Nigerian-born Tayo Aluko is based in Liverpool, UK.

While still working as a self-employed architect, he premiered his one-man play CALL MR. ROBESON at the Edinburgh Festival in 2007. He has since become a full time performer, taking the play around the world, to places as distant as the North West Territories of Canada, Jamaica, Nigerian, Australia and New Zealand. One highlight was a performance at New York’s Carnegie Hall in February 2012.

As writer-on- attachment with the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse theatres, he developed another one-man play titled JUST AN ORDINARY LAWYER which has also been National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and at the Harare International Festival of the Arts.

His latest play, PAUL ROBESON’S LOVE SONG, written and recorded during lockdown with actors in Canada and USA, is now streaming online on Africa Theatre to Your Home.

With The Maltings Theatre, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Aluko developed a presentation titled WHAT HAPPENS? featuring the writings of African American Langston Hughes (with songs from the era), performed to live jazz accompaniment. In October 2013 he produced the inaugural Paul Robeson Art Is A Weapon Festival in Covent Garden, London, which featured speakers and performers from as far afield as South Africa and Canada.

He is currently working on a play inspired by the life and music of the British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

As a baritone, he appeared as soloist at the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, accompanied by the Hallé Orchestra, and has also performed lead roles in various operas and stage musicals and oratorios.

Tayo researched, wrote and narrated to camera a film on the history of West Africa before the TransAtlantic Slave Trade, which forms part of the permanent exhibit at the National Museum Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum. He was one of ten People of Letters: “leading writers of colour” commissioned to write and perform pieces in response to selected objects held in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, forming the inaugural onlne exhibition of the Museum of Colour. Published writings include articles for The Guardian, Counterfire, Morning Star, NERVE Magazine, Liverpool Daily Post and Echo; North West Chronicle the Journal of Museum Ethnographers (all UK); The Progressive, Counterpunch (USA), Punch and ThisDay ( Nigeria), and modernghana.com.

He has also written and performed a lecture-cum-concert titled FROM BLACK AFRICA TO THE WHITE HOUSE, which deals with African History, and particularly Black Resistance to White domination, illustrating it with live renditions of Black Spirituals. His 15-minute play, HALF MOON deals with similar subjects, and has been performed by young actors.

His poem “GREATNESS” IN A TIME OF “COVID” has been developed into a global mapping project, MAPPING “GREATNESS” and an interactive workshop, EXPLORING “GREATNESS”

In this inaugural event, Preston Black History Group and the Institute for Black Atlantic Research invite Tayo to share some of his work and extend the conversation to our wider communities.

You can find out more about Tayo Aluko and his work at https://www.tayoalukoandfriends.com.