They Love to Watch Us Dance

The evolving relationship between Black performers, and white and Black spectators, is central to the story of Black federal theatre. Chapter 2 examines what happens when Black performance and white spectatorship become the focus of the drama itself. It examines Abram Hill and John Silvera’s Liberty Deferred, alongside Stars and Bars, a satirical newspaper developed by the Hartford Negro Unit but usually credited solely to the white dramatist Ward Courtney. Both newspapers position white and Black spectators as objects of the Black gaze and both mock the pretensions to radical innovation by white Living Newspapers such as One Third of a Nation. Scholarship on the Federal Theatre’s Living Newspaper relies almost entirely on Living Newspapers developed and staged by white theatre practitioners. This chapter argues that Black Living Newspapers developed a variety of techniques to unmask the performative devices used within white Living Newspapers that consolidate even as they critique the racial discourses which enforce Black subordination. In so doing, they compelled white FTP administrators to engage with the history and practice of Black performance and white spectatorship.

The Americanization of the Soviet Living Newspaper

This article examines the migration of a Soviet agitational theatrical form from Russia to the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. The Soviet living newspaper, or zhivaia gazeta, began during the Russian Civil War as a method to act out a pro-Soviet version of the news for mainly illiterate Red Army soldiers. During the 1920s, it evolved into an experimental form of agitprop theater that attracted the interest of foreigners, who hoped to develop new methods of political theater in their own countries. In the United States, the living newspaper format was first adopted by American communist circles. Eventually, the depression-era arts program, the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), incorporated an expanded and altered version as part of its many offerings. Living newspapers eventually became one of the FTP’s most celebrated and criticized performance genres. The political content of American living newspapers was a major factor in the government’s elimination of the FTP in 1939.

Living Newspaper: Theatre and Therapy

Living Newspapers—a hallmark of the Federal Theatre Project of the 1930s—were foretold in 1915 by the Italian futurists, brought into existence in 1919 in the Soviet Union, further developed in Vienna in the 1920s by the founder of psychodrama, Jacob Moreno, played in India in the 1960s and after, and are used as therapy today.