![]() ![]() The ’77 blackout presented a rare opportunity for the powerless minority to suddenly seize power, TIME concluded, quoting the head of the National Urban League as saying, “ in a crisis feels no compulsion to abide by the rules of the game because they find that the normal rules do not apply to them. Some saw the worsening circumstances - and institutional neglect - of this group of people as the key to the differences between the two New York blackouts. The blackout ultimately shone a spotlight on some of the city’s long-overlooked shortcomings, from glaring flaws in the power network to the much deeper-rooted issues of racial inequality and the suffering of the “American underclass,” as TIME dubbed it. A headline from Tokyo’s Mainichi Shimbun: PANIC GRIPS NEW YORK from West Germany’s Bild Zeitung: NEW YORK’S BLOODIEST NIGHT from London’s Daily Express: THE NAKED CITY. Newspapers abroad also focused on the looting. ![]() Sample headline from the Los Angeles Times: CITY’S PRIDE IN ITSELF GOES DIM IN THE BLACKOUT. TIME noted how news media outside the city characterized the crisis: Now it seemed as if New York had set itself to auto-destruct. One TIME editor remarked that the tenor of the blackout had more in common with the 1964 Harlem race riots than with the 1965 blackout, which had been generally seen as an example of the city’s resilience. “They set hundreds of fires and looted thousands of stores,” the magazine noted, “illuminating in a perverse way twelve years of change in the character of the city, and perhaps of the country.” As TIME put it, the 1977 blackout left the city powerless in terms of electricity and also powerless to stop the people who seized the opportunity to riot. Yet the effects were dramatically, devastatingly different. The earlier outage affected far more people (25 million, spanning New York and seven other states, plus two Canadian provinces, compared to the 9 million people in New York and its northern suburbs who lost power in ’77, per TIME). ![]() The mayhem of 1977 came as a night-and-day contrast with New York’s previous citywide blackout, in 1965. The sweltering streets became a battleground, where, per the Post, “even the looters were being mugged.” Sounds like a positive and progressive step, yet one white TalkTV presenter – Russell Quirk – decided to take issue with the performance by reportedly buying all remaining front-row seats.Opportunistic thieves grabbed whatever they could get their hands on, from luxury cars to sink stoppers and clothespins, according to the New York Post. “I felt that with a play like Tambo and Bones which unpicks the complexity of Black performance in relation to the white gaze, it was imperative that we created such a space.” Now, Tambo and Bones has decided to adopt the initiative, with director Matthew Xia saying: “Over the past few years, a number of playwrights and directors in the US and the UK have created private and safe spaces for Black theatregoers to experience productions that explore complex, nuanced race-related issues. ![]() Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter A second ‘Black Out’ performance was scheduled for the final performance of Slave Play at the Golden Theatre in the US, before Harris brought the idea across the pond for his play Daddy, which played at London’s Almeida Theatre last year. Harris came up with the idea to create an environment “in which an all-Black-identifying audience can experience and discuss an event in the performing arts, film, athletic and cultural spaces – free from the white gaze”.Īnd it turned out to be pretty popular. So what exactly is a ‘Black Out’ performance?įirst trialed on Broadway back in September 2019 for a production of Slave Play, the show’s playwright Jeremy O. Directed byEgor Baranov Nathalia Hencker. StarringFilipp Avdeev Aleksey Chadov Svetlana Ivanova Pyotr Fyodorov Konstantin Lavronenko. A military crew discovers an outpost of survivors surrounded by corpses, from cars to hospitals, and tries to find out the cause of the mass deaths. Taking place on 5 July, the special performance is “arranged for Black audience members specifically”, and while “no one is excluded from attending”, non-Black individuals are asked to “consider attending another performance”.Īnd to be clear, there are 28 other performances they can go to. Sci-Fi Action Foreign/International Thriller. Theatre Royal Stratford East, an off-West End theatre in London, has upset conservatives after they learned one showing of the comedy play Tambo and Bones has been listed as a ‘Black Out’ performance. ![]()
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