Shange's Influence Of The Black Theatre In The African American Theatre

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After the Black Art Movement, there was a great need to establish a new black theatre that can address the black community and represent its ambitions and needs. The new theatre must emerge from the suffering of the African American people and it must include their experience and strife to get their rights. There was a great need to establish a new identity to the black theatre and to distance it from the western trends popular in the 60s and the 70s of the twentieth century. To do this, there were dramatists who advocate to return to their African roots, one of them was Shange. Shange according to Brown-Guillory “ not only did she popularize the choreopoem , but she brought to the American theater an art that is undeniably African” (41). …show more content…

As voices crash, so do images from her personal history, world history, fashion, and literary and pop culture. In its juxtapositions and emphasis on improvisation, call and response is a dialogistic form of collage. Shange's collage is not the undirected and autonomous collage of surrealism, but a consciously motivated syncretism with a political agenda. After all, black history, be it African, Caribbean, or American is characterized by collage and syncretism-just as white history is characterized by the myths of completion, racial unity, and progress …show more content…

Because the night-life characters narrate her stories in the third person, Layla listens to the details of her own life and hears her emotions described by others. Her voice is heard only intermittently, often echoing something one of her dream figures has already said” (Kumar, 159). The significance of this third-person narration is emphasized by Shange in the foreword to Three Pieces, in which she argues that "everything in boogie woogielLandscapes is the voice of layla's unconscious/her unspeakable realities/for no self-respecting Afro-American girl wd reveal so much of herself of her own will/ there is too much anger to habdle assuredly/ too much pain to keep on truckin/ less ya bury it”" (

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