Provenance-Asε

Lily (Abena-Ansuah) Gyamfi-Kumanini & Gary Kirkham
(Waterloo Region, Ontario)

About The Show

This workshop reading of a play-in-progress unfolds across two timelines:

Present Day – The British Museum

A young Ghanaian academic confronts a museum curator in an effort to reclaim her ancestral sword and return it to Ghana. This moment of cultural reckoning opens a window into the histories that brought them both to this point.

1950s – Colonial Gold Coast (now Ghana)

Nana Abenaa Afima, a Queen Mother and descendant of the Ghana Empire, where women hold immense power and lead resistance against colonial forces, meets a British colonial soldier of Anglo-Indian descent, who passes as white and denies his Indian identity.

Spanning continents and centuries, Provenance-Asε explores the tangled legacies of colonialism, ancestry, and identity through the true and unexpected intersections of two families, asking the questions:

What do we inherit? What do we deny? And what must be reclaimed?

At its core, Provenance-Asε is about cultural memory, the politics of return, and the spiritual weight of ancestry. It is a story of resistance, reclamation, and the radical act of remembering.

Dates & Times

Saturday, September 27, 7pm
Sunday, September 28, 7pm » ASL

60 min

Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts – Blair Hall, Kitchener