EDINBURGH 2017: BWW Q&A- Salt

Salt is a one woman show - with video and sound and ritual and a sledgehammer, that recounts a journey that I undertook last year, in which I sailed from Belgium, to Ghana and then from there to Jamaica. It's a show about my experience of being a part of the African Diaspora, about the afterlife of Slavery, and about how we might take time to grieve historical atrocities, in order to move forwards, and forge new ways of living. I hope that it's a deeply emotional and contemplative show, and one that takes its audience on a journey.

Good question! In many ways it is a bit of a pain for Edinburgh, it's got quite a lot of heavy lifting to set up, and it was made for a big stage (of which there are few at the fesitval). But I wanted this show to take up space, and I wanted lots of people to see it, and I think that the fringe festival has lots of complex and problematic relationships with race bubbling away within it (as it does with Capitalism and with Class and with Gender) so I think it feels politically important to bring a show that is bringing such things to the light, and place it at the heart of the fringe.

Well I don't really know, cus I've not seen any of the other shows. They might all be about spending two months at sea researching the roots of colonialism for all I know, which would be surprising and very intense, but maybe not a bad thing... I'm trying to think, I guess, of what it can maybe offer in the fringe as I understand it. For me, It is a show about space. And I think the Fringe often feels like the antithesis of that. It's an environment that compels you to consume as much theatre as possible, and if you're not careful, those stories merge into one. This is a show that is actively trying to resist that consumption, that tries to sit just a little bit outside of current history and current geography and politics, including the capitalism and competition that resides in a question like that... so I can't explain how it is set apart, but I can ask you to set it apart, to allow space before it and after it, to sit with the questions it asks of you.

People who know what it is to be part of a diaspora.

People with white privilege who are not too fragile to have it challenged.

People with white privilege who are too fragile to have it challenged, and don't email me or tweet me afterwards.

My mum and dad.

Fans of Himalayan Rock Salt, Crystals and Incense.

Saidiyah Hartman super fans.

People with the time.

People that have seen my other shows and liked them.

People who look at buildings built with colonial wealth and want to tear them to the ground.

And people who maybe struggle to get out of bed sometimes because of what they've seen on the news.

I think because it deals with a present - not a history, that is yet to be over, but a present moment - informed by slavery, colonialism, borders and their violence. It deals with how race and it's hierarchies are re created every generation and maintained, and the violence implicit in that. Don't get me wrong, there's pineapple and french bulldogs and plants - but we are all bound up in the story that it tells. In the words of Gwendolyn Brooks - "We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond." That's why you should come and see it.