A tradition is made for the people who already know it. The families at a wedding know when to rise and what each song means. The listeners at a praise poem know whose ancestors are being named, and why it matters. Bringing a tradition to a stage means inviting in people who don't.
That is the central problem of my work, and there are two easy ways to get it wrong.
The first is to explain everything. A narrator stands beside the ceremony and translates it line by line. The audience understands every step, but they are no longer watching a rite. They are watching a demonstration of one. The rhythm breaks, the language disappears behind the commentary, and the very thing that made the tradition worth sharing is lost.
The second is to explain nothing and trust the spectacle to carry it. The dress is beautiful, the drums are powerful and the audience is moved. But they leave having seen something they couldn't read. They saw colour and energy and missed the meaning, and a tradition becomes decoration.
I have come to believe the question is never whether to explain, but where.
Every tradition has its own internal structure: stages, turns, moments of arrival and release. Explanation belongs in the spaces between those stages, never inside them. A few words before a stage begins can tell the audience what they are about to witness and why it matters. Then the rite should be allowed to unfold in its own language, music and movement, uninterrupted. The audience arrives prepared, and the tradition keeps its integrity.
The same principle applies beyond words. Sound, light and staging are forms of explanation too. Lighting can direct the eye to the person who matters in a moment. Sound can be pulled back so that a chanted line is heard clearly. Each of these choices helps the audience understand, and each can just as easily overwhelm the thing it is meant to serve. My rule is that every technical choice must make the tradition clearer, never louder.
This matters more, not less, in the UK. Diaspora audiences here often include people who grew up inside a tradition sitting beside people meeting it for the first time, and beside their own children, who may know it only partly. A good production has to speak to all of them at once. Done well, the person who knows the ceremony isn't patronised, and the person who doesn't isn't left outside.
Accessibility and integrity are often treated as opposites, as if every step towards one is a step away from the other. I don't think they are. When the explanation is in the right place, an audience of strangers can become, for an evening, part of something that was never written for them.
