When Inua Ellams introduced his one-man show Search Party in New York City last January, he informed the audience that its success depended on them. “If it is brilliant it is because of your word choices,” he told the crowd at the experimental theater festival Under the Radar, according to the New York Times, “and if it is terrible it is your fault. Collective responsibility.”
He was only half joking.
During the show, the Nigerian-born British writer and performer reads from his poems, plays, essays and art reviews. But there’s a twist: What he reads depends on the crowd. Audience members take turns shouting out words, which Ellams types into the search bar on his iPad. He then reads a piece of his writing in which the word appears.
This weekend, Hopkins Center for the Arts presents three performances of Search Party at Dartmouth College’s Theater on Currier in Hanover, N.H. Ellams, visiting for a weeklong residency at the college, likens the hourlong production to having a conversation in his living room. “Just come expecting to be open and to have a chat,” he told Seven Days.
The venue, about a block from the Hopkins Center, is well suited for an intimate exchange. It’s a temporary, 65-seat black-box theater the Hop is using while it undergoes renovations.
Ellams created Search Party in 2020 in an effort to be more egalitarian when giving poetry readings. Rather than impose his choices on an audience — “which just meant that if I was in a bad mood, I ended up choosing poems that reflected my bad mood,” he said — he invited them into the process. The call-and-response exercise has grown into a show that changes with each performance. He’s now presented the show more than 30 times, though the Dartmouth performances mark only its third run in the U.S.
“Just come expecting to be open and to have a chat.” Inua Ellams
Ellams, 40, has published one book of poetry and several short collections. The creator of “The Midnight Run,” a cultural walking experience staged in cities around the world, he may be best known in the U.S. for his plays Barber Shop Chronicles and The Half-God of Rainfall. Last month, he won the 2024 Alfred Fagon Award, presented for the best new play by a Black British playwright, for Once Upon a Time in Sokoto.
Based in London, Ellams says he is most comfortable when traveling because he becomes an outsider looking in, a position that’s familiar to him. He immigrated to London with his family when he was 12 and grew up in England and Ireland. For most of his life, he said in a phone call from London, he has felt like he doesn’t belong. “So belonging doesn’t make me feel comfortable because I don’t know what to do with it.
“I’m restless when I’m at home,” he said. “I tend to create projects for myself, largely because I feel as if my community of immigrants is always under attack, and I have something like survivor’s guilt, because I’ve made it through.” Consequently, he’s always looking for new stories to tell and ways to harness the privilege his artistic success has brought him.
Ellams will work with Dartmouth students during his residency, despite the fact that he himself didn’t go to college. He would have liked to, he said, but he couldn’t afford it.
He was already an established writer when, just a few years after high school, he applied to the creative writing master’s program at Goldsmiths College at the University of London. A professor there was teaching Ellams’ work. If he enrolled, the professor told him, he would have to write a paper about himself. “And he advised me not to come,” Ellams said.
The University of the Arts London, which Ellams used to sneak into, awarded him an honorary doctorate two years ago.
At Dartmouth, he plans to share his creative techniques with students.
“I generally look and listen to the world for inspiration,” he said. “I listen to a lot of conversations around me. I try to steal from my fellow commuters. I overhear phone conversations, and even if it’s just a snatch, just a phrase, just a sentence, I imagine it’s part of a longer conversation with someone I don’t know and then begin to riff on the conversation and see where it leads me. So I just take from the world.
“The world is constantly vomiting up new stories, new ideas, new perspectives, new ways of thinking,” he continued. “And rather than sitting down and trying to invent stuff, I just accept what the world throws at me.”
Search Party by Inua Ellams, Friday, January 10, 7:30 p.m., and Saturday, January 11, 2 and 7:30 p.m., at Theater on Currier, Dartmouth College, in Hanover, N.H. $18-30. hop.dartmouth.edu
The original print version of this article was headlined “Shout Out | Inua Ellams brings his audience-driven performance Search Party to Dartmouth”
This article appears in Jan 8-14, 2025.
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