Feast opens at the Young Vic
Wednesday, 23 January 2013
An ambitious new play co-produced by the Royal Court’s Genesis Foundation-supported International Playwrights team and the Young Vic opens this week.
Feast is an extraordinary production that explores the journey of Yoruba culture, tradition and religion as it moved through slavery from West Africa to the Americas – a powerful story of exploitation, resistance and survival. It brings together writing by five playwrights from countries where the Yoruba legacy has had great impact on contemporary life: Yunior Garcia Aguilera (Cuba), Rotimi Babatunde (Nigeria), Marcos Barbosa (Brazil), Tanya Barfield (USA) and Gbolahan Obisesan (UK).
Directed by the award-winning Rufus Norris, Feast is an epic story spanning 300 years, with three female leads playing a variety of different characters from 18th-century Nigeria, via Cuba and Brazil, to contemporary London.
As Liz Hoggard explains in the Evening Standard:
“The play’s genesis came about in 2007, when Elyse Dodgson, head of the Royal Court’s International Department, was running a playwriting workshop in Nigeria [supported by the Genesis Foundation]. At the leaving party on the beach, she mentioned their next workshop would be in Cuba, and the Nigerians became very excited because Cubans practise Santería, the Yoruban belief system that survived the Atlantic slave trade.
In Havana, the Cuban writers were equally curious about Nigerian diaspora culture. “Please bring us some soil from Nigeria!” they begged Dodgson. Later, working with writers in Brazil, she discovered that the Brazilian faith, Candomblé, also has roots in Yoruba culture and knew that the inter-connectedness of this robust African philosophy had the makings of a great play.”
Click on the image below to watch the trailer for Feast.
Feast runs at the Young Vic from 25 January to 23 February. To book tickets, visit the Young Vic website.