It is difficult to write on the National Black Theatre for this theatre cannot be categorized. To categorize it would limit its function and hinder its performance. For The National Black Theatre is not just a theatre. It is much more. It is a “Temple of Liberation, designed to preserve, maintain and perpetuate the richness of the black life-style.” This “temple” is partly formed by the resident acting company and liberation workshops, which are designed to promote positive black values. The workshops offer courses in evolutionary movement/dance, meditation, spiritual release, liberation theory and practice, numerology, astrology and ideology. Certainly, this is an indication that the scope of The National Black Theatre encompasses more than performance. Every Sunday, the theatre gives a symposium in which they present major artists, thinkers and scholars to the Harlem community.

Jacques Lecoq's significance exists in several areas. One is that of Actor Training, for through him run the ripples emanating from Jazques Copeau in the 20's. Long after its brief existence, Copeau's school and its influence operated seminally, as did the Bauhaus experience in architecture and other arts. Copeau affected theatre in Europe and America with his explorations into free, non-naturalistic forms demanding great technical skill in voice and body; he was the seed from which new forms of education and production are still springing. Lecoq came to his principles through playing in the company of Jean Dasté, who had worked with Copeau. It is interesting to note that the four famous French names associated with mime: Decroux, Marceau, Lecoq and Barrault, all stem from Copeau; yet it would be difficult to imagine four artists who differ more in their professional choices.

Joan Jonas uses video TV as an imagemaker and conjures herself. Working alone in the studio with the camera, the TV is her toy and her other. She plays with it and constitutes with it. As a form of play, the TV is a fixation. Fascinated by her image on the monitor, she locks into it. Playing with it, she explores the black and white image, relating it to objects and materials … her accumulated special effects. As a form of constituting, the TV supplies an other. The TV image is an opposite: oneself given back as an other. It suggests one who can become a series of identities, a complexity of associations, a series of images.

As she used it in the studio, the TV was a mediumistic device … a magic and an instructive tool. It allowed for exploration in privacy and for the making of a solo, video tape.

Otomar Krejča's productions employing masks have formed a small but striking part of his total oeuvre. A contemporary Czech director, Krejča (along with Josef Svoboda and Ladislav Vychodil, both designers, and Alfred Radok, a director) has drawn international recognition to the theatre of Czechoslovakia. Consistently seeking to expand the limits of his art, he has extended the parameters imposed by a socialist-realist policy in the arts that has been influencing theatre in Czechoslovakia for nearly twenty-five years. His productions have ranged from fresh ventilations of Chekhov (The Sea Gull, Three Sisters, Ivanov) to boldly staged Shakespearian revivals [Hamlet, Brussels, and Romeo and Juliet,, Prague) to work with new Czech dramatists such as František Hrubín, Josef Topol, Válav Havel, and Milan Kundera.

Black theatre ain't no easy thing. That's the first problem. Mainly because it means a whole group of black people coming together for a long time to decide on what a black theatre is and then to get one going. And to keep it going. Now I'm not trying to come down on any of the myriad number of small groups that are no longer with us today, but let's face it, the reality of black theatre has got to be more than a gleam in some director's eye.

It's people. Simple as that. It can't be the sets, because street theatre takes place virtually without any. It can't be the plays because some of the new rituals have a decidedly impromptu and spontaneous nature. It can't be the foundation grants—if it were that, we'd really be in trouble! It's people.

The Bread and Puppet Theatre was established in New York in 1962 by Peter Schumann, with the idea that “the theatre should be as basic as bread.” Using masks and a variety of puppets as their basic theatrical tools, the group has created its own distinctly innovative performing style. Their presentations often combine religious themes with a political message, with the war in Vietnam a particularly persistent topic. The troupe has done a large amount of traveling outside of New York, performing at GI coffeehouses and at various political demonstrations in the United States and Europe. Their desire to reach a popular audience that does not usually go to the theatre has led them to perform in the streets, parks and ghettos of cities. Bread and Puppet has always been a poor theatre, with unpaid actors and little or no admission charge.

On the stage is a table with a folding chair behind it. On the table are a bottle of wine, a wine glass, a bell, a hammer, a book, chalk and a small blackboard propped up so that the spectators can see it. The long booms of three microphones angle down over the table.

Between the audience and the stage, three television monitors rest high on a board stretching between two ladders. The spectators may easily watch the television sets and any activity at the table at the same time. Close to the television sets, in the center of the hall, is a television camera aimed at the stage. Below it, technicians sit at video tape recorders.

A man—Robert Israel, who conceived the piece—enters the stage. He picks up the hammer; his image appears on the first television screen.

Training does not teach how to act, how to be clever, does not prepare one for creation. Training is a process of self-definition, a process of self-discipline which manifests itself indissolubly through physical reactions. It is not the exercise in itself that counts—for example, bending or somersaults—but the individual's justification for his own work, a justification which although perhaps banal or difficult to explain through words, is physiologically perceptible, evident to the observer. This approach, this personal justification decides the meaning of the training, the surpassing of the particular exercises which, in reality, are stereotyped gymnastic movements.

This inner necessity determines the quality of the energy which allows work without a pause, without noticing tiredness, continuing even when exhausted and at that very moment going forward without surrendering.

Film has become a threat to small community theatre groups, such as those in Harlem. Even a group like the New Lafayette, which has an international reputation and presents three to four major plays a year, has found its best productions playing to half-empty houses. Despite maintaining high artistic standards, black theatre groups have encountered tremendous frustration in trying to develop a large, black audience that will come back show after show. The fact is that black theatre today is not thriving—only surviving. And movies can assume a great deal of the blame.

It is estimated that blacks spend $120 million annually at the film box offices in the United States. Some 50 feature films aimed at a black audience were produced between 1970 and 1972. And an average of four a month were released over this past summer. Down the street from the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, where Don't Play us Cheap spent three months, the effect of the so-called “black film boom“ on Broadway was overwhelming.

Dario Fo, Italy's foremost practitioner of AgitProp theatre, is one of the world's most versatile theatrical talents: actor, director, playwright, scene and costume designer, dancer, mime, mimic, and political clown. Because of his extensive use of mimicry, masks, and puppets, Fo's theatre is mistakenly characterized as stemming primarily from commedia dell'arte.But commedia satirized social stereotypes, whereas Fo's political satire (broad comedy and highly presentational), originated in the period between the tenth and twelfth centuries, the post-feudal age when the Italian peninsula experienced a burst of political freedom; jesters roamed the land with a repertoire of gags and skits celebrating the end of feudalism, and ridiculing the remaining feudal overlords and the Church. Performing in streets and market places, presenting comic routines consisting of simple language, mime arid mimicry, the feudal jester delighted the common people while awakening them to the tyranny of the nobility.

Francois Delsarte (1811-1871) was the founder of a system of “Applied Aesthetics” in which physical and vocal gestures for the orator were codified in terms of a simple, extensive, highly unified pattern. His influence on the theatre was augmented by his only American pupil, Steele Mackaye, who introduced the system to the United States. It became the basic actor-training method and was extremely popular in various social uses in the twenty five years after 1870. Mackaye's own contribution to the system, its development in terms of “Harmonic Gymnastics,” played a significant part in the actor training and in the related application of these principles to physical culture. From 1870 to 1920, the Delsarte System of Oratory was perhaps the most popular single method for speech training in the United States.

Women's theatre groups in the United States have developed during the last five years as a means of exploring and expressing women's identity, potentialities, and the nature of oppression. By dramatizing their conflicts and joys, the women in these groups seek to make other women feel good about being female and to experience outrage at what they consider to be the gross injustices in the relationship between the sexes.

Feminists began forming their own theatre groups because they felt stifled by male domination in both the traditional and experimental theatre worlds. The groups, most in the New York area, vary in performing style, intent and internal structure from the traditional mode of The New Feminist Theatre, a group with a well-defined leader, to the collective arrangement of the It's All Right to be Woman Theatre, where feminism is expressed through the structure of the group and theatre pieces.