Download or read book Black British Women s Theatre written by Nicola Abram and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-10-12 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book marks a significant methodological shift in studies of black British women’s theatre: it looks beyond published plays to the wealth of material held in archives of various kinds, from national repositories and themed collections to individuals’ personal papers. It finds there a cache of unpublished manuscripts and production recordings distinctive for their non-naturalistic aesthetics. Close analysis of selected works identifies this as an intersectional feminist creative practice. Chapters focus on five theatre companies and artists, spanning several decades: Theatre of Black Women (1982-1988), co-founded by Booker Prize-winning writer Bernardine Evaristo; Munirah Theatre Company (1983-1991); Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop (1990-1992); Zindika; and SuAndi. The book concludes by reflecting on the politics of representation, with reference to popular postmillennial playwright debbie tucker green. Drawing on new interviews with the playwrights/practitioners and their peers, this book assembles a rich, interconnected, and occasionally corrective history of black British women’s creativity. By reproducing 22 facsimile images of flyers, production programmes, photographs and other ephemera, Black British Women’s Theatre: Intersectionality, Archives, Aesthetics not only articulates a hidden history but allows its readers their own encounter with the fragile record of this vibrant past.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights written by Elaine Aston and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion, first published in 2000, addresses the work of women playwrights in Britain throughout the twentieth century.
Download or read book An Inconvenient Black History of British Musical Theatre written by Sean Mayes and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-08-26 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A radically urgent intervention, An Inconvenient Black History of British Musical Theatre: 1900 - 1950 uncovers the hidden Black history of this most influential of artforms. Drawing on lost archive material and digitised newspapers from the turn of the century onwards, this exciting story has been re-traced and restored to its rightful place. A vital and significant part of British cultural history between 1900 and 1950, Black performance practice was fundamental to resisting and challenging racism in the UK. Join Mayes (a Broadway- and Toronto-based Music Director) and Whitfield (a musical theatre historian and researcher) as they take readers on a journey through a historically-inconvenient and brilliant reality that has long been overlooked. Get to know the Black theatre community in London's Roaring 20s, and hear about the secret Florence Mills memorial concert they held in 1928. Acquaint yourself with Buddy Bradley, Black tap and ballet choreographer, who reshaped dance in British musicals - often to be found at Noël Coward's apartment for late-night rehearsals, such was Bradley's importance. Meet Jack Johnson, the first African American Heavyweight Boxing Champion, who toured Britain's theatres during World War 1 and brought the sounds of Chicago to places like war-weary Dundee. Discover the most prolific Black theatre practitioner you've never heard of, William Garland, who worked for 40 years across multiple continents and championed Black British performers. Marvel at performers like cabaret star Mabel Mercer, born in Stafford in 1900, who sang and conducted theatre orchestras across the UK, as well as Black Birmingham comedian Eddie Emerson, who was Garland's partner for decades. Many of their names and works have never been included in histories of the British musical - until now.
Download or read book Contemporary Black and Asian Women Playwrights in Britain written by Gabriele Griffin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-12-08 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text was the first monograph to document and analyse the plays written by Black and Asian women in Britain. The volume explores how Black and Asian women playwrights theatricalize their experiences of migration, displacement, identity, racism and sexism in Britain. Plays by writers such as Tanika Gupta, Winsome Pinnock, Maya Chowdhry and Amrit Wilson, among others - many of whom have had their work produced at key British theatre sites - are discussed in some detail. Other playwrights' work is also briefly explored to suggest the range and scope of contemporary plays. The volume analyses concerns such as geographies of un/belonging, reverse migration (in the form of tourism), sexploitation, arranged marriages, the racialization of sexuality, and asylum seeking as they emerge in the plays, and argues that Black and Asian women playwrights have become constitutive subjects of British theatre.
Download or read book The Woman in Black written by Susan Hill and published by Random House. This book was released on 2007 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Proud and solitary, Eel Marsh House surveys the windswept reaches of the salt marshes beyond Nine Lives Causeway. Arthur Kipps, a junior solicitor, is summoned to attend the funeral of Mrs Alice Drablow, the house's sole inhabitant, unaware of the tragic secrets which lie hidden behind the shuttered windows. It is not until he glimpses a pale young woman, dressed all in black, at the funeral, that a creeping sense of unease begins to take hold, a feeling deepened by the reluctance of the locals to talk of the woman in black - and her terrible purpose.
Download or read book Chiaroscuro written by Jackie Kay and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-08-31 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I want to find it all now know our names know the others in history so many women have been lost at sea so many stories have been swept away Chiaroscuro: (noun) the treatment of light and shade in drawing and painting. Aisha, Yomi, Beth and Opal couldn't be more different, but when Aisha hosts a dinner party, the friends soon discover that they're all looking for an answer to the same question. Does it lie in Aisha's childhood? Or in Beth and Opal's new romance? Who will tell them who they really are? What starts out as a friendly conversation between women, soon turns heated when Yomi reveals what she really thinks about Beth and Opal's relationship. A searing, tender look at queer Black womanhood by award-winning writer and Scots Makar Jackie Kay.
Download or read book Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture written by Alison Donnell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-09-11 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture is the first comprehensive reference book to provide multidisciplinary coverage of the field of black cultural production in Britain. The publication is of particular value because despite attracting growing academic interest in recent years, this field is still often subject to critical and institutional neglect. For the purpose of the Companion, the term 'black' is used to signify African, Caribbean and South Asian ethnicities, while at the same time addressing the debates concerning notions of black Britishness and cultural identity. This single volume Companion covers seven intersecting areas of black British cultural production since 1970: writing, music, visual and plastic arts, performance works, film and cinema, fashion and design, and intellectual life. With entries on distinguished practitioners, key intellectuals, seminal organizations and concepts, as well as popular cultural forms and local activities, the Companion is packed with information and suggestions for further reading, as well as offering a wide lens on the events and issues that have shaped the cultural interactions and productions of black Britain over the last thirty years. With a range of specialist advisors and contributors, this work promises to be an invaluable sourcebook for students, researchers and academics interested in exploring the diverse, complex and exciting field of black cultural forms in postcolonial Britain.
Download or read book Black Theatre written by Paul Carter Harrison and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2002-11-08 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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."
Download or read book Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal written by Kate Dossett and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-01-29 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance written by Kathy A. Perkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. Chapter 20 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Download or read book Errol John s Moon on a Rainbow Shawl written by Lynette Goddard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-05 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Errol John wrote Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (1958) after becoming disillusioned about the lack of good roles for black actors on the British theatre scene. While this situation has only slightly improved since, his response has become the most revived black play in Britain, from its original production at the Royal Court in 1958, to the National Theatre in 2012. It depicts the lives of a black community living in poverty in a shared tenement yard in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in the mid-1940s, showing how each of the characters carries dreams of escaping to create better lives for themselves and their families. Lynette Goddard focuses on how the play articulates the narratives of migration that prompted many Caribbean people to uproot from their homes on the islands and move to the England in the post-war era. For some of them, these dreams of a new life became a reality, but they were experienced differently across genders and generations.
Download or read book Black and Asian Theatre In Britain written by Colin Chambers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black and Asian Theatre in Britain is an unprecedented study tracing the history of ‘the Other’ through the ages in British theatre. The diverse and often contradictory aspects of this history are expertly drawn together to provide a detailed background to the work of African, Asian, and Caribbean diasporic companies and practitioners. Colin Chambers examines early forms of blackface and other representations in the sixteenth century, through to the emergence of black and Asian actors, companies, and theatre groups in their own right. Thorough analysis uncovers how they led to a flourishing of black and Asian voices in theatre at the turn of the twenty-first century. Figures and companies studied include: Ira Aldridge Henry Francis Downing Paul Robeson Errol John Mustapha Matura Dark and Light Theatre The Keskidee Centre Indian Art and Dramatic Society Temba Edric and Pearl Connor Tara Arts Yvonne Brewster Tamasha Talawa. Black and Asian Theatre in Britain is an enlightening and immensely readable resource and represents a major new study of theatre history and British history as a whole.
Download or read book Modern and Contemporary Black British Drama written by Mary Brewer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-09-16 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This indispensable overview of modern black British drama spans seven decades of distinctive playwriting from the 1950s to the present. Interweaving social and cultural context with close critical analysis of key dramatists' plays, leading scholars explore how these dramatists have created an enduring, transformative and diverse cultural presence.
Download or read book Black British Drama written by Michael Pearce and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-14 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black British Drama: A Transnational Story looks afresh at the ways black theatre in Britain is connected to and informed by the spaces of Africa, the Caribbean and the USA. Michael Pearce offers an exciting new approach to reading modern and contemporary black British drama, examining plays by a range of writers including Michael Abbensetts, Mustapha Matura, Caryl Phillips, Winsome Pinnock, Kwame Kwei-Armah, debbie tucker green, Roy Williams and Bola Agbaje. Chapters combine historical documentation and discussion with close analysis to provide an in-depth, absorbing account of post-war black British drama situated within global and transnational circuits. A significant contribution to black British and black diaspora theatre studies, Black British Drama is a must-read for scholars and students in this evolving field.
Download or read book Staging Black Feminisms written by Lynette Goddard and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-04-12 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Staging Black Feminisms explores the development and principles of black British women's plays and performance since the late Twentieth century. Using contemporary performance theory to explore key themes, it offers close textual readings and production analysis of a range of plays, performance poetry and live art works by practitioners.
Download or read book Black Women Centre Stage written by Paola Prieto López and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-13 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the political alliances that are built across the diaspora in contemporary plays written by Black women playwrights in the UK. Through the concept of creative diasporic solidarity, it offers an innovative theoretical approach to examine the ways in which the playwrights respond creatively to the violence and marginalisation of Black communities, especially Black women. This study demonstrates that theatre can act as a productive space for the ethical encounter with the Other (understood in terms of alterity, as someone different from the self) by examining the possibilities of these plays to activate the spectators’ responsibility and solidarity towards different types of violence experienced by Black women, offering alternative modes of relationality. The book engages with a range of contemporary works written by Black women playwrights in the UK, including Mojisola Adebayo, Theresa Ikoko, Diana Nneka Atuona, Gloria Williams, Charlene James, or Yusra Warsama, bringing to the fore a gendered and intersectional approach to the analysis of the texts. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in contemporary theatre, gender studies and diaspora studies.
Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage written by Jan Sewell and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-04-29 with total page 850 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together nearly 40 academics and theatre practitioners to chronicle and celebrate the courage, determination and achievements of women on stage across the ages and around the globe. The collection stretches from ancient Greece to present-day Australasia via the United States, Soviet Russia, Europe, India, South Africa and Japan, offering a series of analytical snapshots of women performers, their work and the conditions in which they produced it. Individual chapters provide in-depth consideration of specific moments in time and geography while the volume as a whole and its juxtapositions stimulate consideration of the bigger picture, underlining the challenges women have faced across cultures in establishing themselves as performers and the range of ways in which they gained access to the stage. Organised chronologically, the volume looks not just to the past but the future: it challenges the very notions of ‘history’, ‘stage’ and even the definition of ‘women’ itself.
