A Sourcebook on African-American Performance: Plays, People, Movements

by Annemarie Bean (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781134673926
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	01/04/2002
Series:	Worlds of Performance
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	374
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Annemarie Bean is an assistant professor of theatre at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts. She was managing editor of The Drama Review for three years, and is the co-editor, with James V. Hatch and Brooks McNamara, of Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy (Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England, 1996), winner of the 1997 Errol Hill Award given by the American Society for Theatre Research for outstanding scholarship in African[1]American theatre studies. Her current project is a study of gender impersonation by white and African-American nineteenth-century minstrels.

Table of Contents

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 1 Black Theatre 1998: A Thirty-Year Look at Black Arts Theatre (1998) 2 Clara’s Ole Man (1968) 3 Home on the Range and Police (1968) 4 The Bronx is Next (1968) 5 The Black Arts Movement (1968) 6 Ritual Reformulations: Barbara Ann Teer and the National Black Theatre of Harlem (1998) 7 To Make Black Bodies Strange: Social Critique in Concert Dance of the Black Arts Movement (1998) Part II: Free Southern Theater and Community Activism 8 A Road Through the Wilderness (1998) 9 Dialog: The Free Southern Theater (1965) 10 Motion in the Ocean: Some Political Dimensions of the Free Southern Theater (1968) 11 After the Free Southern Theater: A Dialog (1987) 12 John O’Neal, Actor and Activist: The Praxis of Storytelling (1992) Part III: Moving Beyond the Center 13 Rode a Railroad That Had No Track (1998) 14 Theatre in Historically Black Colleges: A Survey of 100 Years (1998) 15 Stepping, Saluting, Cracking, and Freaking: The Cultural Politics of African-American Step Shows (1991) 16 The Gospel Musical and Its Place in the Black American Theatre (1998) 17 Catalysis: An Interview with Adrian Piper (1972) Part IV: Contemporary Challenges to Representations: African-American Women Playwrights 18 Four Bad Sisters (1998) 19 A Growth of Images (1977) 20 Obsessing in Public: An Interview with Robbie McCauley (1993) 21 Sally’s Rape (1994) 22 Anna Deavere Smith: Acting as Incorporation (1993) 23 The Word Becomes You: An Interview with Anna Deavere Smith (1993) 24 Doo-a-diddly-dit-dit: An Interview with Suzan-Lori Parks and Liz Diamond (1995) 25 The America Play (1994)

Editorial Reviews

A collection of articles from surveying performance from the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s to the New Black Renaissance of the 1990s. Among the areas considered are the professional, revolutionary, and college stages; concert dance; community activism; step shows; and performance art. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

'an excellent resource for teachers and researchers' - Speech & Drama

'This book is invaluable as an introductory text for students of black performance.' - Celeste-Marie Bernier, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, American Studies 2001

From the Publisher