The benefit features Dr. Raul Ruiz Miyares, a professor of Afro-Cuban culture and history at Casa del Caribe, Santiago de Cuba. His lecture, "Cuba & Africanismo: The Making of Revolutionary Culture", will include slides and a video. The benefit also includes: spoken word, an Afro-Cuban folkloric performance, a Caribbean dinner, and a Latin, World Beat dance party, all on Friday, May 2.6 p.m.
IATI is a New York-based, nonprofit performing arts organisation, established in 1968, dedicated to serving both English and Spanish-speaking audiences of all ages. Its productions aim to be both play and provocateur, combining the prose of Gabriel Garc'a Marquez with the intrigue of Borges and Cortázar.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Contains the full text of 1,310 plays written from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 200 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. Contains the full text of plays, written from the 1850s to the present, by playwright
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
274 p, "A model for theatre scholarship on racial impersonation."—Theatre Journal Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895 offers a critical history of the relation between racial impersonation, national sentiment, and the emergence of an anticolonial public sphere in nineteenth-century Cuba. Through a study of Cuba's vernacular theatre, the teatro bufo, and of related forms of music, dance, and literature, Lane argues that blackface performance was a primary site for the development of mestizaje, Cuba's racialized national ideology, in which African and Cuban become simultaneously mutually exclusive and mutually formative." (Doris Sommer, Harvard University)
In creating Scourge, a full-length work of hip hop theater, Joseph digs into his ancestral roots to tell the story of Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere with a long and violent history. The piece's main characters are two Haitian-American kids who are torn between their Caribbean roots and urban America where they have grown up.
Part 2 of Special journal issue: Haitian Literature and Culture., Félix Morisseau-Leroy, was a Haitian writer who wrote in Haitian Creole for poetry and plays.
287 p., With a focus on cultural memory, this dissertation investigates French Caribbean women's plays and their performance at Ubu Repertory Theater, a pioneering French-American theatre in New York. After a theoretical introduction and a historical chapter investigating slavery and its remembrance in the Francophone Caribbean, each chapter is divided into two sections, the first examining the play, and the second its production at Ubu. The author relies on theories of collective memory and cultural trauma to read Ina Césaire's Fire's Daughters, Maryse Condé's The Tropical Breeze Hotel, and Gerty Dambury's Crosscurrents as plays that dramatize a link between the past (the Middle Passage, slavery, and sexual relations between enslaved women and white men) and present-day behaviors, attitudes, and pain. It is argued that these plays work to revise problematic practices of remembrance in France and the Antilles. These practices dissociate slavery from its local context; make the trauma of enslaved women's rape a secret; divide Antilleans of different races, ethnicities, genders, and social classes; and associate resistance almost exclusively with Haiti. In a second section of each chapter, the production and reception of these plays at Ubu are examined.
It ran for more than six years and playing one of [Desmond]'s barbershop cronies was a highlight of [Ram John Holder]'s long career. "It only had half of the audience of Desmond's, but it had much bigger audiences than the shows they replaced it with." In it, the colourful and exuberant traditions of Trinidad's Carnival provide the setting for a stage event which transforms Handel's Messiah into an musical combining song, dance and spectacle with the spirit of Caribbean storytelling.
Colorful scenes of the island of Martinique flashed across the screen in the semi- darkness of the Schomburg Center last Wednesday evening at the kick-off of the first annual International Caribbean Diaspora (ICD) Film, Theatre & Literary Festival. On the screen, the Caribbean scenery transformed into the riveting images of the popular, Emmy Award-winning, Tony-nominated actor Keith David in some of the films in which he has appeared, such as "There's Something About Mary," "Pitch Black" and "Requiem for a Dream." At the Wednesday evening screening, of "A Dry White Season," David introduced [Euzhan Palcy], as the audience enthusiastically welcomed the esteemed, brilliant, beautiful and regal filmmaker, who had flown in from Paris after literally completing post-production on "Les Mariées de lisies Bourbon" ("The Brides of Bourbon Island") a French, three-hour period piece set in the 17th century. Palcy introduced "A Dry White Season," a political drama set in South Africa during the apartheid era. The film, which stars Marlon Brando, Donald Sutherland, Zakes Mokae and Susan Sarandon, is a story that focuses on the social movements of South Africa and the Soweto riots. The film was "heralded for putting the politics of apartheid into meaningful, human terms." The film, which was heartily received by the audience, is a classic. It is still as timely today as when it was first release in 1989.
"I wanted to write a play that celebrated the journey of our parents," explains [Kwame Kwei-Armah]. "A lot of the previous plays tell us the old, grey story about `No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish,' but that isn't very entertaining. "Growing up, I had a big nose but when Afrocentricty came in the '80s suddenly I had an African nose," recalls Kwame. "[Chris Monks] is White and together we have a play that is accessible to all communities," says Kwame. "It's not just about Black issues, it deals with universal themes like love, feeling inadequate and beauty."
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
The Little Theatre Movement (LTM) has the distinction of being Jamaica's longest surviving theatre company of contemporary times. It was founded in 1941 by Henry Fowler and Greta Bourke (later Fowler). Louise Bennett-Coverley and the late Ranny Williams who were among the pioneers of the LTM and who did much to mould the annual show into a unique creation, which features aspects of Jamaican culture, folklore and historical references. The Pantomime prides itself on its universal appeal to children and adults alike. In so doing the Pantomime has utilised some of Jamaica's leading talent in every area of production, from script writing to music composition, set and costume design, choreography as well as on-stage performance.
"[Daniel Beauxhomme] comes from the lighter skin mixed class," said Kevin Johnson, who plays Daniel. "It's the story of two different people from two different worlds falling in love. Fate brings them together and fate takes them apart. It's similar to `Romeo and Juliet.'" "In Haiti, it's very confusing. It's fuzzier than here (the United States). A lot of it has more to do with money and name than this," said Shirley Julien, who is Haitian. "And that's what the musical focuses on. Ti Moune means `little orphan' in the play. But, in Haiti it means `little person.' That drives the theme more because she doesn't have a real name. In Haiti every little kid is called ti moune." "I don't think that there is that much of a difference," said Julien, who is also the musical's choreographer. "It's just highlighted more. The division is put on us and we accept it. It's up to us to say `I don't believe this' and take time to learn about Haitians, Jamaicans and Trinidadians. Our commonalities are so much stronger and deep inside of us."
330 p., This dissertation examines the major works of Trinidad-born playwright Mustapha Matura, dealing with plays written from 1970 to the present. By considering the relation of Matura's work to Britain and Trinidad, it explores the complexity of identity performance in postcolonial theatre and the ongoing need for agency among diasporic communities. Postcolonial scholarship fully recognizes the significance of writing in the development of postcolonial identities, yet dominant postcolonial theory largely excludes theatre from discussions of that development. Given its aural and visual presentation and its immediate interaction with an audience, theatre provides a unique postcolonial moment through which audience members can survey issues of race and place in their lives.
223 p., This dissertation engages with radical Caribbean theater as a crucial literary archive that is nonetheless underexplored as an expression of political culture and thought. The theoretical grounding of the chapters emerges from the analytically generative thrust of a comment by C. L. R. James in The Black Jacobins: "to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental." While the phrase asserts that race cannot be neglected, it also cautions against ensconcing race as fundamental analytical priority, suggesting a powerfully fluid conceptualization of radical political culture. Argues that radical theater projects in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic share this fluid conceptualization of radical politics with the Trinidadian James's own stage versions of the Haitian Revolution.
"The problem involved in the description of Caribbean aesthetics is not only due to the heterogeneity of Caribbean culture - given its antecedents - but also the complex cognitive and social orientation of the individual Caribbean artist." (author)
It has been four years since Detroit has been visited by Mutabaruka who comes our way on Friday and Saturday, November 7 & 8 at the SereNgeti Ballroom located at 2957 Woodward Avenue in Detroit. Providing the music for Mutabaruka will be the renowned Jamaican reggae music group "[Skool]" who creates their own wave with first class music both home and abroad. Opening the show will be Detroit's own, Universal Xpression.
Analyses Sistren Theatre Collective's theatrical and organizational collective model by contextualizing the company's commitment to collectivity in terms of political and social shifts in Jamaica during the 1980s. Argues that race- and class-based divisions within Jamaican society were masked by collectivity masked.
