Preview: Certain Blacks Presents Black Athena Festival
Black Athena Festival | 13-21 March & 17-18 April 2026 | Rich Mix & The Place
The brand-new Black Athena Festival lands across Rich Mix and The Place this spring, asking big questions through dance, live art, sound and the body.
Named after Martin Bernal’s groundbreaking and still widely debated book, which challenged Eurocentric histories by proposing that ancient Egypt — not Greece — was the birthplace of civilisation, Black Athena Festival takes that intellectual provocation as its foundation. The result is a programme rooted in questions about whose histories we tell, whose bodies carry those stories, and what it means to recognise difference in contemporary Britain.
Taking place at Rich Mix in Shoreditch and The Place in Bloomsbury, the programme runs from mid-March through April, bringing together seven events spanning workshops, contemporary dance, sound art, live-art, physical theatre and immersive performance. Certain Blacks — whose Ensemble Festival we featured last year — bring their usual commitment to rigorous, artist-led work, with a lineup that feels both timely and carefully considered.
The programme opens at Rich Mix on 13 March with two dub-centred events: The Art of Dub, a workshop exploring the craft and culture of the form, and The Science of Dub, an immersive performance tracing the dub and bass tradition. The following evening, 14 March, choreographer Dam Van Huynh and vocalist Elaine Mitchener present Graffiti Bodies XV, inspired by Basquiat’s La Hara (1981), the work layers movement, sound art, poetry and sculpture to address police brutality against marginalised urban communities.
On 18 March, Livia Kojo Alour presents STÙRM, a live-art concert exploring climate anxiety and collective healing. Then, on 20 March, Waterside by Kininso Creative brings questions of community, place and belonging to the stage. The Rich Mix programme closes on 21 March with Rising Mirrors, a co-commission by Kimpavita and Certain Blacks which celebrate the strength and activism of Congolese women and all women fighting for visibility, justice and transformation.
The festival closes at The Place in Bloomsbury on 17 and 18 April with RONiN by Japanese choreographer Yukiko Masui. Taking the figure of the masterless samurai as its starting point, the work combines dance, swordplay, and digital projections to tell a story of honour, resilience and survival in a male-dominated world.
This content is brought to you via a paid partnership between To Do List and Certain Blacks.
I am Joint Editor at To Do List. I like: nice pubs, film marathons, not doing real marathons, bad comedy, plays/musicals with shorter second halves, and the Oxford comma.
