By Neil Armstrong

A national arts initiative, the Year of Black Performance, was launched after the matinee performance of Andrea Scott’s play, Get That Hope, at the Stratford Festival on August 17.

It coincides with the final year of the International Decade for People of African Descent and invites the public to celebrate, support and recognize the vital contribution and work of Black artists to live performance across Canada from August 2024 through August 2025. 

This is the brainchild of The Black Pledge Collective led by Sedina Fiati, a Toronto-based performer, producer, director, creator and activist for stage and screen, and other creatives such as Georgia Grant, Tamara Jones, Velvet Wells, Janelle Cooper, Naomi Bain, Nikola Steer, and Ren Niles.

The visioning collective comprises six individuals: Alicia Richardson, Giselle Clarke-Trenaman, Samantha Walkes, Joella Crichton, Diane Roberts, and Dayjan Lesmond.

The Black Pledge Collective started in 2020 during the height of worldwide racial reckoning — in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd — to hold live performance organizations accountable to their promises to address anti-Black racism.

“Our aim is to amplify and highlight Black performances happening all over Canada through a searchable website and comprehensive marketing and outreach campaign. This website will be launched soon. The Year of Black Performance is supported by Canada Council for the Arts and Toronto Arts Council,” notes the collective.

“The Black Pledge is an open call for positive, lasting change in live arts spaces across Canada so that they truly reflect the beautiful mosaic tapestry of our nation. Our mission is to foster greater inclusion and awareness surrounding the needs of underserved communities in the Arts, especially the Black community. We stand in solidarity with Indigenous peoples and other communities of colour seeking equity while retaining our Black-centric advocacy,” notes a statement on their website.

The Stratford Festival is North America’s largest classical repertory theatre company. Each season, it presents a dozen or more productions — classics, contemporary dramas and musicals, with special emphasis on the plays of Shakespeare.

 “The Stratford Festival will use our efforts in EDI [equity, diversity and inclusion] to dismantle the history of white supremacy that has been upheld in the past to move toward a more equitable future. We do this by showcasing stories, artists and audiences that make up the whole of who we are,” it said in a statement posted on The Black Pledge Collective’s website.

Reporting on the festival’s anti-racism initiatives, artistic director Antoni Cimolino and executive director Anita Gaffney noted that in a July 2021 equity, diversity and inclusion update on its website that “like other arts organizations and corporations, the Festival issued a statement condemning racism, and in it we acknowledged the role the Festival, as an institution, has played in upholding systemic racism.

“They were bold words, and important, but not enough. Real change is what is required. And so we dug deeper into a course of self-examination that we had begun back in 2005, when, with the programming of Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet for the 2006 season, we realized the mountain of work that needed to be done to diversify the Festival, the acting company and our audience.”

Acknowledging that they did not do a good enough job in the years that followed that production and that while the company grew more diverse, it did not change the way it worked, they said micro and macro aggressions were common but overlooked.

Get That Hope written by the award-winning Andrea Scott and directed by Andre Sills, a winner of multiple acting awards, is a play about the struggles and triumphs of a Jamaican Canadian family, set in Toronto’s Little Jamaica. 

It features Conrad Coates as the father, Richard Whyte; Kim Roberts as mother, Margaret Whyte; Celia Aloma as daughter Rachel Whyte; Savion Roach as son Simeon Whyte; and Jennifer Villaverde as Millicent Flores.

“A domestic tragicomedy with echoes of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Andrea Scott’s Get That Hope draws the curtain on a Jamaican-Canadian family whose struggles mirror those of an entire community spread across the city, the country and the world,” notes a synopsis.

  Stratford