CLASSIX Launches The CLASSIX Catalog: A new catalog of Black playwrights and Black performance history!

                                 

 

CLASSIX announced the launch of its Black playwright catalog which contains resources about playwrights who are both celebrated and forgotten. The catalog is now available and free for all to use, and is part of an initiative of CLASSIX to celebrate Black performance around the globe and through numerous eras.

Today, the catalog launches with 10 artists: James Baldwin, Aimé Césaire, Alice Childress, Kathleen Collins, Bill Gunn, Pauline E. Hopkins, Ron Milner, Aishah Rahman, Ola Rotimi and Eulalie Spence. 

 

Additional artists, including Loften Mitchell, Efua Sutherland, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Theodore Ward, Marita Bonner and more will follow in the coming weeks and months.

  

This year, through the generous support of a Black Seed grant, CLASSIX gathered a team of researchers and dramaturgs on a mission to collect information about plays, playwrights and productions. Each playwright entry includes biographical information on the writer, a selected list of plays, production history for various plays and other resources including writings by and about the authors.

 

The catalog includes the contributions of members of CLASSIX, Taylor Barfield, Victoria Davidjohn, Mashonica Evans, Zoey Martinson, Nia R. Robinson, Jillian Walker, Melonnie Walker and Alexis Michaela Williams. The CLASSIX website was designed by Mandi Masden with catalog design by Riw Rakkulchon. 

 

CLASSIX stands on the shoulders of so many brilliant artists, writers and scholars whose work to preserve Black performance history is echoed throughout the database. The hope is that the CLASSIX catalog can serve as a solid foundation for students, scholars, historians and all artists so that we may all engage with the tremendous and vast artistry of the past in order to build and dream into the future.

 

The CLASSIX team is Brittany Bradford, A.J. Muhammad, Dominique Rider, Arminda Thomas and Awoye Timpo. To learn more about CLASSIX and explore the catalog please visit theclassix.org.

 

CLASSIX was created by theatre director Awoye Timpo to explode the classical canon through an exploration of Black performance history and dramatic works by Black writers. CLASSIX defines these classic works as plays by authors of African descent from around the world that speak profoundly to the times in which they were written and resonate deeply with our own. CLASSIX engages artists, historians, students, professors, producers and audiences to launch these plays into the public imagination and spark productions worldwide.

 

CLASSIX began in 2017 as a series of staged readings in collaboration with the Martin E. Segal Center. In February 2020, CLASSIX collaborated with Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) on a reading of Alice Childress’s Wedding Band. A full production of the play will be produced and presented by TFANA in April 2022 at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center. 

 

CLASSIX engages the larger narrative of these plays through conversations with historians and theatre makers on its podcast series, social media platforms, and in live events; educational outreach; new writings and analysis; and an archive of information on its website.

 

Other recent CLASSIX events include A Past Becomes a Heritage, a virtual program about the Negro Units of the Federal Theatre Project, in collaboration with Princeton University; Re-Activating Memory, a centennial symposium on 1921’s Shuffle Along and the Tulsa Race Massacre, also in collaboration with Princeton University; a filmed reading of Black Picture Show by Bill Gunn, in collaboration with Artists Space and F.A.M. Creative; the upcoming podcast series, (re)clamation, on various eras and themes in Black theater history, presented by TFANA; and a virtual panel called, "A CLASSIX Convergence: Sustaining and Dreaming With Black Theater Vanguards.”

Photo: Playwright Alice Childress