African Americans in the Performing Arts

African Americans in the Performing Arts PDF Author: Steven Otfinoski
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438107765
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Includes profiles of African-American performing artists. Provides brief biographies, subject indexes, further reading suggestions and general index. Part of a 10-volume set--each volume devoted to the contributions of African Americans in a particular cultural field. This text contains profiles of some 190 performing artists from choreographer Alvin Ailey to hip hop producer Dr. Dre (nee Andre Young). Each entry provides a biographical sketch of the artist's career and lists readings and other materials of interest. The contributions of musicians receive comparatively greater coverage than other artistic endeavors.

Black Theater, City Life

Black Theater, City Life PDF Author: Macelle Mahala
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810145162
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
Macelle Mahala’s rich study of contemporary African American theater institutions reveals how they reflect and shape the histories and cultural realities of their cities. Arguing that the community in which a play is staged is as important to the work’s meaning as the script or set, Mahala focuses on four cities’ “arts ecologies” to shed new light on the unique relationship between performance and place: Cleveland, home to the oldest continuously operating Black theater in the country; Pittsburgh, birthplace of the legendary playwright August Wilson; San Francisco, a metropolis currently experiencing displacement of its Black population; and Atlanta, a city with forty years of progressive Black leadership and reverse migration. Black Theater, City Life looks at Karamu House Theatre, the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, Pittsburgh Playwrights’ Theatre Company, the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, the African American Shakespeare Company, the Atlanta Black Theatre Festival, and Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre Company to demonstrate how each organization articulates the cultural specificities, sociopolitical realities, and histories of African Americans. These companies have faced challenges that mirror the larger racial and economic disparities in arts funding and social practice in America, while their achievements exemplify such institutions’ vital role in enacting an artistic practice that reflects the cultural backgrounds of their local communities. Timely, significant, and deeply researched, this book spotlights the artistic and civic import of Black theaters in American cities.

African American Arts

African American Arts PDF Author: Sharrell D. Luckett
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781684481569
Category : ART
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
"Signaling recent activist and aesthetic concepts in the work of Kara Walker, Childish Gambino, BLM, Janelle Monáe, and Kendrick Lamar, and marking the exit of the Obama Administration and the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, this anthology explores the role of African American arts in shaping the future, and further informing new directions we might take in honoring and protecting the success of African Americans in the U.S. The essays in African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity engage readers in critical conversations by activists, scholars, and artists reflecting on national and transnational legacies of African American activism as an element of artistic practice, particularly as they concern artistic expression and race relations, and the intersections of creative processes with economic, sociological, and psychological inequalities. Scholars from the fields of communication, theater, queer studies, media studies, performance studies, dance, visual arts, and fashion design, to name a few, collectively ask: What are the connections between African American arts, the work of social justice, and creative processes? If we conceive the arts as critical to the legacy of Black activism in the United States, how can we use that construct to inform our understanding of the complicated intersections of African American activism and aesthetics? How might we as scholars and creative thinkers further employ the arts to envision and shape a verdant society?"--

What Makes That Black?

What Makes That Black? PDF Author: Luana
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1483454797
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
We all can name some of the Africanist aesthetic-structures that fuel African American and American art ... Syncopation, Improvisation, Call and Response, Cool, Polyrhythm, or Innovation as an ambition- But there are many, many more. What Makes That Black? The African-American Aesthetic identifies and defines seventy-four elements of the aesthetic through text and illustration. Using the magnificent camerawork of R.J. Muna, Sharen Bradford, Jae Man Joo, Rachel Neville, James Barry Knox, and more- as they point their cameras at Alonzo King LINES Ballet, Complexions Contemporary Ballet, and jazz artists such as Cécile McLorin Salvant and Wynton Marsalis- a specific artistic consciousness or sensibility visually unfolds. Luana even joins the camera crew as she shoots Oakland Street Graffiti.

A History of African American Theatre

A History of African American Theatre PDF Author: Errol G. Hill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521624435
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 652

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Book Description
Table of contents

African Americans in the Performing Arts

African Americans in the Performing Arts PDF Author: Steven Otfinoski
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438107765
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book Here

Book Description
Includes profiles of African-American performing artists. Provides brief biographies, subject indexes, further reading suggestions and general index. Part of a 10-volume set--each volume devoted to the contributions of African Americans in a particular cultural field. This text contains profiles of some 190 performing artists from choreographer Alvin Ailey to hip hop producer Dr. Dre (nee Andre Young). Each entry provides a biographical sketch of the artist's career and lists readings and other materials of interest. The contributions of musicians receive comparatively greater coverage than other artistic endeavors.

White People Do Not Know how to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies & Gentlemen of Colour

White People Do Not Know how to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies & Gentlemen of Colour PDF Author: Marvin Edward McAllister
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807854501
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
McAllister offers a history of black theater pioneer William Brown's career and places his productions within the broader context of U.S. social, political, and cultural history.

Black Arts West

Black Arts West PDF Author: Daniel Widener
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822392623
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
From postwar efforts to end discrimination in the motion-picture industry, recording studios, and musicians’ unions, through the development of community-based arts organizations, to the creation of searing films critiquing conditions in the black working class neighborhoods of a city touting its multiculturalism—Black Arts West documents the social and political significance of African American arts activity in Los Angeles between the Second World War and the riots of 1992. Focusing on the lives and work of black writers, visual artists, musicians, and filmmakers, Daniel Widener tells how black cultural politics changed over time, and how altered political realities generated new forms of artistic and cultural expression. His narrative is filled with figures invested in the politics of black art and culture in postwar Los Angeles, including not only African American artists but also black nationalists, affluent liberal whites, elected officials, and federal bureaucrats. Along with the politicization of black culture, Widener explores the rise of a distinctive regional Black Arts Movement. Originating in the efforts of wartime cultural activists, the movement was rooted in the black working class and characterized by struggles for artistic autonomy and improved living and working conditions for local black artists. As new ideas concerning art, racial identity, and the institutional position of African American artists emerged, dozens of new collectives appeared, from the Watts Writers Workshop, to the Inner City Cultural Center, to the New Art Jazz Ensemble. Spread across generations of artists, the Black Arts Movement in Southern California was more than the artistic affiliate of the local civil-rights or black-power efforts: it was a social movement itself. Illuminating the fundamental connections between expressive culture and political struggle, Black Arts West is a major contribution to the histories of Los Angeles, black radicalism, and avant-garde art.

Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal

Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal PDF Author: Kate Dossett
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469654431
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
Between 1935 and 1939, the United States government paid out-of-work artists to write, act, and stage theatre as part of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a New Deal job relief program. In segregated "Negro Units" set up under the FTP, African American artists took on theatre work usually reserved for whites, staged black versions of "white" classics, and developed radical new dramas. In this fresh history of the FTP Negro Units, Kate Dossett examines what she calls the black performance community—a broad network of actors, dramatists, audiences, critics, and community activists—who made and remade black theatre manuscripts for the Negro Units and other theatre companies from New York to Seattle. Tracing how African American playwrights and troupes developed these manuscripts and how they were then contested, revised, and reinterpreted, Dossett argues that these texts constitute an archive of black agency, and understanding their history allows us to consider black dramas on their own terms. The cultural and intellectual labor of black theatre artists was at the heart of radical politics in 1930s America, and their work became an important battleground in a turbulent decade.

Black Patience

Black Patience PDF Author: Julius B. Fleming Jr.
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 147980682X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
"This book argues that, since transatlantic slavery, patience has been used as a tool of anti-black violence and political exclusion, but shows how during the Civil Rights Movement black artists and activists used theatre to demand "freedom now," staging a radical challenge to this deferral of black freedom and citizenship"--

Sistuhs in the Struggle

Sistuhs in the Struggle PDF Author: La Donna Forsgren
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810142589
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Outstanding Academic Title, CHOICE The first oral history to fully explore the contributions of black women intellectuals to the Black Arts Movement, Sistuhs in the Struggle reclaims a vital yet under-researched chapter in African American, women’s, and theater history. This groundbreaking study documents how black women theater artists and activists—many of whom worked behind the scenes as directors, designers, producers, stage managers, and artistic directors—disseminated the black aesthetic and emboldened their communities. Drawing on nearly thirty original interviews with well-known artists such as Ntozake Shange and Sonia Sanchez as well as less-studied figures including distinguished lighting designer Shirley Prendergast, dancer and choreographer Halifu Osumare, and three-time Tony-nominated writer and composer Micki Grant, La Donna L. Forsgren centers black women’s cultural work as a crucial component of civil rights and black power activism. Sistuhs in the Struggle is an essential collection for theater scholars, historians, and students interested in learning how black women’s art and activism both advanced and critiqued the ethos of the Black Arts and Black Power movements.