Notes to Belonging: An Adaptation

In this timely and poignant performance, critically acclaimed director, playwright and scholar Jaye Austin Williams introduces a live stage adaptation of Toronto-based poet Dionne Brand’s renowned non-fiction book, “A Map to the Door of No Return” published in 2001. Adapted and directed by Austin Williams with excerpts from Brand’s book, this program is staged as a “concert recitation:” an intimate performance and dramatized reading by three local actors.

Held within 2024 Biennial artist Charles Campbell’s installation, How many colours has the sea, the program will highlight overlapping themes Campbell’s work and Brand’s groundbreaking book, which both anchor the ocean and sea as sites of contemplation on Black being, ancestral memory, rupture, and mourning. While this adaptation contains excerpts from Brand’s book, it is not meant as a substitute and is instead offered as a visceral “tasting” by way of reframing passages from the book in a theatrical space, allowing for new and different interpretations. This performance explores the legacy that “A Map to the Door of No Return” created in articulating Black contemporary life in Canada, but also an incredible expansion and reimagining of Brand’s breathtaking and ruminative literary work through visual and performance art.

Note: This program has a limited capacity. Register via Eventbrite.

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Notes to Belonging: An Adaptation is curated by Sarah Edo, Programs Curatorial Fellow and is presented in partnership with the National Gallery of Canada and The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. The 2024 Toronto Biennial of Art Curatorial Fellowship Program is made possible by the generous support of TD Bank Group, through the TD Ready Commitment.

Image credit: Poster designed by ayo tsalithaba.

The Power Plant

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October 12

7:00pm – 8:00pm

This venue is wheelchair accessible.

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This program is free, but registration is required in order to attend.

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Artist Bio

Jaye Austin Williams

Jaye Austin Williams is a critically acclaimed director, playwright and actor. She is also a scholar who specializes in the analysis of drama, cinema and performance theories through critical Black study. Her work focuses on the structural and global implications of antiblackness, and how their myriad, violent performances – both subtle and overt – emanate from the collective unconscious within global modernity.

Her dramatic adaptations create a torsion between the gazing audience’s desire for redemption of blackness into the universal, and the confrontation with redemption’s foreclosure by the collective unconscious (and increasingly, consciously articulated interests) and its violent bearing upon black existence, regardless of economic class, cultural identity, etc.). Dr. Williams is currently Associate Professor and Chair of the Dept. of Critical Black Studies at Bucknell University. She will join the faculty in the new Dept. of Black Study at the University of California, Riverside in Fall 2025.

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