About

Directed by d’bi.young anitafrika

Jah, a former student radical, is speeding through the universe inside a dub song. As they travel, a blue macaw urges them to relive a demonstration during which a colonial monument was toppled. The Earthly consequences were dire, but ancestors intervened to offer Jah an eternal reward.

DIRECTOR'S NOTE:

Within the Afrofuturist kaleidoscopic rainforest of a dub tune we meet Jah—a student radical—travelling inside an everlasting song. A question lingers on the rhythm: Do I return—to the incomplete, to rage, to revolution—or do I rub-a-dub into eternity?

Writer Kaie Kellough took inspiration from the track Every Dub Shall Scrub by Scientist, a Babalawo of dub music who trained under the genre’s founder, King Tubby. Dub embodies a cultural revolution in Jamaica, which reverberated throughout the world, transforming the musical recording process via sonic fragmentation and radical technological experimentation in studio. This new Black soundscape conjured living musical universes through community sound systems, which transported African descendants beyond neocolonialism to Black utopias soaked in the sweat of dancehall and decolonization.

It is in one of these universes that we encounter Jah, who invites us to query our own relationship to coloniality, political action and personal accountability. Jah sings a dub reinterpretation of the original Philippians 2:10-11 Bible verse — “Every knee shall bow / And every tongue confess / On the day / When Jah shall come” — as a warning, an incantation, an invocation and a proclamation. Jah or Jah Jah is the name of God in Rastafari — the anti-colonial socio-religious movement that emerged in Jamaica in the late 1930s. The story’s central character, Jah, journeys toward their Godself, being the very transformation that they seek.

In the process of directing the piece, certain questions arose: How do we move toward our Godself as agents of change in the current global political climate? How can we transform rage, make revolution, and achieve completeness? How will we embody ancient African rhythms transmuted across time — becoming dub — as a space of peace?

Jah in the Ever-Expanding Song does not offer answers; instead it reminds us that we — like Jah, like dub — can choose to be transcendent, transformational and transgressive in the face of ongoing neo-colonial atrocities.

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Jah in the Ever-Expanding Song was a product of Obsidian Theatre’s 21 Black Futures project in which 21 playwrights, 21 directors and 21 actors responded to the question what is the future of Blackness?

Set & Costume Design: Rachel Forbes, Lighting Design: Shawn Henry: Cinematography, Keenan Lynch