White People Do Not Know How To Behave At Entertainments Designed For Ladies And Gentlemen Of Colour

McAllister offers a history of black theater pioneer William Brown's career and places his productions within the broader context of U.S. social, political, and cultural history.

In August 1821, William Brown, a free man of color and a retired ship's steward, opened a pleasure garden on Manhattan's West Side. It catered to black New Yorkers, who were barred admittance to whites-only venues offering drama, music, and refreshment. Over the following two years, Brown expanded his enterprises, founding a series of theaters that featured African Americans playing a range of roles unprecedented on the American stage and that drew increasingly integrated audiences. Marvin McAllister explores Brown's pioneering career and reveals how each of Brown's ventures--the African Grove, the Minor Theatre, the American Theatre, and the African Company--explicitly cultivated an intercultural, multiracial environment. He also investigates the negative white reactions, verbal and physical, that led to Brown's managerial retirement in 1823. Brown left his mark on American theater by shaping the careers of his performers and creating new genres of performance. Beyond that legacy, says McAllister, this nearly forgotten theatrical innovator offered a blueprint for a truly inclusive national theater.

The African Grove/African Theatre was founded by William Brown, a retired ship steward who traveled the Caribbean and Europe before settling in New York City. Brown's entertainments existed from 1821 to 1824 and his African Theatre was the first black-owned theater in North America. In 1822, Brown wrote and produced the first black drama, The Drama of King Shotaway, a play that chronicles a 1795 Black Carib insurrection on the island of St. Vincent. The primary objective of this dissertation is to place the African Grove pleasure garden and the African theatre in the theatrical, political, and social contexts of nineteenth century America. The early nineteenth century was one of the most diverse periods in American entertainment history. By grounding the company in America's early national period, I attempt to recover much of that diversity and to reevaluate this formative era in American and Afro-American history. This project's secondary objective is to establish a tradition of Afro-American performance that predates blackface minstrelsy. America's degrading national art form has nearly erased the existence of Negro cultural institutions like the African Theatre and New World African celebrations like Pinkster. Before minstrelsy, Brown's company employed European, Indian, and African dramatic, dance, and musical conventions. At America's first black theater, actors and audiences occasionally challenged conventional theater practices. In 1822, the troupe was arrested for performing their unique version of Shakespeare's Richard III. Brown's innovative entertainments politicized the New York stage and ultimately led to his theater's demise.

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater collects a critical mass of border-crossing scholarship on the intersections of dance and theatre. Taking corporeality as an idea that unites the work of dance and theater scholars and artists, and embodiment as a negotiation of power dynamics with important stakes, these essays focus on the politics and poetics of the moving body in performance both on and off stage. Contemporary stage performances have sparked global interest in new experiments between dance and theater, and this volume situates this interest in its historical context by extensively investigating other such moments: from pagan mimes of late antiquity to early modern archives to Bolshevik Russia to post-Sandinista Nicaragua to Chinese opera on the international stage, to contemporary flash mobs and television dance contests. Ideologically, the essays investigate critical race theory, affect theory, cognitive science, historiography, dance dramaturgy, spatiality, gender, somatics, ritual, and biopolitics among other modes of inquiry. In terms of aesthetics, they examine many genres such as musical theater, contemporary dance, improvisation, experimental theater, television, African total theater, modern dance, new Indian dance theater aesthetics, philanthroproductions, Butoh, carnival, equestrian performance, tanztheater, Korean Talchum, Nazi Movement Choirs, Lindy Hop, Bomba, Caroline Masques, political demonstrations, and Hip Hop. The volume includes innovative essays from both young and seasoned scholars and scholar/practitioners who are working at the cutting edges of their fields. The handbook brings together essays that offer new insight into well-studied areas, challenge current knowledge, attend to neglected practices or moments in time, and that identify emergent themes. The overall result is a better understanding of the roles of dance and theater in the performative production of meaning.

Terms such as race, ethnicity, otherness, and pluralism are becoming increasingly problematic as we grapple with issues of identity in the “post-multicultural” discursive landscape of the twenty-first century. Querying Difference in Theatre History comprises sixteen scholarly case studies in which authors tease out the limitations of contemporary discourse concerning ideas of difference in theatre history today. The essays then incorporate new approaches, theories, and critical vocabulary for dealing with such issues. Unlike other works that address similar subjects, this volume arranges essays by mode of inquiry rather than by “kind of difference.” It offers essays that are complex and rigorous, yet accessible and pleasurable—ideal for use in graduate- and upper-division undergraduate theatre and performance classrooms. While “difference” may immediately conjure issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and/or sexuality, this volume also includes essays that examine differences more broadly construed: nationalisms, economic gradations, and so forth. Particular topics in this volume range from intersections of class-based and sex-based politics in theatrical performances during the French Revolution, constructions of blackness and whiteness in turn-of-the-century American brothel dramas, “fantasy heritage,” examinations of immigrant, exile, and refugee dramatic characters vis-à-vis notions of diasporic space, to the political and methodological dilemmas raised when dealing with an individual or event that is “repugnant” or “despicable” to the historian (e.g., anti-gay funeral protests).

Pioneer Performances draws from a diverse cast of relevant historical figures, ultimately revealing the frontier as a set of complex performative practices imbued with a sense of trenchant social critique.

This text presents keywords and critical terms that deepen analysis and interpretation of the musical. Taking into account issues of composition, performance, and reception, the book's contributors bring a range of practical and theoretical perspectives to bear on their considerations of American musicals.

Reading representations of whiteness by contemporary African American performers and artists

An innovative blend of cultural and political history, Emancipating New York is the most complete study to date of the abolition of slavery in New York state. Focusing on public opinion, David N. Gellman shows New Yorkers engaged in vigorous debates and determined activism during the final decades of the eighteenth century as they grappled with the possibility of freeing the state's black population. The gradual emancipation that began in New York in 1799 helped move an entire region of the country toward a historically rare slaveless democracy, creating a wedge in the United States that would ultimately lead to the Civil War. Gellman's comprehensive examination of the reasons for and timing of New York's dismantling of slavery provides a fascinating narrative of a citizenry addressing longstanding injustices central to some of the greatest traumas of American history.