D’bi.young understands context. She knows that her urban primitive style is sometimes perceived as threatening; it’s one of the reasons she insisted on Q&A sessions with her audience after each performance of blood.claat earlier this spring at Great Canadian Theatre Company.
“The audiences were predominantly white, affluent, economically in a different class than myself,” notes young. “The talk-backs allowed me, as a human being, to connect with them beyond the entertainment value of the work and to contextualize what they were seeing.”
The production of blood.claat was a remount of the first work in a triology that will be completed on May 16 when young performs word! sound! powah! at the Berkeley Street Theatre. The free performance and pre-show panel discussion are part of the larger 2010 Festival of Ideas & Creation, a celebration of performing arts and behind-the-scenes look at live theatre.
D’bi’s look and radical politics may be intimidating to some but change the context, pull her lovely boys into the frame — Moon, 6, and Phoenix, 1 — and suddenly she’s just another Mom trying to keep her kids happy, healthy and under control.
“I think there are many ways in which I present that might initially seem threatening but within two minutes, literally two minutes, people get over that and see ME,” she states. “I take joy in that because I know there are signifiers like the nose ring that mean certain things to people but I personally think it looks great . . . there are references to Africa and it’s a punk aesthetic, which I’m in support of for myself. The Mohawk, I love to identify with First Nations, the tattoo speaks to body art and owning my own body, stretching my ears, to me these are all elements of how I enjoy the very little time I have on the face of this planet. I don’t get so deep into the rigidity of it, no, I’m not interested in that.”
What does interest young is pushing the boundaries of her work and exploring new theatrical and linguistic terrain. She’s currently working on her MA thesis in which she’s trying to develop “a methodology for biomyth monodrama.”
word! sound! powah! is an example of the form: “It’s what I do best because I’m a poet and my relationship to the audience is very much about the poet being at the centre, talking to the village. It’s like a meeting place of a number of genres, monodrama, opera, and biomyth, which means that the story is loosely based on biography but heavily mythologized with folklore and pithy sayings and proverbs, taking poetic license and twisting dates and times, being a bit of a magician.”
The new work is the fruit of a CanStage playwright residency; young calls it a dub opera, “a hybrid of dub poetry and what I understand to be opera’s revolutionary beginnings and its ability to communicate through music, drama and theatricality. I also recognize that opera is often performed in what may not be the spoken language of the audience and I’ve applied, in a dub poetry context, the nation language of Jamaica, using reggae music and dancehall and being theatrical in the communication of the story.”
Young comes to her work as naturally as a bee to a flower. Her mother, Anita Stewart, is a pioneer of Jamaican dub poetry and her mentor, Toronto’s ahdri zina mandiela, has been another huge influence. “Culture and art are cyclical and reciprocal,” observes young, who has founded her own community theatre group, anitafrika dub theatre, in order to mentor the next generation of artists. “You have to support those coming behind you, that’s how you repay what was given to you.”
When she takes the stage next weekend to deliver word! sound! powah! young will be ready to give her all to the performance. “Part of my philosophy and methodology is that the storyteller is always the storyteller,” she says. “For me going on stage to tell a story is about knowing that story in my body, not just from the neck up, but all the way down, all the way through my being. Living my life is part of the preparation, giving the talk before hand, it’s like a warm-up, because it’s all part of the same thing, it’s people communicating with people.”
Photos of d’bi.young with sons Moon, left, and Phoenix, by Christopher Jones
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