Performing the Black Arts Movement

The course introduces students to the Black Arts Movement (BAM), an era from approx. 1965-1975 of politically charged, socially relevant art making designed to uncover, liberate, connect, and transform Black people. BAM artists used ritual, poetry, music, song, dance, and theatre to identify, disrupt, and examine human thought and action that produced and sustained racism, poverty, colonialism, and sexism. In our class, students will study BAM manifestos, poetry, and plays designed to transform audiences. These course readings will be augmented by regular, on-your-feet, interactive workshops in BAM performance techniques such as improvisational theatre, agit-prop, and the choreopoem. Along the way, we will also dive into the origins of Brown’s own Rites & Reason Theatre (est. 1971), and the importance of community-engaged participant research in the African American theatre tradition.