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Gus Edwards Introduction It is necessary to eradicate the misconception that African and African American theatre is an exotic variation of Western European theatre and must therefore be governed by its general principles and aesthetics—a notion has prevailed both in academic circles and in the popular mind for nearly a century. “We are not white theatre in black face,” playwright Ed Bullins (along with many other black theatre artists) has been saying since the 1960s.1 Yet in the minds of the general public this impression still exists because the so-called opinion makers in the mainstream press refuse to acknowledge our differences, whether out of ignorance or a deliberate attempt to deny us our specific identity as the descendents of Africans. Therefore we must once more go to the mountain, raise our voices, and shout down into the canyon: No, this is not so! African American theatre is governed by its own set of rules and disciplines, evolved out of our experience in the New World and informed by the music, ritual, dance, mask making, and song/chant of Africa. “Our aesthetic is performative and not didactic. In practice it subverts the European definition of aesthetic. It must be understood that when I make theatre, Haiti is in my mind but Brazil is in my hips,” Ntozake Shange announced to a gathering at Dartmouth College on a crisp winter day in March 1998, to the cheers of her African American audience.2 We must train our artists to be true to themselves and their culture, I believe, because it has been so rigorously trained out of them. It must be understood that our spiritual past and future are rendered through the movement, music, and language that emerges out of our culture, then and now. Only when we express our art in this way can we truly express who we are. In a recent interview on performance and preparation for performance, Douglas Turner Ward, actor, playwright, and director and co-founder of the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC), offered these observations: The only vehicle for acting is yourself. No agency other than yourself. And since you will start from there you have to start from that which is most familiar to that self. What you know, what you experience, what you heard. With black actors they start in broad and various ways, crossing many lines of class and experience but essentially in our context of America we have been shaped by a particularly unique experience which happens to be common to other black people in other parts of the world because of the Diaspora. Having some earlier link to Africa that is a common historical/cultural experience that transforms itself, that crosses boundaries. I mean you could say those brought to the West Indies , those brought to Brazil, those brought to the United States, all share a history of subjugation, dispersal, etc., that has created a common background. That is what’s closest to us, whether we like it or not. Whether we try to escape it or not. Culture is very specific, creativity is very specific. Artistry is very specific. It’s not some vague, evanescent sort of liberal nonsense about color-blind casting. There’s no such thing. . . . When you don’t see color, the only color you see is then white. There’s no such thing as color blindness. It doesn’t make things superior, there’s no experience that’s superior to another. But at least in order for everybody to be equal one has to acknowledge the primacy, as a starting point, of one’s own specific cultural background.3 Some years ago, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Charles Fuller put it this way: Culture is a reflection of a country’s estimate of itself. There’s no reason to believe in the United States, where the majority of the population is white, that there is ever going to be a time when this country assesses itself in terms of black man. That’s just ludicrous. That’s just not going to happen. So the best it can do is say things like, “Well, Michael Jordan is one of the best basketball players of all time, but then black people are always good at sports.” There’s always a qualification in there. When it comes to the arts, white people’s praise for your work implies to a certain extent that you have captured the use of this...

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