‘Know Whence You Came’: Dramatic Art and Black British Identity

2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 253-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kwame Kwei-Armah
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Considerable Influence ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
British Identity ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
Black British ◽  
Center Stage ◽  
History Of

Kwame Kwei-Armah's play Elmina's Kitchen was a landmark in British theatre history as the first drama by an indigenous black writer to be staged in London's commercial West End. The play's success since its premiere at the Royal National Theatre included a national tour and a season at Center Stage, Baltimore, directed by August Wilson's director Marion McClinton. In this interview with Deirdre Osborne, Kwei-Armah testifies to Wilson's considerable influence and the inspiration he derives from Wilson's project to account for the history of black people's experience in every decade of the twentieth century. Deirdre Osborne is a lecturer in drama at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and has published essays on the work of black British dramatists and poets including Kwame Kwei-Armah, Dona Daley, debbie tucker green, Lemn Sissay, SuAndi, and Roy Williams.

From the Margins to Center Stage: Tyler Perry’s Popular African American Theatre

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rashida Z. Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Center Stage ◽  
Black Performance ◽  
History Of

If Perry now functions as a platform onto himself, his career began with seemingly much less broad, but no less significant, aspirations. In her analysis of taste, class, and the popular, in Chapter TwoRashida D. Shaw places Tyler Perry’s career within the context of a Black performance and theatre history that extends back to the nineteenth century, as she centralizes the history of the “Chitlin Circuit” or “Urban Theatre.” After establishing a literary cultural history that frames and restages the popularity, appeal, and reception of Perry’s plays, Shaw’s analysis more closely explores the ramifications of Perry’s behind-the-scenes role and onstage presence at the 2012 Tony Awards during a year that resulted in numerous historic successes for not only African American theatre-makers, but also for African American–centric productions in general.

scholarly journals “Irish Nights”: Paratheatrical Performances of Melodrama on and off the Belfast Stage

2018 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Phelan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
The Masses

Until relatively recently, melodrama has been an unfairly maligned genre of theatre history; its pejorative associations based on the prejudiced assumptions that its aesthetics of excess (in terms of its extravagant emotion, sensationalism and popularity amongst predominantly working class audiences) meant, therefore, that it was for simpletons. What Walter Benjamin excoriated as the “ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator” fuelled bourgeois disdain for this theatrical form and the derision of the Theatrical Inquisitor’s dismissal of melodrama as “aris[ing] from an inertness in the minds of the spectators, and a wish to be amused without the slightest exertion on their own parts, or any exercise whatever of their intellectual powers” remained the dominant critical response throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed, such views continued well into the twentieth century and certainly characterized the modernist reactions of the founding figures of the Irish national theatre in this period. Frank Fay, cofounder of the National Dramatic Society, denounced both the aesthetics of Dublin's Queen's Theatre as the “home of the shoddiest kind of melodrama,” and the intelligence of its audiences who, “wouldn't, at present, understand anything else.”

scholarly journals Year 1948: Emancipation of Women and Slovak Theatre.

2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-163
Author(s):  
Nadežda Lindovská
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
Theatrical Production ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Working People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
Theatre Historiography ◽  
First Time

Abstract From the cultural and art point of view, the year 1948 in Czechoslovakia was not just the so-called “Victorious February” of the working people. The remarkable phenomenon of this era, which was related to the post-war political and social movement, was the phenomenon of female emancipation and feminization of the stage production. During the two consecutive theatre seasons 1947/1948 and 1948/1949, at The New Scene Theatre of the National Theatre in Bratislava, several women, led by the director Magda Husaková-Lokvencová created several productions. For the first time, a sovereign feminine alliance had emerged in our performance art, proving that conceptual and thoughtful theatrical production may not be just the domain of men. These women contributed to deconstructing the beliefs of typically male and typically female professions as well as transforming traditional views of the role and position of both sexes in society and the arts. The attention of theatre historiography in the recapitalization of the impacts of the breakthrough events of the Czechoslovak post-war politics of the forty years on cultural events so far focused mainly on the issues of dramaturgy and poetics, the process of ideological transformation and the sovietisation of art in the spirit of socialist realism. The subject of socialist emancipation and theatre was at the edge of the interest of our theatrology. Ten years ago, a collective monograph, dedicated to the first lady of the Slovak theatre directors, Magda Husaková-Lokvencová, managing to free her forgotten personality and work and return her to the context of Slovak theatre history in the second half of the 20th century. There is still room for further research, complementing the knowledge and reflection of the advent of women in the sphere of theatre directory, dramaturgy and scenography artwork, as part of the history of gender relations in Slovakia. Increased interest in the history of women provokes a new reflection on the issue of emancipation and theatre.

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 242-262
Author(s):  
George Oppitz-Trotman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
Disciplinary Structure ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
German Universities

The reception of the English Comedians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is connected to their representation in modern theatre histories by ideations of travelling theatre in Enlightenment theatre projects. Theatre-historical chronicles began to be written in the second half of the eighteenth century, by which time there was already a vocabulary for itinerant theatre ready to be applied to the English Comedians in order to understand their effect on national dramatic culture. Setting these relations next to the development of Theaterwissenschaft out of philology in early twentieth-century German universities, this concluding chapter reflects on the influence of disciplinary structure upon the investigation of controversial historical phenomena. Various sorts of patriotism and methodologism have distorted the comprehension of the itinerant theatre and concealed its involvement in the generation of dramatic art. The contemporary crisis within the discipline of theatre history is explained with reference to the underestimation of theatre professionalization, which was a profound discontinuity in the history of Western culture.

History without a Past: On the Significance of a Non-event and the Researcher's Position in History Writing

2007 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
HANNA KORSBERG
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
World War ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second World

The article discusses a non-event as evidence for history writing, as well as the role of historians as constructors of histories, especially those historians who have taken part in the events they are writing about. These historiographical questions are intertwined in a case study of the Finnish National Theatre's intended visit to Berlin in May 1943. Although the visit was carefully planned, it never happened, due to a change in the political situation between Finland and Germany during the Second World War. This journey, which never took place, and its absence in the history of the Finnish National Theatre, are an indication of the complex bonding between theatre, history and politics.

Politicizing Harley Granville Barker: Suffragists and Shakespeare

2006 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 122-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Carlson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
State University ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
Iowa State University ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
History Of

The importance of Granville Barker’s association with J. E. Vedrenne in the seminal Court seasons of 1904-1907 is one of the ‘givens’ of twentieth-century theatre history, as are Barker’s later, groundbreaking productions of Shakespeare at the Savoy. Yet these and much of his intervening work were also in many ways collaborative achievements, now in association with his wife, the actress Lillah McCarthy – their later divorce helping to rewrite the history of their partnership. Lillah McCarthy was also a prominent suffragist, and Granville Barker allied himself with many other men and women who were working actively in support of the extended franchise. Susan Carlson argues that many of Granville Barker’s productions should be seen, in part, as artistic extensions of suffrage activism, and in this article she explores the ways in which his support for the suffragists manifested itself on as well as off the stage. Susan Carlson, Associate Provost and Professor of English at Iowa State University, has most recently published essays on suffrage theatre, focusing on its political use of comedy and its connections to productions of Shakespeare.

Hard Objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Discrete Series ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
The World ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.

Review: Urban Latino Cultures: La Vida Latina en LA by Gustavo Leclerc, Raúl Villa, and Michael J. Dear (eds.)

1999 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-128
Author(s):  
Catherine S. Ramirez
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
History Of ◽  
Crime Wave ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The City ◽  
History Of Los Angeles

Throughout the twentieth century (and now the twenty-first), the specter of a Latina/o past, present, and future has haunted the myth of Los Angeles as a sunny, bucolic paradise. At the same time it has loomed behind narratives of the city as a dystopic, urban nightmare. In the 1940s Carey McWilliams pointed to the fabrication of a “Spanish fantasy heritage” that made Los Angeles the bygone home of fair señoritas, genteel caballeros and benevolent mission padres. Meanwhile, the dominant Angeleno press invented a “zoot” (read Mexican-American) crime wave. Unlike the aristocratic, European Californias/os of lore, the Mexican/American “gangsters” of the 1940s were described as racial mongrels. What's more, the newspapers explicitly identified them as the sons and daughters of immigrants-thus eliding any link they may have had to the Californias/os of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or to the history of Los Angeles in general.

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