Tako Taal. After Kinte

About

After Kinte is a newly commissioned performance by Glasgow-based artist Tako Taal. Taking place on five occasions throughout the festival, the work comprises a theatrical staging of a script by Tako for three performers.

The performance continues Tako’s interest in the slippage between individual identity and wider cultural histories. After Kinte builds on research into the format of the actors’ roundtable, synonymous with the US-based film industry magazine The Hollywood Reporter. At these roundtables, celebrated actors often reflect on the experience and art of inhabiting a character, and the impact this has on their everyday lives.

After Kinte’s title references the fictional character, Kunta Kinte, at the centre of Alex Haley’s bestselling novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family, 1976. Kinte is based on an ancestor of Haley’s who was enslaved in The Gambia throughout the 18th century and taken to North America. In 1977 Roots was serialised for television and became the most watched TV mini-series. The global success of Roots has led to Kinte’s Gambian birthplace becoming a site of pilgrimage, a condition that Tako has previously explored in her work and circulates through the character of Kunta Kinte as a cultural spectacle. After Kinte questions the various ways that histories and memory may resurface in the present day, and how characterisation can become a place of genesis or departure.