New African Company Faces A Rising Sun

BOSTON – In late July, New African Company’s (NAC) Board of Directors named Born Bi-kim as the company’s new Artistic Director, replacing Vincent E. Siders who served as the company’s ad interim Artistic Director when Lynda Patton retired in 2003. Also joining the team are Naheem Allah as the Director of Educational Programs; Monique Douglas as Director of Operations; and Mwalim *7) as the new Director of Special Programs and will continue as a playwright-in-residence. The current Board consists of the fore-mentioned team as well as NAC founder, James A. Spruill; Artistic Director Emeritus, Lynda Patton, and Kay Bourne, who directed NAC’s first production back in the late 1960’s. Particularly significant is the fact that the members of the new team are all alumni of the NAC’s youth and/or young adult training programs, thus fulfilling one of the company’s founding objectives, to train a new generation of Black arts leadership.

In 1968, James A. Spruill and Gustave Johnson, both professional actors and directors living and working in Boston had a vision: they saw the need for a professional theater company in Boston that would not only develop and produce works by, for and about Black people, but one that would provide professional training and experiences in theater for people from the Black community in the Greater Boston Area. Both of these actors had been involved in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960’s and were influenced by the agenda set forth by the movement’s architects. They named their vision New African Company in honor of the African Company, a name given to the New York City based, 19th Century African Grove Theater (1821 – 1823) by the New York Times. The African Grove Theater was a Shakespearean theater company comprised of free Blacks, destroyed in 1823 by rival white theater owners, politicians, and hoodlums.

In the late 1970’s, playwright and arts educator Lynda Patton become the companies Artistic Director, holding the position for over 25 years. An accomplished playwright and historian, Patton is best known for her award-winning plays: “Drink The Contents of This Vial,” “Ol’ Sis Goose & Other Fox-tails,” and “Skip & Stephanie”, as well as her scholarly paper, “Elements of Brecht in Black Theater” and her theater arts educational curriculum, which evolved into the New African Method®. Under her leadership, NAC not only flourished as a prolific theater company, but also became a model for community-based arts education throughout the country, using the arts as an educational tool to enhance social and academic skill development earning grants from the Rockefeller Foundation almost twenty years before Harvard University’s School of Education published their findings in the correlation between the arts and academic development in youth.

New African Company’s plans for the 2005 and 2006 seasons include presentations of staged readings, and workshop productions of new plays in New Bedford in collaboration with UMass Dartmouth and Oversoul Theatre Collective, Boston productions of plays by John Adekoje, M. Younger Roberts, Robert Johnson, Lynda Patton, Mwalim, Frank Shefton, as well as educational programming collaborations with various arts and community organizations, including Boston Branch Libraries, ACT Roxbury, Franklin Park Coalition, NHS African Meeting House, Museum of the National Center for Afro American Art, and AAARMP.

For more information, New African company can be contacted at: New African Company, Inc., P.O. Box 1138, Jamaica Plains, MA 02130; via e-mail at newafricancompany@gmail.com ; or visit them on the web at www.newafricancompany.org .