The Civil Rights Theatre Movement in New York, 1939–1966

The Civil Rights Theatre Movement in New York, 1939–1966 PDF Author: Julie Burrell
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030121887
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
This book argues that African American theatre in the twentieth century represented a cultural front of the civil rights movement. Highlighting the frequently ignored decades of the 1940s and 1950s, Burrell documents a radical cohort of theatre artists who became critical players in the fight for civil rights both onstage and offstage, between the Popular Front and the Black Arts Movement periods. The Civil Rights Theatre Movement recovers knowledge of little-known groups like the Negro Playwrights Company and reconsiders Broadway hits including Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, showing how theatre artists staged radically innovative performances that protested Jim Crow and U.S. imperialism amidst a repressive Cold War atmosphere. By conceiving of class and gender as intertwining aspects of racism, this book reveals how civil rights theatre artists challenged audiences to reimagine the fundamental character of American democracy.

The Civil Rights Theatre Movement in New York, 1939–1966

The Civil Rights Theatre Movement in New York, 1939–1966 PDF Author: Julie Burrell
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030121887
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
This book argues that African American theatre in the twentieth century represented a cultural front of the civil rights movement. Highlighting the frequently ignored decades of the 1940s and 1950s, Burrell documents a radical cohort of theatre artists who became critical players in the fight for civil rights both onstage and offstage, between the Popular Front and the Black Arts Movement periods. The Civil Rights Theatre Movement recovers knowledge of little-known groups like the Negro Playwrights Company and reconsiders Broadway hits including Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, showing how theatre artists staged radically innovative performances that protested Jim Crow and U.S. imperialism amidst a repressive Cold War atmosphere. By conceiving of class and gender as intertwining aspects of racism, this book reveals how civil rights theatre artists challenged audiences to reimagine the fundamental character of American democracy.

Harlem's Theaters

Harlem's Theaters PDF Author: Adrienne Macki Braconi
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810132265
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Honorable Mention, 2016 Errol Hill Book Award for Outstanding Scholarship in African American Theater, Drama and/or Performance Based on a vast amount of archival research, Adrienne Macki Braconi’s illuminating study of three important community-based theaters in Harlem shows how their work was essential to the formation of a public identity for African Americans and the articulation of their goals, laying the groundwork for the emergence of the Civil Rights movement. Macki Braconi uses textual analysis, performance reconstruction, and audience reception to examine the complex dynamics of productions by the Krigwa Players, the Harlem Experimental Theatre, and the Negro Theatre of the Federal Theatre Project. Even as these theaters demonstrated the extraordinary power of activist art, they also revealed its limits. The stage was a site in which ideological and class differences played out, theater being both a force for change and a collision of contradictory agendas. Macki Braconi’s book alters our understanding of the Harlem Renaissance, the roots of the Civil Rights movement, and the history of community theater in America.

Theatre History Studies 2020, Vol. 39

Theatre History Studies 2020, Vol. 39 PDF Author: Lisa Jackson-Schebetta
Publisher: University Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817371141
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description


Great North American Stage Directors Volume 4

Great North American Stage Directors Volume 4 PDF Author: Henry Bial
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350202355
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
George Abbott, Vinnette Carroll, and Harold (Hal) Prince were trailblazing figures who helped shape and define the Broadway musical over the course of the 20th century. Their careers expanded the boundaries of the genre, highlighting the critical role of the director in the creation of a new musical. As theatre history, the essays in this volume help to complicate and deepen the reader's understanding of the musical genre of Broadway and of the enduring legacies of these three pioneers. As lessons in theatrical direction, they illustrate the particular issues involved in directing musicals, as well as the stakes of working commercially at the highest levels of the industry. The Great North American Stage Directors series provides an authoritative account of the art of directing in North America by examining the work of twenty-four major practitioners from the late 19th century to the present. Each of the eight volumes examines three directors and offers an overview of their practices, theoretical ideas, and contributions to modern theatre. The studies chart the life and work of each director, placing his or her achievement in the context of other important theatre practitioners and broader social history. Written by a team of leading experts, the series presents the genealogy of directing in North America while simultaneously chronicling crucial trends and championing contemporary interpretation.

Of Thee I Sing

Of Thee I Sing PDF Author: Benjamin Railton
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538143437
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
When we talk about patriotism in America, we tend to mean one form: the version captured in shared celebrations like the national anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance. But as Ben Railton argues, that celebratory patriotism is just one of four distinct forms: celebratory, the communal expression of an idealized America; mythic, the creation of national myths that exclude certain communities; active, acts of service and sacrifice for the nation; and critical, arguments for how the nation has fallen short of its ideals that seek to move us toward that more perfect union. In Of Thee I Sing, Railton defines those four forms of American patriotism, using the four verses of “America the Beautiful” as examples of each type, and traces them across our histories. Doing so allows us to reframe seemingly familiar histories such as the Revolution, the Civil War, and the Greatest Generation, as well as texts such as the national anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance. And it helps us rediscover forgotten histories and figures, from Revolutionary War Loyalists and the World War I Espionage and Sedition Acts to active patriots like Civil War nurse Susie King Taylor and the suffragist Silent Sentinels to critical patriotic authors like William Apess and James Baldwin. Tracing the contested history of American patriotism also helps us better understand many of our 21st century debates: from Donald Trump’s divisive deployment of celebratory and mythic forms of patriotism to the backlash to the critical patriotisms expressed by Colin Kaepernick and the 1619 Project. Only by engaging with the multiple forms of American patriotism, past and present, can we begin to move forward toward a more perfect union that we all can celebrate.

The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil RIghts Era

The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil RIghts Era PDF Author: Jonathan Shandell
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609385950
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Jonathan Shandell provides the first in-depth study of the historic American Negro Theatre (ANT) and its lasting influence on American popular culture. Founded in 1940 in Harlem, the ANT successfully balanced expressions of African American consciousness with efforts to gain white support for the burgeoning civil rights movement. The theatre company featured innovative productions with emerging artists—Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Ruby Dee, and many others—who would become giants of stage, film, and television. In 1944, the ANT made theatrical history by creating the smash hit Anna Lucasta, the most popular play with an African American cast ever to perform on Broadway. Starting from a shoestring budget, the ANT grew into one of the most important companies in the history of African American theatre. Though the group folded in 1949, it continued to shape American popular culture through the creative work of its many talented artists. Examining oral histories, playbills, scripts, production stills, and journalistic accounts, Shandell gives us the most complete picture to date of the theatre company by analyzing well-known productions alongside groundbreaking and now-forgotten efforts. Shedding light on this often-overlooked chapter of African American history, which fell between the New Negro Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, Shandell reveals how the ANT became a valued community institution for Harlem—an important platform for African American artists to speak to racial issues—and a trailblazer in promoting integration and interracial artistic collaboration in the U.S. In doing so, Shandell also demonstrates how a small amateur ensemble of the 1940s succeeded in challenging, expanding, and transforming how African Americans were portrayed in the ensuing decades. The result is a fascinating and entertaining examination that will be of interest to scholars and students of African American and American studies and theatre history, as well as popular culture enthusiasts.

Impermanent Blackness

Impermanent Blackness PDF Author: Korey Garibaldi
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691245126
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Revisiting an almost-forgotten American interracial literary culture that advanced racial pluralism in the decades before the 1960s In Impermanent Blackness, Korey Garibaldi explores interracial collaborations in American commercial publishing—authors, agents, and publishers who forged partnerships across racial lines—from the 1910s to the 1960s. Garibaldi shows how aspiring and established Black authors and editors worked closely with white interlocutors to achieve publishing success, often challenging stereotypes and advancing racial pluralism in the process. Impermanent Blackness explores the complex nature of this almost-forgotten period of interracial publishing by examining key developments, including the mainstream success of African American authors in the 1930s and 1940s, the emergence of multiracial children’s literature, postwar tensions between supporters of racial cosmopolitanism and of “Negro literature,” and the impact of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements on the legacy of interracial literary culture. By the end of the 1960s, some literary figures once celebrated for pushing the boundaries of what Black writing could be, including the anthologist W. S. Braithwaite, the bestselling novelist Frank Yerby, the memoirist Juanita Harrison, and others, were forgotten or criticized as too white. And yet, Garibaldi argues, these figures—at once dreamers and pragmatists—have much to teach us about building an inclusive society. Revisiting their work from a contemporary perspective, Garibaldi breaks new ground in the cultural history of race in the United States.

The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess

The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess PDF Author: Ellen Noonan
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807837164
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
Examines the opera Porgy and Bess's long history of invention and reinvention as a barometer of 20th-century American expectations about race, culture and the struggle for equality.

The Continuum Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre

The Continuum Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre PDF Author: Colin Chambers
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1847146120
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 892

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Book Description
International in scope, this book is designed to be the pre-eminent reference work on the English-speaking theatre in the twentieth century. Arranged alphabetically, it consists of some 2500 entries written by 280 contributors from 20 countries which include not only top-level experts, but, uniquely, leading professionals from the world of theatre. A fascinating resource for anyone interested in theatre, it includes: - Overviews of major concepts, topics and issues; - Surveys of theatre institutions, countries, and genres; - Biographical entries on key performers, playwrights, directors, designers, choreographers and composers; - Articles by leading professionals on crafts, skills and disciplines including acting, design, directing, lighting, sound and voice.

The Soviet Government and the Jews 1948-1967

The Soviet Government and the Jews 1948-1967 PDF Author:
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN:
Category : Jews in Russia
Languages : en
Pages : 636

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Book Description