IDENTITY: A LIFETIME WORK IN PROGRESS Comes to Barons Court Theatre

Identity: a lifetime work in progress is a one-person ritual disguised as a play - a wild, defiant, tender ride through bloodlines, gender, and memory. Meet [redacted deadname], or what's left of him, as he stands face-to-face with ancestral hunger, a talking parrot, and a name that was never his to begin with. Through humour, raw poetry, and a cracked mirror of colonial history, this show asks: is a human being their history or their will? Expect soil. Expect fire. This isn't theatre - it's an invocation.

Tahiris Adames (she/they) is transfemme artist and a product of the Caribbean diaspora (Dominican Republic). She grew up in a small village in Italy, and her experiences as a person of colour in rural isolation have fed the radical vision in her work. She is a trained actor, a writer and multidisciplinary artist. Previous work includes 'Dirt Girl' and Good Girls Don't Go to Heaven for Brooklyn Rep Theatre and 'Body On Board' Banton Theatre.

Of the show 'Identity: A Work In Progress' she says 'Identity is the product of a journey of artistic growth and a thirst for social justice. On first encountering it, an audience member may think it's following a formula that is very pleasing to western sensibilities until it shows its true colours. It's a decolonial anticapitalistic ritual that aims to honour the memory of my indigenous cultural roots.'

Those indigenous cultural roots reach back to Taino culture.

What is Taino culture?

Taino is the name of the people that populated the whole of the greater Caribbean islands until mid 1800. They were the first to meet Cristopher Columbus before the plan to colonize and enslave the Caribbean began.

Even though Taino culture and language has been put under the test of the colonial hammer by erasing its symbols, practice, or humiliating and abusing the people who identify with it, it found a way to survive. To this day Taino exists through food, through vocabulary and through spiritual practice, land practice and cultural musical practice. About 90% of people with a Caribbean mother carry the same genetic material as the first inhabitants of the Caribbeans. That means that almost anybody from the Caribbean has a connection genetically to Taino culture. Identity: A lifetime Work In Progress is a rare opportunity to establish contact with a language and a culture that exists in the shadow of mainstream Caribbean culture. Taino culture is deeply underrepresented across Europe and the UK, but it's key to understanding the diversity and deep history of the pre and post-colonial Caribbean.