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.

Free at Lass!

The final chapter examines the Harlem Negro Unit’s immensely popular production of Haiti. Authored by white New York journalist William Dubois, white theatre critics attempted to place Haiti within a white dramatic tradition of Black primitivism which included Emperor Jones and Orson Welles’ recent Voodoo version of Macbeth. By contrast, the Black performance community worked to transform Dubois’s racist play into a celebration of the Haitian Republic’s Black heroes. The success of Haiti helped the Black performance community push the Federal Theatre to invest in Black dramatists. On the eve of the FTP’s closure two new Black dramas were being prepared for production: Panyared, (1939) explores the origins of African slavery and was the first instalment of a historical trilogy by Hughes Allison; Theodore Browne’s Go Down Moses (1938), is a dramatization of Harriet Tubman’s life which examines Black agency in ending slavery. While neither drama made it to the stage, centering Black theatre manuscripts, and the performance communities who developed them, allows us to see how African Americans imagined radical paths to the future.

Our Actors May Become Our Emancipators

This chapter examines how Black performance communities in New York City and Seattle transformed the political narrative of Stevedore from an interracial labor drama into a play of Black self-determination. First staged by the Theatre Union in New York in 1934, this white-authored labor drama explores interracial relations between Black and white dockworkers. The Black hero who stands up for fellow dockworkers is framed on a rape charge. When the white mob arrives to lynch the Black hero, Black dock workers fight back with the help of white union men. Two years later Stevedore was staged by the Seattle Negro Unit. On the federal theatre the interracial ending was downplayed, and possibly dropped altogether: Black men appear to resist the white mob alone. Black self-determination, rather than interracial unionism wins the day. Stevedore’s fascinating production history offers insight into the practices and theoretical debates which framed political theatre in the 1930s. It suggests that Black performance communities moved beyond the realist-anti-realist binaries that consumed white leftist theatre and instead developed a Black realism with radical potential.

Enabling Virtual Music Performance Communities

The chapter provides an overview of virtual music communities focusing on novel collaboration environments aiming to support networked and geographically dispersed music performance. A key objective of the work reported is to investigate online collaborative practices during virtual music performances in community settings. To this effect, the first part of the chapter is devoted to reviewing different kinds of communities and their corresponding practices as manifested through social interaction. The second part of the chapter presents a case study, which elaborates on the realization of virtual music communities using a generic technological platform, namely DIAMOUSES. DIAMOUSES was designed to provide a host for several types of virtual music communities, intended for music rehearsals, live performances and music learning. Our recent experiments provide useful insights to the distinctive features of these alternative community settings as well as the practices prevailing in each case. The chapter is concluded by discussing open research issues and challenges relevant to virtual music performance communities.

Enabling Virtual Music Performance Communities

The chapter provides an overview of virtual music communities focusing on novel collaboration environments aiming to support networked and geographically dispersed music performance. A key objective of the work reported is to investigate online collaborative practices during virtual music performances in community settings. To this effect, the first part of the chapter is devoted to reviewing different kinds of communities and their corresponding practices as manifested through social interaction. The second part of the chapter presents a case study, which elaborates on the realization of virtual music communities using a generic technological platform, namely DIAMOUSES. DIAMOUSES was designed to provide a host for several types of virtual music communities, intended for music rehearsals, live performances and music learning. Our recent experiments provide useful insights to the distinctive features of these alternative community settings as well as the practices prevailing in each case. The chapter is concluded by discussing open research issues and challenges relevant to virtual music performance communities.

A Temporal Factors Battery for Studying Individual Differences in Perception

Individual differences in perception have drawn increased attention from training and task-performance communities. If perceptual tests are to be utilized to train, predict, or optimize performance, then they need to be studied and evaluated as differential measures. In this study, the reliability and individual differences for a perceptual test battery (seven tasks) were investigated. The participants (10 males, 11 females) completed five trials of the test battery within a ten day span. In general, the results of this study are positive. Six of the seven tasks showed sizable individual differences and four of the seven were reliable. The three tasks that showed unreliability have since been modified and need to be formally studied.