Author: George Clinton Densmore Odell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Theater
Languages : en
Pages : 860

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Book Description

Author: Shane WHITE
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674045149
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Stories of Freedom in Black New York recreates the experience of black New Yorkers as they moved from slavery to freedom. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, New York City's black community strove to realize what freedom meant, to find a new sense of itself, and, in the process, created a vibrant urban culture. Through exhaustive research, Shane White imaginatively recovers the raucous world of the street, the elegance of the city's African American balls, and the grubbiness of the Police Office. It allows us to observe the style of black men and women, to watch their public behavior, and to hear the cries of black hawkers, the strident music of black parades, and the sly stories of black conmen. Taking center stage in this story is the African Company, a black theater troupe that exemplified the new spirit of experimentation that accompanied slavery's demise. For a few short years in the 1820s, a group of black New Yorkers, many of them ex-slaves, challenged pervasive prejudice and performed plays, including Shakespearean productions, before mixed race audiences. Their audacity provoked feelings of excitement and hope among blacks, but often of disgust by many whites for whom the theater's existence epitomized the horrors of emancipation. Stories of Freedom in Black New York brilliantly intertwines black theater and urban life into a powerful interpretation of what the end of slavery meant for blacks, whites, and New York City itself. White's story of the emergence of free black culture offers a unique understanding of emancipation's impact on everyday life, and on the many forms freedom can take.

Author: George Thompson
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810114616
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
A history of the African Theatre, the first all-black theatre company in the United States. Founded in 1821 in New York by William Alexander Brown, the African Theatre was created in response to the social segregation of the day. Within its first year, however, the theatre had expanded its audience. No longer characterizing itself as a resort primarily for New York's African-American community, it began to address itself to New Yorkers in general. The author has researched and documented all available facts about the company: its members; productions; playhouses; length of operation; types of audiences; and the reasons for its demise.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Performing arts
Languages : en
Pages : 510

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Book Description

Author: Michael Chemers
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000593347
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Monsters in Performance boasts an impressive range of contemporary essays that delve into topical themes such as race, gender, and disability, to explore what constitutes monstrosity within the performing arts. These fascinating essays from leading and emerging scholars explore representation in performance, specifically concerning themselves with attempts at social disqualification of "undesirables." Throughout, the writers employ the concept of "monstrosity" to describe the cultural processes by which certain identities or bodies are configured to be threateningly deviant. The editors take a range of previously isolated critical inquiries – including bioethics, critical race studies, queer studies, and televisual studies - and merge them to create an accessible and dynamic platform which unifies these ranges of representations. The global scope and interdisciplinary nature of Monsters in Performance renders it an essential book for Theatre and Performance students of all levels as well as scholars; it will also be an enlightening text for those interested in monstrosity and Cultural Studies more broadly.

Author: Ann Haugo
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443814997
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
Terms such as race, ethnicity, otherness, and pluralism are becoming increasingly problematic as we grapple with issues of identity in the “post-multicultural” discursive landscape of the twenty-first century. Querying Difference in Theatre History comprises sixteen scholarly case studies in which authors tease out the limitations of contemporary discourse concerning ideas of difference in theatre history today. The essays then incorporate new approaches, theories, and critical vocabulary for dealing with such issues. Unlike other works that address similar subjects, this volume arranges essays by mode of inquiry rather than by “kind of difference.” It offers essays that are complex and rigorous, yet accessible and pleasurable—ideal for use in graduate- and upper-division undergraduate theatre and performance classrooms. While “difference” may immediately conjure issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and/or sexuality, this volume also includes essays that examine differences more broadly construed: nationalisms, economic gradations, and so forth. Particular topics in this volume range from intersections of class-based and sex-based politics in theatrical performances during the French Revolution, constructions of blackness and whiteness in turn-of-the-century American brothel dramas, “fantasy heritage,” examinations of immigrant, exile, and refugee dramatic characters vis-à-vis notions of diasporic space, to the political and methodological dilemmas raised when dealing with an individual or event that is “repugnant” or “despicable” to the historian (e.g., anti-gay funeral protests).

Author: David Worrall
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317315499
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Under the 1737 Licensing Act, Covent Garden, Dury Lane and regional Theatres Royal held a monopoly on the dramatic canon. This work explores the presentation of foreign cultures and ethnicities on the popular British stage from 1750 to 1840. It argues that this illegitimate stage was the site for a plebeian Enlightenment.

Author: W. T. Lhamon
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674010628
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
Beginning in the 1830s, the white actor Thomas D. Rice took to the stage as Jim Crow, and the ragged and charismatic trickster of black folklore entered—and forever transformed—American popular culture. Jump Jim Crow brings together for the first time the plays and songs performed in this guise and reveals how these texts code the complex use and abuse of blackness that has characterized American culture ever since Jim Crow’s first appearance. Along with the prompt scripts of nine plays performed by Rice—never before published as their original audiences saw them—W. T. Lhamon, Jr., provides a reconstruction of their performance history and a provocative analysis of their contemporary meaning. His reading shows us how these plays built a public blackness, but also how they engaged a disaffected white audience, who found in Jim Crow’s sass and wit and madcap dancing an expression of rebellion and resistance against the oppression and confinement suffered by ordinary people of all colors in antebellum America and early Victorian England. Upstaging conventional stories and forms, giving direction and expression to the unruly attitudes of a burgeoning underclass, the plays in this anthology enact a vital force still felt in great fictions, movies, and musics of the Atlantic and in the jumping, speedy styles that join all these forms.

Author: Rosemarie K. Bank
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521563871
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
A study of pre-Civil War American theatre.

Author: James Fairhead
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300213255
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Sailing the uncharted waters of the Pacific in 1830, Captain Benjamin Morrell of Connecticut became the first outsider to encounter the inhabitants of a small island off New Guinea. The contact quickly turned violent, fatal cannons were fired, and Morrell abducted young Dako, a hostage so shocked by the white complexions of his kidnappers that he believed he had been captured by the dead. This gripping book unveils for the first time the strange odyssey the two men shared in ensuing years. The account is uniquely told, as much from the captive’s perspective as from the American’s. Upon returning to New York, Morrell exhibited Dako as a “cannibal” in wildly popular shows performed on Broadway and along the east coast. The proceeds helped fund a return voyage to the South Pacific—the captain hoping to establish trade with Dako’s assistance, and Dako seizing his only chance to return home to his unmapped island. Supported by rich, newly found archives, this wide-ranging volume traces the voyage to its extraordinary ends and en route decrypts Morrell’s ambiguous character, the mythic qualities of Dako’s life, and the two men's infusion into American literature—Dako inspired Melville’s Queequeg, for example. The encounters confound indigenous peoples and Americans alike as both puzzle over what it is to be truly human and alive.