The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance is an outstanding collection of specially written essays that charts the emergence, development, and diversity of African American Theatre and Performance--from the nineteenth-century African Grove Theatre to Afrofuturism. Alongside chapters from scholars are contributions from theatre makers, including producers, theatre managers, choreographers, directors, designers, and critics. This ambitious Companion includes:
A "Timeline of African American theatre and performance."
Part I "Seeing ourselves onstage" explores the important experience of Black theatrical self-representation. Analyses of diverse topics including historical dramas, Broadway musicals, and experimental theatre allow readers to discover expansive articulations of Blackness.
Part II "Institution building" highlights institutions that have nurtured Black people both on stage and behind the scenes. Topics include Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), festivals, and black actor training.
Part III "Theatre and social change" surveys key moments when Black people harnessed the power of theatre to affirm community realities and posit new representations for themselves and the nation as a whole. Topics include Du Bois and African Muslims, women of the Black Arts Movement, Afro-Latinx theatre, youth theatre, and operatic sustenance for an Afro future.
Part IV "Expanding the traditional stage" examines Black performance traditions that privilege Black worldviews, sense-making, rituals, and innovation in everyday life. This section explores performances that prefer the space of the kitchen, classroom, club, or field.
This book engages a wide audience of scholars, students, and theatre practitioners with its unprecedented breadth. More than anything, these invaluable insights not only offer a window onto the processes of producing work, but also the labour and economic issues that have shaped and enabled African American theatre.
Author(s): Kathy A. Perkins, Sandra L. Richards, Renée Alexander Craft, Thomas F. DeFrantz
Series: Routledge theatre and performance companions
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: xxiv+426
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Editors and Contributors
“Black art now”
Introduction
Note
Works cited
Highlights of African American theatre and performance
1700s–1800s
1900s–1940s
1950s–1970s
1980s–1990s
2000–present
Part 1 Seeing ourselves onstage
1 Dudley, the Smart Set, and the Beginning of the Black Entertainment Industry
Notes
Works cited
2 Black Theatre History Plays: Remembering, Recovering, Re-envisioning
Defining the genre
Purpose
Theatricality
Thematic overview
Works cited
3 “Hung Be the Heavens with Black” Bodies: an Analysis of the August 1822 Riot at William Brown’s Greenwich Village Theatre
Notes
Works cited
4 Mulattoes, Mistresses, and Mammies: the Phantom Family in Langston Hughes’ Mulatto
Notes
Works cited
5 Interview with Woodie King, Jr : Producer and Director
6 Freedom Forward: Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry Circling Broadway in the 1950s
Works cited
7 Navigating Respectability in Turn-of-the-century New York City: Intimate Apparel by Lynn Nottage
Notes
Works cited
8 Earle Hyman: Scandinavian Successes
Note
Works cited
9 Pittsburgh Piety: a Century of Symbolism
Works cited and further reading
10 Interview with Ron Simons: Broadway Producer
11 Paul Tazewell: Costume Designer
12 Race on the Opera Stage
Works cited
13 The Wiz and the African Diaspora Musical: Rethinking the Research Questions in Black Musical Historiography
Notes
Works cited
14 Bob Cole’s “colored Actor’s Declaration of Independence”: the Case of the Shoo-fly Regiment and George C Wolfe’s Shuffle a
Note
Works cited
15 Shuffle Along and Ethnic Humor: a Family Story
Notes
Works cited
16 Interview with Eva Yaa Asantewaa: Dance Writer
17 Black Female Sexuality in the Drama of Pearl Cleage
Works cited
18 Coming-of-age and Rituals of Gender Nonconformity in Leslie Lee’s the First Breeze of Summer
Works cited
19 Pomo Afro Homos: a Revolutionary Act
Works cited
Part II Institution building
20 Being Black on Stage and Screen: Black Actor Training Before Black Power and the Rise of Stanislavsky’s System
Works cited
21 Three Visionary African American Women Theatre Artists: Anita Bush, Barbara Ann Teer, and Ellen Stewart
Anita Bush
Barbara Ann Teer
Ellen Stewart
Works cited
22 The Birth of Queen Anne: Re-discovering Anne M Cooke at Spelman College
Notes
Works cited
23 The Howard University Players: from Respectability Politics to Black Representation
Works cited
24 An African American Theatre Program for the Twenty-first Century
Works cited
25 Interview with Karen Allen Baxter: Senior Managing Director of Rites and Reason Theatre
26 The Negro Ensemble Company, Inc : One Moment in Time?
Nec History
The autonomy model
The price
The institution
Works cited
27 Interview with Shirley Prendergast: Lighting Designer
Note
28 Interview with Femi Sarah Heggie: Stage Manager
Note
28 Interview with Femi Sarah Heggie: Stage Manager
Works cited
30 The National Black Theatre Festival and the “marvtastic” Legacy of Larry Leon Hamlin
Works cited
31 The Black Feminist Theatre of Glenda Dickerson
Note
Works cited
32 Ernie Mcclintock’s Jazz Acting: a Theatre of Common Sense
Defining ourselves: healing through jazz technique in training and performance
Jazz acting and self-determination
Conclusion
Notes
Works cited and further reading
33 Black Acting Methods®: Mapping the Movement
“Theatre of Being”: the American Theatre of Being
Frank Silvera (July 24, 1914–June 11, 1970)
“Teer Technology of Soul”: the National Black Theatre
Dr. Barbara Ann Teer (June 18, 1937–July 21, 2008)
“Hendricks Method”: the Freddie Hendricks Youth Ensemble of Atlanta3
Freddie Hendricks (b.1954)
Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches (edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer)
Notes
Works cited
34 Financial Fitness of Black Theatres: Roundtable of Artistic Directors
Panelists
35 A Reflection on the University of Arkansas Pine Bluff’s the Hip Hop Project: Insight into the Hip Hop Generation
Notes
Works cited
36 Interview with Ekundayo Bandele: Founder and Ceo of Hattiloo Theatre
Part III Theatre and social change
37 W.E.B. Du Bois, Dramatist
Notes
Works cited
38 The Third Gift of the Negro: Muslim Identity and Du Bois’ Star of Ethiopia
October 22, 1913
Pageantry and politics
History as strategy
Performance as strategy
The gift of Star of Ethiopia
Notes
Works cited
39 Oh, Ma Dear! What’s Going On?: Staging Angelina W Grimke’s Rachel in the Wake of Black Lives Matter
What’s going on? Black Lives Matter then
Oh, Ma Dear! What’s going on from 1916 to 2016?
What’s going on now? Directing and producing Rachel in the wake of Black Lives Matter
All things being equal: casting Black trauma
“It was the tree where they were …” (Grimke 26)
“Tell the truth and shame the devil” (McSpadden and LeFlore 187)
Notes
Works cited
40 Leaning Left: Why Theatre Artists in the 1930s Were Attracted to the Red Movement
Introduction
Contextualizing the period
The play
Conclusion
Notes
Works cited
41 Fighting Fire with Fire: Violence and the Black Liberation Movement
Revolutionary violence and the Black struggle
Dutchman and Slave Ship: A Historical Pageant
Note
Works cited
42 “When We Gonna Rise”: Free Southern Theater Performances of Slave Ship and Black Power in Mississippi
Notes
Works cited
43 From “poemplays” to Ritualistic Revivals: the Experimental Works of Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement
Poemplays and Verfremdungseffekt
Problem musicals
Ritualistic revivals
Conclusion
Note
Works cited
44 Interview with Micki Grant: Actor, Singer, Composer, Lyricist
45 Keeping His Gloves Up: August Wilson and His Critics
Notes
Works cited
46 Interview with Edward Everett Haynes, Jr : Designer
47 Afro-latinx Themes in Theatre Today
Solo shows
Biographical plays
Self-produced companies
Full productions
Online and onstage
The future
Notes
Works cited
48 To Be Young, Performing, and Black: Situating Youth in African American Theatre and Performance History
Note
Works cited
49 Interview with Dr Kariamu Welsh: Professor and Choreographer
50 Robert O’hara’s Defamiliarizing Dramaturgy
Works cited
51 Black Plight in Flight
Questions of freedom and choice
Conclusion: theatre for social change
Notes
Works cited
52 Creatively Censoring African American Drama While Teaching in the Arab Gulf Region
Works cited
53 Mike Wiley: a Multi-faceted Artist on a Mission for Social Change
Works cited
54 “locked Away but Not Defeated”: African American Women Performing Resilience
Notes
Works cited
55 A Hundredfold: an Experiential Archive of Octavia E Butler’s Parable of the Sower: the Opera
Prelude
Part I
Dedicated to Una Christine Gumbs
Part II
Dedicated to Ariana Christine Good
Further reading/viewing/listening
Part IV Extending the traditional stage
56 Many Stories/one Body: Black Solo Performance from Vaudeville to Spoken Word
Works cited and further reading
57 Standing Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries
The cultural labor of Black feminist stand-up comedy
From Jackie “Moms” Mabley to Mo’Nique
(R)evolutionary Black feminist comedy
Note
Works cited
58 My Name Mudbone: What I Learned About Playwriting from Richard Pryor
Note
Works cited
59 Ntozake Shange and the Choreopoem
Notes
Works cited
60 Interview with Donna Walker-kuhne: Audience Development
61 Performed Ethnography
Staging qualitative research data: subjectivity, belonging, and the other
Reflections on oral history and performed ethnography
Note
Works cited
62 the United States of Lucia: Three Generations of Haitian-americans Reconfigure Ancestry, Home, and Host Lands Through Storyt
Prelude
Salutations
The novena
1. The aural/oral
2. Sight
3. Scent
4. Touch
5. Taste
6. Being
7. Longing
8. The invisible
9. Last novena: balance
Notes
Works cited
63 “We Were What No One Else Had”: How Black Fashion Models Constructed a New Wave of Performance and Visibility
Introduction
“The core of who we were”
Conclusion
Notes
Works cited
64 Interview with Pam Green: Artist Management and Consulting
65 Sidelong Glances: Black Divas in Transit, 1945–1955
Works cited
66 Black Indians of New Orleans: Performing Resistance and Remembrance
The tribes
Suits and masking
History and heritage
Rehearsal
Mardi Gras Day
Community theatre
Notes
67 Interview with Darryl Montana: Black Indian Chief and Master Artisan
Notes
68 African Performance in the Feast of St Francis Xavier in Seventeenth-century Luanda, Angola
Notes
Works cited
69 Afrofuturism and the 2018 Wakanda Diaspora Carnival
Afrofuturism and #WakandaForever pageantry and play
Wakanda Diaspora carnival as Black cultural performance
Works cited
70 A Beginner’s Guide to Implementing Hip Hop Theatre
Step 1: keep it 100
Step 2: identify what kind of experience you want your students to have
Step 3: chart a curriculum for success
Step 4: everything is a remix
Vocal warm-up: beatbox drills
Ice breaker: step up, step back
Assignment: ol’ skool
Assignment: class anthem
Notes
Works cited
71 Interview with Shirley Basfield Dunlap: Educator and Director
Index
