I scratched my head struggling with this question of the absence of Black males in the field. I hadn't really thought about it before and particularily not in those terms. My colleagues male, female, black, white and Latino, all complain about the lack of access and so on, occasionally. We do talk about the overall state of emergency for all black artists. That question echoes the current cry in many black communities across the nation, in nearly every field, service or occupation.
Black men appear to be everywhere, but the right place.
Yet with a little thought it became quite apparent that within my own community and nationally very few black men are in the performance game. Well, we surely can't overlook the economic, social and educational situations currently facing many black men in America. Yet those problems haven't stopped us from being dominant forces in sports and other popular arts. Considering our historic contributions to American performance technologies, the reasons for our absence from the world of performance art are numerous and this situation should be quite embarrassing, if somebody really gave a damn. My interest in performance art probable began while I sat in the dark of the uptown theater in Philadelphia as a youngster watching beads of sweat from James Brown's face shower down into the screaming crowd in the front row seats.