Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches

Black Acting Methods seeks to offer alternatives to the Euro-American performance styles that many actors find themselves working with.

A wealth of contributions from directors, scholars and actor trainers address afrocentric processes and aesthetics, and interviews with key figures in Black American theatre illuminate their methods. This ground-breaking collection is an essential resource for teachers, students, actors and directors seeking to reclaim, reaffirm or even redefine the role and contributions of Black culture in theatre arts.

Reviews

“Black Acting Methods is a necessary and miraculous book chock full of insight, history, fact, conjecture, fascinating points-of-view and valuable insight. The contributors include a who’s who of distinguished artists and practitioners as well as serious academic minds, coalescing in a must-read book for our times. An accomplishment!”

– Anne Bogart, Co-Artistic Director, SITI Company

“Enacting the now legendary notion of “the audacity of hope” from Barack Obama, Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer have the audacity to imagine and execute a volume of essays that attempts to fill a void in the annals of the theatrical cannon. The audacity is to reclaim and articulate “Black acting methods,” as quintessentially linked with cosmologies of knowing/doing that are race and culture based. These essays offer a reunification of thought as much as embodied methods of doing, rightfully broadening pedagogies of theatre and expressive cultural ways of approaching performance.”

– Bryant Keith Alexander, author of The Performative Sustainability of Race: Reflections on Black Culture and the Politics of Identity

“Grounded in radical acts of freedom making, Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches begins the critical work of making the struggles for freedom that Black actors experience audible and legible, and validates so much of the invisible labor that Black artists perform in order to connect with their craft and work.”

-Nicole Hodges Persley, professor, University of Kansas

“Black Acting Methods is a gift for theatre artists and artist-scholars. This multiperspectival collection exists as a mosaic that reveals how central, and indeed endemic, theatre and performance are (and have always been) to African and Black diasporic experiences.”

– Harvey Young, author of Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body