Moving the Centre

Moving the Centre is a two-play anthology that leans into the problems and possibilities of verbatim theatre as a way to take on questions of justice, identity, and the history all around us. Both born of Toronto’s socially engaged theatre company Project: Humanity, these plays centre two very different artists who have relied on the power of recorded “real-life” encounters to shape and reshape their own defining narratives. Small Axe, charts the quest of a queer white playwright, Andrew Kushnir, who – because of an unsettling moment with a friend – is compelled to investigate homophobia in Jamaica. What starts as an artist researching an injustice “elsewhere” evolves into a startling excavation of self and the stories we claim of others. To whom does an injustice “belong”? Through a constellation of exchanges – with activists, refugees, ministers, journalists, fellow artists, patient teachers, and vivid critics, Small Axe invites us to sit with our differences in order to discover how intricately connected we are. Freedom Singer is the stage version of artist Khari Wendell McClelland’s multi-iterative personal history project of the same name. This musical and verbatim-theatre hybrid, constructed from hard-won historic material and family lore, documents Khari’s search for his ancestral grandmother, Kizzy, and the songs she may have sung during her escape through the Underground Railroad. For Khari, Detroit-born and now living in Vancouver, the songs are like maps. Anchored in the facts he can find and conversations with remarkable knowledge-holders (and on occasion “withholders”), Khari imagines how vibrations of the past may transcend the systemic barriers that keep a Black person from their own history. As he puts it: “Sometimes you need to improvise. Sometimes you need to mythologize.” Moving the Centre explores the work of two theatre makers who simultaneously dare, fumble, and persist in their belief that the arts can help us dialogue across differences. Alongside personal essays complementing the playscripts and a dynamic foreword from poet Cecily Nicholson, the book’s literal centre is a verbatim dialogue wherein Kushnir and McClelland discuss the white gaze vs. Black “looking back,” the nature of practice, and how the theatre is a vital ritual for our times. By centring caring and equitable relationships, these two artists ask: Can we undertake daunting stories in more ethical, more viable, more truthful ways?