Windrush Secret / The Black Dancer Hitler Could Not Silence

First Act: Windrush Secret

The Windrush Secret, set in 2018, is about a young white far-right racist party leader, a black Caribbean diplomat and a white Oxford educated Home Office government official who are giving speeches on the same day, at different times, in separate locations about a million people who migrated from the Caribbean to Britain between 1948 and 1973 (The Windrush Generation), and the British political scandal which began in 2018. 

One of them has a dark secret that he struggles to come to terms with during his fiery speech – it will change his life forever!
 

‘Pulling no punches in its portrayal of racist rage and proselytising’ The Guardian

Second Act: The Black Dance Hitler Could Not Silence

This 30-minute solo play follows Noah, a black performer receiving the Goethe Medal for Arts and Science at the Goethe Institute in Berlin, as he uses the stage to honour Hilarius “Lari” Gilges, a black German dancer and agitator-propaganda performer whose brilliance and political activism were extinguished by Nazi violence in 1933. Moving through vivid biographical detail, eyewitness recollections, and historical context, Noah’s acceptance speech traces Gilges’s rise from a dance- driven Düsseldorf childhood to his electrifying work in Weimar-era agit-prop troupes, where his body became both a vehicle for dance and an act of defiance. As the Nazi regime tightens its hold, Noah chronicles Lari’s refusal to disappear, his targeted murder, and the decades of silence that followed. But towards the end of his speech Noah decides not to accept the Medal until Lari’s legacy is recognised. By speaking Lari’s name on a ceremonial stage he never lived to stand upon, Noah transforms the non-acceptance of the Goethe Medal into an act of witness, promising to carry forward the dancer’s resistance, and unfinished legacy.