A new arrival on Canberra’s theatre scene is Kabu Okai-Davies. University studies in his home country, Ghana, began his interest in theatre.
In America from 1988, where he studied film, taught African film and theatre courses and became resident playwright at New York’s Ensemble Theatre Company, his major achievement before migrating here has been African Globe TheatreWorks, a company he formed originally in Newark, New Jersey, a city where he found African-Americans needed an outlet to celebrate their culture.
By 2002, his still struggling independent company had produced a long series of plays, often re-worked to suit his African-American performers and audience. One critic commented “Though the playhouse’s seats are plastic, its productions are not.”
The company was attracting considerable corporate sponsorship, and yet, says Okai-Davies, he became aware of a major shift in American attitudes as the Bush administration took over from the Clinton era, when the arts and community had been exciting arenas for him to work in.
Though he had become a ‘legal resident alien’, especially after the September 11 disaster he felt society becoming “too saturated with its own self, insular, parochial”. He had to face the question, Have I finished here?
In Australia, he says in contrast, he has found new “exciting people who have a sense of natural friendliness” which was reinforced when he brought his African Globe TheatreWorks production of When a Man Loves a Woman by Solomon F Caudle to Canberra for the 2005 Multicultural Festival.
With his family now settled in, and after involvement backstage in local productions, his immediate venture this Christmas is An Australian Nativity for the Canberra City Uniting and Belconnen Community Churches, partly based on the Black Nativity by Langston Hughes, who was one of the most important writers and thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance, the African-American artistic movement in the 1920s that celebrated black life and culture.
In May 2007 at The Street Theatre, Okai-Davies will direct local writer Mark Taylor’s Young Followers, a play about bastardisation and the ‘accelerated deconstruction’ of officer cadets.
If all his plans come to fruition, a new organisation will form with a strong emphasis on multicultural theatre. Multiculturalism is an Australian reality, he says. Integration never works. In the meantime he is taking a post-graduate course in Creative Writing at the University of Canberra with projects already in mind for at least the next three years.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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