It’s very hard to represent slavery in a way that isn’t clichéd,” director Rufus Norris tells me. “You have images, moments you like, but as soon as you put them up, you think, ‘Oh God, that really is terribly naff’. But this isn’t a play about slavery, it’s about survival, in the broadest sense, and celebration.”

We’re in a chilly studio in west London watching a group of actors, dancers and musicians rehearse the Young Vic’s new epic, Feast, about the voyage of the Yoruba diaspora from southern Nigeria across the Atlantic and back again. Feast travels from 18th-century Nigeria, via Cuba and Brazil, to contemporary London. It has been created by playwrights from five countries where the Yoruba legacy has had great impact on life today: Yunior Garcia Aguilera (Cuba), Rotimi Babatunde (Nigeria), Marcos Barbosa (Brazil), Tanya Barfield (US) and Gbolahan Obisesan (UK).

In the opening section of the play, written by Babatunde, we meet three sisters (played by Noma Dumezweni, Michelle Asante and Naana Agyei-Ampadu) incarnating three Yoruba divinities, or Orisha. They are on their way to a feast when they are separated at a crossroads by Esu, the trickster god (played by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith). It takes them four centuries — and incredible adventures — to be reunited in modern-day London.

Part road-movie, part dance-theatre piece, Norris’s goal with Feast is to create seamless “transitions” between the five stories, using live music, projection and choreography. The cast need to become a chain gang, a congregation, even civil rights activists at a moment’s notice. This approach is in keeping with the Yoruba belief in reincarnation, that when you die, you enter the realm of the ancestors and still have influence on earth.

“The circle of life is present in everything,” says Norris, who is keen to have this “cosmology” close to the surface of the play. “Increasingly the work I’m drawn to is about rootlessness. Your home is your culture but your belief system is something you carry with you. And that, in a way, is what the piece is about.” The multi-award-winning theatre director of Festen, Vernon God Little, London Road and Dr Dee partly grew up in Nigeria when his civil servant father was posted to Africa. In 2009 he directed Death and the King’s Horseman at the National about the end of British colonialism in Nigeria, and has long been fascinated by the vast numbers of descendants of Yoruba slaves stolen away from Nigeria and now scattered around the globe.

In fact the enforced dispersal of Nigerian captives played a critical role in broadcasting the Yoruba faith (known as Ifa) across the Atlantic. Slaves would disguise their Orishas as Catholic saints in order to preserve their ancestral beliefs. Today many people in Latin American countries such as Cuba and Brazil pay homage to the same deities as the Yorubas.

Many of the cast and crew of Feast have Yoruba ancestry — including Cuban choreographer George Cespedes (who has worked with Carlos Acosta), British contemporary dancer Ira Mandela Siobhan (who performed in DV8’s Can We Talk About This?), Cuban-born dancer Alexander Varona (formerly a member of the Russell Maliphant company) and Jamiroquai percussionist Sola Akingbola, who is giving traditional Yoruba drumming an experimental sonic twist.

A Young Vic and Royal Court co-production, Feast is part of World Stages London, an unprecedented project where eight London producing venues collaborated on work to mark the Olympic year. But the play’s genesis came about in 2007, when Elyse Dodgson, head of the Royal Court international department, was running a playwriting workshop in Nigeria. At the leaving party on the beach, she mentioned their next workshop would be in Cuba, and the Nigerians became very excited because Cubans practise Santería, the Yoruban belief system that survived the Atlantic slave trade.

In Havana, the Cuban writers were equally curious about Nigerian diaspora culture. “Please bring us some soil from Nigeria!” they begged Dodgson. Later, working with writers in Brazil, she discovered that the Brazilian faith, Candomblé, also has roots in Yoruba culture and knew that the inter-connectedness of this robust African philosophy had the makings of a great play.

The five playwrights were invited to London to meet Norris and together they devised the narrative arc of Feast — which incorporates key moments in black history — then returned home to write. Brazilian writer Marcos Barbosa’s segment is set in Brazil in 1888, when the abolition of slaves became an imperial decree. US playwright Tanya Barfield brings the action to 1960s Nashville — the time of the sit-ins of the African-American Civil Rights Movement.

British playwright Obisesan (whose play Mad About the Boy, about problems facing black youth, sold out at the Young Vic this summer) is writing the London segment, which he says, references the Olympics but, “with the familiarity also has otherworldliness”.

Obisesan was born in Nigeria and is Yoruba but moved to south-east London aged nine. Feast has encouraged “a lot more investigation and introspection” about his identity. “There’s a sense of pride — and responsibility to be really careful about how things are treated.”

All the playwrights feel it has been life-changing. “I was particularly impressed with the way Rufus stitched what often appeared like disparate elements and thematic material into a cohesive whole — much like the syncretic nature of the Yoruban religion itself,” Barfield enthuses.

His choreographers serve Norris’s structure as well as adding colour and excitement to the theme. “My role is to help Rufus find solutions for spaces, for rhythms on the piece,” says Cespedes.

“With movement you can tell stories instantly,” agrees dancer Mandela Siobhan. “You can chop and change and jump in. Sometimes with dialogue you have to explain what you’re talking about.”

Norris is a big fan of contemporary dance — Javier Frutos did the choreography for his 2006 production of Cabaret — but this is different. He doesn’t want us to think, “Oh, they’re doing a dance number now”. I watch a sequence where Dumezweni (who won an Olivier for A Raisin in the Sun and played Captain Magambo in Doctor Who) clambers over a “roof” of bodies as she makes her 100-year journey across the globe. An upturned table becomes a church, a bed, a shelter. By day three of rehearsals, it’s raw but extraordinarily powerful.

Feast is ambitious all right. This versatile director describes it as throwing “darts” in the “dartboard of history”. The trick is to take the audience on a journey without giving them a history lesson. “It’s got to be resonant, rather than literal,” Norris says.

At this point, it looks to me as though it will succeed in wrapping spectacle and information in one lively show. And, given that many of us don’t even know that Yoruba is Southwark’s second language, hopefully it might also give us Londoners more idea about the life of a market trader or a Nigerian priest in Peckham.

http://www.standard.co.uk/arts/theatre/spirit-of-modern-london-8423330.html

Proud to be a Yoruba man.

Second to English? In England? wow!

Yah,Queen Elizabeth speaks it too

but unfortunately, the yoruba they speak is not the real one but hybridized and diluted yoruba language.

Interesting

I will rather hide my post myself.

Which kain mods dey here?