world that cannot breathe without change and cannot breathe without trees, where a woman in some African heaven hears her grown son calling “Mama… Mama…”… and she floats down… like leaves to the ground… lifts his face from the dirt… and carries her baby home… no more suffocation, pollution, asphyxiation… but the right to cellular respiration. It’s about the original ‘extinction rebellion’ from the ‘wretched of the earth’, ethics of the earth, risking the earth, dying of whiteness, dying to whiteness to witness: burial as a form of gardening. See three women come running loosening their plaits and shaking their Afros free scattering seeds to sew soul food to eat. It’s about where life grows, where a woman breathes life into an inner floating soul, drinking in, sustained in the Orisha of women, sweet water and unlocked-down hairdressers. It’s about finding a route home through the roots of the tree they made on your back, the tree you hung from, the tree of your lungs, the tree in your womb, a family tree. It’s about nursing the nursery, curing creation, remedies and vaccinations against white supremacist racism. It’s about birthing revolution, raising redemption, finding yourself in the forest of futurity, the promise of immortality and the matter of black lives. Featuring: Anarcha, Betsey and Lucy (the unremembered victim heroes of plantation gynaecology at the hands Dr Sims – pulled down from his plinth); starring: three Black NHS nurses – Ain, Bibi and Lyn, calling on the names of Doreen Lawrence and Fannie Lou Hamer, vibing with Beyoncé and bowing to the wisdom of Toni Morrison. With a surprise appearance by… Oh and there’s a cameo by the Man from Marlboro and in the leading role, the everlasting Henrietta Lacks. Rest in peace! Rise in peace! Rise in Power!
Mojisola Adebayo (playwright, performer, producer, director and Lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Contemporary Performance, at Queen Mary, University of London), will read extracts from her latest play, Family Tree with a discussion about the research process, from and through community gardens in Berlin graveyards, to a former hospital in South London and petri dishes in science labs. This practice-as-research project is part of her White Climate: Afriquia Literatures and Agri/cultural Practices research fellowship, at University of Potsdam, Germany.
We’re looking forward to welcoming you online!