Playwright August Wilson convenes national meeting on future of African American theater

Posted 02/04/98

Approximately 40 of the nation's leading black theater artists, scholars, arts and community organizers, entrepreneurs and corporate executives will gather at Dartmouth College facilities March 2-7 to discuss how to develop and support theater by, for and about African Americans. The participants will meet in private for five days and then open discussions to the public and press in a one-day conference on March 7 titled "African American Theatre: The Next Stage."

August Wilson, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and numerous other national awards for his plays on the African American experience, will convene the six-day proceedings. Wilson is at Dartmouth through March as a fellow of Dartmouth's Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Endowment. In addition to delivering several public lectures, he is teaching an undergraduate course in playwriting for the Dartmouth Department of Drama.

The summit and conference build on themes outlined by Wilson in his historic June 1996 speech titled "The Ground On Which I Stand," delivered to the 11th Biennial Theatre Communications Group Conference at Princeton University. The practice of casting African Americans in roles written for white performers, Wilson said, denies African Americans "our own humanity, our own history, and the need to make our own investigations from the cultural ground on which we stand as black Americans...We do not need color-blind casting; we need those misguided financial resources to be put to better use." Such better uses would include supporting and developing theaters that feature the work of African American playwrights and performers and reach out to an African American audience, Wilson has said.

Summit participants will include playwright and poet Ntozake Shange, best known for her poetry-turned-Broadway hit for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, and designated in 1995 as "A Living Legend in Black Theatre" by the National Black Theatre Festival; Thulani Davis, librettist for Anthony Davis' 1993 opera X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X and the new opera, Amistad; and Ricardo Khan, artistic director and co-founder of Crossroads Theatre in New Brunswick, N.J., one of the nation's leading black-owned theaters.

Others are the Off-Broadway award-winning theater artist Ifa Bayeza, artistic director of the Duncan YMCA Chernin's Center for the Arts in Chicago; Idris Ackamoor, musician, actor, dancer, producer, director and founder and executive/co-artistic director of the San Francisco performance company Cultural Odyssey, founder and director of the African American Performance Art Festival, produced in San Francisco, New York and Winston-Salem; Mikki Shepard, director for arts and humanities at the Rockefeller Foundation; Amina J. Dickerson, director of corporate contributions for Kraft Foods Inc., overseeing a $13-million philanthropic program to address hunger, educational reform, arts in education and cultural programming; Karen Stokes, project associate of public programming at The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities; artistic directors of African American theaters in New York, St. Paul, Minn. and Houston, Texas; as well as playwrights, theater performers and directors, academics and business people from around the nation.

The proceedings begin with a closed-door session March 2-6 at Dartmouth's Minary Conference Center in Ashland, N.H., titled "The National Black Theatre Summit - On Golden Pond." Participants will break into small groups to consider such topics as how to encourage black playwrights, build audiences, and address the legal, social, financial and aesthetic issues related to developing African American theater. On Saturday, March 7, participants return to the Dartmouth campus for the one-day public conference. Each of the summit's small groups will address the conference in turn to summarize their work and respond to comments and questions from conference-goers.

Chief organizers for the summit and conference are Victor Leo Walker II, assistant professor of drama and film studies at Dartmouth, and William W. Cook, Israel Evans Professor of Oratory and Belles Lettres and Chair of the English Department at Dartmouth. The events are funded in part by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and numerous Dartmouth entities including the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration; the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center; the Hopkins Center for Performing Arts; and the offices of the president, dean of faculty and provost.