This summer, I had the privilege of attending the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, thanks to the incredible Fringe of Colour scheme, which provides free or discounted tickets to people of colour (PoC). The scheme allowed me to see incredible shows by PoC performers for free. I’d been to Edinburgh many times before; I distinctly remember the first night I visited I felt so cold that I wound up crying at how isolated I felt.
People weaponise our blackness against us; it’s a feature of our identity that is immutable yet constantly highlighted. Being Black is always political. Attending the Fringe under the scheme combatted this sentiment: seeing Black comedians, actors, actresses, buskers, and performance artists in a de-politicized environment felt freeing. We took up spaces without having to speak for the room, laughed and watched performances and felt the space as ours. It was electrifying.
The true highlight of the Fringe was Burgerz by Travis Alabanza. The show is a hybrid of performance art, spoken word, interactive theatre, and theatre of the oppressed. The show’s name is derived from an incident where Travis had a burger thrown at them on Waterloo Bridge. Drawing on this episode and its passive witnesses moves Travis to explore the composition of the burger and makes it their own, inviting a cis white man to come on stage and assist in the process.
The show is a natural, improvised conversation between Travis and the white man. With insightful interjections on musings on gender, blackness, and the history of trans and non-gender conforming people. Despite the audience largely being white, middle-aged and probably middle-upper class, the performance does not fall into the usual formula of pandering to white liberalism. Travis reminds us that discrimination is not always overt: microaggressions like children pointing fingers or adjacent empty tube seats in a full carriage bring an air of social isolation.
Black history month needs to include the nuances in experience. Burgerz and Travis’s work as a Black performer illuminates this importance. Being Black is not only about race, but about intersections: being women, men, queer, disabled, working class, single-parent household-raised. It’s also about what and who has been excluded. Our conversations on identity have to include those who’ve remained in the shadows, those whose identities can only be partially shown because of what they aren’t.
One of the most revealing links made in the show was between gender and blackness. Black people know what gender can do, how it hyper-sexualizes us, how it categorically places us in between uncontrollable desire and complete rejection of ‘conventional’ beauty. Alabanza is a master of nuances, of penmanship and performance, of wedding emotion with rationality. After being moved to tears by Burgerz, I vowed to attend whatever next performance they would be part of.
On a rainy Saturday night, nursing a hangover and trekking on the Northern line to the Ovalhouse theatre, I found myself at We Dig, a performance by five trans artists and performers on digging and self-preservation. The historic Ovalhouse Theatre had to conduct major renovations, including digging up the theatre, and the Theatre invited artists to explore the space and whatever was found in the foundations. What the cast of We Dig found was a poster showing that Martha P. Johnson – African-American activist and queer rights icon – had once performed in the Ovalhouse. This new evidence on the concept of representation showed that the idea that conversations on the identities of trans, gender non-conforming, and non-binary people are novel is simply false. Trans people have existed, gender non-conforming people have existed, non-binary people have existed.
Travis’ work has illuminated to me that representation is a flimsy concept often used to pander to the idea that Black identities should be ‘accepted’. Their work asserts that we have been here, throughout history, contributing to the very foundations of the ground we all walk on. Their work illuminates that rather than pointing to the present, history can reveal how perennial we have been. How liberating it is to be in a space knowing that you are not the first, that others have traversed the same course and asserted themselves, did not ask to be seen but boldly declared, I am here and I am not moving.
