![danganronpa killing harmony speeding through text danganronpa killing harmony speeding through text](https://hardcore-gamer.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/09/Taxi-2.jpg)
Thank you to my team at Obsidian, who have been my rock during this process.
![danganronpa killing harmony speeding through text danganronpa killing harmony speeding through text](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/1cIAAOSw8NNed1mQ/s-l300.jpg)
Huge thanks to our venue production partner, TO Live, for giving us a space to film the project, and to all our donors and community supporters who have helped us make this project possible. A special thanks to our supervising producer, Lucius Dechausay, who has been an incredible collaborator, helping us shape the filming of this project with so much rigour and care. We celebrate their incredible talent, and we hope you embrace and engage with their work over and over again this Black History Month and beyond.Īll of us at Obsidian are truly grateful for the partnership with the CBC, which has given us a national platform to present this work. We are proud of and grateful to the 63 Black artists and creative and production teams who have been working tirelessly for months to make this project happen.
![danganronpa killing harmony speeding through text danganronpa killing harmony speeding through text](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/GMIAAOSwKeNdu8cB/s-l300.jpg)
We have learned a ton, adapted daily to producing a new form of storytelling that is a hybrid of theatre and film, and met and connected with so many incredible Black artists in a way that had never happened before at Obsidian. The journey to get here - to create and present work of this scale in the middle of a pandemic - has certainly not been easy. It was a grand experiment to create as rich a tapestry as we could for the imagining of Black futures. Our goal was to give as many opportunities to as many diverse Black artists as possible and to bring new voices together from both film and theatre. Each writer was tasked with writing a 10-minute monodrama - a one-person play - in response to the question What is the future of Blackness? We further engaged 21 Black directors and 21 Black actors to bring these stories to life as short theatrical films. Twenty-one to celebrate Obsidian’s 21st anniversary in 2021. In conversation with the team at Obsidian, we decided to engage 21 writers from different generations and with different levels of experience - writers who reflected the rich diversity of Blackness in Canada. I was interested in new words, in new language, in what Black writers and thinkers across the country had to say about our future. I was interested in new stories about imagined Black futures to counter the messaging that was suddenly everywhere about us, but not from us. Was there a way we could come together in this moment and create something communal something unapologetically Black something with the Black gaze at its centre? A radical offering in unprecedented times. How could I respond and support Black artists from an institutional capacity? I thought about all the veteran artists who had been part of building Obsidian’s legacy and the aspiring theatre-makers, in various parts of the country, who had maybe never even heard of Obsidian. Especially when, around the world, the gaze of institutions, individuals and even politicians had turned sharply toward us. I wondered how other Black artists across the country were doing. With no access to the theatre and no access to community, I was hurting and in need of connection. With no end to the pandemic in sight, I went further into self-isolation, mourning privately the continuous murder of Black people at the hands of police. Prior to beginning my role at Obsidian, I was a busy freelance theatre director who had also seen all of my upcoming gigs disappear due to COVID-19. I had the choice either to wait out the pandemic or to adapt and create new programming that would reflect our times in both form and content.
![danganronpa killing harmony speeding through text danganronpa killing harmony speeding through text](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XaYDwX1PcIk/maxresdefault.jpg)
I was in the position of not only learning a new job, but also developing material for the 2020-2021 season. All the programming my predecessor Philip Akin had planned for his final season was cancelled or postponed.