THIS cross-fertilisatory season of British Afro-Caribbean arts, under the Zebra Crossing umbrella, is organised by British black theatre's guiding spirit, Yvonne Brewster. Even by her inexhaustible standards, it marks yet another giant leap forward.

It's not just what is being said, but the way it is said that impresses. Dorothea Smartt and Shirlee Mitchell's elegiac mediation on the death of parents, From Me To You, for example, is a seamless carpet of remembrance in words and pictures - a rite of passage that pays homage to grief and what has gone before at the same time as it celebrates the journey from the Caribbean to a new breed of black Britons, Smartt's own London-born New Woman.

Smartt's words stroke and coil themselves around you. In contrast, Sol B River's To Rahtid, performed by Angela Wynter, lashes at you. A kaleidoscope of sound, it starts where Beckett's Not I leaves off, compressing the pain and humiliation of years of racial oppression in the impressions of a few shattered moments.

Technically extraordinary, it's still no preparation for le soir avec roney f-m - performance artist Ronald Fraser-Munro. A regular visitor to Glasgow, Fraser-Munro's lethal, uncomfortable mixed-media dance of death makes us as much his aunt sallies as British theatre culture, the Royal Family and ageing jazz singers.

A bitter middle section draws us into laughing at one of his alter-egos, a dustbin-dwelling god figure - ``I want to do something to you but I can't remember what it is'' - only to over-turn our willing collusion in a chilling reminder of our desensitisation to the cruelty around us. The fury is palpable. So, too, the talent. Unforgettable.