Dr Sylvan Baker Features on the BBC'S Small Axe: The Podcast
Dr Sylvan Baker, Central’s Lecturer in Community Performance Applied Theatre, has featured on the BBC Sounds series ‘Small Axe: The Podcast’.
Steve McQueen’s ‘Small Axe’ films show how Black Britons have survived and challenged racism in the UK – be that on the dance floor at a Blues party, round the kitchen table at a pan African Saturday school of in the town halls of political activists. Through the accompanying podcast series, the themes and dreams of the films serve as a jump off point to tell the everyday stories of Black Britons through the generations and to shine a light on those who are taking on racism in Britain and imagining a better future.
As shown in the film ‘Alex Wheatle’, the experiences of Black children in the care system are under-explored and often traumatic.
In the fifth episode of Small Axe: The Podcast, these themes are explored in more depth as Dr Baker meets and talks with the BBC broadcaster Ashley John-Baptiste. In a frank and personal conversation about their shared – and differing – experiences growing up in care, they discuss the erasure of cultural heritage, the lasting trauma of repeated rejection, and the work that is being done to help give care-experienced children and young people a platform to speak about their lives.
Ashley John-Baptiste is a young BBC broadcast journalist and presenter whose personal story is one of overcoming tremendous adversity. Growing up in South London, he was taken in to care at the age of four and grew up being shuttled between foster families and children’s homes, moving primary schools three times. A bright student, he attended a comprehensive school which had three times the number of children from derived backgrounds than the national average. There, with the help of his MP, he battled to win a place at Cambridge where he went on to mentor other students who grew up in care. He is also an active champion for a change in the UK’s fostering laws.
Dr Sylvan Baker is an artist and academic, a practitioner and researcher working across the fields of applied theatre, socially engaged arts and social justice for the past 30 years. At Central, he lectures across the School’s undergraduate and postgraduate applied theatre courses. Beyond Central, his practice has taken place across the UK and globally in sites in Brazil, and the USA, in a diverse range of contexts and communities and has a specific interest in international interventions in site of conflict and transitional justice.
Dr Baker also founded, and is a co-investigator for, The Verbatim formula, a collaborative participatory arts project that has developed verbatim theatre techniques to share the voices of care-experienced young people, care leavers and adults responsible for their care and education.
The Verbatim Formula works with young people as co-researchers, as they are experts in their own life experience and in the systems they deal with. Through using verbatim performances of their testimonies, it raises awareness and provokes change to working practices in care and education.
You can listen to this and other Small Axe: The Podcast episodes at BBC Sounds. at BBC Sounds.
