B4 Youth Theatre Stages ‘200 Years of Returns’ on Providence Island

B4 Youth Theatre in collaboration with Colonial Williamsburg will stage the play, “200 Years of Returns”, at 6pm, December 18, on Providence Island

By Tamozia Graves and Chanani Ricks

The holidays are here, and schools are closing for the Christmas break. And in spite of all the political maneuverings on the horizon, this is still Liberia’s bicentennial! So, for those who care to enrich their cognitive faculties concerning Liberia’s true potential, put those politicians to one side and book the entire afternoon of Sunday, December 18, on your calendar. 

Here’s why.

You’ve probably heard of B4 Youth Theatre, a group of young talented Liberian actors who have made a name for themselves acting alongside some of the world’s leading thespian talents. They’ve performed some of the greats, such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Murder in the Cassave Patch (by Bai T. Moore). This Sunday, December 18 at 6pm, in collaboration with the world famous Colonial Williamsburg Theatre Department they will stage a theatrical performance, titled, “200 Years of Returns” on Providence Island, Monrovia, Liberia. 

Like we said, book the entire afternoon because, In collaboration with Year of the Diaspora, a Providence Tour will be conducted on the same day at 3pm at Providence Baptist Church, with the reading of the 1847 Proclamation and the signing of the Declaration of Independence! This will be followed by a trip to the JJ Roberts Monument, then the National Museum, culminating with the B4YT/Colonial Williamsburg’s amazing play “200 Years of Returns” at 6pm on Providence Island. Contact details below.  

2022 marks 200 years since the first Black Americans settled in Liberia through the American Colonization Society, a project inspired by Black merchant Paul Cuffee’s repatriation journey to Sierra Leone in 1815 and catalyzed by New Jersey’s Robert Finley in 1822 that would result in what is arguably the earliest historical site of Black American liberation. 

“200 Years of Returns” is a collaboration between Burning Barriers Building Bridges (more commonly known as B4 Youth Theatre in Liberia) and the Museum Theatre Department of Colonial Williamsburg (CW) in Virginia, United States. This interactive performance juxtaposes past and present “returns” to Liberia since 1822 when Black American settlers first arrived encountering various African ethnic groups. 

“Instead of a re-enactment, which aims to recreate an often one-sided history with little reckoning with historical trauma, truth, consequences or responsibility, we deeply engage and present an interpretation of historical documents in a way that considers multiple perspectives and viewpoints,” says B4 Youth Theatre Founder and Executive Director, Dr. Jasmine Blanks Jones. According to her, Liberia’s founding recognized “the making of the African diaspora as a continuous process; the returns of African people to and from the continent afford new ideas of what it means to be part of a global African community.” 

Therefore, the performance draws on research from historical accounts from within the American Colonization Society, Maryland Colonization Society, and other relevant archives and collections of letters written by early settlers to their former slaveholders in America. Anxious about the place that free Black people occupied in American society where they were denied the rights of citizenship, members of these organizations sought to colonize them in West Africa. 200 Years of Returns centers on narratives about free and enslaved Black people in the DMV (Washington DC, Maryland, Virginia region) in the decades leading up to 1822 and what became the first “Back to Africa” movement before and during the Revolutionary War. 

Finally, it unsettles myths regarding early interactions between the repatriates and those who met them on the land now called Liberia as historicized by Dr. C. Patrick Burrowes, enlivening new possibilities for understanding African abolition and transnational Black solidarity. Though the performance will be a historical account connecting the modern-day United States and Liberia, the performance focuses on the contemporary sociocultural and political issues arising from multiple perspectives of this early encounter against subsequent returns to Liberia. 

Burning Barriers, Building Bridges (B4) Youth Theatre is a performance company founded in 2010 in Liberia, West Africa and dedicated to empowering youth to become educated citizens through the arts. Performances span street theatre across the country of Liberia to staged performances at Monrovia City Hall and RLJ Resort where they performed both Hamlet with Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre of London, UK, and Liberia’s own Murder in the Cassava Patch by Bai T. Moore. These performances drew audiences in the hundreds and had an online reach of nearly 10,000 live viewers.  

The “200 Years of Returns” project is the first time the B4YT Liberia team will perform in the United States. B4’s annual Vacation School for the Arts program has trained hundreds of youth across Montserrado, Bong, Grand Bassa, Margibi, and Nimba counties to use music, dance, and drama as tools to share information, spark important discussions, and learn about community needs on contemporary issues such as gender and education, lack of employment, and the rights and responsibilities of citizens. Their work gained global attention during the Ebola epidemic where, as the first active awareness campaign in Liberia in coordination with UNICEF, youth actors reached 300,000 people through live drama and hosted UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Orlando Bloom.

Colonial Williamsburg is the world’s largest outdoor living history museum with exhibitions including artisans of trades common in the 18th century practiced in period clothing, exhibition sites of original and reconstructed 18th Century buildings, and theatrical presentations exploring themes relevant to modern audiences. 

This collaboration focuses on the Museum Theatre Department in the Education, Research, and Historical Interpretation (ERHI) Division at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Primary contact and collaborator is The Artistic Director of museum theater, Katrinah Lewis, who works with actor interpreters who portray thoroughly researched 18th century people of the past and devise theatrical programming to illuminate aspects of their lives and culture. 

These programs include first-person interpretations that portray characters such as the US founding fathers and also devise contemporary theater to portray the stories of those who are less often told. In 1926, the Reverend Dr. William Archer Rutherfoord Goodwin, with the financial backing of John D. Rockefeller Jr., began to restore Williamsburg to its original colonial state, starting with the purchase of the historic Ludwell-Paradise House. Today, Colonial Williamsburg’s Historic Area houses restored and historically preserved buildings, 88 of which are originals, upholding our educational mission, “That the future may learn from the past” through immersive, authentic 18th-century experiences and programming for our guests. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation is a private, not-for-profit 501(c)3 educational institution. 

For more information, please call 0886407932 or 0779372972.