Travis Alabanza on Keeping London’s Theatre Scene Alive

This article is taken from the Spring/Summer 2023 issue of AnOther Magazine:

“I gave one of my first performances at [east London’s] Cocoa Butter Club. I used to write poems and put them over beats and take my clothes off – it was bad but people loved it. There’s something beautiful about letting anyone onto the stage to figure it out up there. We talk about how theatre and performance should be accessible to everyone but they’re enshrined by standards of education. The kind of cabaret that is performed at the Cocoa Butter Club opens the doors. I wanted to honour that, so I put Sadie Sinner in my Royal Court show, Sound of the Underground. She changed the ecosystem in performance. Before Cocoa Butter I was often the only person of colour on a line-up. For a long time, it was my only constant gig and it made me braver. Sound of the Underground shows how many artists train in nightlife – how if nightlife goes, theatre and other forms of culture go.”

A playwright, performer and author, Bristol-born Travis Alabanza made their Royal Court debut at the beginning of this year with Sound of the Underground. The play, their third, is a comedy about workers’ rights with some music thrown in – although Alabanza is adamant it’s not a musical. “You can’t put all those singers in a room and not have music,” they say of the cast: eight performers from London’s cabaret scene, including Sadie Sinner the Songbird, founder of the Cocoa Butter Club, a performance company for people of colour. Sound of the Underground is about how culture is subsumed by capitalism. Naturally so, since Alabanza has always questioned the status quo – not least with their recent refreshing “anti-memoir”, None of the Above.

Hair: John Allan using L’ORÉAL PROFESSIONNEL. Make-up: Machiko Yano. Photographic assistant: Guanhao Wang. Styling assistant: Cara Natalie Hayward

This story features in the Spring/Summer 2023 issue of AnOther Magazine, which is on sale now. Order here.