Act One African-American Theater Takes Center Slaoe

Don't let the photo fool you. The hip-hop at the Hop wasn't just a show. It was the overture to a panel at a recent one-day conference on African-American Theater convened at Dartmouth by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Montgomery Fellow August Wilson. Preparing to discuss "Cultures Rooted within African and New World Diaspora Theaters," the panelists performed what they preached. "It is through movement and language and ritual that we know freedom, and if we know freedom we can know art," playwright Ntozake Shange the audience. Added playwright Keith An tar Mason, "When we create theater, we blow life back into the depleted soul of the black theater."

The public conference marked the culmination of a week-long closed summit on African-American theater held at the College's Minary Center in answer to a call to action August Wilson issued in 1996. Heeding the call, Dartmouth drama professor Victor Walker and English professor Bill Cook prepared the way for Wilson and the summit to come to the College. Wilson and the two professors plan to publish the summit's proceedings as a book that will set the "next stage" for African-American theater.

Among the proposals emerging from the summit is the establishment of an organization to aid black theater. One kind of finance-enhancing boost is already in the works. The Tuck School will be inviting African-American theater directors to its executive training program this summer.

At the conference's end, August Wilson stressed the rationale: "Black theater is black America's imagination on display, its intelligence on display, and its humanity on display."

Panelists Keith Antar Mason, Mart Moreno Vega, Mikell Pinkney, Idris Ackamoor, Elmo Terry-Morgan, and Ntozake Shange practiced the theater they preached.