Barbara Ann Teer and the National Black Theatre

Transformational Forces in Harlem

Lundeana Marie Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317776956
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

While chronicling the development of Teer's National Black Theatre of Harlem, this study explores the National Black Theatre's quest to develop a new black theory of acting. Teer's theory of performance was realized in a theater that combined elements of Pentacostal worship and African ritual, melding spontaneity from the performers, percussive music, singing, dancing, emotional expression from both actors and audience, and spectacle. The National Black Theatre's major achievement is the creation of an original art form that helps African Americans identify with their roots and invites spontaneous audience interaction. The study offers the National Black Theatre as a model African American community theater with valuable lessons for other theaters. The innovative methods of the National Black Theatre provide a model for enlightening and sensitizing audiences to cultural diversity. A pioneering institution, the National Black Theatre has proven itself over its 25 year history to be a cultural treasure and the quintessential theater in Harlem. Also includes maps.(Bibliography, and index; foreword by Dr. Winona Fletcher, Professor Emeritus of Theater and Drama and Afro-American Studies; Founder of the National Black Theatre)

Barbara Ann Teer and the National Black Theatre

I

Before the National Black Theatre

The conflicts inherent in being African-American artists in the world of traditional American theatre led to the development of what was to be called the Black Arts Movement. This movement, that rejected the need to create a theatre in the image of the dominant White culture, was a stimulus for the establishment of the National Black Theatre [NBT]. Before founding the NBT of Harlem in 1968, Barbara Ann Teer was enjoying success as an actress on the Broadway stage. The reasons for her transformation from an actress of Western traditional theatre to the director of a Black theatre are complex. A better understanding of Teer’s theatre can be achieved by first examining the history of African-American theatre before 1968. Because theatre has always been a reflection of life, this investigation will necessitate an examination of the lives of African-Americans as they were reflected in the world of the American theatre.

This chapter focuses on the African cultural heritage of African-Americans, which is rooted in rich theatrical conventions. Black art was suppressed by slave holders and parodied by the nineteenth-century theatrical producers into ugly, demeaning stereotypes. African-American writers and performers were forced by White-dominated theatre to perpetuate these stereotypes on stage or to work outside of the American theatre. Occasional accomplishments by Black performers led to projects modeled upon Eurocentric dramatic structure, espoused the moral values of the dominant majority, and benefited White producers. Black intellectuals from as early as the 1920s called for the creation of a truly Black theatre that was produced by and for African-Americans, that celebrated their cultural heritage, and that addressed the concerns of the Black community. However, it was not until the Black Power Movement, arising from the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s, that Black playwrights began to challenge the Black community with plays that needed a Black theatre—a theatre that was ideologically and financially separate from that of the White majority.

American theatre history, for the African-American, might be seen as an example of “cultural hegemony,” a term denoting the almost inevitable result of the coexistence of two or more cultures: one typically subjugates the others or seduces them into conformity. The overt power and the covert glamour of the dominant or “hegemonic” culture constitute its cultural hegemony. Members of the subordinate cultures are said to “assimilate” to the dominant culture, and although they may only grudgingly acquiesce in certain demands, they eagerly comply with others, for, as Bruce McConachie writes, “People will always need to identify with others because of their fear of alienation and estrangement.”¹ The theory of cultural hegemony has a direct bearing on understanding the development of Black Theatre in the United States.

Since Western theatre history is grounded in the history of Greek culture, and since theatre in America grew out of Western traditions, African-American theatre has had difficulty establishing its African roots.² Black artists have suffered from feelings of inferiority and have expressed shame for those characteristics of speech, music, and dance that linked them to Africa, characteristics that James V. Hatch notes as “Africanisms”:

For Afro-Americans, a shared glory with the Pharaohs is as legitimate as shared glory with the Greeks for Western Caucasians. When Afro-American culture is denied African roots, it is left to attach itself to European traditions which afforded it little respect. Because Afro-American theatre stems from roots on both sides of a hyphen, the hyphen must become a bridge. Africanisms that survived must be investigated—a difficult task which takes the historian into anthropology, sociology, psychology, and religion.³

Africanisms are cultural artifacts, like speech, music, and dance that survived the infamous middle passage. Other nationalities often adjusted their names in order to assimilate faster, but with time the stigma attached to the Irish, the Italian, and the Scottish has faded. These ethnic groups were able to assimilate faster because their differences were less easily discernible. However, the darker complexions, kinky hair, and full lips of African-Americans are salient features and are not so readily disguised. African-Americans were taught to be ashamed not only of their physical characteristics but also of many cultural, educational, and social characteristics which made them different. It is this enduring shame at their own heritage that distinguishes African-Americans from all other immigrants to America.

Amiri Baraka⁴ defines the African-American or American Negro as a unique race created by the oppressive conditioning of slavery. He also reminds us that people of African descent are the only race who did not happily migrate to the United States looking for freedom of opportunity. Instead, Africans were “brought to this country in bondage and remained so for more than two hundred fifty years. But most of the Black people who were freed from formal slavery in 1863 were not Africans. They were Americans.”⁵ The indoctrination received by slaves, viewed by many as a form of oppression, had produced a post-Emancipation group of Black people whose familiarity with the mores, attitudes, languages, and other cultural references of this country rivaled those of willing immigrants trying desperately to embrace these same mores by choice. But the much older African heritage has survived at a deeper level, and it is from this source that many modern Blacks derive their sense of identity. African-Americans have preserved a portion of their ancient heritage in the form of Africanisms, a source for much of modern Black drama.

Unlike the Egyptians’ written history, which has largely perished, the Black oral tradition has survived, committed not to paper or clay but to the practice and habit of oral history. The offspring of emancipated Negroes learned about Africa and slavery primarily through the stories, tales, riddles, and songs of their older relatives descended from early Africans, of kingdoms like the Benin, the Zulu, the Kikuyu, the Mendi, the Bantu, the Yoruba, and others south of the Sahara.⁶ In addition to tales, riddles, and songs, this oral tradition consists of still more pervasive cultural habits (e.g., roughness or sweetness of speech, pitch variations, booming tones, and body language) revealing a speaker’s emotional state: “It embraces silent signals locked within the voiced speech as well as an aura of signals,” as Hatch describes them, “surrounding the voiced content of the speech”;⁷ in other words, subtextual language and emotional depth. Collectively these aspects of African oral tradition can be called Africanisms.

Africanisms are still part of the lives of Black people to varying degrees in Haiti, Brazil, Cuba, and Guyana. Baraka explains:

Africanisms in American Negroes are not now readily discernible, although they certainly do exist. It was in the United States only that the slaves were, after a few generations, unable to retain much of their more obvious African traditions, yet some basic and fundamental traditions endured.⁸

In the United States in particular, the African oral tradition is largely limited to such Africanisms as rituals and tales. These were often harshly suppressed by slavemasters who, fearing the results of allowing slaves a sense of their own history and human dignity, sought to have these Africanisms buried forever. Genevieve Fabre reports that

The oral tradition holds a prominent place in Afro-American culture. For slaves (who were often forbidden to learn to write) it was the safest means of communication. It provided basic contact with Africa as a homeland and a source of folklore, a contract [sic] also between ethnic groups unified under a common symbolic heritage, between generations, and finally, between the speaker and his audience.⁹

Black slaves were forbidden to practice any African rituals, to speak African dialect, or to communicate anything about the land beyond the “river.” Both written and unwritten laws, pre- and post-slavery, forbade the practice of the ways of indigenous African culture. Violation of these laws was punishable by death.¹⁰ However, the less recognizable manifestations of the ancestral culture were tolerated. Slave narratives contain numerous references to instruments brought from Africa and using African references. Hatch notes that

The kinds of laughter, the placement of the voice in the throat, gestures of the hands, face, and feet passed and received unconsciously—all provided direct transfusion of Africanisms from parent to child…. these signals have transmitted racial memory and, in many examples, specific bonding rituals: “signifying,” “rappin’,” “toasting,” and boasting appear formally on the Black stage and less formally on the street. To hear and enjoy these silences fully, one must either have grown up black or have learned them through study.¹¹

The covertness of this survival of Africanisms endowed them with greater emotional power among African-Americans. And since oppression was also suppression of the spirit, the preservation of the African heritage required either a great masking or a hardening of the emotions. Paul Lawrence Dunbar, in “We Wear the Mask,” expresses with mournful sensitivity the figurative complexities of masks and masquerading in the lives of African-American people.¹² James Anderson reports that

In America, as white children leave home and move on through the educational system and then into the work of the world, the development of cognitive and learning styles follows a linear, self-reinforcing course. Never are they asked to be bicultural, bidialectic, or bicognitive. On the other hand, for children of color biculturality is not a free choice, but a prerequisite for successful participation and eventual success. Non-white children generally, are expected to be bicultural, bidialectic, bicognitive; to measure their performance against a Euro-American yardstick; and to maintain the psychic energy to maintain this orientation.¹³

In other words, African-Americans have learned to behave one way at school or with Whites but another way at home or with members of their own culture. This reversion is as important as the adaptation itself, its purpose being to avert ridicule and/or physical abuse by people of their own culture who might resent any appearance of trying to be “better” than they. Therefore, historically, masking and masquerading have been a vital and necessary means of survival for African-Americans among Whites and even among members of their own culture.

Two important points must be clarified before discussing the Black experience in American theatre and its relationship to Barbara Ann Teer and the NBT. First, the image of the Black American was in American theatre long before Blacks themselves became a genuine part of it. Second, the notion of a Black theatre with playwrights, actors, composers, musicians, and technicians, founded primarily to serve the cultural needs of the Black community and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Appendices
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter I. Before the National Black Theatre
• Chapter II. Barbara Ann Teer: Background
• Chapter III. The National Black Theatre: The Beginning
• Chapter IV. Training at the National Black Theatre
• Chapter V. The NBT: The Quintessential Black Theatre of Harlem
• Conclusion
• Afterword
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index