Every winter quarter, Dominic Taylor, acting chair of the theater department at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, teaches an undergraduate course on African American theater. It’s a four-part cycle that, collectively, looks at material from 1619 to the present. He’s currently teaching the second class in the sequence, which touches upon early musical theater, blackface performance and the Harlem Renaissance. He developed the courses as a two-part series when he was a professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and it grew in scope when he arrived at TFT in 2015.
“There’s just so much material to cover in a 10-week period of time that you can’t do from 1619 to 1920 with any kind of justice,” Taylor said. He recently took a moment from his busy schedule to chat about it.
Your current class covers the decades between 1820–1920. What are the time frames for the others?
The first one goes from 1619 to 1820, which looks more at ritual: how imported and enslaved Africans built ritual performance spaces. We make the connection between Mardi Gras and the Egungun Festival of the Yoruba people of Nigeria in terms of costumes, headdresses and music. That class is more about music, anthropology, ritual and performance. Next winter quarter we will look at the time period between the Harlem Renaissance in 1920 to the Black Arts Movement of 1960. In [academic year] 2021–22, we’ll be looking at the time period between the Black Arts Movement up to today.
What do you look at in this class?
Because there aren’t a lot of play texts available from 1820 to 1920, much of our class time is devoted to reading parts of the Constitution, talking about the Declaration of Independence and looking at the pillars of nation-state construction — economic, political, ideological and social — and how those things interact in terms of how American identity is constructed. In the last couple of weeks of the quarter, though, we’re looking at plays.
