The National Black Theatre Festival (NBTF), held biennially across Winston-Salem, has been postponed until August, 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Nigel Alston, Executive Director of the North Carolina Black Repertory Company (NCBRC), the festival attracts over 60,000 people and generates anywhere from $7-11 million for the city. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In addition to the massive crowds and revenue generated for the city, the festival attracts dozens of celebrities and Black theatre companies from around the world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s a star-studded event,\u201dsaid Lawrence Evans, the NBTF Celebritiy Coordinator, \u201cWe have a lot of celebrities from theatre, television, and film. Everyone has been, you name it, from the \u2018Denzel Wahingtons\u2019 to the \u2018Phylicia Rashads.\u2019 You know, Oprah Winfrey came to the first festival. Anybody who\u2019s anybody in Black television, film, and theatre has been to the festival.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In addition to 20-30 theatre companies both domestic and international, thousands of volunteers are required to run the six-day festival. Venues range from the downtown Stevens Center of UNCSA to Wake Forest University\u2019s Scales Fine Arts Center. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
COVID-19 would prevent many of the events that make the festival a celebration. \u201cIf it was just theatre, maybe <\/em>you could hold a hybrid event,\u201d Evans said. \u201cThe core of it are the plays, yes, the mainstage productions, but you have all this other stuff going on at the same time. You have your readers\u2019 theatre, midnight poetry, vendors market, celebrity youth program, workshops and seminars, and even film.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alston said the festival was postponed because \u201cwell, there are a lot of reasons. COVID is the primary one. There are a lot of restrictions: capacity issues in terms of the number of people allowed in venues, safety protocols, social distancing.\u201d These current challenges would prevent a festival of grandeur that people have become accustomed to internationally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The NCBRC, the state\u2019s first professional Black theatre company, produces each festival. The NCBRC was founded in 1979 by Larry Leon Hamlin, known for having an innovative and upbeat attitude towards theatre, who was awarded many accolades during his time as an actor, director, and playwright. <\/p>\n\n\n\n According to Alston, who worked intimately with Hamlin, \u201che was somewhat eccentric, a very electric person, very colorful. If you Google the company, you\u2019ll find that he always had shades on. He was an artist, he was a genius in his own right – he had big visions, big goals.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first NBTF, led by Hamlin as executive director, was in 1989 and hosted around 10,000 people. Dr. Maya Angelou, world-renowned poet and civil rights activist who spent many years at Wake Forest University, played an integral role in coordinating and fundraising for the first festival and served as the first chairperson. The theatre company considers the NBTF to be an opportunity to reach across the world and illuminate the best Black performers, designers, directors, producers, and technicians. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Known as the \u201cBlack Theatre Holy Grounds,\u201d organizers say the festival is a spiritual experience in every aspect. Arthur Reese, Technical Director of the NBTF, said, \u201cI\u2019ve been around quite a bit – I\u2019m talking around the world – and the festival is one of the most positive Black-run events on the planet. It is truly a reunion of spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to Alston, the festival\u2019s budget is between $1.3M and $1.5M and, \u201cit\u2019s continued to grow and we\u2019ve continued to add different components to it.\u201d Next year the festival will present a documentary about the festival itself, Alston said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reese, who oversees \u2018all of it,\u2019 said, \u201cThere was no way I felt we could guarantee safety.\u201d However, he said, \u201cGiven this extra time we\u2019re able to prepare even more and do a better job so that when 2022 hits, it\u2019s the most Marvtastic festival you could imagine.\u201d \u2018Marvtastic,\u2019 a word created by Larry Leon Hamlin, is a combination of \u2018marvelous\u2019 and \u2018fantastic.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n The executives of the festival view the postponement in a positive light; more time for preparation will yield a better experience for everyone. Jason Thiel, President of the Downtown Winston-Salem Partnership, said, \u201cI think the positive story is that we\u2019re so fortunate to have this event and its creation in our city.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The National Black Theatre Festival (NBTF), held biennially across Winston-Salem, has been postponed until August,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":1424,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-semester-spring21","wpcat-1-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zerwicp.sites.wfu.edu\/CommunityJournalism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zerwicp.sites.wfu.edu\/CommunityJournalism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zerwicp.sites.wfu.edu\/CommunityJournalism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zerwicp.sites.wfu.edu\/CommunityJournalism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zerwicp.sites.wfu.edu\/CommunityJournalism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1423"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/zerwicp.sites.wfu.edu\/CommunityJournalism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1423\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1448,"href":"https:\/\/zerwicp.sites.wfu.edu\/CommunityJournalism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1423\/revisions\/1448"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zerwicp.sites.wfu.edu\/CommunityJournalism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zerwicp.sites.wfu.edu\/CommunityJournalism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zerwicp.sites.wfu.edu\/CommunityJournalism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zerwicp.sites.wfu.edu\/CommunityJournalism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}