Montgomery Fellow August Wilson, English Professor William Cook and Drama Professor Victor Walker have joined playwrights, businessmen, lawyers and scholars from across the country for The National Black Theater Summit at the College's Minary Conference Center on Squam Lake near central New Hampshire.
The five-day, closed-door summit, which was convened to discuss the needs of black theater and its movement into the next millennium, will culminate on Saturday with a one-day national conference in the Hopkins Center.
At Saturday's "African-American Theater: The Next Stage" conference, the participants of the closed summit will return to campus to discuss the issues and ideas developed during the week's working sessions.
Panels will address legal and social initiatives, economic issues, playwriting techniques, diversity within the black arts community and audience development. Discussion will be open to students and faculty as well as the public.
The summit's attendees include "Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk" creator George C. Wolfe, playwright, poet and scholar Ntozake Shange, attorney Esmerelda Simmons of the Medgar Evers College Center for Law and Social Justice and several Fortune 500 company executives.
Cook said the wide range of people invited to the summit and conference makes the experience unique.
Organizers said they felt such diversity was important since the actions of the black performing arts community impact the whole community, he said.
Walker stressed the fact that sometimes focusing on the specific can cause profound change to the general, like how the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s caused people to think about rights for all people.
"The summit will start a constructive national dialogue about change in the African-American performing arts community that can extend to the arts community as a whole," he said.
Walker also emphasized that the event does not have a reactive agenda.
"We are proactive, positive and productive," he said.
Summit attendees will respond to Wilson's 1996 speech at Princeton University in which he called playwrights, theater intellectuals and artists to come together to lead a new movement to strengthen and revitalize black theater in America.
"This response to Wilson's call for a black theater, not separate from, but an integral part of the whole of American theater, is vital to the overall health and spirit of the black community, to the cultural enrichment of our nation, and to the advancement of our respect for cultural diversity," Walker wrote in an information booklet on the summit.
Through the summit, participants said they hope to encourage the development of a national institute for African-American theaters, as well as gather material for a book to be edited by Wilson, Walker and Cook, making available the issues, ideas and practices presented in the working sessions.
The book, which is tentatively titled "Cultivating 'The Ground on Which [We] Stand' For Growth & Prosperity in the New Millennium: African American Theater, The Next Stage," will be a collection of chapters written by 15 different participants at the summit.
The Ford Foundation, Dartmouth College, The Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts funded the National Black Theater Summit.
