The ONCA 2017 Green Curtain Award went to the show ‘The Privileged’ by Jamal Harewood

About the Winner

The Privileged by Jamal Harewood: A participatory experience which progresses as the audience responds to instructions issued by an absent authority. The premise is that we have come to petting zoo to have a close-up encounter with an apex predator: a polar bear. The instructions, which tell the audience how to treat the bear, become increasingly problematic and we soon realise that it’s our own reactions that are the story. The Privileged forces audiences to confront serious questions including how we respond to authority, how we make decisions, and when entertainment becomes exploitation. It confronts head-on issues of othering, control, and the violence of domestication.

We are honoured to offer the first ONCA Green Curtain award to Jamal Harewood. We love The Privileged and thought it was brilliant to use the device of a displaced, captive polar bear – icon of human-caused climate change and disappearing wilderness – to bring to life very human problems that are hard to look at – racism, colonialism and the brutality humans inflict on each other, especially, and painfully, through inherited power structures and inequalities that brutalise black and brown people here, and all around the world.

– Persephone Pearl, ONCA co-director 

ABOUT THE GREEN CURTAIN AWARD

The ONCA Green Curtain Award goes to the Brighton Fringe project that best manifests ONCA’s mission of supporting artists and audiences to engage with environmental and social challenges.