Rickyah Blake AKA blackplanet

Born in the USA, crafted from scorching hot Southern plantation soil, and pushed up North, Rickyah Blake is a New Yorker born in the Midwest working as an Afro-amerikana storyteller. She transforms the ancestral practice of storytelling and adopt it as a performancee method. Through performance, she reflects and rediscovers the world around her reclaiming the stories told to her. The oral practice of sharing knowledge challenges the Western record-keeping methods that often tell a colonial history excluding the history of Black/African ancient empires long before it. Departing from this one sided narrative, Rickyah uses the pseudonym ‘blackplanet’ alluding to an existence prior to her arrival on this Earthly plane. blackplanet sees the act of story telling as an act of care by protecting the ancestral practices of storytelling. 

blackplanet’s research typically investigates ancestral traditions and practices. By incorporating the ideologies of those who came before, she makes amends with a fragmented history and identity halted at African enslavement. It is a core belief of hers that the process of creating, art-making, is a divine power gifted to humanity to get a glimpse of the Creator’s power. With this power, blackplanet uses to remember her “first self”. The first self is a concept synonymous with the “higher self”, a belief that every human being has a conscious spirit with otherworldly potential not rooted in the flesh.

Instead, she uses the flesh as an elastic canvas taking the form of a character whose story she must tell. Painting this canvas with her voice box, blackplanet merge sound and performance to discuss complex subjects that include satirical gestures and dramatized scenarios mimicking mass media tropes. Combining movement, improv, and technology, her performance art challenges colonial images of Blackness, femininity, and power.