Performing Africa in America

In the semiotics of American culture, black is what white is not, appearing in eternal opposition. Instead, in fact, the presence of both has the complementary effect of affirming the integrity of the other until fused into an artificial confluence that shifts consciousness toward visions of gray and confusion. Such might be said to be the problem of assessing the paradox of Black Theatre performance in the American cultural firmament.

The African presence on the American stage has evolved considerably from the rude characterizations of nineteenth-century minstrelsy, as well as the mis-representations of black life generated by early twentieth-century Euro-American writers responding solely to a pigment-of-the-imagination. In 1926, the esteemed sociologist, W. E. B. Du Bois, declared that serious representation of "Negroes" required plays "written, directed, produced and performed" by African Americans in a theatre located in the black community. Absent from the declaration was any concern for an aesthetic departure from the conventions of the Western Tradition other than an opportunity to produce on stage authentic (read, respectable) portrayals of black life. In the latter half of the same period, however, black musicians introduced Bebop into the cultural matrix, proffering what Amiri Baraka has referred to in Blues People as a "willfully harsh, anti-assimilationist sound" that reached outside the aesthetic constraints accepted by theatre artists. In the Sixties, poet Larry Neal raised the critical bar in his aesthetic manifesto that demanded that black writing should have its own "symbology, mythology, iconology, and critiques," paving the way toward an inquiry into the retentions of Africa in the African American experience that would codify the stage writings and practices as Black Art in the process of constructing a social ideology focused on liberation from oppression.

During the next two decades, Black Thea(tre) began to emerge as an ethno-specific, ritual performance mode, rather than a thea(ter) presentation that replicates black experience. Black Thea(tre), as practice, should not be a Living Newspaper that simply records the dramas of life, or otherwise indulge in pathologies of personal confessionals, i.e., O'Neil's Long Day's Journey Into Night. Rather, a black play depends upon character archetypes to release testimonials that resonate with an entire community, as evinced in Clay's invocation of the orishas, Bessie Smith and Charlie Parker in Amiri Baraka's Dutchman, as well as King's unconditional announcement of self-empowerment as a challenge to arbitrary systems of control in August Wilson's King Hedley II. The ritual mode of a black play must invoke the metalanguage of the culture to penetrate the deep structures of mythic life that inform nuanced behavior which guides us toward revelations that could not be witnessed without the ritual exercise of theatre practice. The making of theatre requires a process that offers a reappraisal of the familiar in black experience, one that leads to the construction of a performance practice that illuminates and makes significant the symbolic systems of a people.

Irrespective of successful expressions of Black Thea(tre) practice as a transcendental process for dramatic illumination (i.e., Adrienne Kennedy, Ntozake Shange, Ed Bullins), most black stage writing since the Nineties has capitulated to the traditional convention of Social Realism and the fixed universe of the thea(ter) proscenium to frame familiar, more frequently burlesqued, images of social dysfunction. Or, they have retreated into the feel-good nostalgia of personal memory for reclamations of the past, journalistic expositions of reality, at best, more suited for television. As a result, all manners of black performance, ranging from simplistic Eurocentric stereotypes of black life in Porgy and Bess to the simple-minded self-parodies that burlesque black life on the Urban (so-called Chittlin') Circuit, have been arbitrarily subsumed under the rubric of Black Thea(tre). Perhaps it is the color-focal response to performance that blinds critical assessment of rigorous Black Thea(tre) practice as distinct from undistinguished popular entertainments, thereby problematizing the designation of the practice as...