Black Media Reporting on Theater, Dance, and Jazz Clubs in Canada: From Shuffle along to Rockhead’s Paradise

Canada has a history of de facto Jim Crow (1911–1954). It also has a historical Black press that is intimately connected to Black America through transnational conversations, and diasporic migration. This article argues that Canada’s Black newspapers played a pivotal role in promoting Black performance during a time when they were scarcely covered in the dominant media. Drawing on news coverage from the 1920s through 1950s of black dance, musicals, and jazz clubs this article examines three case studies: Shuffle Along (1921–1924), the first all- Black Broadway musical to appear at Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theater, Alberta-born dancer Len Gibson (1926–2008), who revolutionized modern dance in Canada in the 1940s and 1950s, and the Montreal jazz club Rockhead’s Paradise (1928–1980), a pivotal site in the city’s Little Burgundy, a Black neighborhood that thrived in the 1930s through 1950s. The authors argue that when Black people were excluded from and/or derogatorily portrayed in the dominant media, Canada’s Black press celebrated collective achievement by authenticating Black performance. By incorporating Canada’s Black Press into conversations about Jim Crow and performance, we gain a deeper understanding of Black creative output and resistance during the period.

Kate Dossett. Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal

Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal focuses on the Negro Units of the Federal Theatre Project (1935–39). Dossett argues that Black performance communities consisting of Black theatre artists and the Black public sphere helped shaped the performance and reception of theatre manuscripts in the New Deal era.

Intermediality and Queer African American Improvisation: Dianne McIntyre, Sounds in Motion

This article explores the work of choreographer Dianne McIntyre as an improvisational artist entangled in questions of intermedial relations among sounds and motions. It discusses the terms of performance in relation to emergent paradigms of Afro-pessimism, and argues for a black regard as a method of engaging with experimental performances by artists of African descent. The article explores theoretical terms of witness and encounter with black performance in relation to queer alterities, and non-normative modes of physical expression. The article suggests further need for research into the work of an outstanding black American female artist of theatre and dance.

dancing among the watery folds

This essay explores conceptual terms that might surround the dancing within watery folds of “liquid blackness.” A speculative invention, the essay proposes a shifting status of water-in-motion as a register for considering black faith and worldmaking through dancing. Written from a movement artist's perspective, the essay provokes with speculative formations that reveal citational activities always evident in black performance.

An Inconvenient Black History of British Musical Theatre

A radically urgent intervention, An Inconvenient Black History of British Musical Theatre: 1900 - 1950 uncovers the hidden Black history of this most influential of artforms. Drawing on lost archive material and digitised newspapers from the turn of the century onwards, this exciting story has been re-traced and restored to its rightful place. A vital and significant part of British cultural history between 1900 and 1950, Black performance practice was fundamental to resisting and challenging racism in the UK. Join Mayes (a Broadway- and Toronto-based Music Director) and Whitfield (a musical theatre historian and researcher) as they take readers on a journey through a historically-inconvenient and brilliant reality that has long been overlooked. Get to know the Black theatre community in London’s Roaring 20s, and hear about the secret Florence Mills memorial concert they held in 1928. Acquaint yourself with Buddy Bradley, Black tap and ballet choreographer, who reshaped dance in British musicals - often to be found at Noël Coward’s apartment for late-night rehearsals, such was Bradley’s importance. Meet Jack Johnson, the first African American Heavyweight Boxing Champion, who toured Britain’s theatres during World War 1 and brought the sounds of Chicago to places like war-weary Dundee. Discover the most prolific Black theatre practitioner you’ve never heard of, William Garland, who worked for 40 years across multiple continents and championed Black British performers. Marvel at performers like cabaret star Mabel Mercer, born in Stafford in 1900, who sang and conducted theatre orchestras across the UK, as well as Black Birmingham comedian Eddie Emerson, who was Garland’s partner for decades. Many of their names and works have never been included in histories of the British musical - until now.

The Future Perfect, Autopsy, and Enfreakment on the 19th-Century Stage

The public autopsies of 19th-century enfreaked performers remains a central issue in studies of 19th-century enslavement. While previously black performance studies focused on the instability of the historical past tense, the study of freak shows and enslavement dictates a reckoning with the future perfect tense, which sheds light on the history of the future by asking “what will have been” rather than “what was” or “what could have been.”

Framing Black Performance

Recent African American film scholarship has called for an attention to the structures of black representation on screen. This work echoes the calls made in the 1990s by black feminist film and cultural scholars to resist the allure of reading for racial realism and to develop more appropriate critical tools and terms to acknowledge black artistic innovations. This essay takes up and reiterates that call, drawing attention to the problems of film interpretation that attend to a version of historical analysis without an understanding of form and medium. Foregrounding film as a terrain of struggle, the essay mobilizes an analysis of the 2014 film Selma to illuminate the multiple resonances of the concept representation. Focusing on the film’s representation of women and girl characters, the essay argues that cinematic play with the terms and conditions of representation comment powerfully on the limitations of cinematic and historical discourses to speak about the black femme as a political subject. Analysis of Selma exposes the key problems of reception and criticism facing contemporary African American film. The film speaks to the failure of de jure representational regimes in post–civil rights movement America and offers up the cinematic terrain as an important twenty-first-century site of African American struggle.