‍Jaja’s African Hair Braiding is an incredible play written by Jocelyn Bioh and directed by Monique Touko exploring the lives and experiences of a Harlem Braiding salon staffed by West African immigrant female braiders.

The play reflects experiences, aesthetics and conversations already deeply familiar to Black & Diasporic communities, particularly around beauty, identity, migration, care and female solidarity.

To promote the play, Nourishment organised a large community theatre trip and created a visual campaign focused on inviting young Black and diverse audiences both to the Lyric & to see Jaja's through culturally resonant marketing, design & visuals.

Our campaign included:
🫧Audience development and community outreach via our theatre trip
🫧Ticket promotion through Nourishment channels and networks
🫧Managing discounted ticket access for attendees
🫧Facilitating audience engagement during the post-show Q+A
🫧Producing a video recap & quickfire voxpop about hair stories
🫧Photography, interviews and audience documentation of the night

We created 2 reels and 2 posts highlighting and recapping our community's experience of the play and fun audience reactions. We also created a graphic showing our favourite hairstyles of the evening with design that reflected Black women's experiences with hair and beauty.

The resulting content gained over 1000 likes, 30,000 views across Instagram and TikTok with 100+ clicks on our Nourishment Newsletter.

The new relationships and positive sentiment evidenced by comments on the content such as: "Love this soo much 😍", "uhhh black women... 😍", "😍😍😍", 'This is so wholesome 😍" and "Black women are BEAUTIFUL… lemme refocus😍😍"

This speaks to how content that is familiar, empowering and culturally resonant can connect with underrepresented audiences.