Tanya Blake is the Sports and Enrichment Coordinator at New City College’s Tower Hamlets campus. She organised one of our grantees, Purple Moon Drama, to bring its play Essentially Black to the college for students aged 16-18 as part of the college’s Black History Month programme. 

Essentially Black is a play examining the Black and mixed race experience at UK’s elite universities and is set against the backdrop of the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movement at Oxford University in 2016, written by Purple Moon youth board member Naomi Denny.

In 2022, we supported Purple Moon Drama’s Essentially Black project through our Connecting People and Places Fund’s Collaborative Commissions 2022, co-funded by the City of London Corporation. 

Here Tanya talks about the impact the play and accompanying workshop made on the college students, why having theatre that represents the Black/BPOC experience is needed for young people and educators in the school setting and why the arts is crucial in young people’s lives. 

Purple Moon Drama CIC is a youth arts organisation with a special focus on creating access into the creative industry for young people from traditionally marginalised backgrounds

The Collaborative Commissions was part of our Foundations Programme, our four-year partnership with the City of London Corporation. 

These commissions aimed to unlock further understanding of how creativity can be used to deliver arts, education, and employment programming that provides creative learning opportunities, employment and leadership roles, training and fusion skills development. 

Photo & video: Chris Baker

Part 1

Transcript: Good afternoon. My name is Tanya Blake. I’m the sports and enrichment coordinator at New City College. I work at Tower Hamlets campus, so we brought in Purple Moon for Black History Month. They had an amazing play. It was called ‘Essentially Black’, so they came in twice this year and hopefully it’s the beginning of a great relationship with them.

For Black History Month, it’s relevant, even though we’re trying to get away from just doing black things during Black History Month, it’s relevant all the time. But we brought them in because it was something different. And these conversations that we need to have, and we just thought it would be perfect for our students. And the play was about, erm, the students at Oxford University wanting to bring down the statue of Cecil Rhodes.

Part 2

Transcript: Yeah, it’s super important. Some of our other sites have performing arts centres. We don’t unfortunately. So just to say that a drama is coming, it’s a performance. Everyone’s just excited about that because it’s something completely different.

And it was young actors, it was a diverse cast. The students could relate to them and especially with our community, a lot of students feel quite pressured to go into finance and law and those sort of avenues. So it inspires them to see that this is another option.

Yeah, I do, because it is raising awareness about a really important subject because they’re doing it in a creative way. So it’s not just a PowerPoint presentation, it’s not just a discussion we’re seeing like a real situation being played out, but through a play. And so for a lot of people who can’t articulate what they’re going through, the play spoke to them and then other students said that they learned a lot like they had no idea of about kind of racial issues and how you should say things and how you shouldn’t.

So that makes an impact, which impacts everyone on a wider level. And then some students felt very empowered to like, they wanted to speak at the end. They wanted to give a statement. So it all has a very positive knock-on effect.

Part 3

Transcript: Yeah, and we’ve done work with BlackLivesMatter this year, and I think some students are very forthcoming with information. Some students are still very reluctant. They don’t know if they’re even allowed to have these conversations. So the play just kind of opened that door for a lot of people and again, it spoke for a lot of people.

So it wasn’t just students sitting, watching a performance, afterwards they had a workshop, which was very interactive and students got to give a lot of feedback and to tell about. They got to have the opportunity to say how they would address certain issues or how they could have done things differently.

So yeah, students definitely were given a voice through this performance.

Part 4

Transcript: Of course, it wasn’t just the students that benefited, it was the staff who were watching as well that benefited. So personally. I think that performance should be for all of our staff because many of us are trying to have these conversations and there’s only so much you can say and so much you can do.

So that would that would help so many people just to understand and again, raise awareness and start important conversations.

Part 5

Transcript: I think art and creativity are everything to all people.

So just earlier I was talking to a young student who was going through very, very serious problems, of which I cannot talk about obviously. And I said to them, I said, but, you know, you’re still a person of worth. You’ve still got goals. What is it you want to do? And she said, I want to be an artist and her face just lit up.

And I said, Well, does art help you do drawings and stuff? And she said, yes. And so she’s using art to help her cope with life and to express herself, and that’s her goal.

And in art, you can be different. You can all the things, negative things people say about you can be positive when it comes to creativity because you’ve got so much to draw on.

So she said, Oh, they keep telling me I’m sensitive. And I said, But being sensitive is great. Being sensitive is what’s helping you be creative.

To learn more about Purple Moon Drama and its project, check out the Essentially Black project page on our website. 

To learn more about the Westfield East Bank Creative Futures Fund, see our Grant Programme page.