Black Arts Company prepares to show assortment of dramas

Five minutes before intermission, people begin shifting in their seats and checking their watches. They turn on their cell phones, hoping that an electronic and seasonally appropriate rendition of "Jingle Bell Rock" will achieve some sort of retroactive revenge on this dramatic production. They anticipate the raising of the lights and the lowering of the curtain with glee. The average attention span of an audience simply isn't what it used to be.

Luckily, the Black Arts Company's upcoming dramatic sampler will still hold the postmodern audience member's interest for the entirety of its duration. The show, which plays at 8 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 19 and Saturday, Nov. 20 in the Wilson Blackbox theater, is an assortment of scenes from various works such as: "Fences," "The Talented Tenth," "Caligula," "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf," "Blues for Mr. Charlie and the "Vagina Monologues." These excerpts are diverse and eclectic enough to allow the audience to be interested in each new spectacle and also long enough to engage them and give them a sense of the drama as a whole.

The director of two of the pieces, Lileana Blain-Cruz '06, explained why she chose to do an array of works rather than a single one: "I wanted to give other members the opportunity to explore pieces they found interesting as well as exploring the role as director." The range of dramatic styles and culturally relevant topics in these scenes keeps participants as well as observers engrossed throughout the performance.

Most people on campus are familiar with the Black Arts Company's dance ventures, but not as many know about their dramatic productions. The group was founded at Princeton University in 1990 with the intention of being both a dramatic and dance troupe. As Blain-Cruz said, "We organized in order to perform the experiences of people from the African Diaspora, but we are a group open to all nationalities and we love to experiment with new things."

With a cast and directors so heavily involved in various extracurricular activities, the hardest problem for the crew was organizing time and fixing rehearsal schedules. Luckily, the group has proved to be a dedicated one that came together in the past few weeks. New members have found their place among the old, and almost everyone will participate in the upcoming show.

The diverse production was a broadening exercise for directors and actors alike. Nneka Nwosu '05, Sean Stone '06, Calida Motley '06, Crystel Harris '06 and Blain-Cruz directed some of the scenes individually and some of them jointly. Directing segments from a wide variety of plays helped them develop their abilities to interpret texts and determine how to best represent them through the actions and words of their players. As Blain-Cruz said, directing "is an interpretive process...it takes hard work to attempt to make your interpretation and vision become alive through the performance of the actors."

At a time when Princeton students are surrounded by a plethora of large-scale dramatic productions, the Black Arts Company's sampler offers a welcome alternative. This show is refreshingly quick and intense in a way that leaves audience members wanting more rather than less.