SHITE Productions bring Joy Nesbitt’s new play, Scenes With Black Folk, to Camden Fringe this month.
“What are the rules of being Black? Who decides, and who enforces them? What happens when those questions are asked aloud—with a mostly white audience looking on?
Scenes with Black Folk is a bold, genre-bending ritual play that blends satire, surrealism, and raw vulnerability to explore how Blackness is performed, policed, and pushed to the edge.
Four “somebodies” take the stage, confronting the absurdity of racism and the weight of self-awareness in spaces where being seen is never simple.”
Where: Camden People’s Theatre
When: 19 – 22 Aug
Ticket link: https://camdenfringe.com/events/scenes-with-black-folk/
Joy tells us more below.
What’s your show about and what inspired it?
Scenes with Black Folk is about 4 Black performers who are attempting to put on a play about “being Black” but their Somebodiness (or lack thereof) gets in the way of their performance.
This leads them to turn the play into ritual towards understanding their identities while being watched.
I wrote this play in 2020 because I was at a crossroads in my life where I was trying figure out who I was while also feeling like a lot of expectations were being placed on me by the white gaze.
I wrote this play about that double or triple consciousness that you experience as a young Black person because you feel the expectations and stereotypes being placed upon you.
Somebodiness is a term coined by Martin Luther King Jr, and it refers to the feeling or state of being a person of worth, meaning you have the right to exist as your most honest self regardless of stereotypes or racism.
So I wrote this play to explore the quest of identity as a Black Person, and I wanted to perform the ritual of finding your somebodiness.
Why should someone come to see your show and what might they expect?
People should come to Scenes with Black Folk because it’s a conversation starter. There’s music, there’s dancing, there’s comedy, there’s love, and there’s introspection.
Bring a friend who you want talk to about their process of identity making. We live in a world where we ask people to live in absolutes and we force people to be one thing or another.
This play is an offer for audiences to consider that we are all works in progress constantly dealing with the stereotypes, ancestry, and preconceptions about ourselves.
I hope that people think about their role in giving others the space to explore their somebodiness, and I hope that people consider the ways in which they allow expectations to force them to perform a certain way of being.
It’s funny, it’s heartfelt, and most of all, it’s a conversation starter.
How did you make a start in the business?
I’m originally from Texas where I started off as a young actor in community musical theatre, and then after university, I moved to Ireland for my MFA in Theatre Directing.
This really gave me an opportunity to explore the power of straight plays and more experimental theatre. It was also a really great way to engage with post colonial ideas in theatre in new ways.
So my work really blossomed out of the fringe theatre scene in Dublin. I moved to London to continue to expand my practice and to continue the post colonial conversations in my work, especially with the diversity of artists and cultures in this city.
Do you have a favourite type of venue to work in?
I love unique spaces with a quirk to the shape of them, and I love intimate spaces.
It’s exciting to me when an audience is confronted with the fact that the performers can see them up close, and I especially love when the audience sees each other during a show.
Theatre is a collective experience, and the more we can feel connected to each other during the experience, the better.
What’s next for the show?
The script of Scenes with Black Folk is written to be malleable so that people from different parts of the diaspora can perform the play in their own locations.
We would love to put this play on again in the UK and then also explore the piece in other countries as well, with local casts that can reflect the truths of the communities where the play is performed.