The writing of The American Performance – Cultural Diversity in Theatre, Music and the Cinematic Arts was a project I chose to undertake after working for over a decade as a university professor of Theatre and Film studies, and as a professional freelance director for the stage throughout Southern California. I chose to write the textbook beginning in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic when I, like so many others in the teaching profession during that time, was no longer in a physical classroom but in front of a computer screen with students only visible in small video boxes. Times had certainly changed. I suddenly found myself privileged with much more available time because of the ongoing quarantine and stay at home orders that we as a nation all experienced to some degree. It was during those first weeks after live Theatre was canceled and university campuses were locked down that I decided to utilize the extra time afforded to me in a productive way for the writing of this book.
The origins for the American Performance as a textbook came specifically from a college-wide Arts elective lecture course that I have developed and taught since 2014 at California State University, Fullerton titled Theatre and Cultural Diversity. Teaching the lecture series and developing curriculum for this class has been one of the joys of my professional life as it allows the opportunity in every academic year to interact with scores of national and international students from many backgrounds all representing the beautifully diverse nature and identity of our modern multicultural American society.
The aim of the Theatre and Cultural Diversity course is to educate university students on the rise and role of multicultural representation in the American Performing Arts by positing the following questions:
How have the social, political, and cultural mores on race in American society changed since America’s Antebellum era in the early 1800s, or since the decades of Jim Crow in the early and mid-1900s, since the Civil rights Movement in the 1960s, or even since the start of this new millennia in 2000?
What have been the greatest engines for positive cultural change and racial progress throughout American society, and how have the various attitudes, sensibilities and belief systems surrounding the topic and expression of race and racial representation in America changed since the countries founding until present day?
We then seek to answer these questions by examining the exquisite contributions that artists from the African American, Asian American, and Latino American communities have created over the last 250+ years and their vast influence on American pop-culture and society working in professional theatre, music, film and in television responding and reacting to the events of the era in which they lived with the expression of their humanity through the application of their Art.
The content of The American Performance is primarily organized in the manner of my college course and is a vast expansion and culmination of the many lectures, writings, and research that I have used over several years to tell the story of how the growth of racial and ethnic diversity within the American Performing and Cinematic Arts has been one of the greatest engines for social, cultural, and political change throughout the history of the United States.
The impetus to write The American Performance stems from my desire as an educator to provide a comprehensive primary reader and resource for my students to have as much contextual information as possible on the topic of cultural diversity within the Performing Arts and the historical moments, social trends and cultural events that have shaped so much of our shared American experience. Over the many semesters teaching on this topic I would often reinforce with students that to fully understand the slow progress in American history for positive, and more authentic representation of BIPOC communities or persons throughout all aspects of American entertainment, we must initially highlight and appreciate the historical times and events (both the good and the bad) that these important artists of color were experiencing, and the ever-changing socio-political realities that shaped the attitudes, voices, and popular performance styles that, over time, have become commonplace, familiar, widely popular and authentically American.
Though The American Performance is not intended as a history textbook per se, it is meant to create a baseline of information for the reader(s) and survey many of the more salient moments and trends in America’s past that are contextually pertinent to the books subject to become a starting point for the further study on the rise of multiculturalism in American society because of the work and influence of visual and performing artists of color. I’ve made this further research possible by providing those persons reading the text (particularly for those students or readers who are coming to this information for the first time) with hundreds of researchable links for individual BIPOC artists and other related topics of interest that have been mentioned or described within the various chapters of this book.
My hope for The American Performance is that it will become a useful and informative resource for anyone who seeks to understand how the rise, trajectory and growing embracement of multiculturalism throughout America’s modern society has changed, developed, and progressed over the last two centuries because of the dynamic work that visual and performing artists from numerous racial backgrounds have created for the live and cinematic Arts, in their pursuit of fully realizing the reach and scope of the American dream for all the wonderfully diverse communities of color living and thriving within the United States.