1/15/2024 0 Comments Americal little theatre movementOne of Charlotte’s oldest cultural organizations, Theatre Charlotte has overcome many challenges during its long history, but 2020 stands out as an especially trying year. Damage from fire at Theatre Charlotte on December 28, 2020. No one was harmed, but the fire resulted in major damage to Theatre Charlotte’s 216-seat auditorium located at 501 Queens Road. This was also the era of the Little Theatre Movement and the New Stagecraft the former stimulated the growth of amateur theatres to stage plays spumed by the professional theatre, many of these titles.Thousands upon thousands of playgoers have filled the seats in Theatre Charlotte’s auditorium since it first opened to the public in December 1941, but the auditorium stood empty on the evening of December 28, 2020, when an electrical fire broke out. That was the undeclared mandate when, in the Twenties, American culture came of age and impressed the world with the work of Eugene O'Neill, the Theatre Guild, and the ingenious song and dance confections of the Great White Way. Moreover, educational programs of this kind could exist anywhere in the land because this society didn't buy the notion of restricting accessibility of educational opportunity to national centers of arts production, which was the tendency in traditional Western education. It actually required a generation or two to work out the rationale justifying the inclusion of the arts in education, but when it emerged first in music) the import was that the arts could have a place in schooling and even an important place if the community or constituency wanted them dealt with. In other cultures, study and pursuit of theatre and the arts remained a privilege of a select, persistent few in America serious interest in the arts would be available for anyone who possessed the requisite talent and energy. When the Yankee spirit generated the democratic right to education for all, Old World molds had to be broken and new patterns evolved. The society at that time did not exhibit a sure sense of its indigenous sell In all the arts, its agenda called for clever imitation of European models. Nor did it seem likely to do so in the years after the Civil War. It could have happened only in the United States, for indeed no other society has granted theatre the position in its educational structure that it occupies in America. To assess the condition of the theatre in education today, we need to consider how theatre won its place. But by the second centennial these activities had spread so widely in colleges and schools that theatre education was the largest enterprise within the nation's theatrical scene. More explicitly, putting on plays and studying drama did not hold a high priority for the nation's schools in America's first hundred years. At length, theatre made itself too useful and productive to be ignored and won a modest place in the nation's education system. Yet the foster child proved attractive and resourceful, even when it had to endure misunderstanding and exploitation. When the family prospered and grew, it gained in recognition but felt intimidated from being regarded as an illegitimate child of the Humanities. For generations this fosterling didn't seek acknowledgment as a fully autonomous member of the education family it sought to be tolerated and occasionally indulged in its playmaking as it made its way through a prolonged childhood. Not an important lace, to be sure, for its role resembled that of a foster child of whom the family often seemed unaware. Theatre has had a place in American education for more than a century.
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