Land Rights: open call for projects 2022-2023Who has rights to the land? Does the land have rights? Who has access to natural resources and the “commons” and who grants it? How has modernity shaped our relation to nature and how has this relationship in turn shaped our culture, our social relationships and our daily lives?With the present call, we invite artists of all fields (dance, performance, visual arts, video, theatre, playwriting etc) , culture professionals, architects and urban designers, documentarists, activists and researchers, to submit their work on themes related to the rights to the land/rights of the land. Interested applicants may submit for a presentation or a residency, a finished project or an in-progress work.***
Feels Blind Literary welcomes submissions of short fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, plays, and art from new and emerging writers and artists who are nonbinary or identify as women.Feels Blind Literary is committed to speaking out against social and environmental injustice, police brutality, and unconstitutional attacks on our free press. With that being said, we didn't feel just saying we're committed to these causes was enough. Rather, we knew we needed to demonstrate that commitment in tangible and monetary ways, both by continuing to elevate marginalized voices in the work that we publish and by raising money for causes we believe will help directly combat racism in this country.***Every summer, The Blank Theatre produces the 12 best plays by playwrights ages 9 to 19, chosen from a nationwide competition. In the past 29 years, we’ve produced 357 plays by these young writers. Winning playwrights are provided careful mentoring and direction from industry professionals to help prepare their work for public performance and hone their skills, talent and confidence.*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ****** BLACK AMERICAN THEATER HISTORY ***The first American production of a play was sometime during the middle of the seventeenth century. The play, Prince of Parthia, patterned its form from neo-classicism as all Theatre in America would until the Minstrelsy period. The Black man was introduced as subject matter very early in American drama. In 1769, a character with the name of Mungo, a West Indian slave, was a profane clown of little authenticity in the play entitled Padlock. Two years earlier, a Black character with the name of Raccoon appeared in Thomas Forrests play The Disappointment. With few exceptions, the plays that followed and used Blacks as characters gave Black actors two options: (a) accept the comic role or, (b) create a Theatre of his own. The second option was logically taken.More...https://theatrearts.howard.edu/about/black-theatre-history***
The African Theater began with a ship steward — William Alexander Brown, a free Black man born in the West Indies who, in 1816, bought a house at 38 Thompson Street in Manhattan that would soon become a neighborhood hub.Sundays were ripe for entertainment, with Black New Yorkers fresh out of church hungry for leisure. In his backyard, Brown began what became known as the African Grove, where brandy and gin and wine were poured and cake and ice cream were served, while James Hewlett, a fellow ship steward, sang for guests.It wasn’t long before more performers joined Hewlett, who would become the principal actor in what came to be called the African Theater. On Monday, Sept. 17, 1821, it opened with “Richard III.” This wasn’t the swankiest showing; the first king was played by an enslaved man who wore a makeshift robe fashioned from a window curtain, and the play was condensed for a smaller cast.And yet it was a hit. Hewlett would take over the role of Richard and later tour the country performing Shakespearean monologues, making him the first Black American Shakespearean actor. A younger member of the company, Ira Aldridge, would later travel overseas where he made a career as an internationally renowned Black Shakespearean actor.More...https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/22/theater/african-grove-theater.html***One morning in April 1833, Londoners awoke to find flyers circulating around the city. Addressed “To The Public”, the flyers protested because a performance of a William Shakespeare play had become a political flashpoint. “Base and unmannerly attempts”, they said, were being made to prevent the actor Ira Aldridge “from making his appearance as Othello, on Wednesday next” at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. Aldridge had been “threatened with DAMNATION” should he have the “PRESUMPTION to appear”: “His heinous offence”, the handbills explained, “is that he was born in Africa”.In fact Ira Aldridge was an African-American, born in New York in 1807, but otherwise the flyers were accurate. When it was announced that he was to play Othello at one of England’s most prestigious theatres, a racist campaign was launched “to annihilate him,” said the Morning Post. Satirical publication Figaro in London urged patriots to “drive him from the stage” that he was “about to defile” and prevent the “sacrilege” of a negro playing Othello. In the 19th-century the character was always played as a light-skinned Arab and the poet Coleridge wrote that to imagine “this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro” was “monstrous”.In his early teens Ira Aldridge had acted with the pioneering African Company in New York, but when they performed plays written by the Bard, including Richard III and Hamlet, the black actors were beaten up on the orders of rival theatre managers, derided and arrested. “Shakespeare described what was universal”, Aldridge’s first biographer protested, therefore “may there not be an Ethiopian Juliet to an Ethiopian Romeo?”More...https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/ira-aldridge-shakespeares-black-othello/***Home to one of the best-known Black acting company – The Lafayette Players – the Lafayette Theater was a training ground and showcase for artists that would later move onto Broadway as well as films.Originally established at the rival Lincoln Theatre as The Anita Bush Players, actress Bush sold the company in 1916 to the theater in 1916 to erase debts that had been incurred. The group’s name was changed to the Lafayette Players with Bush’s consent although she remained a member until 1920. Within the first year, Bush organized four new groups of Lafayette Players in other cities for her circuit tour.After Bush stepped down as manager, lead actor Charles S. Gilpin, took over. Gilpin had starred in some of The Bush Players most successful productions. He went on to become Broadway’s first Black dramatic star when he was cast as Brutus Jones in Eugene O’Neill’s THE EMPEROR JONES. Under him, the Lafayette Players became the first legitimate Black stock company in Harlem.More...https://blacktheatrematters.org/2017/02/22/lafayette-theatre-remembered-for-as-an-important-venue-to-black-theater/***...in 1940, The American Negro Theater (ANT) was organized in Harlem, New York. Coordinators were Frederick O’Neal, Abram Hill, and members of the McClendon Players.ANT was a pioneering African American theater company and school in which several hundred Black actors, writers, and technicians began their careers. The Academy's Award-winning actors Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee and actor and singer Harry Belafonte, are three of the prominent Blacks who were affiliated with the American Negro Theater. The theater was founded in Harlem by the Black writer Abram Hill and the Black actor Frederick O'Neal, who wanted to create a company that would provide an opportunity for African American artists and entertainment for African American audiences unavailable downtown on Broadway.Over the next nine years, 50,000 people attended ANT productions. Hill and O'Neal felt that the mainstream professional theater provided only limited opportunity for African Americans and that it encouraged a "star system," under which actors constantly competed to be the one, breakthrough hit. Hill and O'Neal were more interested in the potential for local Black community theaters, where directors, writers, and technicians would be as important as actors would, and where Black artists would be able to develop their talents. They sent postcards inviting other local writers and actors to join them, and in June of 1940, 18 artists met to form the American Negro Theater.More...https://aaregistry.org/story/american-negro-theater-formed/
***Lost Voices in Black HistoryIn response to the national conversation surrounding Black Lives Matter, we at the Mint would like to affirm our solidarity with those who are currently seeking social justice. It is our mission to unearth lost plays and playwrights and we now commit to searching out the lost plays by Black writers of the Harlem Renaissance and beyond. We have made a commitment to share our discoveries with you in a monthly series entitled "Lost Voices In Black History", co-curated by S.J. de Matteo and Aviva Helena Neff:
EULALIE SPENCE ~ MARITA BONNER ~ ANGELINA WELD GRIMKÉ ~ WILLIAM ALEXANDER BROWN ~ GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON ~ MAY MILLER ~ ZORA NEALE HURSTON ~ MARY P. BURRILL ~ REGINA M. ANDERSON ~ WILLIS RICHARDSON ~ ELOISE BIBB THOMPSON ~ ALICE DUNBAR NELSONMore...https://minttheater.org/lost-voices-in-black-history/
***A Son Sends Josephine Baker to the Panthéon
Brian Bouillon-Baker—one of the twelve children of the St. Louis-born entertainer, French Resistance fighter, and destroyer of stereotypes—visits France’s hall of “great men” for the induction of his Maman, the first woman of color to be so honored.Three hours before Josephine Baker was inducted into the Panthéon last week, Brian Bouillon-Baker, one of her ten sons, was on the terrace of a café in Montparnasse. “We found out in May that they were likely going to nominate Maman,” Bouillon-Baker said. He had been summoned to the Élysée, along with the initiators of a petition urging President Emmanuel Macron to honor Baker’s contributions to the performing arts, to the French Resistance, and to the fight against racism and anti-Semitism by elevating her to the Panthéon, France’s hall of “great men.” “We had been received by Macron’s counsellors, and, at the end of our appointment, Mrs. Macron came into the room,” Bouillon-Baker went on. The President was in Brussels. Bouillon-Baker recalled, “She said, ‘The Élysée is calmer when he’s away; let me show you around myself. And, I can tell you—I know my husband, and his opinion is favorable.’ ”The panthéonisation was a go, making Baker the sixth woman, and the first woman of color, to be so recognized. Born in St. Louis in 1906, she is also the first American-born person (she became a French citizen in 1937) to be honored alongside the likes of Voltaire and Hugo.More...https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/13/a-son-sends-josephine-baker-to-the-pantheon
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