Young, Gifted, and Black | Returning, Reshaping, Re….

June 6–7 2025

Running Time: 50
13+ years

Program Director d’bi.young anitafrika

Obsidian Theatre presents Returning, Reshaping, Re… (A collection of star songs and soil) by the Young, Gifted, and Black Ensemble.

This showcase is rooted in decolonial approaches to design and direction, guided by Black performance aesthetics and multidisciplinary storytelling to explore the expansiveness of Blackness. The work draws from African and Afrofuturist storytelling traditions—where time, space, and meaning unfold in non-linear, cyclical, and intuitive ways. It flows between a range of characters and worlds, forming a narrative structure that is relational, symbolic, and centered in African ways of knowing and becoming.

Themes such as ancestral ties and roots, transformation, Black love, Black fragility, Black femininity, and Black joy are interwoven through a process grounded in exploration and improvisation. The work exists within a decolonial, African-centered perspective, inviting audiences into a world shaped by rhythm, ritual, and memory.

An Obsidian Theatre Program

Young, Gifted, and Black is Obsidian Theatre’s arts training program dedicated to supporting Black theatre practitioners in non-performance disciplines. Lead by Program Director d’bi.young anitafrika, this six-month intensive explores Black diaspora theatre and performance aesthetics through a decolonial and intersectional lens. The program culminates in an ensemble creation devised, directed, and designed by the Young, Gifted, and Black cohort.

Image design by Awake Studio

Program Director

d’bi.young anitafrika

d’bi.young is a playwright-performer, director-dramaturge and activist-educator, who creates, embodies, and teaches decolonial praxis. Culminating their PhD in Black womyn’s theatre at London South Bank University (LSBU), their research centres on the emancipation of the oppressed self, through theatre making. d’bi.young developed the Anitafrika Method—a nurturant Black-queer-feminist pedagogy of transformation—offering arts practitioners globally, an intersectional framework of knowing, doing and being. A widely anthologised Siminovitch Playwright Prize finalist, three-time Dora award winner, and founding Artistic Director of Watah Theatre, Spolrusie Press and Ubuntu Decolonial Arts Centre in Costa Rica, d’bi.young has authored twelve plays, seven albums, and four poetry collections—headlining poetry & literary festivals, theatre seasons, and academic conferences globally. Most recently they have held lectureships at Rose Bruford College of Theatre & Performance and LSBU as a decolonial theatre practice, leadership & education specialist. Utilising the Anitafrika Method, they design courses that reframe playwriting, devising, acting, performance, directing, dramaturgy, theatre design & curriculum development from an African-Indigenous epistemological, ontological, cosmological, ethical, & aesthetic perspective. d’bi.young is lead faculty at Soulpepper Theatre Academy and currently lectures in the theatre department at the University of Victoria.

As this year’s Program Director and Lead Mentor, d’bi.young will utilize the Anitafrika Method to develop the program curricula, provide comprehensive mentorship to each practitioner, and guide the ensemble creative process.