The term "baroque" refers to an aesthetic of beautiful irregularity characterized by complexity, surprise, dizzying folds, metamorphoses, illusions, perpetual movement, self-referentiality, and a profusion of carefully contrived ornaments. There are profound affinities between the baroque aesthetic and the aesthetic developed by many artists from the African diaspora. Yet the baroque also refers to a time period (roughly, the mid-16th c to the mid-18th century) which saw the launch of the genocidal tactics of settler colonialism, the development of color-based slavery in the Atlantic world, and the transnational invention of whiteness. Thus, the relationship between the Baroque and the African diaspora is always already fraught. This interview series features Black theatre-makers who, in their artistic practice, reckon with the complex relationship between Blackness and the Baroque.

Profile picture: Wole Lagunju “Of race, mythology, and redefinitions of storytelling,” 2014