Media Contact: Carmen Ramos Chandler, Director of News and Information, (818) 885-2130
February 2, 1996
A two-day symposium will use the premiere of the university's theatrical production "Hating to See the Sun Rise" as a pivot point to explore a new genre of theater and drama, the "documentary performance."
The symposium, "The American Theatre: The Documentary Performance and Its Emergence Out of Oral Tradition of the African Diaspora," will take place Feb. 23-24 in the Little Theatre in Northridge's Speech Drama Building. The event is free and open to the public.
The term "documentary performance" was coined by UCLA theater professor Beverly Robinson, and refers to a new form of theater that she says has its roots in the oral traditions of African-Americans.
Robinson, administrative head of the African Area Studies M.A. Program and associate director of the James S. Coleman African Studies Center at UCLA, will participate in the symposium along with actor/director Victor Leo Walker II, a Northridge alumnus who is currently a professor in the drama department at Dartmouth College, and playwright/director Paul Carter Harrison, who won a 1985-86 Rockefeller Foundation fellowship for American playwriting and is writer-in-residence at Columbia College Chicago.
The symposium will begin Friday, Feb. 23, at noon with a discussion of the adaptation of oral histories, autobiographies and biographies to the stage.
Attendees will be invited that night to the premiere of "Hating to See the Sun Rise," a play based on slave oral histories created by Northridge theater professor Peter Grego.
The symposium will conclude Saturday, Feb. 24, with a post production discussion of the play at 10:30 a.m. Lunch and a matinee performance of "Hating to See the Sun Rise" will follow.
The symposium will close at 4:30 p.m. with a discussion on "The Politics and Polemics in the American Theatre of Race, Gender and Sexuality."
For more information, call (818) 885-2024 or (818) 885-3086. The symposium is sponsored by Cal State Northridge's School of the Arts, Department of Theatre and The Arts Educational Equity Program.