Blog11.24.2019

DOES BLACK COMMUNITY THEATER HAVE A FUTURE IN THE NEW NEW ORLEANS?



One of the outstanding features of the WORDS & MUSIC FESTIVAL 2019 (November 21-24) was a panel on the history of black community theater in New Orleans.  Long before the Free Southern Theater  (FST) migrated from Mississippi to New Orleans in 1964, black citizens embraced drama as a part of their cultural expressiveness.  Public schools, churches and colleges sponsored plays and theatre pieces to showcase the innate talents of young people and to delight and instruct audiences.  What FST added to the mix were writing and acting  workshops as well as some training in production skills and emphasis on fund-raising.  In short, FST provoked greater curiosity about the communal functions of theater.  It was out of community theater that such a masterpiece as Tom Dent's Ritual Murder emerged.

Kalamu ya Salaam makes a point I have in mind succinctly in "Tom Dent and the Development of Black Literature," the chapter he contributed to New Orleans: A Literary History, ed. T. R. Johnson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019)

"The New Orleans-based FST was not only an advocate of socially progressive politics; it was also  a focal point of arts and aesthetics in the Brechtian tradition of arts for social engagement rather than arts for art's sake" (270).

Salaam also edited New Orleans Griot: The Tom Dent Reader (New Orleans: University of New Orleans Press, 2018), and he gave us a necessary perspective on art and social action when he noted

"…Tom Dent had undertaken the additional and far more arduous  ---indeed daunting ---task of documenting and analyzing his culture, his people, and himself.  In short, Tom decided to be more than a writer: Tom Dent became a griot.  In his case, this meant combining the acuity of a ethno-cultural anthropologist facing his past with the critique of a public intellectual and cultural activist confronting his present.  Moreover , the dimensionality of Tom's work was consciously aimed at audiences of the future" (18).

We are that referenced future which raises a crucial question for our post-Katrina city ---Does black community theater have a future in the new New Orleans?  

There is some gravity enshrouded in the question, and only a sustained dialogue among black citizens  from many neighborhoods who have diverse socio-economic identities  can yield meaningful, non-trivial responses.  The effort might begin with a dialogue between the members of the WORDS & MUSIC panel ---Chakula Cha Jua, Karen-kia Livers, Tommye Myrick,  Anthony Bean, Carol Sutton and Lauren E. Turner, whose interview with Amelia Parenteau---"The American Theatre Was Killing Me: Healing from Racialized Trauma in an Art Workspace" (November 18, 2019)---is a devastating testimonial regarding the "long history of disenfranchisement of black artists" in "a city that is basically built upon the creative and artistic genius of black people" and the fact rather than the fiction that art institutions in New Orleans "tend to not want to work with local black folk" and that those art institutions have established laws and policies to secure hegemony and perpetual cultural enslavement of black citizens in New Orleans. A dialogue between Ms. Turner and the panel members would be merely the first move in a long-term effort to determine whether black community theatre can anticipate a future. Repeat: that would only be a first move.  What needs to follow is robust research on the sense of paternalism and propriety which is dedicated to keeping black New Orleanians within an orbit of systemic racism. The research findings should logically lead to series of public  meetings about viable options and action in revitalizing black community theater. Continuing warfare on gentrified efforts to secure white supremacy in the arts and everything else in the Crescent City is something other than a simple matter of choice.  It is matter of self-interested existential obligation among black people



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            November 24, 2019.