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Black Theatre Movement PREPRINT PREPRINT - Olga Barrios, The Black Theatre Movement in the United States and in South Africa . Valencia: Universitat de València, 2008. 2008 1 To all African people and African descendants and their cultures for having brought enlightenment and inspiration into my life 3 CONTENTS Pág. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS …………………………………………………………… 6 INTRODUCTION …………………………………………………………………….. 9 CHAPTER I From the 1950s through the 1980s: A Socio-Political and Historical Account of the United States/South Africa and the Black Theatre Movement…………………. 15 CHAPTER II The Black Theatre Movement: Aesthetics of Self-Affirmation ………………………. 47 CHAPTER III The Black Theatre Movement in the United States. Black Aesthetics: Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, and Douglas Turner Ward ………………………………. 73 CHAPTER IV The Black Theatre Movement in the United States. Black Women’s Aesthetics: Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Kennedy, and Ntozake Shange …………………….. 109 CHAPTER V The Black Theatre Movement in South Africa. Black Consciousness Aesthetics: Matsemala Manaka, Maishe Maponya, Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema and Barney Simon …………………………………... 144 CHAPTER VI The Black Theatre Movement in South Africa. Black South African Women’s Voices: Fatima Dike, Gcina Mhlophe and Other Voices ………………………………………. 173 CONCLUSION ………………………………………………………………………… 193 BIBLIOGRAPHY ……………………………………………………………………… 199 APPENDIX I …………………………………………………………………………… 221 APPENDIX II ………………………………………………………………………….. 225 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing this book has been an immeasurable reward, in spite of the hard and critical moments found throughout its completion. The process of this culmination commenced in 1984 when I arrived in the United States to pursue a Masters Degree in African American Studies for which I wish to thank very sincerely the Fulbright Fellowships Committee. I wish to acknowledge the Phi Beta Kappa Award Selection Committee, whose contribution greatly helped solve my financial adversity in the completion of my work. Additional acknowledgements are due to the Institute of American Cultures and the Graduate Division and Theatre Department at the University of California, Los Angeles for offering me the possibility to accomplish my research in South Africa. I also wish to thank the Afrika Cultural Centre, the Institute of African Studies and the Department of Theatre at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg for their hospitality and immense help in my research. My special and sincere gratitude to James V. Hatch who patiently and kindly allowed me to use the materials of the Hatch-Billops Collection in New York, and who continued to support me throughout the research process. Very special thanks must be extended to all the theatre artists I interviewed and conversed with both in the United States and in South Africa for their kindness and the time they spent answering my questions. Among these theatre artists and critics I would like to thank very sincerely the following: Amiri Baraka, Fatima Dike, Benjy Francis, John Kani, Adrienne Kennedy, Siphiwe Khumalo, Phyllis Klotz, John Ledwaba, Maishe Maponya, Doris Mazibuko, Gcina Mhlophe, Aubrey M. Moalosi, Smal Ndaba, Mbongeni Ngema, Jay Pather, Kriben Pillay, Malcolm Purkey, Ian Steadman, Sipho Sepamla, Barney Simon, Mavis Taylor and Margaret Wilkerson. I want to express my deepest gratitude to the Department of Afro-American Studies, its supportive and warm staff and professors, at the University of California, Los Angeles which offered me the great opportunity to be exposed to the richness of African American culture, and especially to Richard Yarborough who always offered me his support, advice and wise criticism. Very special thanks must be expressed to Mel Helstein, Beverly J. Robinson ( in memoriam ) and Carl Mueller for helping and supporting my initiation and growth in the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. I wish to thank particularly Beverly J. Robinson for having supervised my work and extend my gratitude to Edward A. Alpers, Henry Goodman and Mazisi Kunene for their continuous support, friendship, advice and availability to offer their help whenever I needed it. In the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), I wish to thank its entire staff who greatly contributed to solve my bureaucratic problems 6 and strengthened my weak moments with their affection. Additionally, I wish to thank Michael McLain for his support and for permitting me to attend his classes; Meg Wilbur and Lisette Rabinow and all the students with whom I shared their classes, for their spiritual and technical guidance and understanding; Anna Krajewska-Wieczorek and Edit Villarreal for their teaching, continuous support, advice, affection, friendship and concern in moments when I was tumbling down in a country which was foreign to me. I would like to express particular thanks to the Chicano Studies Research Center staff whose warmth and continuous support throughout the process of my doctoral studies made me feel I was a member of their big family. I also want to thank many friends and colleagues, among them Bonnie Chiu, Marcela Domínguez, María Eugenia Fuenmanyor and Héctor Geffner and Miquel Huguet, for their supportive presence in difficult moments and sheltering affection; the “Gang of Four,” without whom I would not have been able to accomplish my Doctoral degree at UCLA; Batya Casper Laks, whose contagious enthusiasm, passion, generosity and friendship were always stimulating and encouraging; Yolanda García-Reynero, whose warmth, strength and forceful spirit were always cause of admiration and inspiration to me; and, Antonio Jiménez, whose friendship, love and generosity became one of the strongest foundations that supported me in difficult moments of weakness and hopelessness. 7 INTRODUCTION Theatre can’t be some random exercise in finger popping. It has to represent the striving of men to try to raise themselves to a new level of thought, and it’s not—I mean, we don’t talk about theatre down here, or theatre up there as an idle jest but because it is necessary to pump life, blood back into our community—that’s what we’re talking about. Amiri Baraka 1 I am here between the voices of our ancestors and the noise of the planet. between the surprise of death and life; I am here because I shall not give the earth up to non-dreamers and earth molesters; I am here to say to you: my body is full of veins like the bombs waiting to burst with blood. … I am here, and my breath/our breaths must thunder across this land arousing new breaths. new life. Sonia Sanchez 2 The 1960s throughout the 1980s have been, with no doubt, the most vibrant and prolific decades in Black Theatre both in the United States and in South Africa. A great number of plays burst out like a forceful waterfall of red blood—expression of a long time-held rage and expression of life. Houston A. Baker, Jr., has observed the significance of the sixties and seventies for African Americans: At no time in the history of black America have so many spokesmen dedicated themselves in serious and informed ways, to a particular set of meanings and values. These men and women altered the existing face of society in a way that makes it impossible to begin the journey back as though blacks have always rushed eagerly into harbors of the white world. The texts of the sixties and seventies constitute a level of discourse where functional oppositions are readily observable. 3 1 Amiri Baraka, First Pan-African Cultural Festival, 1969, in Algiers, in Black Theatre 5 (1969):30. 2 Sonia Sanchez, “Reflections After the June 12th March for Disarmament,” in homegirls & handgrenades , Sanchez (New York and Chicago: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1984) 68. 3 Houston A. Baker, Jr., The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago, 1983) 131. 9 The Black Theatre Movement emerged after being gestated for almost three centuries and activated by the Black Power Movements in North America and by the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa. The plays of the Movement were breathing and pulsating so vigorously because its authors had something important to utter as the Black community’s representatives. The Black community became the protagonist of the new theatre. Audience recovered its traditional and pivotal role as part of the theatrical event—a stylistic element almost non-existent in modern Western theatre. About two decades earlier, Western theatre artists, such as Antonin Artaud and Bertolt Brecht, had already commenced to question the validity of Western theatre and proposed the need to include new elements, which would eventually give birth to a new aesthetics. Artaud and Brecht observed the need to create a new theatrical language and asserted the importance to engage the theatre audience in a dialectical process with the action taking place on the stage. In the same line, the artists of the Black Theatre Movement realized not only the passivity played by the audience in the past but also the passive role imposed on the Black community in a society governed by White rule. These artists initiated a double task: the restoration of theatre audience and Black culture from the death imposed on them by Western imperialism—both political and intellectual. The Black Theatre Movement exploded as a spring of life freed by a new aesthetics created by artists who were committed to and voiced their community’s needs. Geneviève Fabre accurately points out that the emergence of African American theatre is “above all
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