Let's chat about Dickens Fair and antiracism
Let's chat about Dickens Fair and antiracism
Support Black Victorians and LoAD's cast strike!
Black Victorians existed. But at the Great Dickens Christmas Fair in San Francisco, the production company doesn't really care. Living history and reenactment events need good inclusion, diversity, anti racism, and accessibility policies, but Red Barn Productions has really shoddy ones.
The Londoners of the African Diaspora (the Black cast and crew affinity group, LoAD for short) deserve our support in their push for change. After a year of negotiating and work done by LoAD, and dishonest communication from Red Barn, LoAD has issued a Statement of No Confidence in their leadership. If Red Barn does not create a supervisory board to run Dickens Fair and bring in HR and IDEA consultants by July 31st 2021, the cast and crew will support LoAD with a strike.
The context of what’s going on…
The Great Dickens Christmas Fair is a Victorian Christmas themed reenactment fair in the San Francisco Bay Area. It's a huge event and theatrical production in one, operated by Red Barn Productions, but the cast and crew are almost entirely unpaid volunteers.
Red Barn has a long history of abusing the cast and crew's love of Dickens Fair by failing to protect marginalized people in all sorts of ways— failing to address serious sexual harassment, racist and discriminatory portrait-accurate casting, restricting the roles trans and nonbinary actors can play, and an environment that's completely inaccessible to disabled performers.
BIPOC and other marginalized people are expected to justify first to Red Barn and then to any prejudiced customer who asks, why they're allowed to exist in a whitewashed portrayal of Victorian London. This whitewashing is historically inaccurate, and completely unfair to marginalized people of the past and present.
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