This artist residency scholarship is part of DTA x LOATAD’s Out Of Many, One People 1-year Festival, celebrating transnational Black cultural activism inspired by the life and legacy of Ghanaian playwright and Pan-African cultural activist, Efua Sutherland (1924-1996). The residency is extended to both Ghanaian and international cultural playwrights /artists and activists who wish to use Efua Sutherlands’ method of creating plays for outdoor performance.
The central aims of the plays you will be creating;
To create a political play addressing the theme of Out of Many One People, cultural identity, the African diaspora, cultural literacy, unity, the descendants, re -imagining the return, Nation Language, embodied knowledge cultural amnesia
Tto create a children's play
This writing residency will support to create the piece over 3 days and then have the piece performed through a play reading with actors from the University of Ghana. This 3 day workshop will be funded by DTA and give full scholarships to participate in the workshop. The writing resdency will cover lunch over the 3 day residency and Production costs for the staged reading. To participate and gain a funded space on the residency you must submit an application here.
Efua Sutherland, (born June 27, 1924, Cape Coast, Gold Coast [now in Ghana]—died January 21, 1996, Accra, Ghana), Ghanaian playwright, poet, teacher, and children’s author, who founded the Drama Studio in Accra (now the Writers’ Workshop in the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon). Sutherland established a Drama Studio as a workshop for writers who wrote for children. The studio soon became a training ground for Ghanaian playwrights. Sutherland herself wrote several works for children, including two animated rhythm plays, Vulture! Vulture! and Tahinta (both 1968), and two pictorial essays, Playtime in Africa (1960) and The Roadmakers (1961).
Many of Sutherland’s works were broadcast in Ghana on a popular radio program, “The Singing Net,” and most of her unpublished plays were performed by drama groups in Ghana. Many of her short stories can be described as rhythmic prose poems; one of her later plays, Nyamekye, a version of Alice in Wonderland, shows the inIuence of the folk opera tradition. Sutherland’s book of fairy tales and folklore of Ghana, The Voice in the Forest, was published in 1983.