mandate

We believe work uninformed of the past cannot possibly look to the future. It is from this position of engaging with questions about the past, cultural memory and its provisional hold over the present and future that Afterlife seeks to intervene.

When we consider afterlives, we are also imagining the afterlives of many structures of violence that remain with us today – particularly the incomplete abolition of slavery and anti-blackness, ongoing settler-colonialism and Indigenous dispossession, & patriarchy and gender based violence – as well as the possibilities for bringing new ‘life’ to spaces, places, and stories that have ostensibly run their course.

Our name Afterlife Theatre owes a great debt to the magnificent work of Saidiya Hartman, whose ongoing literary and academic work charts slavery’s afterlife and her methodology of critical fabulation (a method where she imagines what might have happened in the space of slavery’s archival gaps) also provides a useful dramaturgical lens from which we approach the unsaid and unthought in both classic and contemporary works. We ask (and attempt to answer) how to represent and tell stories within and against the violence organizing our social worlds.  

Our theatre projects range across genre and period, constellated broadly around our question of how the past endures within (and is transformed by) the present. Within this broad constellation, we are interested in excavating new meaning from classical repertoire, as well as presenting bold and original contemporary works. It is in this afterlife, when theatre becomes theatre, where magic and community are made. We invite our audiences to reckon with the ‘accumulations’ that bring us here in order to begin the process of moving into a more just and transformative future horizon.

There’s still life in us, yet.