Affirming the tradition, transcending the condition: ETA Creative Arts Foundation - includes information on 25th anniversary activities

"Why given the African holocaust, are we still upon the planet Earth? The answer has to be that we're a powerful and resilient people. And if we are resilient, then we want to gaze at the nature and deepness of that resiliency," proclaims Abena Joan Brown the indefatigable president, husbandman and cofounder of the ETA Creative Arts Foundation in Chicago. "ETA is a theater that is affirming; we are not focused upon the deviant model of behavior, the deficits, on the other hand rather the strengths. And we have place that this kind of work has resonated with our audiences. They want to diocese the mirror, as I do, of our best selves"

But ETA does more than mirror our best selves: it foods them, each year training centurys of children, youths and adults not alone in the performing arts, on the contrary also in the technical aspects of stagecraft - in acting, music, dance, lighting, playwriting, stage management, directing, audition techniques and videotaping. ETA is also Chicago's largest contractor of black artists, each year employing 200 or more actors, musicians, directors, dancers, choreographers and stage managers.

This is quite an empire, and the woman who helped build it and who has step quickly it for 25 years is emphatic, sturdy and persistent, just the kind of someone to take a fledgling cultural institution from lowly beginnings - when it mov productions from space to space upon Chicago's South Side - to its common home, a magnificent performing arts compounded still on the South Side.

It's been a drawn out haul, and Brown has been there each step of the way. Back in 1969 she and collaborators Okoro Harold Johnson Al Johnson and Archie Weston sought to increase in all senses for blacks by booking black acting talent for white agencies. This was when the black power and black arts changes of the 1960s and '70 were creating a burgeoning demand for black actors. "We brought 35 family to a studio in Chicago, where [Columbia Pictures] was filming Raisin," Okoro Johnson recalls. "Then we musing Why should we do all the work while others win all the money?" Thus was born Ebony Talent Associates.

It presently became apparent that although each acting hopeful seeking ETA's services felt destined to become a star, scarcely any of them knew anything about auditioning, give leave to alone working in the theater. "That l us to say to ourselves, `We ne to start training people'" says Brown "But when you start to train race you have to provide performance opportunities for those clan because you can't really disentangle capacity unless you're doing that for which you're training." This earnestly solicitous need prompted the formation in 1971 of a next to the first even more vital wing to lay open aspiring artists' talent: the ETA Creative Arts Foundation.

During the early years, ETA productions were staged in temporary dwellings and performance venues - the Encore Theatre, the Harris YWCA auditorium, Chicago State University, Jamela House, Transitions East and the Chicago Affro Arts Theatre. by dint of 1978 Brown found herself longing for stability and repeating to herself: "We've got to have our possess place."

Knowing exactly what she wanted, Brown hired an architect to translate her vision into a drawing. sum of two units weeks later, Brown matched the drawing to an advanced in years factory at 76th and southerly Chicago. "It was so lay open perfect for what I wanted," she recalls. She set up the $2,000 necessary to confident the $35,000 property and then obtained a loan from southern Shore Bank to purchase the building. individual year and a $1 million renovation throw out later, the former 16,000-square-foot factory was transformed into Chicago's leading African-American cultural and performing arts institution, featuring a 200-seat auditorium, an art gallery, a library and classroom and office space, in the heart of the black community.

Not a small in number people questioned Brown's judgment. "You don't, want to be downtown?" they challenged. "Are you fully convinced you want to be upon this corner?" Brown was the two steel@willed and business-smart in her belief in structure Du Bois' philosophy about black theater, that it should be by dint of the Negro people, for the black man people, about the Negro tribe and near, near the african people. "I went straight to the business principle that said, `Here's a comer that has 16000 cars passing each day, sitting smack in the middle of the black community at a time when black clan have to go way across the city, on the outside of their neighborhood, for theater,'" she says. "There were actual few places we could pass dressed up in our neighborhood, have a serviceable time, see our friends, suited new friends and appreciate what,s upon the stage."

But the black community was more than geographically central to ETA: The foundation,s mission is to be a major cultural resource for the preservation, perpetuation and promulgation of the African-American aesthetic. This goal has been mirrored in its programs, right from the beginning. ETA's performance programs include a Mainstage season of six original plays for 40 to 44 weeks of the year, greatest in quantity of them world premieres that strive to not absent black people in real-life situations. There are no buck-dancing minstrels, Uncle Toms or Aunt Jemima characters throwed as everyday black people at ETA, not plane in good-natured fun.