Black Ensemble Theater Company
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Black Ensemble Theater Company
Black Ensemble Theater Company is a theatre company that performs at the Black Ensemble Cultural Center in the Uptown community area of Chicago, Illinois. The company is known for productions related to African-American culture, especially musicals depicting notable African-American musicians and performers. The company is a significant contributor to Chicago's emergence as a Theater Town, and its theater has been selected as one of the 25 top major theaters in the country by the Encyclopædia Britannica Almanac. The company performed in the Black Ensemble Theater at 4520 North Beacon Street until it opened a new state of the art Black Ensemble Cultural Center at 4450 N. Clark Street, on November 18, 2011. The company raised $20M dollar to build the new theater which is also in Uptown. The new Black Ensemble Theater Cultural Center was designed by Morris Architects Planners, who has previously designed Steppenwolf, Lookingglass, and Playhouse on the Square. The new theater ...
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Chicago, Illinois
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Playhouse On The Square
Playhouse on the Square is a regional theatre company located in Memphis, Tennessee. It is owned by Circuit Playhouse, Inc., which operates two other Memphis theaters. While it has its own resident company of professional actors, auditions are still frequently open to the public. The theater has 347 seats on two levels, an orchestra and balcony with boxes, as well as a rooftop terrace, which is open during shows and rented out for private events. Buildings Since its founding, Circuit Playhouse, Inc. has acquired multiple theaters in Memphis. New Building In January 2010, architect John Morris designed a new building for Playhouse on the Square, located at 66 S. Cooper St., just across from the previous (now The Circuit Playhouse) theater. The new building, which cost 12.5 million dollars and includes a 340-seat theater and rehearsal space is connected to an office building which houses various internal theater projects, as well as headquarters for nonprofit arts organizations ...
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Theatre Companies In Chicago
Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music, and dance. Elements of art, such as painted scenery and stagecraft such as lighting are used to enhance the physicality, presence and immediacy of the experience. The specific place of the performance is also named by the word "theatre" as derived from the Ancient Greek θέατρον (théatron, "a place for viewing"), itself from θεάομαι (theáomai, "to see", "to watch", "to observe"). Modern Western theatre comes, in large measure, from the theatre of ancient Greece, from which it borrows technical terminology, classification into genres, and many of its themes, stock characters, and plot elements. Theatre artist Patrice Pavi ...
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Arts Organizations Established In 1976
The arts are a very wide range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling and cultural participation. They encompass multiple diverse and plural modes of thinking, doing and being, in an extremely broad range of media. Both highly dynamic and a characteristically constant feature of human life, they have developed into innovative, stylized and sometimes intricate forms. This is often achieved through sustained and deliberate study, training and/or theorizing within a particular tradition, across generations and even between civilizations. The arts are a vehicle through which human beings cultivate distinct social, cultural and individual identities, while transmitting values, impressions, judgments, ideas, visions, spiritual meanings, patterns of life and experiences across time and space. Prominent examples of the arts include: * visual arts (including architecture, ceramics, drawing, filmmaking, painting, photography, and sculpting), * literary arts (includin ...
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Jackie Taylor (actress)
Jackie Taylor (born August 10, 1951) is an American actress, director and theater producer. She is the founder and CEO of the Black Ensemble Theater in Chicago. Taylor grew up in the Cabrini–Green housing projects in Chicago. She has acted in several films beginning with ''Cooley High'' (1975), as well as on television and stage. Among other honors, Taylor has been given the lifetime achievement award by the League of Chicago Theaters, and Actors' Equity's ''Rosetta LeNoire Rosetta LeNoire (born Rosetta Olive Burton; August 8, 1911 – March 17, 2002) was an American stage, film, and television actress. She was known to contemporary audiences for her work in television. She had regular roles on such series as ' ... Award'' for "outstanding artistic contributions to the universality of the human experience in American Theater". References External links * {{DEFAULTSORT:Taylor, Jackie American theatre managers and producers American stage actresses American f ...
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Apollo Theater
The Apollo Theater is a music hall at 253 West 125th Street between Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard (Seventh Avenue) and Frederick Douglass Boulevard (Eighth Avenue) in the Harlem neighborhood of Upper Manhattan in New York City. It is a noted venue for African-American performers, and is the home of ''Showtime at the Apollo'', a nationally syndicated television variety show which showcased new talent, from 1987 to 2008, encompassing 1,093 episodes; the show was rebooted in 2018. The theater, which has a capacity of 1,506, opened in 1913 as Hurtig & Seamon's Music Hall. It was designed by George Keister in the neo-Classical style. Alterations were made that year for showing movies, and it was renamed the Apollo Theater. (It was often referred to as the "125th Street Apollo" to distinguish it from the legitimate Apollo on 42nd Street). In 1924, the Minsky brothers leased the theater for burlesque shows. In 1934, it became a venue for black performers and was opened to black ...
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Jackie Wilson
Jack Leroy Wilson Jr. (June 9, 1934 – January 21, 1984) was an American singer and performer of the 1950s and 60s. He was a prominent figure in the transition of rhythm and blues into soul. Nicknamed "Mr. Excitement", he was considered a master showman and one of the most dynamic singers and performers in soul, R&B, and rock and roll history. Wilson gained initial fame as a member of the R&B vocal group Billy Ward and His Dominoes. He went solo in 1957 and scored over 50 chart singles spanning the genres of R&B, pop, soul, doo-wop, and easy listening. This included 16 Top 10 R&B hits, six of which ranked as number ones. On the ''Billboard'' Hot 100, Wilson scored 14 top 20 pop hits, six of which reached the top 10. Wilson was posthumously inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. He is also inducted into the National Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame. Two of Wilson's recordings were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999. He was honored with the Rhythm and Blue ...
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Stax Records
Stax Records is an American record company, originally based in Memphis, Tennessee. Founded in 1957 as Satellite Records, the label changed its name to Stax Records in 1961. It also shared its operations with sister label Volt Records. Stax was influential in the creation of Southern soul and Memphis soul music. Stax also released gospel, funk, and blues recordings. Renowned for its output of blues music, the label was founded by two siblings and business partners, Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton (STewart/AXton = Stax). It featured several popular ethnically integrated bands (including the label's house band, Booker T. & the M.G.'s) and a racially integrated team of staff and artists unprecedented in that time of racial strife and tension in Memphis and the South. According to ethnomusicologist Rob Bowman, the label's use of "one studio, one equipment set-up, the same set of musicians and a small group of songwriters led to a readily identifiable sound. It was a soun ...
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Teddy Pendergrass
Theodore DeReese Pendergrass (March 26, 1950 – January 13, 2010) was an American soul and R&B singer-songwriter. He was born in Kingstree, South Carolina. Pendergrass spent most of his life in the Philadelphia area, and initially rose to musical fame as the lead singer of Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes. After leaving the group in 1976, Pendergrass launched a successful solo career under the Philadelphia International label, releasing five consecutive platinum albums (a record at the time for an African-American R&B artist). Pendergrass's career was suspended after a March 1982 car crash left him paralyzed from the shoulders down. Pendergrass continued his successful solo career until announcing his retirement in 2007. He died from respiratory failure in January 2010. Early life He was born Theodore DeReese Pendergrass on March 26, 1950, in Kingstree, South Carolina. He was the only child of Jesse and Ida Geraldine (née Epps) Pendergrass. Ida suffered six miscarriages before ...
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Dionne Warwick
Marie Dionne Warwick (; born December 12, 1940) is an American singer, actress, and television host. Warwick ranks among the 40 biggest U.S. hit makers between 1955 and 1999, based on her chart history on ''Billboard'''s Hot 100 pop singles chart. She is the second-most charted female vocalist during the rock era (1955–1999). She is also one of the most-charted vocalists of all time, with 56 of her singles making the Hot 100 between 1962 and 1998 (12 of them Top Ten), and 80 singles in total – either solo or collaboratively – making the Hot 100, R&B and/or adult contemporary charts. Dionne ranks #74 on the ''Billboard'' Hot 100's "Greatest Artists of all time". During her career, she has sold more than 100 million records worldwide and she has won many awards, including six Grammy Awards. Warwick has been inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Grammy Hall of Fame, the R&B Music Hall of Fame and the Apollo Theater Walk of Fame. In 2019 she won the Grammy Lifetim ...
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Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan; April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959) was an American jazz and swing music singer. Nicknamed "Lady Day" by her friend and music partner, Lester Young, Holiday had an innovative influence on jazz music and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, pioneered a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo. She was known for her vocal delivery and improvisational skills. After a turbulent childhood, Holiday began singing in nightclubs in Harlem, where she was heard by producer John Hammond, who liked her voice. She signed a recording contract with Brunswick in 1935. Collaborations with Teddy Wilson produced the hit "What a Little Moonlight Can Do", which became a jazz standard. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Holiday had mainstream success on labels such as Columbia and Decca. By the late 1940s, however, she was beset with legal troubles and drug abuse. After a short prison sentence, she performed at a sold-out conce ...
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Chicago Tribune
The ''Chicago Tribune'' is a daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, United States, owned by Tribune Publishing. Founded in 1847, and formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" (a slogan for which WGN radio and television are named), it remains the most-read daily newspaper in the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region. It had the sixth-highest circulation for American newspapers in 2017. In the 1850s, under Joseph Medill, the ''Chicago Tribune'' became closely associated with the Illinois politician Abraham Lincoln, and the Republican Party's progressive wing. In the 20th century under Medill's grandson, Robert R. McCormick, it achieved a reputation as a crusading paper with a decidedly more American-conservative anti-New Deal outlook, and its writing reached other markets through family and corporate relationships at the ''New York Daily News'' and the ''Washington Times-Herald.'' The 1960s saw its corporate parent owner, Tribune Company, rea ...
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