Yahoo Finance BlackStage UK: how a new documentary series reveals the truth about being a black creative in the UK
Gabrielle Brooks is the creator of BlackStage UK, a new online documentary series about the experience of black creatives in the UK
( )“We’re at a crossroads – and either we can continue on this road of superficial change, or we can move towards something more meaningful.” This is how actor Gabrielle Brooks describes the choice facing the arts world, nearly a year after George Floyd’s death provoked worldwide protests and calls for change within the industry. As the creator of BlackStage UK, a new online documentary series that candidly reveals the experiences of black creatives in the UK, she wants to make sure that the conversation continues beyond 2020.
The first episode of the series launches online tomorrow and is completely free to watch. It’s vital viewing. Interviewees recount being confused for another black person, people touching their hair, being asked where they’re from, and being told they are too intimidating. Brooks spoke to 30 black creatives across the industry, from actors to directors to writers, intending BlackStage UK to be both a resource for anti-racist learning and a cathartic way for the black arts community to safely share their experiences. She hopes too that, for the latter, it can be a useful reference point to help explain why certain behaviours are inappropriate if needed.
The idea had been in Brooks’s mind for a while, because, “I’d just gotten to the point where I was done. I was done with my mum, my friends, my black colleagues, all being seen as less human and our experience not being heard,” she says. But it was Floyd’s death on May 25 that left her ”changed, forever.”
“The conversations I was having behind closed doors with my black friends and colleagues suddenly became really urgent, because the arts and entertainment industry immediately started responding to his murder with posts and vague statements about standing with us as a community and condemning racism, and not realising the hypocrisy in their statements and how complicit they had always been,” says Brooks.
“I really just wanted to create a space where we could put faces to these experiences, so that people could begin to empathise, and understand that they’re real and it would take more than initiatives. But also for us, as a black community, to start to heal and get our stories out there.”
The first episode explores microaggressions – subtle, sometimes indirect moments of racism – and the examples are endless, from being told by a director not to perform a role “too street”, to repeatedly forgetting how to pronounce someone’s name. One interviewee, stage manager Constance Oak, describes the cumulative effect as like trying to stem the bleeding from a series of hundreds of small cuts.
Although Brooks never appears on camera herself, she did all of the interviews - an experience that was both powerful and difficult. “I was reliving trauma through these conversations, so I had to take care of myself.” Her previous roles include Viola in Twelfth Night at the Young Vic, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie and forthcoming Netflix series Shadow and Bone, and she focused specifically on her own industry for a reason. The arts, she says, “should be a reflection of life and the world, that poses questions and provokes thought. If the people in charge of the arts are still being led by their unconscious bias, then that provoking thought will only lead to more bias and racism.”
One interviewee is actor Omari Douglas, who recently starred in Channel 4’s hugely successful It’s A Sin. For him, the project was an opportunity to speak about his experiences in a more personal way. “When we’re restricted to things like forums, sometimes there’s a pressure for things to feel very formal, and I think the honesty and transparency of this is really important for other people to see, to understand the feeling and the raw truth behind everything.
“What the industry is very quick to do is quantify these feelings and experiences into stats and data and I think when we get locked into that, that’s when we get fooled. People can fall into the trap of playing lip service to things,” he says. And despite public pressure, the stats remain disappointing anyway, he adds. A report by the Creative Diversity Network released in January revealed that representation in British TV had actually gone backwards.
Douglas has repeatedly made the point in interviews about his It’s A Sin character Roscoe that black queer characters are only viewed as transgressive because of a lack of visibility. “I’ve been wanting to hammer home that these people existed for generations and generations and generations. There’s no novelty, there’s nothing new about this,” he says. “Erasure of those experiences across all arts and media and storytelling means because now there’s this gradual emergence, people suddenly think it’s new. It’s not. And I guess that’s down to how you document history, as well. I’m not sure we’d be having the same conversation with my white counterpart.”
An important step is to allow black creatives to take ownership of their own stories – the more that this happens, the less one group is regarded as a monolith. Similarly, there’s a need to overcome the misconception that one black person’s success means all of the industry’s representation problems are over. “We did see brilliant black-led stories last year like I May Destroy You. People see that and go, ‘oh OK, everything’s fine now’. As amazing and trailblazing and incredible as Michaela Coel is, we can’t rely on her as the sole source of all things that are non-white in the industry,” says Douglas.
Also featured in the series is Natalie Rose, Head of Features at Naked Television, and an executive producer on shows like BBC Three’s The Rap Game. Last year she was working as a commissioning editor for UKTV, where she brought shows like Big Zuu’s Big Eats to our screens.
“Big Zuu was a 24-year-old grime rapper who had never made a show or been on television before in this way,” she says. “I just feel that demonstrates the difference that black commissioners can actually make when it comes to taste, authenticity, cultural sensibility and allowing our community to be properly represented on screen in all of its rich glory.”
Rose believes BlackStage UK will illuminate the issue in a way that will genuinely move things forward. “If we are going to nudge the dial and really affect change, we need to understand what the picture is, what that looks like now and where we want to be. That doesn’t happen without conversation or discourse or dialogue, or without people getting uncomfortable,” she says.
“You have to think: how do you really affect change? If the problem is ignorance – not knowing or understanding – as well as things like unconscious bias, then BlackStage is one of the most important ways to peel back that layer and get people to understand and start a very important conversation that shouldn’t just feel as though it ended in 2020.”
She wants the series to be watched by anyone in a position of influence, and drives home the point that making change happen is about widening off-screen opportunities too. “It’s much easier to address on-screen diversity and put more black people on television – but who’s behind the camera, who’s in the development team, who’s commissioning them, who’s shooting or editing them? Every single element of those things has a subjectivity to it.”
If commissioners feel like they are always getting similar ideas, it’s a sign that the pool of talent they’re drawing from needs to broader. “The more we encourage black talent to television and the stage, they will feel like they are trusted and heard and seen,” Rose says.
This is the first time a dialogue about black experiences and allyship in the arts has really opened up, and Brooks doesn’t want that to go to waste. But she’s clear this isn’t just about institutions - it’s up to individuals too. “They have their own work to do. Because what we have to remember is now there’s an intersection between capitalism and activism – activism is marketable. And when something becomes marketable it loses its message and becomes surface. But if you continue to do the work as an individual in power, then that can’t happen.”
“That’s why I wanted people to remember why they’re doing things, why they’re talking and why they’re being allies.”
The first episode of BlackStage UK launches online tomorrow. Visit blackstageuk.com for more information
