Famed playwright Amiri Baraka leads discussion following dramatic reading of Dutchman Apr. 14

Date: Apr. 14, 2008
Time: 8:00 p.m.
Location: Alice Jepson Theatre, Modlin Center for the Arts

The Department of Theatre and Dance and the University Players invites students, faculty and staff to a dramatic reading of Dutchman by Amiri Baraka, directed by Roi Boyd, on Monday, April 14, at 8:00 p.m. in the Alice Jepson Theatre, Modlin Center for the Arts. Mr. Baraka will be in attendance and will lead a post-reading talk with the audience.

Tickets not required for those with UR ID (please present at door for admission). The general public may purchase tickets or get more information by visiting www.africanamericantheatre.org. This event is produced in partnership with the Virginia Commission for the Arts, African American Repertory Theatre, Virginia Union University Drama Department and University Players.
 
Amiri Baraka, born in 1934 in Newark, New Jersey, is the author of over 40 books of essays, poems, drama, and music history and criticism and is a poet icon and revolutionary political activist who has recited poetry and lectured on cultural and political issues extensively in the United States, the Caribbean, Africa and Europe.

With influences on his work ranging from musical orishas such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk and Sun Ra to the Cuban Revolution, Malcolm X and world revolutionary movements, Baraka is renowned as the founder of the Black Arts Movement in Harlem in the 1960s that became, though short-lived, the virtual blueprint for a new American theater aesthetic. The movement and his published and performance work, such as the signature study on African-American music, Blues People (1963) and the play Dutchman (1963) practically seeded “the cultural corollary to black nationalism” of that revolutionary American milieu.  In 1964, his play The Slave won second prize at the Dakar International Arts Festival in 1966.

Other titles range from Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1979), to The Music (1987), a fascinating collection of poems and monographs on Jazz and Blues authored by Baraka and his wife and poet Amina Baraka, and his boldly sortied essays, The Essence of Reparations (2003).

The Essence of Reparations is Baraka’s first published collection of essays in book form and radically explores what is sure to become a twenty-first century watershed movement of Black peoples to the interrelated issues of racism, national oppression, colonialism, neo-colonialism, self-determination and national and human liberation, which he has long been addressing creatively and critically. It has been said that Amiri Baraka is committed to social justice like no other American writer. He has taught at Yale, Columbia and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems is Baraka’s first collection of poems published in the Caribbean and includes the title poem that has headlined him in the media in ways rare to poets and authors. The recital of the poem “that mattered” engaged the poet warrior in a battle royal with the governor of New Jersey and with a legion of detractors demanding his resignation as the state’s poet laureate because of the provocatively poetic inquiry in a few lines of "Somebody Blew Up America" that asked who knew beforehand about the New York City World Trade Center bombings in 2001.

The poem’s own detonation caused the author’s photo and words to be splashed across the pages of New York’s Amsterdam News and the New York Times and to be featured on CNN.

Baraka lives in Newark with his wife, author Amina Baraka; they have five children and head up the word-music ensemble, Blue Ark: The Word Ship, and co-direct Kimako’s Blues People, the “artspace” housed in their theater basement for some fifteen years.

Baraka's awards and honors include an Obie (for Dutchman), the American Academy of Arts & Letters award, the James Weldon Johnson Medal for contributions to the arts, Rockefeller Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts grants, Professor Emeritus at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the Poet Laureate of New Jersey.

Posted April 14, 2008