As a longtime supporter of the International Black Theatre Festival, Wake Forest University also hosts festival productions in the Scales Fine Arts Center. This was the first year Special Collections had an outreach table related to the festival. While performances are in different venues across the city, I limited it to only the on-campus productions so I had a table in front of the Tedford Mainstage and Brendle Recital Hall. Festival performances this year included adaptations of titles in Special Collections such as Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, performed by the North Carolina Central University Theatre and Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, presented by the Ensemble Theatre of Houston. There was also a panel discussion with the producers of the Broadway adaptation of Maya Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman”. I attended two in-person performances and spoke with attendees about the original texts, Dr. Angelou’s film and theatre manuscript collection, and other materials in SCA’s holdings that are related to Black literary and performing arts. With the help of SCA colleagues we created new designs of items to share. I distributed over 300 buttons and magnets featuring images of title pages from SCA’s first edition of Their Eyes Were Watching God, a book-jacket photo of Toni Morrison, and additional cover images of works by Black authors and poets. A special ZSR Letterpress broadside was also made with a quote from Their Eyes Were Watching God,

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer”

Since its inaugural year in 1989, the biennial festival has been organized by the North Carolina Black Repertory Company (NC Black Rep) and hosted exclusively here in Winston-Salem. It brings together Black theatre and performing arts organizations from the US and abroad. Both the NC Black Rep and The Black Theatre Festival were founded by the late Larry Leon Hamlin, a native of Reidsville, North Carolina, and husband of the late Sylvia Sprinkle Hamlin, who was the first woman and African American director of the Forsyth County Public Library System. Larry Hamlin established the NC Black Rep to support, showcase, and promote Black theatre on national and international stages. At the time of the festival’s founding, Maya Angelou was in her faculty appointment at Wake Forest and Hamlin was able to enlist her as the festival’s first Chairperson.

Overall, I enjoyed welcoming festival attendees to Wake Forest and sharing information about the intersections of archives and the performing arts and hope to do it again in the future.