Question- What is experimental Theatre?

Answer - 

Experimental theatre after the black arts movement is a loosely-related body of work that offer new ways of experiencing drama, reconsidering history and interpreting black identity. Indepted to the theatrical poetic, and performance trends of black arts movement, especially its political and aesthetic innovations, experimental theatre has both worked with and against the anti assimilationist impulses of the balck arts movement to create work that explorer how black theatre should engage with the world whereas the artists of the black arts movement sought to define a doctrine of black art as a collective vision experimental theatre relies on individual artists to articulate their own.

Despite this attention to individual vision, experimental theatre embraces many elements of the black arts movement theatre, including the "nonobjective", African-American history, black vernucular, poetry and interdisciplinary art collaboration. The non-objective was a strategy for challenging an audience's passive engagement with the theatre by providing an opportunity for them to "live through" the event they had come to see. In Ed Bullins's play. The Theme is Blackness (1973) the non-objective was realized as performance of blackness which is this case was the absence of light. When seated, the audience was told that the night's theme was blackness. All lights were turned out for twenty minutes lights were then turned up to announce a certain call for blackness and turned out once move.

Baraka's Slave Ship (1969) exposed audiences to the sounds and smells of Africans being tortured during their journey across the Atlantic. Instead of focusing on enacting a stony, the non-objective created a visceral experience that word stay with the audience after the performance.

Black arts movement theatre also mined African-American history to expose the truth about slavery, segregation, and racial violence inflicted on African-Americans. Because plays were written to appeal primarily to younger African-American audiences, black vernacular was featured prominently to cannote the youth, social intelligence and political awareness of characters. Poetry also thrived during the black arts movement. Independent presses such as Dudley Randall's Broudside Press in Detroit and Haki Madhubati's Third world Press in Chicago published new voices to great international acclaim.

Experimental theatre was also influenced by other artistic movements during the 1960s and 1970s especially "happenings" and feminist performance art. 'Happenings' also called "the painter's theatre", emerged in New York and echoed the impulses in abstract expressionist painting through presentations of public spectacle and action. Unlike traditional theatrical events, happenings did not require there to be a distinction between the actors and audience. Instead it was the crowd's response to an away of visual, aural or textual stimuli that determined the meaning of the event. Happenings encouraged discussions about now art exists in time. Feminist performance art also help to define "live art" through the presentation of action-oriented art.

Influenced by the activism of the civil rights and antiwar movements, feminist performance art aimed to challenge entrenched ideas about gender, sexuality and women's rights. Feminist performance art also addressed gender inequities in the art world and brought attention to the ways various people had been excluded from participating in it. Repercussions from this movement reverperated across cultures and helped to create an audience for new works in experimental theatre, especially those created by African American women.

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