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Dateline: 19th June, 2009
Black Show Business History Exhibition Opens The Living Archive, an exhibition which celebrates the contribution which Black people have made to the culture of Britain, especially in theatre, opened this week in the Palladium Theatre in London's West End. You can see posters, photographs, programmes and old playbills dating from the eighteenth century through to today. More than two centuries of black entertainers are celebrated here, with actors, singers and dancers ranging from one-legged Billy Waters, who busked audiences outside the Adelphi theatre at the end of the 1700s and Ira Aldridge, the 'African Roscius' who played Othello, Shylock and Lear as well as black slaves to audiences at Covent Garden and Drury Lane and the transpontine theatres of early Victorian London, and composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor through to Edwardian musical entertainers Bert Williams and George Walker, stars of In Dahomey at the Shaftesbury Theatre in 1903, Florence Mills, 1920s star of Lew Leslie's Blackbirds revues, Winifred Atwell, Elizabeth Welch, and Paul Robeson, to Berto Pasuka and his 1940s Ballets Nègres and on to Shirley Bassey -- right up to current shows such as Lion King and Sister Act. All of this Living Archive Exhibition has been assembled by Positive Steps, an organisation founded and run by dancer and performer Leon Robinson who, for twenty years, has been collecting and preserving the evidence of Black performance culture in Britain, developing a 'wonderful and unique resource' as Baroness Lola Young described it in a message to the opening reception. Robinson himself spoke of how, as a student and a young dancer, he became aware how little Black Britons in show business knew of those who had gone before them, ignorant of the hundreds of black entertainers in Victorian London, of the richness of the Black contribution to entertainment history. Simon Callow, who first met Leon when he danced in the actor/director's production of Carmen Jones at the Old Vic, called him 'a poet, dreamer, visionary - hardworking and determined' who amazingly had built up a collection that would be slavered over by museum curators despite being someone 'with negative financial capacity!' "Leon himself," he declared, "is a Positive Step. He's been auditioning for twenty years. Now's the time to give him the part - and give him lots of money' - for Positive Steps do need cash to keep up the work. Callow reinforced Leon's remarks about the need for awareness of the depth and variety of past achievement, not least to help develop aspiration in the younger Black community. "If you don't know your history you don't know what you're worth." Another speaker at the opening reception was tap-dancing star Steve Clark of the legendary Clark Brothers who claimed to be so old he can't remember how old (but then admitted to being 85). He recalled first appearing here in the West End in Hellzappopin' at the Casino (now Prince Edward Theatre). The Clarks made their home in Britain but this exhibition also celebrates the many American performers who came here as visiting artistes, from Josephine Baker and Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson to Harry Belafonte, Eartha Kitt, Sammy Davis Jnr, and Nat King Cole. The Variety Bar downstairs at the Palladium has a display of posters and other material devoted to Black entertainers who have appeared there since the theatre opened in 1910. Guests at the opening were treated to a display of a great deal more unframed material drawn from the collection but the exhibition itself will be on display to audiences for the whole of the run of Sister Act and a large part of it can be viewed freely by the general public who can come in from the street to see those parts of it in areas leading to the box office during all the hours that it is open for bookings. Howard Loxton
Please note that all three Archive indices are very long and will therefore take some time to download.
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