AN interactive performance using music, rum and an installation built from human hair will be presented in Bradford next week.Dark & Lovely explores the connotations, history and politics of afro hair and what it means to be black, British and female in the UK today.

Presented from within ‘the tumbleweave’, a home for hair built from abandoned weaves and hair extensions, this part autobiographical, conversational new show by artist Selina Thompson, is designed for audience of 40 people.

They are invited to peer through the tumbleweave and feel its various hidden treasures. Inside, they will find Selina’s nan’s living room - drinks trolley, pineapple ice bucket and all, where they will be offered a rum punch.

Using recorded conversations with barbers, hair vendors and customers, feel-good music and written text, Selina explores the complexities of the social debate surrounding black hair. The Leeds-based artist and performer transforms the tumbleweave, which she admits is “a little gross”, into something beautiful.

Dark & Lovely celebrates what it means, and doesn’t mean, to be black through the way we wear our hair.

It was developed as part of a project where she undertook six residences in six different cities. She spoke to people about their relationship to where they live, to build up a picture.

Selina’s work is playful, participatory and intimate, focusing on the politics of identity and how this defines our bodies, lives and environments. She has made work for venues including pubs, cafes, hairdressers and toilets, as well as galleries and theatres.

The performance was first played out in Chapeltown, Leeds, in a disused barber’s shop for a week-long sell-out run.

“Making the work was a real coming of age moment for me: one in which I got to reconnect my heritage and cultural upbringing with my developing political consciousness and practice as an artist,” she says. “I like to think that I have made something that reflects the love and care that those who opened up their community spaces extended to me – but also something with bite.”

She described the performance as the “equivalent of the friend that notices (and compliments!) each new weave, holds your braids back if you need to be sick, lends you a scrunchie if you’re going in for a fight, and strokes your head wrap as you fall asleep. Something like that.”

Over the past three years Selina has developed a body of work called ‘Edible Women’ exploring the fat body, dieting, control around food and how much of a mess she can get away with.

Dark & Lovely is being performed at Theatre in the Mill, Bradford, from Wednesday November 25 to Saturday November 28 at 7.30pm; Box office: 01274 233200; theatre@bradford.ac.uk; selinathompson.co.uk