ASHEMBAGA (ASHE) JAAFARU
Ashembaga (Ashe) Jaafaru is an actor, performer, writer, and creative idea-maker. She is involved in theatre, film, and voiceover work in the Twin Cities + beyond. She creates art for liberation and continues to write imaginative stories. Film credits include Buttafly Precinct (Lady) and Keon (Patience) with Catalyst Arts, The Convert (Jekesai) with Frank Theatre, for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf (Lady in Brown) with KC Repertory Theatre & Penumbra Theatre, A Midsummer Summer Night’s Dream (Hermia) with Black Ensemble Players, School Girls; or the African Mean Girls Play (Paulina) with Jungle Theater.
JOY ON ME
Directed by Antonio Duke
A solo performance that will illustrate the challenges, triumphs, and JOY of being in your body and spirit while crippling mental health and outside dangers that assail you. This project will use theatrical body wisdom and African diasporic religious concepts to capture the emotions, feelings, and physicality of black queer womxn, femmes, and non-binary folx with liberation and healing. Yoruba, Ibibio traditional spirituality, religious uses divination, Oriṣas, rituals, offerings, sacrifices, dance and utterances — through these practices there is an honoring of Jaafaru’s family and lineage, mind and body, artistic creation, and making sense of the universe within multiple realities. Body wisdom is the fusion of yoga, reiki, dance, song, mediation and ancestral veneration through performance, in the hopes of invoking more information of the inner workings of the body + mind + spirit.