Affirming Black Theater Aesthetics

In June 1996, at the 11^th biennial Theatre Communications Group National Conference at Princeton University, August Wilson, one of the most popular and celebrated black American playwrights of the 20^th century, gave a talk entitled “The Ground on Which I Stand.” In his speech he talked about influences on his work and on his contemporary playwrights, describing Black Theater as a conglomerate of European forms and “African aesthetics”:

The foundation of the American theater is the foundation of European theater that begins with the great Greek dramatists; it is based on the proscenium stage and the poetics of Aristotle. This is the theater that we have chosen to work in. And we embrace the values of that theater but reserve the right to amend, to explore, and to add our African consciousness and our African aesthetics to the art we produce.¹¹⁹

With the reference to “African aesthetics” and an “African consciousness” Wilson writes himself into the discussion of the characteristics of a distinct black aesthetic that dates back to the Black Power Movement, seeking to demonstrate the African spirit of black American dramatic art. Paul Carter Harrison, a contemporary playwright and professor emeritus of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has been one of the most influential spokespersons in this context, encouraging the discovery of African and African-inspired traditions in contemporary Black Theater produced by black American playwrights such as Barbara Ann Teer.¹²⁰ Harrison does not argue for a direct adoption of African traditions on the American stage, but urges black American writers to develop a unique style that is able to express the “continuum of African memory” in black American theater:

119August Wilson, The Ground on Which I Stand, Dramatic Contexts (New York; St Paul, MN:

Theatre Communications Group, 2001): 41.

120 Barbara Ann Teer (1937-2008) was the founder of the National Black Theater (NBT) in Harlem and developed eclectic forms based on the combination of Yoruba traditions and a close examination of black life in America. For further details on Barbara Ann Teer and the National Black Theater see for example Hatch, "Some African Influences on the Afro-American Theatre"

and Barbara Lewis, "Ritual Reformulations. Barbara Ann Teer and the National Black Theatre of Harlem," A Sourcebook of African-American Performance: Plays, People, Movements, ed.

Annemarie Bean (London; New York: Routledge, 1999).

The challenge of contemporary Black Theatre is to formulate a specific practice that can contextualize African-inspired values and overcome the trauma of dislocation and subjugation. Black Theatre must generate a transformative ritual style of work informed by the expressive strategies located in the continuum of African memory throughout the Diaspora. At its expressive core is a spiritual connection between shadow and light, ancestors and the living. Most importantly, whatever value it might have as entertainment, the inventive process of Black Theatre must illuminate the collective ethos of the black experience in a manner that binds, cleanses, and heals.¹²¹

According to Harrison, an Afrocentric black theater uses African traditions such as ritualistic structures, repetition, and the combination of music and dance on stage in order to create a “methexis drama [that] demands full audience engagement.”¹²² Two striking examples of this inclusion of an African aesthetic in art by African-American playwrights are Judith Alexa Jackson’s play WOMBmanWARs (1992) and Shange’s choreopoem for colored girls (1976).

In her play WOMBmanWARs, that draws on the social and political controversy about the 1991 court case of Anita Hill versus US Supreme Court Justice Senator Clarence Thomas, Jackson combines masks, pantomime, film, video, and live and recorded sound to address the questions of power politics within the African-American community. In the explanatory notes to WOMBmanWARs, she defines her aesthetic “as political satire and movement theatre” and explains:

I use the story format and the West African idea of telling a story in a circle, giving you bits and pieces but not in a linear order. In western culture, stories are told from A to Z. What I like about the West African storytellers is that they don’t necessarily tell you where the beginning is and where the end is, but by the time they are finished, you have the whole picture.¹²³

In WOMBmanWARs Jackson interweaves three main plot strands. First, there is the reproduction of the Hill-Thomas court hearings with original visual and audio material on stage. According to the stage directions, “the objective here is to remind the audience through visual and audio means of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee’s

121 Paul C. Harrison, Victor L. Walker and Gus Edwards, eds., Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002): 4-5.

122 Harrison, Walker and Edwards, eds., Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora: 249.

123 Jackson, "WOMBmanWARs (1992)": 147.

4. The Idea of Mother Africa and African-AmericanIdentity 72

insensitive handlings of the harassment charge brought against the Supreme Court nominee” (WMW 153). Second, there are several scenes that introduce us to the family living of Sapphire and her husband Danny, who watch the court hearings on stage, while their daughter Danisha is fighting with her playmate outside the house, who tries “to look up [her] dress” (WMW 180) against her will. Finally, there is the Anima/Animus figure, the ancient unity of man and woman, who can move back and forth in time, and who repeatedly comments on the action presented on stage as well as on the position of black females in today’s society on a meta-level. The Anima/Animus figure introduces itself as originating from the Ituri Forest, a rainforest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Accompanied by “the music from any indigenous forest people” (WMW 170), the figure tells the audience: “My memory of the Ituri Forest is particularly strong. We played amid the trees as they made breath for us” (WMW 170).

During the play the focus is constantly shifted from one strand to the other, disregarding any linear progression. The circular structure that Jackson adopts from the West African art of storytelling thereby allows her to combine different temporal and geographical dimensions on stage. There are indeed also scenes of temporal standstill in which the characters talk to the members of the audience about their thoughts and about the action on stage. Although the plot strands do not directly interfere with each other and they do not follow a linear progression, they are nevertheless closely connected by their common focus on the black male-black female relation, presented from different perspectives. In Jackson’s words, at the end of WOMBmanWARs the audience has been told three different and nevertheless similar stories that form parts of “the whole picture.”

Another playwright that deliberately borrows from African culture and art is contemporary poet and playwright Ntozake Shange. With her play for colored girls Shange introduces the new theatrical form of the so-called choreopoem, which unifies the three characteristics of ritualistic structures, repetition, and the combination of music and dance on stage that Harrison expects from black theater as quoted above. The choreopoem focuses on the productive combination of word, song, and bodily movement in order to elevate a distinct black female consciousness, creating what Harrison calls “a total event”¹²⁴ for the audience and for the actors. The choreopoem deviates from traditional theatrical forms in that there is no division into acts and no clearly defined setting. It

124 Paul C. Harrison, The Drama of Nommo (New York: Grove Press, 1972): 231.

mainly consists of a sequence of different poems which are accompanied by effects of lighting and music.

In the preface to her play Shange describes the beginnings of it in 1974, when

“[w]ith as much space as a small studio on the Lower East Side, the five of us, five women, proceeded to dance, make poems, make music, make a woman’s theater for about twenty patrons” (FCG ix). According to Shange, they used for colored girls to express themselves and their femininity, “clarifying [their] lives – & the lives of our mothers, daughters, & grandmothers” (FCG x). In order to emphasize the diversity of black female experience and identity, Shange does not include specific characters in her choreopoem, but rather presents a choral group of anonymous female voices or archetypes who re-live traumatic female memories in the form of “choric testimonies”¹²⁵ on stage. In her art Shange combines a female aesthetic with elements of African culture, using dance, songs, and music as “proof of origin” (FCG 12) and a means to access “the depth of [her] past”

(FCG xi), thus “preserv[ing] the elements of our culture that need to be remembered and absolutely revered.”¹²⁶ Elsewhere she explains:

I wanted to use the forms that were available to us (that is, dance, music) that are used colloquially and in a vernacular art form to move those to another level, so that I could use the things that were endemically black in some cultural way as a further extrapolation of my understanding of our realities and our unconscious desires […]¹²⁷

Shange indeed repeatedly stresses the significance of rituals and ritualistic structures associated with African forms in her art. For her, dancing enables her to discover that

“everything African, everything halfway colloquial, a grimace, a strut, an arched back over yawn, waz mine” (FCG xi). She emphasizes that she is “very concerned about and passionately committed to the idea of creating new rituals and new mythologies for people of color,”¹²⁸ who witness and take part in the action on stage.

125 Paul C. Harrison, "Form and Transformation: Immanence of the Soul in the Performance Modes of Black Church and Black Music," Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora, eds. Paul C. Harrison, Victor L. Walker and Gus Edwards (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002): 325.

126 Ntozake Shange, "Interview," Black Women Writers at Work, ed. Claudia Tate (New York:

Continuum, 1983): 163.

127 Neal A. Lester, "Interview with Ntozake Shange," Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights, eds. Philip C. Kolin and Colby H. Kullman (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1996): 218-219.

128 Lester, "Interview with Ntozake Shange": 218.

4. The Idea of Mother Africa and African-AmericanIdentity 74

The collective participatory force of the choreopoem that aims to actively engage the audience in the theatrical event is based on the African formal element of call-and-response. According to Gunter Schuller, “the call-and-response pattern permeates all African music, and usually takes the form of a chorus responding to a leader or soloist.”¹²⁹ In for colored girls the pattern is used to support the “testamental”¹³⁰ quality of the play.

The women react to each other, answer each other, but seldom do they directly address each other. During the different scenes or stories the individual woman rather talks to herself in a monologue, being caught up in her feelings, while the others encourage or support her verbally, creating a powerful tension between individual and community. The pattern intensifies the performative and choreographic quality of the play in

“encourag[ing] speakers to continue because the listeners are totally engaged in the conversation, in agreement with the speaker’s point of view or in awe of it.”¹³¹ For example, in the following scene the lady in yellow’s expression “my love is too delicate to have thrown back on my face” is picked up by the other ladies and varied in the course of the action:

lady in yellow

my love is too delicate to have thrown back on my face

The lady in yellow starts to exit into the stage right volm.¹³² Just as she gets to the volm, the lady in brown comes to life.

lady in brown

my love is too beautiful to have thrown back on my face lady in purple

my love is too sanctified to have thrown back on my face lady in blue

my love is too magic to have thrown back on my face lady in orange

my love is too saturday nite [sic] to have thrown back on my face

129 Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986): 27.

130 Paul C. Harrison, Totem Voices: Plays from the Black World Repertory (New York: Grove Press, 1989): xlii.

131 Lisa J. Green, African American English: A Linguistic Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 154.

132 “Volm” refers to the Latin term vomitoria that designates the passageway for the spectators in an amphitheater such as the ancient Coliseum in Rome.

lady in red

my love is too complicated to have thrown back on my face lady in green

my love is too music to have thrown back on my face everyone

music music

The lady in green then breaks into a dance, the other ladies follow her lead and soon they are all dancing and chanting together.

(FCG 46-47; italics original)

Single words are then repeated by the women several times, resulting in a quasi-spiritual ecstasy: “The dance reaches a climax and all of the ladies fall out tired, but full of life and togetherness” (FCG 49). This scene strikingly illustrates that the focus is not set on the individual female archetypes but rather on the way they are part of a larger entity. In the inclusion of the call-and-response pattern on stage Harrison sees the African tradition of oral performance preserved, pointing out that “choreopoems reach beyond descriptive commentary to reveal encoded nuances of experience.”¹³³ The performance of for colored girls becomes a mutually conceived ritual for the “activators” on stage and the

“participators”¹³⁴ in the audience. In the discourse on Black Theater, the inclusion of African-inspired traditions and forms in theater written by black American playwrights is seen as a necessity, enabling the expression of a unique black consciousness and experience associated with a collective sense of African-American cultural identity.

133 Harrison, Walker and Edwards, eds., Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora: 249.

134 Harrison, The Drama of Nommo: 198.

4. The Idea of Mother Africa and African-AmericanIdentity 76

4.5 Conclusion

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) Toni Morrison traces the appearance and function of an “Africanist presence”¹³⁵ in literature written by 19^th-century non-black American authors such as Edgar Allen Poe, Nathanial Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain. She points out that the inclusion of black American characters in literature written by white American authors served both the development of a proto-American literature and the formation of a distinct white cultural identity.

Blackness, race, and their pejorative associations functioned as productive counter-images to whiteness and were objectified in the African presence in literature. Consequently, Morrison argues that “Africanism is inextricable from the definition of Americanness”¹³⁶ from its origins to the present.

The previous analyses have supported Morrison’s claim, albeit from a slightly different perspective. The focus was not on a close examination of the African presence in literature written by 19^th-century white American authors; rather, the aim was to trace Africanisms and African influences in 20^th-century black theater written by black American female playwrights. The analyses have shown that Morrison’s claim may also be rephrased into ‘Africanism is inextricable from the self-definition of black Americanness.’ Since the early beginnings of theater written by black American playwrights at the turn of the century, Africa has been a valuable resource for identification. Like W. E. B. Du Bois, since the turn of the century many black Americans have struggled with the question of “What is Africa to Me?”¹³⁷ While the first half of the 20^th century was dominated by a pan-African longing for originarity and rootedness, the recourse to Africa was accompanied by a critical process of examination and differentiation from early mid-century onwards. Several generations after the Middle Passage black Americans started to recognize that the Africa evoked was not the real one, but an imaginary construction. In 1940 Langston Hughes reconsidered his former identification with Africa and concludes: “I was only an American Negro – who had

135 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992): 5.

136 Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination: 65.

137 W. E. B. Du Bois, ""What Is Africa to Me?"," W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David L. Lewis (New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1995).

loved the surfaces of Africa and the rhythms of Africa – but I was not Africa. I was Chicago and Kansas City and Broadway and Harlem.”¹³⁸ With the search for a distinct

‘Black Aesthetic’ and especially with the advent of the Black Arts Movement, the assumed likeness of Africans and black Americans underwent a critical examination, asking how African black Americans actually were.

Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) and Alice Childress’s Wine in the Wilderness (1969) deliberately deal with the question of black American identity construction based on the adoption of African cultural elements. While Hansberry primarily focuses on a naïve access to African rituals and traditions whose meanings remain opaque for Beneatha, Childress connects the discourse on Afrocentrism with questions of gender differences, unmasking the romantic ideal of African female beauty that obstructs the appreciation of real black womanhood. The black characters in both plays try to express themselves by experimenting with a wide variety of cultural practices such as naming, clothing, hairstyle, music, and dance, all seen as endemically African. At the end, however, these practices are recognized as mere “accessories,” foreshadowing the post-Afrocentric discourse on Black Aesthetics and Black Ritual Theater during the 1970s and 1980s. As Olaynian points out, “[t]he post-Afrocentric discourse not only quests for different representations but also, simultaneously, queries the representation of difference.”¹³⁹ The adoption of and identification with all things African turned out to be a primary outcome of black Americans’ desire to distinguish themselves from white hegemonic culture. The African identity was invented and formed by black Americans’

needs and desires for empowerment and solidification of the black community. It turned out that African elements adopted by black American culture “engaged in a critical dialogue between black and white Americans, not one between black Americans and Africans.”¹⁴⁰

Playwrights Judith Alexa Jackson as well as Ntozake Shange aimed to represent these cultural differences between white and black America in her art. While Jackson adopts the circular structure of West African storytelling in her play as a means to

138 Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography, American Century Series (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993): 325.

139 Tejumola Olaniyan, "Agones: The Constitution of a Practice," Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora, eds. Paul C. Harrison, Victor L. Walker and Gus Edwards (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002): 78. Emphasis original.

140 Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies: 111.

4. The Idea of Mother Africa and African-AmericanIdentity 78

combine different temporal dimensions and plot strands, Shange introduces the form of the choreopoem, creating an eclectic theatrical form by combining music, dance, song, as well as African ritualistic and testimonial structures, all things that are “endemically black in some cultural way,”¹⁴¹ as she says. This selective approach to African culture reveals that the issue of African rootedness in the discourse on black American identity is not a question about what things are genuinely African but what elements are adopted by African-American culture, creating a conglomerate of both sides of the hyphen.

In a mirror image to the deliberate dissociation from blackness that Morrison detects in the construction of whiteness, black America longs for the dissociation from whiteness

In a mirror image to the deliberate dissociation from blackness that Morrison detects in the construction of whiteness, black America longs for the dissociation from whiteness

Im Dokument Enacting Cultural Identity : Time and Memory in 20th-Century African-American Theater by Female Playwrights (Seite 71-81)