The award-winning Birmingham Black Repertory Theatre Collective is a Black-queer led grassroots non-profit organization building power and capacity for marginalized artists through sustaining a culture of Black theatre in the South.
.Our core strategies include: advocacy for racial justice, gender justice, and disability justice in the arts; intergenerational collaboration; culturally empowering artistic development; and holistic community-engaged performance art. At BBRTC, we envision a future where artists living within the margins of the margins can thrive, are celebrated, and have access to creative capital* in order to work toward a world of communal liberation.
Through our “for us by us' leadership model we prioritize the people most impacted by systemic violence centering Black QTGNC people, Black women, Black disabled people, Black youth, and Black senior citizens in our process, practices and organizational leadership. BBRTC utilizes cultural movement organizing strategies (mutual aid support, capacity building, leadership development, and cultural production) to not only amplify those voices, but also provide them opportunities to bridge generations of community together through.
1. Intergenerational Collaborative Art-Making: Social connectedness through storytelling is how we keep our recipes. We believe that by bridging together generations of Black artists with methodologies that are based in a trauma informed-intersectional approach through consensus based practices we can move closer towards liberation as a community.
2. Disrupting the Status Quo: BBRTC has a revolutionary foundation activated by a local, regional, & national cry in cultural movement to deconstruct systems of oppression in the arts industry by focusing on telling stories by and for the most impacted artists living within the margins of the margins.
3. Decolonizing Theatre: BBRTC's organizational DNA includes framework from social justice movements, wholistic wellness, and national artistic movements in effort to decolonize our own practices. Continuing the work of the Black Arts Movement, springing from the Civil Rights Movement.
4. Educating the Next Generation of Black Southern Theatre Makers: BBRTC programs to shift the narrative of the perceived void of Black theatre practitioners. BBRTC provides financial resources, job opportunities, leadership development, artistic development, and professional experience to Black artists that are often gate-kept by financial capacity, locality, and white supremacy.
BBRTC is currently supported, funded, and sponsored by the following organizations & individuals:
A special thanks to our individual donors/patrons: Andrew Duxbury, Jamil Jude, Grace Edgar, Marva Douglas, Verniss McFarland, The Bell Family, Tonya Pinkins, and Stephanie Yates.
