Black and Asian Theatre at the Theatre Museum: a Users’ Guide
Source: www.vam.ac.uk
Topic: Acting Technique
Sort Desciption: a Users’ Guide. The Theatre Museum is Britain’s National Museum of the Performing Arts and. maintains the record of live performance across the country. ...
Content Inside: Black and Asian Theatre at the Theatre Museum: a Users’ Guide The Theatre Museum is Britain’s National Museum of the Performing Arts and maintains the record of live performance across the country. My brief at the Museum includes ensuring it collects material on the whole explosion of ‘alternative theatre’ that emerged roughly from 1968 onwards. This includes experimental theatre and live art, physical and visual theatre, feminist and other political theatre, gay and lesbian, community theatre and community plays… and black theatre. These become the inspiration for exhibitions and displays reflecting that work such as the Black Theatre History Trail, originally created for Black History Month in 1999 which involved several different displays, covering Ira Aldridge the great nineteenth-century black Shakespearean actor, black performers featured in Hogarth’s prints, minstrel puppets in the Victorian Tiller Clowes theatre, carnival exhibits by Mahogany Carnival Arts, material on Ballets Negres, the first black dance company established in Britain in 1946, and black performers’ involvement in the productions of Unity, the Workers’ Theatre. You don’t need to spend very long researching a display or trail, event, exhibition or educational project at the Theatre Museum before you discover that there is an enormous amount of material already in the collections that relates to black theatre history. The difficulty has always been in locating it. The Theatre Museum has extensive Special Collections where the relevance to black theatre history is sometimes easy to identify such as in the Temba and Black Theatre Collection, the Black Mime Theatre archive or the recently-acquired Tricycle Theatre archive. However, the Museum’s Core Collections consist of a huge assembly of programmes, playbills, reviews. photographs, biographical files, stage designs, books, videos, prompt-scripts, paintings, costumes, props, set models, puppets, ceramics, prints e ...
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