Liverpool’s BlackFest are to showcase their Black Lives Matter Soundscape LIVE for the very first time as part of the city’s Black History Month celebrations.
Earlier this year, the annual Black-led festival which platforms, develops and celebrates Black artists and communities across art forms, joined forces with a variety of creative voices from Liverpool and across the world to put together a creative response in solidarity with the BLM movement.
Liverpool, with the oldest continuous black community in Europe, has a vibrant heritage, enriched by successive waves of immigration. Black History Month this year will shine a light on the city’s history but, like the Liver Bird, it looks out across the Atlantic for international connections.
The full soundscape compilation from BlackFest is an anti-racist piece, featuring a commissioned collection of poems, and spoken word celebration pieces, all examining what it means to be Black and on Blackness.
Artistic Director, Jubeda Khatun said,
“The rise of the Black Lives Matter campaign during the ongoing pandemic has created greater awareness of the injustices of prejudice and racism across the globe, and a sense of solidarity has become more prominent, but the work is not over. BlackFest will not stop working towards support and equity for Black creatives and the communities we engage with.”
“At BlackFest we wanted to create a meaningful, creative response to the Black Lives Matter movement. We decided to use the strength of our varied creative community of artists, to curate an anti-racist soundscape that embodies the ebb and flow of collective personal responses. Through the medium of poetry and spoken word pieces the sense pain and of resilience are given expression through voices of the artists that we have engaged who are from Black and other backgrounds but who are active in campaigning for racial equality and restorative justice.”
As part of the month’s packed line-up of events, BlackFest will also be sharing Hear Me Now, a song that was created, written, produced by their 2019 festival cohort of young actors, to challenge institutional racism, toxic masculinity, hegemony, gentrification and racism. Watch the official video here.
The live broadcast of the soundscape will be FREE to watch online on BlackFest’s Facebook Page, but the festival team are asking for donations to help them produce and create more events and commissions in the future, in order to celebrate and empower Black artists and artists of colour across the North West.
