Experiences Transformed: Check Out the Black Theater festival from Loud ‘N Unchained Co.

The LNU (Loud ’N Unchained) Black Theater Festival, which debuts on April 30, has been several years in the making. Producer Dana Pellebon says it feels long overdue.

 “I was actually the last member added to the team,” Pellebon says in a recent interview. “But this idea aligned really well with my goals as a director, producer and artist. I’ve been working for a while to create a space to showcase Black theater artists.”

After a quick search online in 2019, Pellebon found a mere four theater festivals in the country that specifically celebrated Black artists, only one of which was an annual event. “I knew there were so many talented artists of color out there — in our own community and many other places around the country — who didn’t have opportunities in ‘traditional’ theater spaces. I was very excited to build a festival focusing on them, celebrating their unique art, and introducing them to wider audiences.”

T.S. Banks. Photo by Dana Pellebon.

The free, online presentation of theater, music, poetry and performance art, written, directed and performed by Black artists, which focuses on the Black experience, was the original brainchild of T. S. Banks. A community organizer, disability justice and mental wellness advocate, poet, and playwright from Madison, Banks wanted to create a platform that specifically highlighted Black, queer, trans and/or artists with disabilities.

Loud ’N Unchained Theater Co. (named after Banks’ first two plays) came to fruition through a collaboration that included Banks, Pellebon, Broom Street Theater Artistic Director Doug Reed, and Broom Street board member Janine Gardner.

Originally the LNU Black Theater Festival was intended to feature live, in-person performances at Broom Street Theater, scheduled to run for three weekends in June 2020. After putting out a national call for submissions and sifting through 75 entries from all over the country, the producers had chosen the final line-up and were ready to announce the program last March. Then the pandemic hit. Festival organizers agreed to hit pause on the project in order to keep all participants and audiences safe from COVID-19. 

The intervening year was full of radical change for the country, and also for Black voices in theater. After the death of George Floyd and a wave of demonstrations by the Black Lives Matter movement, many mainstream theaters began examining their programming and pledging to be more inclusive of people of color. Miranda Hawk of the Communications and Performing Arts department at Madison College contacted Pellebon about what her department could do to amplify Black voices in the community. Hawk was instrumental in securing a $10,000 grant from Madison College to support the LNU festival.

With this money in hand, Pellebon says they were able to compensate all the artists participating in the festival and, working with Hinckley Productions, to finance the filming of each piece. Amid the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, the festival conducted rehearsals virtually via Zoom, then spent two days in the studio recording their performances.

With the underwriting from Madison College, the LNU festival was no longer dependent on ticket sales. “The grant allowed me to make the show free and accessible to everyone,” Pellebon says. “This was a very big part of how we wanted to move forward.”

The content of the festival is varied in both tone and form, but Pellebon hopes that audiences of all ages and backgrounds will enjoy seeing Black artists transform their experiences into spoken word poetry, full-length plays, drag performances and hip-hop music. She says it is an event the whole family can watch.

“My whole family would wait for the one time each year when The Wiz was shown on TV,” says Pellebon. “That was the only expression of Blackness available to us.” Now, Pellebon says, it feels like the only large events that the Black community gathers for revolve around trauma and the often violent deaths of Black people. “I’m so tired sitting down with my Black brethren and my Black son to see a verdict. I want to see a celebration of our art and our livelihood instead.”

The works chosen for the LNU festival create an arc, says Pellebon, opening with “the voices of our ancestors. Then there are lighter moments in the poetry, monologues and drag performances. And we’re ending on a new interpretation of Homer’s Odyssey.”

Pellebon notes that “when we think about what it means to perform works in the canon, we have the opportunity to reimagine the canon.” That’s what Austin Dean Ashford has done with the classic, she adds. He has “taken this well known, incredible piece and infused Blackness into it.” And, she says, “Austin does an amazing job at this.”

Ultimately the organizers want the black theater festival to be an annual event. But for its inaugural year, Pellebon’s greatest goal is “to have young folks in the community know that the theater experiences that you’ve had in Madison before aren’t the only ones that are available. Theater can include them. It can include a full spectrum of who Black folks are and what Black performers put onstage.”

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For a complete schedule, and additional information about the artists featured, visit BlackTheaterFestival.com. All shows are free and available for streaming only at the times listed. They are also closed-captioned.

Friday, April 30

7 p.m.: I Know My Robe Gonna Fit Me Well; I Tried It On at the Gates of Hell: Atlantic Voices of Enslaved Black Women

Written and directed by Quanda Johnson

Quanda Johnson. Photo taken by Maia Pearson.

With a title taken from the spiritual “Bye and Bye,” this play is a compilation of historical narratives documenting many different experiences of Black women who endured slavery. Speaking of the title in an Aug. 11, 2020, interview in Isthmus, Quanda Johnson said, “It pops up in a lot of 20th century gospel songs as a chant, or as a refrain. I remember hearing the old women in my grandfather's church singing this refrain. As a hook it latched on in my psyche.

“The play looks at the Black female voice in Atlantic slavery, a voice that has been virtually invisible,” she added. “There are a lot of slave narratives in the archives, mostly Black male voices. Very few Black female voices had agency to write their narratives: Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. But for the most part, the Black female voice in the Western Hemisphere has been silenced when it comes to chattel slavery. That story has been told for her by others. So, I wanted to find first-person narratives, either written directly, dictated, or culled from the archive: wills, escape notices, court records.”

The piece was designed to highlight representative voices from French and British Canada, the U.S., the French and Spanish Caribbean, and Portuguese and Spanish voices from Central and South America.

There will be a talkback following the show.

Johnson is a Fulbright Scholar and a UW-Madison doctoral candidate in interdisciplinary theater studies, with an additional emphasis in Afro-American studies. As a Dean’s Graduate Scholar at the Gallatin School at New York University, she produced two original works: In Search of Negroland: a different study of the negro race and The Ballad of Anthony Crawford: a love letter to america. Onstage she has performed on Broadway in the original cast of Ragtime, and has lent her voice to grand opera productions. As a playwright she looks for ways to “utilize performance to disrupt and consequently alter entrenched, cyclical conversations about Blackness and the African Diaspora.”

7:30 p.m.: A Collection of Spoken Word Poetry and Monologues

Directed by T. S. Banks

These diverse pieces feature Erick Blue, Aaleh Hughes, Charles Edward Payne, Adrianna Shanklin, Rene Simon and Lexy Ware.

Drag Show

Performances by local drag artists from Madison and Milwaukee, including Anya Knees, Jasper Madison, SunShine Raynebow, Mimi $anchez and Amethyst Von Trollenberg.

Saturday, May 1

5 p.m.: SkinnyBlk (encore presentation)

Written and Directed by Sean Avery

SkinnyBlk (Skinny Black) is a hip-hop album/staged play about a black masculine individual figuring out how to navigate the world while being authentic in dress, thoughts, actions and preferences. Based in part on Avery’s own experiences as a non-binary person of color, the piece deals with masculinity, gender and sexuality in an innovative, evocative format.

Outside of performance, Avery teaches creative writing in classrooms across the country and collaborates with arts groups on multidisciplinary works including rap, poetry, prose and performance pieces.

6 p.m.: Good Bad People

By Rachel Lynett, directed by Dana Pellebon

In Good Bad People, June returns home and attempts to make amends with her family after her brother Amiri is shot by a police officer. But when her family refuses to make a statement and her personal beliefs are questioned, June is forced into the spotlight. She must decide which is more important: making amends with her family or standing up for her brother’s life.

Lynett recently received the prestigious 2021 Yale Drama Series Prize for her play, Apologies to Lorraine Hansberry (You Too August Wilson). A queer Afro-Latinx playwright, Lynett sums up the majority of her work as “dark comedy about complex, complicated women of color.” Her plays Well-Intentioned White People and Abortion Road Trip have been widely produced.

8:30 p.m.: (I)sland T(rap); The Epic Remixology of The Odyssey

Re-imagined and directed by Austin Dean Ashford

A hip-hop riff about Black Ulysses on an odyssey of self-discovery, this piece is a powerful exploration of a young artist of color navigating the turbulent waters of contemporary American culture, while trying to find his authentic voice. (I)sland T(rap) includes lyrical poetry, live music, and commentary on Black experience in America.

Ashford is an actor, playwright and musician. He is also currently a doctoral student at Texas Tech University in interdisciplinary fine arts.