Defiance
noun /de·fi·ance/
The act or an instance of defying : CHALLENGE ; disposition to resist : willingness to contend or fight
Bloom
To blossom; A period of flowering; To mature into achievement of one's potential; To flourish in youthful beauty, freshness, or excellence; To shine out : GLOW; To become more apparent or fully expressed
noun /blu:m/
EXPLORE THE SEASON DRAMATURGICAL EXHIBITION
National Black Theatre’s 56th Season while still NBT Beyond Walls is themed, Defiance of Our Bloom. A season that summons the ancestral wisdom and technology to bear fruits in luminous colors, transcendent sounds, delectable flavors, and spellbinding movements.
This season acknowledges the multitude of systems that try to bury our light, our Culture, and our humanity, whilst highlighting and honoring the science, soul, frequency, and vibrancy of our Bloom.
5 Productions
Purlie Victorious–Broadway Revival
Purlie Victorious is set on the heels of Reconstruction in an era when Jim Crow laws are still in effect in the American South. Its focus is on the dynamic traveling charismatic preacher, Purlie Victorious Judson, who returns to his small Georgia town hoping to save Big Bethel, the community's church, and emancipates the cotton pickers who work on oppressive Ol' Cap'n Cotchipee's plantation. With the assistance of Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins and the community, Purlie hopes to pry loose from Cotchipee an inheritance that he’d use to achieve his own goals.
September 7 - February 4, 2024
Music Box Theatre
Playwright: Ossie Davis
Director: Kenny Leon
(pray)
A congregation comes to power in nicHi douglas’ (pray). Through music, movement, and human connection, (pray) celebrates and reckons with the complexity of spiritual inheritance, summoning the curiosity, anger, confusion and bliss that transcends generations of Black womxn across the African diaspora. Channeling the joy and vitality of a Sunday Baptist Church service through a surreal and Afrofuturist lens, (pray) serves as an invitation to examine one’s own spiritual practices and holds space to inspire human transformation through the liberation of the Black feminine divine.
September 23 - October 28, 2023
Ars Nova @ Greenwich House
Playwright, Director, and Choreographer: nicHi douglas
Music: Starr Busby and JJJJJerome Ellis
Co-Producer: Ars Nova
Packages O’ the Things We Deliver
Packages O’ The Things We Deliver is about brotherhood, redemption, and the threat that police violence has in the black community. This story follows the concerns of three brothers who have been given the chance to save the souls of their family and themselves - all of which are being haunted by their past.
The brothers, who have to deliver packages to save their family… until one of the brothers is murdered during delivery. After a year of waiting and still haunted by the past, the brothers are reunited and learn that delivering packages is the first task towards redemption.
March 27 – 31, 2024
Chelsea Factory
Playwright: Oya Mae Dxtchxss-Davis
Director: Daniel Boisrond
The Gathering: A collective Sonic Ring Shout
The Gathering: A Collective Sonic Ring Shout is a one-night-only musically-driven theatrical performance centering the soul of Black folks and the heart of America's brilliant and bitter present through orchestral and choral music. This show honors our need for a collective space of remembrance to enact the sacred technology of a Ring Shout to engage the streets–a place where today's civic unrest has happened and taken place.
June 1, 2024
The Kennedy Center
Director and Creative Conception: Jonathan McCrory
Featuring: Nona Hendryx, Abby Dobson, Toshi Reagon, Joel Thompson, Carlos Simon, Courtney Bryan, and Troy Anthony, Chelsea Tipton, II and Nolan Williams, Jr
Co-Producers: The Apollo
Blood work
Blood Work takes us on a journey of twelve generations of women converging in this epic journey across time and space in the name of deep healing. As 34-year-old Nyanda wrestles with a mysterious disease, her entire mother line emerges from the past to save her (and in turn, save themselves). Armed with the desire to be whole but at a loss for how to get there, ancestors and descendants struggle to shoulder the weight of wellness. Bold and gripping, Blood Work asks, “if trauma can be passed down, what happens when we pass liberation down too?”
June 26 – 30, 2024
Chelsea Factory
Playwright: Kristen Adele Calhoun
Director: Tiffany Nichole Greene
Check Out Season 2022/23
Love, a Ritual of Repair
HELP US BUILD the theatre of the FUTURE!
Join us in continuing to invest in a cultural and creative hub for collective healing, radical imagination of Black artists, and fearless creativity! With each gift, NBT can awaken our theory of change and create the space for human transformation.