Month: January 2015

Untitled

tessb

medievalpoc:

Wlliam Hogarth

Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn

England (1738)

Etching/Engaving, 16 3/4 x 21 1/4 in.

By the middle of the 18th century there were between 10-15,000 black people living in London. The development of the slave trade from the mid 17th century brought many more African people to the UK. However not all black people at this time were slaves.

Hogarth’s prints of life in London feature black performers in pageants as well as black actresses and dressers. The picture ‘Strolling Actresses in a Barn’ shows a group of touring actresses in various states of undress as they prepare for that evening’s performance of ‘The Devil to Pay’ at the George Inn in South London.

Men at this time could pay to peek at the actresses changing. The figure in the centre of the image looking out at the viewer appears to be performing for us, and casts us as one of these Peeping Toms.

The print also shows the presence of black people in
London at the time: to the right a black woman is darning the stockings of an actress; and on the left, a black actress dressed as Aurora (the goddess of dawn) picks lice off the collar of a kneeling colleague whose costume has a mermaid’s tail.

The engraving shows a seedy, disordered side to a play filled with magic and goddesses, but also illustrates the normality of a black presence in English working class communities.

-Black Performance in Britain Before 1800 (V&A Museum)

[source] [source]

Of course, this blog amazing and the work you do is awesome! I have to do a research term paper this semester for a theatre history class on theatre from Grecian to Elizabethan periods. I would like to do a research paper on Black people/POC, and I know you specialize in art, but do you have information on POC in theatre? It’d be really helpful if you have ANY information. Thanks!

tessb

medievalpoc:

Thank you!And, absolutely!

History of Black and Asian Performance form the Victoria and Albert Museum (series of articles) is a fantastic place to start…fair warning, you’re definitely going to have to refine your topic:

Here is a series of downloadable PDFs from the V&A.

Here is some further reading on this topic:

  • Alexander, Catherine M.S., and Stanley Wells, eds. Shakespeare and Race,. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000.
  • Banham, Martin, and others, eds.  African Theatre: Playwrights & Politics.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.
  • Banham, Martin, and others, eds. The Cambridge Companion to African and Caribbean Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
  • Bean, Annemarie, ed.  A Sourcebook of African-American Performance: Plays, People, Movements. London: Routledge, 1999.
  • Bourne, Stephen.  Black in the British Frame: The Black Experience in British Film and Television. 2nd edn. London: Continuum, 2001.
  • Brandon, James R., ed. The Cambridge Guide to Asian Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
  • Croft, Susan, and others. Black and Asian Performance at the Theatre Museum: A User’s Guide. London: V&A Theatre Museum, 2003.
  • Donnell, Alison, ed. Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture. London: Routledge, 2002.
  • Harris, Roxy, and Sarah White, eds. Changing Britannia: Life Experience with Britain. London: New Beacon, 1999.
  • Harrison, Paul Carter, and others, ed. Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the Black Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002.
  • Layiwola, Dele, ed. African Theatre in Performance: A Festschrift in Honour of Martin Banham. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 2000.
  • Lindfors, Bernth, ed. Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Business. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
  • Tompsett, A. Ruth, ed. Black Theatre in Britain. in ’Performing Arts International’. 1996, vol. I, part 2

Here’s a link to all posts on Medievalpoc tagged “Theater”.

Here’s a link to Disabusing-Common-Notions, which deals specifically with people of color in European Drama and Theater.

Here is a Masterpost of specific works you can look into from that blog.

Here’s a post about the work of Wole Soyinka, whose work involves analysis of Ancient Greek, Yoruba, and Italian Theater.

Promotion questions!

tessb

So I’m a little bit less than six months out from Release Day (dun dun dunnnnnn), and that means I’ve gotta start doing… something. Marketing calls it “building a platform,” which I think means “finding the cool kids and making them like me,” but I already have you guys reading me, so! 

(har. It sounds like I’m either sucking up or being sarcastic, but it’s more like… sarcastically truthful because all y’all are my actualfax first adopters, my best encouragement, and that means more to me than I can ever express.)

I’ve been poking around on places like Goodreads, and a lot of folks do contests and giveaways to get copies out, send review copies around, that sort of thing. I was wondering, though, what kind of promos do you want to see from an author? Preview chapters? Character profiles? Are the free copy giveaways actually a thing people enjoy? 

You have the chance to shape my promos and bend me to your will! (within the legal constraints of my contract, must be over 18 to read this hot hot sexing, entrants may be asked a skill-testing question, offer not available in Quebec.)

Hit me. 😀