A comprehensive directory of more than 600 entries, this detailed ready reference features professional, semi-professional, and academic stage organizations and theatres that have been in the forefront in pioneering most of the advances that African Americans have made in the theatre. It includes groups from the early 19th century to the dawn of the revolutionary Black theatre movement of the 1960s. It is an effort to bring together into one volume information that has hitherto been scattered throughout a number of different sources. The volume begins with an illuminating foreword by Errol Hill, a noted critic, playwright, scholar and Willard Professor of Drama Emeritus, Dartmouth College. A comprehensive directory of more than 600 entries, this detailed ready reference features professional, semi-professional, and academic stage organizations and theatres that have been in the forefront in pioneering most of the advances that African Americans have made in the theatre. It includes groups from the early 19th century to the dawn of the revolutionary Black theatre movement of the 1960s. It is an effort to bring together into one volume information that has hitherto been scattered throughout a number of different sources. The volume begins with an illuminating foreword by Errol Hill, a noted critic, playwright, scholar and Willard Professor of Drama Emeritus, Dartmouth College. Included in the volume are the earliest organizations that existed before the Civil War, Black minstrel troupes, pioneer musical show companies, selected vaudeville and road show troupes, professional theatrical associations, booking agencies, stock companies, significant amateur and little theatre groups, Black units of the WPA Federal Theatre, and semi-professional groups in Harlem after the Federal Theatre. The A-Z entries are supplemented with a classified appendix that also includes additional organizations not listed in the main directory, a bibliography, and three indexes for shows, showpeople, and general subjects. Cross referencing makes related information easy to find.

This directory includes over 500 African American performers and theater people who have made a significant contribution to the American stage from the early 19th century to the beginning of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Entries provide succinct biographical and theatrical information gathered from a variety of sources including library theater and drama collections, dissertations and theses, newspaper and magazine reviews and criticism, theater programs, theatrical memoirs, and earlier performing arts directories. Among the professional artists included in this volume are performers, librettists, lyricists, directors, producers, choreographers, stage managers, and musicians. The individuals profiled represent almost every major category and genre of the professional, semiprofessional, regional, and academic stage including minstrelsy, vaudeville, musical theater, and drama. Persons of historical significance are included as well as those stars and theatrical personalities that were well known during their time but who are relatively forgotten today. This comprehensive volume will appeal to theater and musical theater, Black studies, and American studies scholars. Cross-referenced throughout, this reference also includes an extensive bibliography and appendices of other theater personalities excluded from the main text. Separate indexes list the personalities, teams and partnerships, and performing groups, organizations, and companies.

A comprehensive directory of more than 600 entries, this detailed ready reference features professional, semi-professional, and academic stage organizations and theatres that have been in the forefront in pioneering most of the advances that African Americans have made in the theatre. It includes groups from the early 19th century to the dawn of the revolutionary Black theatre movement of the 1960s. It is an effort to bring together into one volume information that has hitherto been scattered throughout a number of different sources. The volume begins with an illuminating foreword by Errol Hill, a noted critic, playwright, scholar and Willard Professor of Drama Emeritus, Dartmouth College. A comprehensive directory of more than 600 entries, this detailed ready reference features professional, semi-professional, and academic stage organizations and theatres that have been in the forefront in pioneering most of the advances that African Americans have made in the theatre. It includes groups from the early 19th century to the dawn of the revolutionary Black theatre movement of the 1960s. It is an effort to bring together into one volume information that has hitherto been scattered throughout a number of different sources. The volume begins with an illuminating foreword by Errol Hill, a noted critic, playwright, scholar and Willard Professor of Drama Emeritus, Dartmouth College. Included in the volume are the earliest organizations that existed before the Civil War, Black minstrel troupes, pioneer musical show companies, selected vaudeville and road show troupes, professional theatrical associations, booking agencies, stock companies, significant amateur and little theatre groups, Black units of the WPA Federal Theatre, and semi-professional groups in Harlem after the Federal Theatre. The A-Z entries are supplemented with a classified appendix that also includes additional organizations not listed in the main directory, a bibliography, and three indexes for shows, showpeople, and general subjects. Cross referencing makes related information easy to find.

Entries provide succinct biographical and theatrical information gathered from a variety of sources including library theater and drama collections, dissertations and theses, newspaper and magazine reviews and criticism, theater programs, theatrical memoirs, and earlier performing arts directories. Among the professional artists included in this volume are performers, librettists, lyricists, directors, producers, choreographers, stage managers, and musicians. The individuals profiled represent almost every major category and genre of the professional, semiprofessional, regional, and academic stage including minstrelsy, vaudeville, musical theater, and drama.

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 historical dramas, Broadway musicals, and experimental theatre allow readers to discover expansive articulations of Blackness. Part II "Institution building" highlights institutions that have nurtured Black people both on stage and behind the scenes. Topics include Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), festivals, and black actor training. Part III "Theatre and social change" surveys key moments when Black people harnessed the power of theatre to affirm community realities and posit new representations for themselves and the nation as a whole. Topics include Du Bois and African Muslims, women of the Black Arts Movement, Afro-Latinx theatre, youth theatre, and operatic sustenance for an Afro future. Part IV "Expanding the traditional stage" examines Black performance traditions that privilege Black worldviews, sense-making, rituals, and innovation in everyday life. This section explores performances that prefer the space of the kitchen, classroom, club, or field. This book engages a wide audience of scholars, students, and theatre practitioners with its unprecedented breadth. More than anything, these invaluable insights not only offer a window onto the processes of producing work, but also the labour and economic issues that have shaped and enabled African American theatre. Chapter 20 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

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.

African American Performance and Theater History is an anthology of critical writings that explores the intersections of race, theater, and performance in America. Assembled by two esteemed scholars in black theater, Harry J. Elam, Jr. and David Krasner, and composed of essays from acknowledged authorities in the field, this anthology is organized into four sections representative of the ways black theater, drama, and performance interact and enact continual social, cultural, and political dialogues. Ranging from a discussion of dramatic performances of Uncle Tom's Cabin to the Black Art Movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, articles gathered in the first section, "Social Protest and the Politics of Representation," discuss the ways in which African American theater and performance have operated as social weapons and tools of protest. The second section of the volume, "Cultural Traditions, Cultural Memory and Performance," features, among other essays, Joseph Roach's chronicle of the slave performances at Congo Square in New Orleans and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s critique of August Wilson's cultural polemics. "Intersections of Race and Gender," the third section, includes analyses of the intersections of race and gender on the minstrel stage, the plight of black female choreographers at the inception of Modern Dance, and contemporary representations of black homosexuality by PomoAfro Homo. Using theories of performance and performativity, articles in the fourth section, "African American Performativity and the Performance of Race," probe into the ways blackness and racial identity have been constructed in and through performance. The final section is a round-table assessment of the past and present state of African American Theater and Performance Studies by some of the leading senior scholars in the field--James V. Hatch, Sandra L. Richards, and Margaret B. Wilkerson. Revealing the dynamic relationship between race and theater, this volume illustrates how the social and historical contexts of production critically affect theatrical performances of blackness and their meanings and, at the same time, how African American cultural, social, and political struggles have been profoundly affected by theatrical representations and performances. This one-volume collection is sure to become an important reference for those studying black theater and an engrossing survey for all readers of African American literature.