Opeyemi Oluwaseun Rewriting the Rules of Live Performance

If you’re interested in Opeyemi Oluwaseun Farimoyo’s latest work, you might want to leave your evening attire at home. Her productions aren’t set in opulent carpeted lobbies with red velvet curtains or tiered seating. Instead, you’ll likely find yourself pushing through the humid, bustling walkways of Soweto Market in Lusaka, Zambia, dodging cart pushers. Alternatively, you might be following a crowd of strangers past the Victorian glasshouses of Sheffield’s botanical gardens, drenched in the pouring British rain.

Opeyemi, a live event producer and creative director, crafts theatre from the very places and histories that mainstream stages often overlook. Through her production company, Black & White Craft, she has dedicated years to staging what she refers to as “soul-centric” live experiences across Nigeria, Zambia, and the UK. However, her approach goes beyond simply bringing art to a space; it’s about allowing the space to shape and influence the art itself.

“I work from a hyper-local, grassroots framework,” Opeyemi believes that treating the people who live in these environments not as passive subjects to be studied, but as active co-creators is essential.

Her career is characterised by her unwavering refusal to separate performance from her daily life. For The Marketplace Monologues, she defied conventional venues in Lusaka and instead staged women’s autobiographical stories directly within the market stalls where they worked. The cacophony of commerce, the aroma of fresh produce, and the footsteps of everyday shoppers were not mere distractions; they served as the backdrop and the script, compelling audiences to witness profoundly personal testimonies amidst the hustle and bustle of a working day.

She brought that same grit to Makoko, Africa’s largest floating slum. Instead of hosting a conventional, glamorous award ceremony in an upscale Lagos neighborhood, she established the Makoko Creative Talent Awards right on the water. This deliberate choice aimed to identify, celebrate, and financially support local, unrecognised talent directly on their own ground. By doing so, she transformed a severely under-resourced environment into a vibrant cultural platform.

“My work ensures that grassroots voices are authentically centred in every performance ecosystem.”

Opeyemi doesn’t view traditions as fixed; instead, she reshapes them for live audiences. Her Lagos-based festival, Moonlight Tales, was created because of the detached nature of ancestral oral history in progressive urban youth. In an attempt to fix this issue, she eliminated the “sit in rows and watch” formula. In its place, she introduced a circular performance space with live drum music and spoken word, which forced the audience to be a part of the performance. The festival incorporates movement, music, and a theatrical performance to restore the old communal way of experiencing storytelling in Africa, which is meant to be lived and experienced as an active and involved participant rather than as a passive museum exhibit.

That same fascination with transforming history into a tangible experience led her to the UK. In Sheffield, she directed and produced “A Day in Colonial Garden,” a satirical promenade drama that compelled audiences to walk through the city’s botanical gardens. As viewers followed the actors past exotic and classified plant collections, the garden itself transformed into an active archive of British imperial history. It wasn’t merely an observation of a play about cultural exploitation; it was a physical journey that retraced the spatial legacy of colonialism.

“Performance arts act as a vital counter-archive,” Opeyemi explains, pointing to how live performance can return agency to indigenous identities where textbooks fail.

Opeyemi’s cross-continental productions demand more than just a creative vision; they require immense logistical endurance. She skillfully manages international teams of actors, dramaturgs, and community organisers across diverse political and cultural terrains.

Her recent work in the UK shows no signs of slowing down. With “Black History Month: The Unseen Narrative,” a multi-city series that blends acoustic music, poetry, and testimonial theater, she continues her fight against cultural invisibility. This is the same approach she has employed from the beginning: identifying the gaps in the cultural ecosystem, bringing in artists who have been marginalised, and creating a platform where their stories can be heard and acknowledged.

Opeyemi’s mission is to foster community cohesion, combat cultural invisibility, and elevate non-traditional creatives and emerging talent within marginalised UK communities.