A Sourcebook on African-American Performance

Plays, People, Movements

Annemarie Bean, Annemarie Bean

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134673926
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

A Sourcebook on African-American Performance is the first volume to consider African-American performance between and beyond the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and the New Black Renaissance of the 1990s.
As with all titles in the Worlds of Performance series, the Sourcebook consists of classic texts as well as newly commissioned pieces by notable scholars, writers and performers. It includes the plays 'Sally's Rape' by Robbie McCauley and 'The American Play' by Suzan-Lori Parks, and comes complete with a substantial, historical introduction by Annemarie Bean.
Articles, essays, manifestos and interviews included cover topics such as:
* theatre on the professional, revolutionary and college stages
* concert dance
* community activism
* step shows
* performance art.
Contributors include Annemarie Bean, Ed Bullins, Barbara Lewis, John O'Neal, Glenda Dickersun, James V. Hatch, Warren Budine Jr. and Eugene Nesmith.

Part I: Theatrical In(ter)ventions of the Black Arts Movement

1: BLACK THEATRE 1998: A THIRTY-YEAR LOOK AT BLACK ARTS THEATRE (1998)

Ed Bullins

It is approaching the thirtieth anniversary of the special Black Theatre edition of The Drama Review (TDR T40) that I edited in 1968. At the time there was skepticism throughout the United States and the world as to whether an adequate case could be made for such a thing as Black Theatre. Nonetheless, a case was made, and curiosity reigned as to the legitimacy of this emerging “cultural paradigm”.

In early August 1997, I attended the National Black Theatre Festival and International Black Theatre Colloquium in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The theme of this fifth biennial Black Theatre Festival was “An International Celebration and Reunion of Spirit”. Founder, executive and artistic director of the NBTF, Larry Leon Hamlin, pointed out that “global theatre practitioners and scholars from South Africa, Brazil, Cuba, Nigeria, Jamaica, Republic of Benin, England, Ghana, Canada and other parts of the world come together” here. The National Black Theatre Festival showcased the new World Black Theatre Movement. One of the prominent features of the festival was the International Colloquia/Workshop, organized by Dr Olasope O. Oyelaran of the International Program at Winston-Salem State University. This year's theme for the colloquia was The Black Family on Stage’, which looked at how Black theatres around the world deal with family issues. In addition, there were ninety performances by more than twenty-three of the world's Black theatre companies in a six-day period. I was able to attend the Crossroads Theatre Company production of August Wilson's Jitney, directed by Walter Dallas; Black Goat Entertainment and Enlightenment's Ghost Café, featuring Andre De Shields; Woodie King's National Black Touring Circuit's Do Lord Remember Me, by James de Jongh, directed by Regge Life; Jomandi Productions' Hip II: Birth of the Boom, by Thomas W.Jones II, directed by Marsha A.Jackson; curator Idris Ackamoor's New Performance in Black Theatre series, featuring a stand-in reading/ performance for ailing Sekou Sundiata by Amiri Baraka with Craig Harris; and a standing-room-only visit to a reading of a play by Samuel Hay, Crack Cream an’ Brown Sugar, at the Festival's ‘Readers Theatre’ under the direction of Garland Thompson.

To say that Black Theatre has come a long way in the past thirty years is to admit the obvious. In examining some of the material of the original TDR and comparing it to a quick survey of today's not so hidden, but actually obscured African-American aesthetic and cultural institution, Black Theatre, some truths about this sometimes near-mysterious phenomenon may be revealed. Clara's Ole Man, written by me in 1965, was almost immediately produced. I had written How Do You Do and The Rally; or, Dialect Determinism several months before. The two plays were scheduled to be produced at The Firehouse Repertory Theater in San Francisco, but it was feared that the evening was too short. A grotesque little skit concerning an absurdist minstrel show was proposed to complete the program. Fearful that this could occur, I set to work and completed Clara's Ole Man. I felt that Clara gave the bill balance, and my co-producers agreed, so my three plays premiered the same night that Watts first blew up from Black rage, as has been documented in the TDR T40 issue.

I imagine that a similar black drama could be produced now for the first time on an American stage. But I have my doubts that it could happen quietly. Why? The times are different. Many factors confront Clara's “degree of honesty” and, yes, “rawness” in this era—political correctness, any one of a number of isms, and so on. It seems the Free Speech Movement did have good reason to make speeches. Formally, and pathetically, the new myths suggest that the 1960s impulses and urges toward freedom have been sublimated to marketable and exploitable strategies disguised as critical thinking, watered down in academic and corporate America.

Plays like Baraka's Home on the Range and Police were nearly unique in American Theatre when they appeared in the late 1960s. The plays have been given the argot of “agitprop” (agitational propaganda), but this seems oxymoronic in theory; the elements of these creations stem from a modern bohemian sensibility and milieu fused with black/ white inner-city conflict, and having little to tie it to early twen-tieth-century anarchism or nihilism which the term “agitprop” stems from. Home on the Range, a concise play of the black/white apocalypse fore-told, uses avant-garde techniques of symbolic-sounding language and Albert Ayler improvisational jazz, in a form borrowed from Harlem playwright Ben Caldwell's (brief scenario) dramaturgy. Police is a mini-myth of inhuman (bestial) black/white police versus victimized black street people, who cause the white cops to turn on the black cop and cannibalize him. Both plays exist very much through the nativistic political and cultural revolutionary ideology of the time. Sonia Sanchez’ play The Bronx Is Next is more traditional in structure but just as extremely radical in Black Revolutionary sentiments and calls to action.

“The Black Arts Movement” essay, by Lawrence P. (Larry) Neal, was commissioned by me as editor of the special Black Theatre issue of TDR. Neal had written a short piece for the initial issue of Black Theatre Magazine, published by the New Lafayette Theatre of Harlem. Shortly thereafter, I thought Larry would be ideal to write an essay which turned out to be “The Black Arts Movement”. It has proven to be the single most significant piece in the edition, and on its subject, arguably, of the period. Having been reprinted numerous times, usually with no acknowledgement of original source, it has helped give a vocabulary and intellectual structure to an important area of African-American aesthetic ideological studies.

Barbara Lewis' essay “Ritual Reformulations: Barbara Ann Teer and the National Black Theatre of Harlem” is a Black Theatre historical “labor of love” based upon the writer's subjective passion and more objective research. Ms Lewis begins, “In 1972, four years after she relocated to Harlem where she established her ritual-based company, Barbara Ann Teer, founder of the National Black Theatre, looked around and saw death and life vying for supremacy in the faces and lives of the people around her. The community where she had chosen to settle and perform her rituals of liberation…”. Lewis does not fail to cite the significance of Robert Macbeth as a visionary pioneer of the 1960s who introduced Barbara Ann Teer to the Black Ritual Theatre form. Yes, the great Barbara Ann Teer has devoted the past twenty-five some years to Black Ritual Theatre, and in so doing, has honored the popularizer of this cultural paradigm, Robert Macbeth, founder/director of the New Lafayette Theatre of Harlem (1967–73). Macbeth perfected the “black ritual form” through improvisational and black aesthetic cultural performance practices in workshops with his company for three years and then produced A Ritual to Bind Together and Strengthen Black People So That They Can Survive the Long Struggle to Come (1969), To Raise the Dead and Foretell the Future (1970), The Devil Catchers (1970), The Psychic Pretenders (1971), and A Black Time for Black Folk (lost). It is fair to say that the National Black Theatre took off with Black Ritual Theatre where the New Lafayette Theatre retired. Barbara Ann Teer and her NBT are pioneers and supremely accomplished and successful in their longevity.

Today is the time of August Wilson. His voice will carry the American Black Theatre Movement into the twenty-first century. Not only are his plays some of the finer theatrical works of this century, his voice gives a “legitimate” discourse to theatre change. August Wilson's art and identity have become the mainstream, and have brought the entire Black Theatre into a pantheon of global respect. So it is fitting that this piece end with his words, taken from an interview with Neworld Renaissance: A Multicultural Magazine of the Arts (Spring 1997):

Somehow people got into their minds…that I was talking about a Black theater that would exclude whites. That's not what I said. […] I've been saying we've been fighting to be included. So I'm not talking about theater for Blacks only. […] There's a difference in “for Blacks” and “for Blacks only”. You see so that American theater is for whites. It doesn't say “for whites only”. It just says “for whites”. And I think we should have a theater that says “for Blacks”. […] I am an inclusionist. I'm fighting to be included. I don't want to be separate. The American theater is separate. It is separate from the Black community. […] So that out of these 66 white theaters they're separate from Crossroads Theater….

I was fired in the kiln of Black nationalism and the Black Power movement when Blacks were seeking ways to alter their relationship to the society, or to acquire some power, […] In 1984, in my first interview I ever did with the New York Times I said I am a Black nationalist so why anything should surprise people. […] I gave a speech at Carnegie Man and Ideas Lecture Series in 1987, I talked about cultural imperialism which I mentioned briefly […] the awareness that there is a cultural war going on and has been since Blacks first came over here. And they said, you guys don't have no culture, no language, no gods, you don't have nothing of any value. Of course people fought hard to affirm their sense of self and their manners and values.

There are literally hundreds of playwrights, let's say there's five hundred Black playwrights. And there's one Black theater of the 66 [members of the] League of Resident Theaters and those are theaters that have certain levels of production values, that have certain financial obligations that they're going to make them pay their actors so much and they're judged important theaters. […] There's literally hundreds of Black community groups, theater groups. There's a lot of Black theaters in the country, but only one League theater. It means that of these five hundreds of playwrights, there's this theater here that has a five-play season. So five playwrights will have an opportunity to develop their talent. Now if you're a white playwright and you have 66 times five or seven, then obviously you have more opportunities. So w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction: Performing Beyond Pre-formations and Between Movements: Thirty Years of African-American Performance
• Part I: Theatrical in(ter)Ventions of the Black Arts Movement
• Part II: Free Southern Theater and Community Activism
• Part III: Moving Beyond the Center
• Part IV: Contemporary Challenges to Representations: African-American Women Playwrights