A century ago, Black theater practitioners such as Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, had to move through their work in ways that perhaps seems absurd now in 2021. Yet bodies that move are always raced and gendered. As the jogger, Ahmaud Arbery, who was gunned down in Georgia for running while Black in 2020, or George C. Wolf’s recent staging of Shuffle Along, or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed reminds us, Black bodies moving on the stage and hence in any space are surveilled and brutalized. Given my research questions within the fields of Performance Studies and Black Studies I was invited to contribute to and recently published an online piece on the 1920s musical Shuffle Along “Shuffle Along: Part II” on a curated site that is dedicated to chronicling the history of 1920s New York City … [ Read the full post here ]