دانلود کتاب تئاتر سیاه، زندگی شهری – مؤسسات هنری آفریقایی آمریکایی و بوم‌شناسی‌های فرهنگی شهری

When I stepped outside of Fulton County’s Southwest Arts Center on a summer evening in 2018, a hypnotic and pulsating sound surrounded me, making it seem as if the air itself were alive. I asked the woman next to me what it was. “You must not be from around here,” she laughed. “Those are crickets.” The cumulative effect of hundreds of these tiny creatures making the air sing was as awe-inspiring as the excellent theater production I had just witnessed: Colman Domingo’s Dot, produced by Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre Company. As I drove back to Atlanta, I thought about the joy of witnessing black theater in the South. I had never before seen theater performed in a space built and maintained by a cadre of wealthy and influential African American county commissioners and patronized almost entirely by an enthusiastic and well-heeled black audience. Experiencing the atmosphere of this production reinforced my belief that all theater is site specific. The location and community in which a play takes place are as important to the meaning making and overall theatergoing experience as the material being produced. Watching Dot in the suburbs of Atlanta confirmed my belief that to truly understand the cultural importance of theater, one must examine all of the material conditions that go into production, including and perhaps especially the arts ecology in which a particular work circulates. Black theater institutions are vital parts of pluralist arts ecologies. Just as symphonies, orchestras, and opera companies primarily celebrate the European patrimony of America, publicly supported black theaters, dance companies, and arts institutions celebrate America’s African cultural patrimony. The significance of a well-supported black theater in a multiethnic urban area is an assertion that the city as a whole values and celebrates its African heritage. Black theaters thus play a role in the performance of the social and cultural identity of the city. In their essay “Reflections on Publics and Cultures,” Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson state that “performative bodies and rational discourse are interleaved as forms of communication in a continuum of human intelligent response to the environment.”1 Bridge and Watson focus primarily on public spaces such as parks and squares and the corporeal ways that people culturally assert themselves and influence each other in these spaces. Their theory is also quite applicable to the practice of black theater. One way a city recognizes the importance of African American culture is by providing explicit funding and support to the intellectual labor and bodily performances of African American artists. Census projections tell us that in the next half century, “the U.S. will become a plurality nation, where the non-Hispanic white population remains the largest single group, but no group is in the majority.”2 In terms of urban arts funding, planning, and programming, it is no longer controversial to assert that arts programming in American cities should reflect the cultural backgrounds, histories, and identities of a particular city’s constituents. While accepted in theory, in practice arts funding continues to exhibit racial and ethnic inequalities in the portions of funding directed to arts organizations focused on nonwhite cultural production. 3 Black theaters are thus an important, yet underfunded, component of many cities’ “mosaic” approach to arts administration and support. For the past decade I have focused my scholarship on articulating the important cultural, artistic, and civic work done by African American theater institutions. Like historically black colleges and universities, the contributions of black theater institutions are underappreciated both in terms of financial support and in terms of widespread recognition of the critical purpose they serve in their field. By chronicling the history of black theater institutions in several American cities, the aim of this book is to call attention to their artistic and civic import and to articulate how they shape as well as reflect the culture and history of the cities in which they reside.