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)

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)

Generating a new understanding of the past—as well as a vision for the future—this path-breaking volume contains essays written by playwrights, scholars, and critics that analyze African American theatre as it is practiced today.Even as they acknowledge that Black experience is not monolithic, these contributors argue provocatively and persuasively for a Black consciousness that creates a culturally specific theatre. This theatre, rooted in an African mythos, offers ritual rather than realism; it transcends the specifics of social relations, reaching toward revelation. The ritual performance that is intrinsic to Black theatre renews the community; in Paul Carter Harrison's words, it "reveals the Form of Things Unknown" in a way that "binds, cleanses, and heals."

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.

The Black Arts Movement (1965–76) consisted of artists across the United States deeply concerned with the relationship between politics and the black aesthetic. In Search of Our Warrior Mothers examines the ways in which black women playwrights in the movement advanced feminist and womanist perspectives from within black nationalist discourses. La Donna L. Forsgren recuperates the careers, artistic theories, and dramatic contributions of four leading playwrights: Martie Evans-Charles, J.e. Franklin, Sonia Sanchez, and Barbara Ann Teer. Using original interviews, production recordings, playbills, and unpublished manuscripts, she investigates how these women, despite operating within a context that equated the collective well-being of black people with black male agency, created works that validated black women's aspirations for autonomy and explored women's roles in the struggle for black liberation. In Search of Our Warrior Mothers demonstrates the powerful contributions of women to the creation, interpretation, and dissemination of black aesthetic theory, thus opening an interdisciplinary conversation at the intersections of theater, performance, feminist, and African American studies and identifying and critiquing the gaps and silences within these fields.

This reference identifies key contributors to the Black Arts Movement, the name given to a group of poets, artists, dramatists, musicians, and writers who emerged in the wake of the Black Power Movement. This book also discusses major works produced during the period, as well as significant publications, influential groups, and organizations.

(Applause Books). From the origins of the Negro spiritual and the birth of the Harlem Renaissance to the emergence of a national black theatre movement, The Theatre of Black Americans offers a penetrating look at a black art form that has exploded into an American cultural institution. Among the essays: James Hatch Some African Influences on the Afro-American Theatre; Shelby Steele Notes on Ritual in the New Black Theatre; Sister M. Francesca Thompson OSF The Lafayette Players; Ronald Ross The Role of Blacks in the Federal Theatre.