Cover Image: Promotional image for Taonga Sendama in Black Girl in Five Acts. Photo: Mohammed ‘Ayo’ Busari

Black Girl in Five Acts – by Taonga Sendama
Presented by The Blue Room Theatre
Summer Nights, Fringe World Festival

Black Girl in Five Acts is a poetic and ritualistic performance that unfolds as both personal testimony and collective memory. Rather than following a traditional narrative arc, the work moves through emotional states, inviting the audience into a space where Black girlhood, identity, gender, and inheritance are felt through the body as much as they are articulated through language.

The stage design immediately establishes the tone. Books are scattered and stacked around the performer, including Dropbear by Evelyn Araluen and A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀. These are quiet but deliberate references to Black authors whose work engages with liberation, oppression, and survival. A milk crate draped with a keffiyeh sits nearby, grounding the space in layered histories of resistance. The room is dark, washed in blue light, accompanied by the sound of pouring water. Centre stage, the performer stands with a microphone stand, still and intentional.

Costuming reinforces this grounded presence. She wears a simple white dress made of natural fabric, her locs worn freely, with minimal makeup. There is no attempt to embellish or disguise the body. Instead, the body is presented as archive, memory, and source of knowledge.

The performance opens with an Acknowledgement of Country before moving into a poem that references genesis. From the beginning, the work interrogates religion as a colonial tool, tracing how “they said God said” becomes a mechanism for disconnection between body and mind, land and spirit. Lines such as “forgetting the language of the soul” and “the body remembers first” position the body as a site of truth. Nigerian wooden instruments punctuate the performance, often used to signal tension or transition, creating a rhythmic undercurrent that mirrors emotional shifts.

Throughout the piece, the performer names the daily violence of stereotype and assumption placed on Black women. Words like “strong,” “resilient,” “jezebel,” “mammy,” “boujee,” and “uppity” are recited not as abstractions, but as labels imposed and internalised. Moments of recognition and humour, such as “my first weave was purple” or learning one’s place on the roll because a teacher consistently mispronounced a name, sit alongside sharper reflections on microaggressions. Being asked “where are you really from,” or being called African American in so-called Australia, highlights how Blackness here is often understood through imported media rather than lived interaction.

The work also makes space for conversations around gender identity and dysphoria. “Gender is a performance and I am an understudy. The world is my stage and I was cast without audition” captures the tension of navigating gender within a body already heavily policed by race. “I can experiment with gender, but just not skin” lands with particular weight.

Food, hair, ancestry, and memory recur as anchors. Cassava, oxtail, fufu, sugar cane, hair relaxer, and references to mothers and ancestors frame identity as something inherited and negotiated. The line “what is blood if not a border?” reframes lineage as both grounding and constraint, while ancestors emerge as the first true sense of self.

By its conclusion, Black Girl in Five Acts becomes a meditation on choice and self-definition. “I wonder who I would become if I had a choice” lingers as a central question, before resolving into a quiet but powerful assertion: “joy does not ask for permission.” The performance suggests that the future becomes possible when one is no longer responding to imposed narratives, but instead defining themselves on their own terms.

As an audience member, I felt seen, liberated, and deeply connected to the work. So many moments felt intimately relatable, particularly in the way Black girlhood and identity were treated with tenderness rather than spectacle. It was not only emotionally resonant, but genuinely enjoyable to experience. This was a display of Black excellence in its truest form; unapologetic, nuanced, and expansive. There is something profoundly liberating about witnessing Black women take up space, especially within the arts. Representation matters, not as a trend or token, but as a necessity. Black Girl in Five Acts is a powerful reminder of that, and I would recommend everyone check it out if given the opportunity.

Black Girl in Five Acts ran as part of The Blue Room Theatre’s Summer Nights program as part of Fringe World Festival.