Ira Aldridge
He didn't only play Othello
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Dense Oliver Velez
Today marks the anniversary of the birth of one of the worlds most famous Shakespearean actors, over 200 years ago. Ira Frederick Aldridge was born on July 24, 1807 in New York City to free black parents.
Errol Hill, author of Shakespeare in Sable: A History of Black Shakespearean Actors, wrote about his performance:
The career of Ira Aldridge spanned four decades. In that time he performed over forty roles, including Othello, Aaron the Moor, Richard III, Shylock, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear. He played in towns and cities throughout England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. He appeared in some thirty cities of Europe and Russia, among the most important being Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Munich, Stockholm, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Constantinople, Warsaw, and Paris. He performed in many towns that had never before seen Shakespeare on stage. He played the great tragic roles in bilingual productions, speaking English himself with foreign companies who spoke their native language
I have always had an interest in Aldridge. I learned about him first from my father, who struggled with popular restrictions in theater here in the US against black actors playing non-black roles. I remember my dad telling me, when I was about 6 and he was cast as Othello in a rep company production "he (Aldridge) didn't only play Othello".
Othello was frequently performed as an Arab Moor during the 19th century. He was first played by a black man on the London stage in 1833, by Ira Aldridge. However, the first major screen production casting a black actor as Othello would not come until 1995 with Laurence Fishburne opposite Kenneth Branagh's Iago. In the past, Othello would often have been portrayed by a white actor in blackface or in a black mask; more recent actors who chose to ‘blacken up’ include Ralph Richardson (1937), John Gielgud (1961), Laurence Olivier (1964), Anthony Hopkins (1981) and Orson Welles. Ground-breaking black American actor Paul Robeson played the role from 1930 to 1959. The casting of the role comes with a political subtext. Patrick Stewart played the role in the Royal Shakespeare Company's 1997 staging of the play and Thomas Thieme, also white, played Othello in a 2007 Munich Kammerspiele staging at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford. Michael Gambon also took the role in 1980 and 1991; their performances critically acclaimed.
Years later, when I was a student at Howard University in Washington DC in the Department of Fine Arts, I spent a lot of time in the
Ira Aldridge Theater, where I learned more about his history. Though there are currently several theater companies in the U.S. that bear his name, among them the
Ira Aldridge Repertory Players in San Diego and the
Ira Aldridge Theater Company in Las Vegas, he is still not a well-known historical figure to many.
Perhaps this is because, though born in the U.S., Aldridge spent most of his life in Europe. He died in 1867 in Poland, where he is buried.
Early life and career
At age 13, Aldridge went to the African Free School in New York City, established by the New York Manumission Society for the children of free blacks and slaves. They were given a classical education, with the study of English grammar, writing, mathematics, geography, and astronomy. His early "education" in theater included viewing plays from the high balcony of the Park Theatre, New York's leading theater of the time. Aldridge's first professional acting experience was in the early 1820s with the company associated with the African Grove, an African-American theatre. He debuted as Rolla in Pizzaro. He went on to play Shakespeare's Romeo and later became a notable Hamlet. The British actor and comedian Charles Mathews came to the United States on tour in 1822–23. He had developed table entertainments, one-man shows in which he played a variety of parts. From his seeing the African-American actor James Hewlett, he developed a piece which he called "The African Tragedian", which he performed while still in the US. (This became part of his larger work entitled A Trip To America). Mathews was very popular in London, so many people became familiar with his new work after he returned to London. Hewlett wrote a letter to him, which was published, challenging him on his satirical portrayal of an African-American actor.
Confronted with the persistent discrimination which black actors endured in the United States, Aldridge emigrated to England, where he first worked as a dresser to the British actor Henry Wallack. According to the scholar Shane White, English people had heard of the African Theatre because of Mathews, so Aldridge associated himself with that. Bernth Lindfors says, "[W]hen Aldridge starts appearing on the stage at the Royalty Theatre, he’s just called a gentleman of color. But when he moves over to the Royal Coburg, he’s advertised in the first playbill as the American Tragedian from the African Theater New York City. The second playbill refers to him as 'The African Tragedian.' So everybody goes to the theater expecting to laugh because this is the man they think Mathews saw in New York City."
In his performances, Aldridge used his skill to reverse what was expected. Aldridge performed scenes from Othello that stunned reviewers. One critic wrote, "In Othello (Aldridge) delivers the most difficult passages with a degree of correctness that surprises the beholder." He gradually progressed to larger roles; by 1825, he had top billing at London's Coburg Theatre as Oronoko in A Slave's Revenge, soon to be followed by the role of Gambia in The Slave, and the title role of Shakespeare's Othello. He also played major roles in plays such as The Castle Spectre and The Padlock, and played several roles of specifically white characters, including Captain Dirk Hatteraick and Bertram in Rev. R. C. Maturin's Bertram, the title role in Shakespeare's Richard III, and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.
Though Aldridge did not get the chance to return to the United States after the end of the Civil War, his daughter,
Amanda Christina Elizabeth Aldridge, known as Amanda Ira Aldridge, would carry on the family artistic tradition, though in music. She
studied with Jenny Lind, became an opera singer, teacher and composer. Among her students were Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson.
Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius
(Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora)
For further reading about Aldridge, I suggest this collection.
Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius
Ira Aldridge -- a black New Yorker -- was one of nineteenth-century Europe's greatest actors. He performed abroad for forty-three years, winning more awards, honors, and official decorations than any of his professional peers. Billed as the "African Roscius," Aldridge developed a repertoire initially consisting of Shakespeare's Othello, melodramas about slavery, and farces that drew on his ability to sing and dance. By the time he began touring in Europe he was principally a Shakespearean actor, playing such classic characters as Shylock, Macbeth, Richard III, and King Lear. Although his frequent public appearances made him the most visible black man in the world by mid-nineteenth century, today Aldridge tends to be a forgotten figure, seldom mentioned in histories of British and European theater.
This collection restores the luster to Aldridge's reputation by examining his extraordinary achievements against all odds. The early essays offer biographical information, while later essays examine his critical and popular reception throughout the world. Taken together, these diverse approaches to Aldridge offer a fuller understanding and heightened appreciation of a remarkable man who had an exceptionally interesting life and a spectacular career. Contributors: Cyril Bruyn Andrews, Nikola Batusic, Philip A. Bell, Keith Byerman, Ruth M. Cowhig, Nicholas M. Evans, Joost Groeneboer, Ann Marie Koller, Joyce Green MacDonald, Herbert Marshall, James J. Napier, Krzysztof Sawala, Gunner Sjögren, James McCune Smith, Hazel Waters, and Stanley B. Winters.
Roscius, in the book's title, is a reference to Roman actor Quintus Roscius Gallus, born into slavery in Rome about 126 BC.
Ira Aldridge as Aaron in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus
It is interesting how far we haven't come in the 145 years since his death. There are still too few starring roles in theater, film, and television for black actors, and other actors of color, that are not typecast by their "race" or ethnicity. And even roles written for us are often whitewashed.
The struggle continues.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The reign of Elizabeth I saw the beginning of Britain's first black community. It's a fascinating story for modern Britons, writes historian Michael Wood. BBC: Britain's first black community in Elizabethan London.
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Walk out of Aldgate Tube and stroll around Whitechapel Road in east London today, and you'll experience the heady sights, smells and sounds of the temples, mosques and curry houses of Brick Lane - so typical of modern multicultural Britain.
Most of us tend to think that black people came to Britain after the war - Caribbeans on the Empire Windrush in 1948, Bangladeshis after the 1971 war and Ugandan Asians after Idi Amin's expulsion in 1972.
But, back in Shakespeare's day, you could have met people from west Africa and even Bengal in the same London streets.
Of course, there were fewer, and they drew antipathy as well as fascination from the Tudor inhabitants, who had never seen black people before. But we know they lived, worked and intermarried, so it is fair to say that Britain's first black community starts here.
There had been black people in Britain in Roman times, and they are found as musicians in the early Tudor period in England and Scotland.
But the real change came in Elizabeth I's reign, when, through the records, we can pick up ordinary, working, black people, especially in London.
Shakespeare himself, a man fascinated by "the other", wrote several black parts - indeed, two of his greatest characters are black - and the fact that he put them into mainstream entertainment reflects the fact that they were a significant element in the population of London.
Employed especially as domestic servants, but also as musicians, dancers and entertainers, their numbers ran to many hundreds, maybe even more.
The black trumpeter John Blanke played regularly at the courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII
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Haiti has a lot of art talent, says Karine Villard, a metal artist in Port-au-Prince, who goes by the name Cookie. Haitian Times: Haitian Artists from Urban Zen Exhibit Have a Say on Rebuilding, Development.
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This artistic skill was on display in a recent exhibit hosted by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) Cultural Center in Washington, DC and co-sponsored with fashion designer Donna Karan's Urban Zen Foundation and Nomad Two Worlds.
Dozens of beautifully designed and exquisitely crafted pieces were on view from heart-shaped stones and bracelets, to small vessels fashioned from cattle horns. Multitudes of hand-woven handbags, place mats, colorful beaded necklaces and purses, decorative metal plates, votives and sculptures showcased diverse forms of Haitian art.
A once vibrant art scene has been severely impacted by political turmoil and natural disasters. More recently, the earthquake of 2010, which destroyed the economy and the art market, destroyed many museums and art centers.
People used to come in to buy art but it's not like that any more. Most of the major artists passed away, said Philippe Dodard, a premiere Haitian artist featured in the exhibit. Now we have a new generation of artists and a new kind of art coming up.
These metal pieces are the creations of Phillipe Dodard, an internationally reknown contemporary artist who was born in Port-au-Prince.
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This piece was contributed by Oboi Reed, founder of The Pioneers, a bike club that promotes cycling on Chicago's South Side, and co-leader of the Southeast Side community advisory group for the city's Streets for Cycling 2020 plan. GRID Chicago: Black Power Riding: Oboi Reed reports from Brazil.
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In February, I embarked on a journey to live and study in Brazil for six months. With the tremendous support of many family and friends, I travelled to Salvador, Bahia, Brazil to study public health in the African-Brazilian community in Salvador and elsewhere in northeast Brazil. Throughout this nearly four month program, Brazil: Public Health, Race, & Human Rights organized by The School for International Training, colleagues and I were blessed to have unparalleled access to the people, families, organizations, institutions, and systems that make up the fabric of Brazil's healthcare delivery system. We experienced firsthand, in sight and in sound, the contemporary successes and challenges of the public healthcare system for African-Brazilian people and all Brazilians. We engaged patients, community health agents, nurses, doctors, administrators, activists, educators, and more. We directly participated in the Candombla spiritual tradition. We explored Candombla traditional healing as a critically important and culturally relevant system of healthcare in fact a viable & effective complement to the Brazilian government system of healthcare delivery.
We traveled throughout northeast Brazil, visiting a diverse set of communities: Itapua, Cachoeira, Alecrim, Ilha de Mara, Feira de Santana, Santo Antonio de Jesus, Lenais, and Luna. The exposure to different geographies, lifestyles, cultures, people, income levels, struggles, and successes was an incredibly eye-opening experience. The opportunity to achieve all of this in such a short timeframe was a divine blessing and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It served as an important chance for me to grow personally, academically, and professionally by embracing my global citizenship. My life has changed forever.
Some of Oboi's colleagues from the program with Quilombo de Remanso residents.
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Caster Semenya says her controversial victory in the 2009 world championships is behind her, and she is entirely focused on Olympic gold. Mail and Guardian: Semenya comes out fighting for gold.
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The 21-year-old who is coached by 2000 Sydney Olympics 800m champion Maria Mutola from Mozambique had to undergo drug tests followed by gender tests following that magnificent victory in Berlin.
The situation spiralled out of control with Caster complaining of "unwarranted and invasive scrutiny of the most intimate and private details of my being".
She was barred from the track for almost a year before being cleared to run again and her comeback was hampered by a lower back injury and a growing belief that coach Michael Seme had taken her as far as he could.
She told several British national newspapers on Wednesday that nightmare was all in the past and she wanted to go on and win the gold something if she does achieve she will dedicate to the increasingly frail South African political icon Nelson Mandela, who celebrates his 94th birthday on Wednesday.
"That [controversy] is in the past," she said.
"You need to concentrate on the future. I don't have to entertain those things now. I can concentrate on my running, that's all.
Caster Semenya says the nightmare over her gender is a thing of the past and she's aiming for gold at the Olympic Games. (Gallo)
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As new documentary I Am Bruce Lee shows, black audiences in the US have long embraced eastern martial arts films. Guardian: Why Bruce Lee and kung fu films hit home with black audiences.
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America is generally regarded as the land that subtitles forgot, the graveyard where foreign-language film goes to be buried, with a tombstone reading: "Negligible box office". But that's only if you ignore one special genre, which has had consistent success with a particular audience more loyal than the Cahiers du Cinema-brandishing, iPad-pawing arthouse set. Since Five Fingers of Death in March 1973 the first kung fu film to get a release by a mainstream US distributor black Americans have stood staunchly by eastern martial-arts films like an outraged young acolyte ready to kick off for his sifu.
"Cross-cultural stuff has been going on in the ghettoes for a long time," says producer-writer James Schamus, whose Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon played big to black audiences, too. "Remember Bruce Lee was probably the greatest African-American star of the 70s. And that culture persists." That's certainly what comes across in new documentary I Am Bruce Lee, where one commentator goes as far as suggesting love for Lee ran so deep in the black community because, as Hong Kong's 1958 cha-cha champion, his footwork bore the hallmarks of a rhythm that ultimately had African roots.
There are more obvious reasons, though. In the 1970s, Lee was a rare non-white leading man, and an unfeasibly cool one at that. His four (completed) films amounted to a picture of a world in which oppression whether from drug lords, Japanese imperialists or cat-executing pseudo-Bond villains was swatted aside with hyper-kinetic ultraviolence. You can see why his creed of righteous self-reliance appealed to black audiences, who were emerging from the civil rights struggles, but were still subject to plenty of prejudice.
Martial arts films, like blaxploitation, were adrenalin-drunk revenge fantasies. In fact, the two genres crossed paths a few times before blaxploitation ran out of steam in the mid-70s, in films like Melinda, Black Belt Jones (both starring Enter the Dragon's Jim Kelly) and Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold (a co-production between Warner and the ubiquitous Shaw brothers). In 1973 American audiences of all kinds were on a massive kung fu high from late March to mid-October, six Hong Kong films held the No 1 spot, with around 15 successful imports in total but it was the urban black crowd in fleapit theatres who kept the flame alight after the craze died down.
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A much needed step. The Grio: NAACP develops HIV manual for black churches.
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As the pastor of a mostly African-American Baptist church near Houston, Timothy W. Sloan has known for years that he needed to talk about HIV and AIDS with his congregation.
He worried the 3,000 parishioners at St. Luke Missionary Baptist Church in Humble, Texas, could be offended and leave the church or curtail their giving.
On a scale of 1 to 10 it was a 6, he said of his concerns.
Then, a year and a half ago, he joined a group of pastors organized by the NAACP to write a manual for church leaders like himself on talking to their congregations about a disease that has a disproportionate effect on the black community.
Sloan spoke to his congregation about the issue soon after. They surprised him with a standing ovation.
Now Sloan hopes others can use the manual he helped create to talk to their congregations. The NAACP this month released it and a 61-page activity manual at the group's convention in Texas.
Shavon Arline-Bradley, the director of health programs for the NAACP, who helped oversee the manual's creation, said it makes sense for the nation's largest civil rights organization to be involved in the discussion of HIV and AIDS.
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Executive Leadership Foundation chair Laysha Ward says the group's goals are attainable. The Root: Training Black Women to Have It All
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According to the Executive Leadership Council, an organization focused on increasing the number of African Americans at the senior level in Fortune 500 companies and on corporate boards, the numbers are grave: Of the more than 35,000 senior-executive positions either at the CEO level or those one or two levels below CEO within Fortune 500 companies, it is estimated that only 3.2 percent -- or fewer than 800 -- are black.
And when it comes to CEOs themselves, just six in the country are African American -- and only one of those, Ursula Burns of Xerox, is a woman.
Laysha Ward, board chair of Executive Leadership Foundation, says that the statistics "definitely can change, they must change and they will change." The Root caught up with her after the ELC's ninth annual Women's Leadership Forum and Black Women on Power discussion series, an event that offers leadership-development opportunities to its 200 high-potential African-American female members with the explicit goal of increasing their ranks in high-level positions in corporate America.
Ward, who is president of community relations for Target, told The Root about the research-based lessons that the high-powered executives learned during the forum, why she thinks the ELC's ambitious goals for corporate boardrooms are attainable (and even inevitable) and why she doesn't worry about whether she and the women she works with can "have it all."
Laysha Ward, Bloomberg/Getty Images
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor
When Khrushchev spoke at the UN, back during the height of the Cold War, he famously banged his shoe on the lectern he spoke from; it made all the news at the time. People were either aghast and appalled, or humored by yet again, another Kruschevian, dramatic masterpiece. Regardless, the world couldn't stop speaking about it. What was less reported was an off hand answer to an off hand question as Khrushchev moved about on his escorted tour of the US. He was asked how he was so sure that the Soviets would prevail over the West.
"When I come to grind the West under the iron heel of my iron boot," I like to embellish his response, "rest assured, the Capitalist will sell me the rope I hang him from first."
That last part is all Khrushchev; and though the Soviets have gone the way of the Velociraptor, Khrushchev's truism about the Capitalist cannot be refuted. How else to explain the deep water oil blowouts? How else to explain contaminated foodstuffs, acid rain, polluted aquifers and mountaintop removal? How else to explain what it means to live...
Under Corporate Skies
Dawn, you miserable slow-cooker
of goat meat, why do you park
yourself at my window to snooker
me into imagining the smoky night
will never come again? Sometimes
when you turn up so impeccably
disguised as a new day with wines
of forgetfulness, I respectfully
give in. Life clouds the very trail
life spins: a spidering website.
How long can we put truth in jail?
How long can politicians stab
biology and physics in the heart
and gut the world before there is
no world left? Where profit ignites,
where dividends burn up, lives go out.
-- Al Young
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