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In Hollywood, we hear, it’s all about the money. It’s a ready explanation for why so few black films get made—no crossover appeal, no promise of a big payoff. But what if the money itself is color-coded? What if the economics that governs film production is so skewed that no film by, about, or for people of color will ever look like a worthy investment unless it follows specific racial or gender patterns? This, Monica Ndounou shows us, is precisely the case. In a work as revealing about the culture of filmmaking as it is about the distorted economics of African American film, Ndounou clearly traces the insidious connections between history, content, and cash in black films. How does hi...
"Everyone involved in the performing arts, from professors to casting directors to actors to students, especially those just starting out, should read this eye-opening work." Library Journal, Starred Review A practical guide that shows BIPOC actors how to break down the audition process rather than being broken down by the entertainment industry and its practices of exclusion and bias. Working in an environment that often stereotypes or attempts to “universalize” experiences, it’s more important than ever that actors consider how culture, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and ability are inseparable and important parts of their identity that should not be minimized and can instead en...
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 histori...
This new edition provides an expanded, comprehensive history of African American theatre, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Including discussions of slave rebellions on the national stage, African Americans on Broadway, the Harlem Renaissance, African American women dramatists, and the New Negro and Black Arts movements, the Companion also features fresh chapters on significant contemporary developments, such as the influence of the Black Lives Matter movement, the mainstream successes of Black Queer Drama and the evolution of African American Dance Theatre. Leading scholars spotlight the producers, directors, playwrights, and actors who have fashioned a more accurate appearance of Black life on stage, revealing the impact of African American theatre both within the United States and around the world. Addressing recent theatre productions in the context of political and cultural change, it invites readers to reflect on where African American theatre is heading in the twenty-first century.
Presenting an innovative approach to performance studies and literary history, Soyica Colbert argues for the centrality of black performance traditions to African American literature, including preaching, dancing, blues and gospel, and theatre itself, showing how these performance traditions create the 'performative ground' of African American literary texts. Across a century of literary production using the physical space of the theatre and the discursive space of the page, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, August Wilson and others deploy performances to re-situate black people in time and space. The study examines African American plays past and present, including A Raisin in the Sun, Blues for Mister Charlie and Joe Turner's Come and Gone, demonstrating how African American dramatists stage black performances in their plays as acts of recuperation and restoration, creating sites that have the potential to repair the damage caused by slavery and its aftermath.
In this work examining Argentine theatre over the past four decades and drawing on contemporary research, Noe Montez considers how theatre can serve as activism and alter public reception to a government addressing human rights violations by its predecessor.
Stanislavsky and Race is the first book to explore the role that Konstantin Stanislavsky’s “system” and its legacies can play in building, troubling and illuminating today’s anti-racist theatre practices. This collection of essays from leading figures in the field of actor training stands not only as a resource for a new area of academic enquiry, but also for students, actors, directors, teachers and academics who are engaged in making inclusive contemporary theatre. In seeking to dismantle the dogma that surrounds much actor training and replace it with a culturally competent approach that will benefit our entire community, the “system” is approached from a range of perspectives featuring the research, reflections and provocations of 20 different international artists interrogating Stanislavsky’s approach through the lens of race, place and identity. Stanislavsky and ... is a series of multi-perspectival collections that bring the enduring legacy of Stanislavskian actor training into the spotlight of contemporary performance culture, making them ideal for students, teachers and scholars of acting, actor training and directing.
Ernie McClintock and the Jazz Actors Family is a critical biography examining the life and work of Ernie McClintock, the founder of the Jazz Acting Method and 1997 recipient of the Living Legend Award from the National Black Theatre Festival, whose inclusive contributions to acting and actor training have largely remained on the fringes of scholarship and practice. Based on original archival research and interviews with McClintock’s students and peers, this book traces his life from his childhood in Chicago to Harlem in the 1960s at the height of the Black Arts Movement, to Richmond, Virginia in 2003, paying particular attention to his Black Power–influenced, culturally specific acting t...
How do nationalized stereotypes inform the reception and content of the migrant comedian’s work? How do performers adapt? What gets lost (and found) in translation? Border-Crossing and Comedy at the Théâtre Italien, 1716-1723 explores these questions in an early modern context. When a troupe of commedia dell’arte actors were invited by the French crown to establish a theatre in Paris, they found their transition was anything but easy. They had to learn a new language and adjust to French expectations and demands. This study presents their story as a dynamic model of coping with the challenges of migration, whereby the actors made their transnational identity a central focus of their comedy. Relating their work to popular twenty-first century comedians, this book also discusses the tools and ideas that contextualize the border-crossing comedian’s work—including diplomacy, translation, improvisation, and parody—across time.
Congratulations! You got the part! Now what? Many actors of all levels find it challenging to apply classroom and studio techniques to the rehearsal process. Rehearsing for a class is vastly different than a professional situation, and a consistent, practical, and constructive method is needed to truly bring to life vibrant and intricate characters. Building a Performance: An Actor's Guide to Rehearsal provides tools and techniques through different stages of the rehearsal process to enable actors to make more dynamic choices, craft complex characters, and find an engaging and powerful level of performance. John Basil and Dennis Schebetta bring decades of acting and teaching experience to he...