BAG performance of Jean Genetâs The Blacks, 1968, Vincent Terrell on right. Photograph courtesy of Portia Hunt.
The Black Rep owes a debt to an older organization—one that flourished in the midst of the burgeoning civil-rights movement and whose lessons still have much to teach us.
By Lynnda Greene
The mounting of a Shakespearean drama would be a magnificent achievement for any company, but the St. Louis Black Repertory Company's splendid rendition of Macbeth this past spring, its first main-stage Shakespeare production, achieved a relevance rare in theater today. It was director Fontaine Syer's brilliant decision to relocate the plot from Scotland to the deathly dunes of the Sudan, where the action, reminiscent of modern-day militias and egos run amok, lent eerie new meaning to the concept of a timeless tale.
But the Black Rep has been telling us tales, timely and timeless, for almost 30 years. Founded by Ron Himes in 1976, the company puts on daring productions of plays by new and established African-American writers and routinely attracts the most diverse audiences in the city, last year exceeding 175,000. The third-largest African-American performing-arts organization in the country, the Black Rep has trained scores of young professionals for successful careers in theaters around the country. That's why this Macbeth, so sensitively played out by local actors (as talented as any she'd worked with in the country, Syer told me), represents such a glorious flowering.
The making of a work of art, be it drama, poetry, music or painting, is inherently a social process. Every artist stands on the shoulders of those who have gone before, and each work survives only to the degree that it provides a base, an inspiration for those who will follow. Though most of us don't realize it, the Black Rep stands on some strong, if long-forgotten, shoulders.
Indeed, the company might never have formed had it not been for an earlier arts cooperative known as the Black Artists' Group, a rem-arkable band of local African-American musicians, dancers, poets, actors and graphic artists that flowered on the city's North Side from 1968 to 1972. As you'll learn in Benjamin Looker's new book, BAG: Point from Which Creation Begins, published by the Missouri Historical Society, BAG artists (including renowned jazz greats Julius Hemphill and Oliver Lake) came of age just as the rising tide of cultural nationalism in the 1960s spawned a wave of black arts cooperatives around the country. What BAG accomplished—a new kind of interartistic cooperation and social activism—was remarkable for its time and place because its members did it all themselves.
They bought their own building on Washington Avenue, retrofitted it with studios and offices, and opened an arts academy for North Side youth (the young Himes among them). Realizing that people like to see themselves on stage, they nurtured dozens of young musicians, choreographers, artists, dancers, poets, play-wrights and actors toward a singular cultural expression of and within their own community. BAG's performances—rich and wildly imaginative amalgamations of art, dance, drama and music—drew from their experiences to reflect the struggles audiences lived out every day in segregated St. Louis. Early outreachers, they held daytime performances in neighborhood storefronts, where the artists routinely conducted lively interactive discussions with their audiences. No wonder they came back in ever-greater numbers and colors; BAG offered the only setting in which black and white St. Louisans could begin to understand each other and act together for civic change. In giving voice to two timely and potent debates—civil rights and the role of the arts in daily life—BAG achieved a kind of community narrative we rarely see today: art of, by and for a specific population that reaches beyond its own perimeter to launch a trajectory, shape a future.
The Black Rep's continuation of this through-line affects our city's cultural life in ways we rarely realize but should. Many of us, for example, were glad to note that while Shakespeare's Macbeth anguished on the Black Rep's Grandel stage, five black women discussed hats, faith and values in Regina Taylor's Crowns over at the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis in Webster Groves. Such a phenomenon would have been unthinkable 50 years ago. But Crowns used only one local actor, who had to go to New York to audition. The Black Rep employed 16 local actors in a cast of 18. Ironically, student matinee tickets to Crowns went begging, even as the Black Rep had to add Macbeth matinees for a total of five sold-out student performances.
But even as the Black Rep continues its tradition and mission—theater as potent forum for community discourse—it has yet to achieve status as a major cultural institution in our public consciousness. Though it serves our city's vital need for diverse perspectives, nurtures new talent and employs a whole company of local actors, directors, and set and lighting designers, it does not own its theater or its administrative and production facilities. Granted, all arts groups are struggling now, but we can't afford to forget what BAG taught us decades ago: that art can empower an entire community to draw from its own experience and shape an even broader reality for all of us. The Black Rep isn't just about diversity; it's about the next Sidney Poitier, Morgan Freeman, James Earl Jones, Regina Taylor, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, August Wilson, Denzel Washington, Cicely Tyson, Don Cheadle, Ron Himes ...
It's about our future.
