At the International Black Theatre Festival, America’s 250th Finds a Fuller Story

By the end of July, any available stage in Winston-Salem, NC, will be occupied.

A theatre lover could spend the afternoon with August Wilson’s Fences, see the satirical Purlie Victorious that evening, catch Michael Colyar’s late-night comedy, and settle into the Hamlin Theatre for poetry at midnight. Across town, other audiences could be watching Marvin: The Marvin Gaye Revue, a concert honoring Luther Vandross; a Grenadian family drama; or Broadway performer Chester Gregory’s personal account of being Black on the Great White Way.

That’s just one day at the International Black Theatre Festival (IBTF).

“We’ve turned four spaces now into theater spaces, so really every place you can imagine is going to be filled with art,” said Brittany Giles-Jones, managing director of North Carolina Black Repertory Company (NC Black Rep for short), in an interview with NPQ. “If it is available, we are using it.”

Every other summer, NC Black Rep turns Winston-Salem into what the festival calls “Black Theatre Holy Ground.” This year’s gathering, running July 27 through August 1, will bring more than 100 performances to 19 theatre locations, while films, workshops, readings, public conversations, cultural tours, youth programs, poetry, and an International Vendors Market extend the festival into other community spaces.

Roughly two dozen theatre companies, university programs, and producing groups will take part. Some are arriving from New York, Los Angeles, Houston, and Pittsburgh. Others are coming from cities throughout North Carolina—or as far as Nairobi. Three historically Black universities will bring collegiate productions into the week, while emerging performers will share the larger festival with veteran actors and nationally recognized theatre companies.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, festival attendance exceeded 60,000. It has been slowly growing again. Giles-Jones estimates about 40,000 people will attend this year.

But the festival’s reach is more than just the large ticket count. “The whole week, if you have anything to do with public life in Winston-Salem, you will be wearing purple,” said Shannon B. Henry, president and CEO of the Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County. “Everybody told me when I moved here, you gotta wear purple for the Black Theatre Festival.”

The numbers and enthusiasm make IBTF one of the largest celebrations of Black theatre in the world. Its significance during America’s 250th anniversary, however, is deeper.

A True Celebration

Black history is not presented solely through injury, and Black theatre is not asked to serve only as a somber correction to an official celebration.The US national 250 anniversary celebrations in July 2026 presented a tidy narrative in which the country declared its ideals, overcame its failures, and arrived at the present ready for fireworks. But disappearing in the pageantry were the experiences of people excluded from the original promise and the institutions they built themselves.

IBTF offers another way to commemorate the anniversary of the United States because theatre refuses to leave history safely in the past. It gives a more painful but more complete narrative—and asks an audience to sit with it, to be a witness, both to what the country promised and what generations of people in this country endured while pressing the country to fulfill those promises.

The festival does not accomplish that through one prescribed version of Black history. Rather, its productions cross centuries, countries, and artistic forms. This year’s productions move through enslavement, segregation, apartheid, femicide, racism, beauty standards, family, faith, love, and ambition. All are part of the American story.

IBTF holds grief beside laughter and struggle beside the culture, language, and institutions Black communities created.

Cross That River recovers the overlooked history of Black cowboys through blues, jazz, gospel, and folk music. The Kenyan solo production Running for My Life uses protest, reenactment, and personal narrative to remember runner Agnes Tirop and confront violence against women. The Bluest Eye brings Toni Morrison’s Pecola Breedlove to the stage, while Sizwe Banzi Is Dead follows an ordinary man trying to preserve his identity and dignity under South African apartheid.

The schedule also holds late-night comedy, evening concerts, family programming, and a midnight poetry jam. Black history is not presented solely through injury, and Black theatre is not asked to serve only as a somber correction to an official celebration. Audiences will encounter joy, romance, absurdity, artistic ambition, and the pleasure of gathering together.

A true commemoration of America cannot treat Black life and history as a grim corrective added after the main story has been told. IBTF holds grief beside laughter and struggle beside the culture, language, and institutions Black communities created. That movement between celebration and pain is what makes the festival such an honest way to mark the country’s 250th.

The Nonprofit That Built “Holy Ground”

IBTF began with a nonprofit created to respond to a threat facing its field.

Larry Leon Hamlin founded NC Black Rep in 1979, making it North Carolina’s first professional Black theatre company. Over time, its work has included Black theatre classics, new plays, youth training, and free performances intended to reach people who might otherwise have little access to live theatre.

Nearly a decade later, Hamlin attended a theatre conference in Atlanta where he heard Black theatre companies described as being in dire straits.

His response was to bring them together.

Hamlin imagined a gathering where those theatre companies could perform before large audiences, share resources, and draw national attention to their work. The first National Black Theatre Festival, as IBTF was known for decades, came to Winston-Salem in 1989 with 30 performances by 17 professional Black theatre companies.

Giles-Jones described Hamlin’s original vision as creating “a safe space for artists from all over the country and really, the world” and “a place of connection and development.”

That purpose remains visible nearly forty years later. Submissions open in October before each festival, and Giles-Jones said an external review team evaluates the work.

Giles-Jones knows that pathway personally. She started with the company more than a decade ago as a stage manager before becoming NC Black Rep’s managing director.

“You get to meet techs, and you get to network, and of course you meet all of your favorite actors that you saw growing up, which is fun,” she said. “But it’s a space that I’ve learned so much from.”

IBTF draws upon a wider nonprofit arts ecosystem. Henry said the city’s arts institutions are “not isolated” but woven into education, tourism, public health, and economic development.

That professional exchange is one of the festival’s most important achievements. IBTF functions as infrastructure for Black theatre, connecting organizations that spend most of the year working in separate cities with new audiences and giving emerging artists access to established professionals. Hamlin’s answer to a field in distress was to bring its people together. Nearly four decades later, the festival is still doing that.

Maya Angelou’s Winston-Salem

That a festival of this scale grew in Winston-Salem rather than New York or Los Angeles is part of what makes its history compelling.

Maya Angelou first came to Wake Forest University in 1973 after students invited her to speak during Black Awareness Week. The reception stayed with her. She later wrote that the experience made her realize that “one day I would return to The South in general, and North Carolina in particular.”

She did return, first for additional visits and then as Wake Forest’s first Reynolds Professor of American Studies in 1982. Angelou taught at the university for more than three decades, making Winston-Salem the center of a life that continued to carry her around the world.

Asked why she had settled there, she spoke of the place’s beauty, friendship and belonging. “My friends are here. My art is here. Naturally, this is home,” she said in 2012.

When Hamlin began assembling the first festival, he approached Angelou for help. She became its inaugural chairperson and invited Oprah Winfrey and performers from The Blacks, the Off-Broadway production in which Angelou had once appeared.

The city that became a stage for Angelou’s teaching, connections, art, and civic life, becomes a literal stage for IBTF every other summer. Her presence remains in the 2026 program through a fireside conversation about Phenomenal Woman, Maya Angelou with its author, Angelica Chéri. The NC Black Rep production premiered in Winston-Salem in 2023 and is being developed for a planned 2028 Broadway premiere.

A Seat for Everyone

IBTF is the definition of Black theatre, but Giles-Jones wants people outside the theatre industry, North Carolina, and the Black community to understand that the invitation includes them.

“We actually have a pretty diverse audience who comes to the festival,” she said. “We’re absolutely looking to open it up more to people who are outside of North Carolina to make sure they know that everyone is welcome.”

She added, “Black theater is for everyone, and ‘We’re saving a seat for you’ is definitely something that we live by.”

There are plenty of ways to accept that invitation even without buying tickets to several mainstage productions. More than 30 original works will be presented through daytime and late-night readings. Free programming includes daily workshops, the IBTF Film Fest, and the Phenomenal Woman, Maya Angelou fireside chat. Visitors may also encounter a video installation honoring Black life in Winston-Salem or an interactive virtual reality work about identity, discrimination, and the pressure to conceal parts of oneself.

The variety is part of the point. Someone may enter through one of three productions from August Wilson’s Century Cycle, a musical revue, a college production, a film, or an afternoon at the international market. Each offers a unique way into the festival.

“It is really about theater excellence, making that accessible, and rooted in Black stories,” Giles-Jones said.

America’s 250th anniversary asks the country to decide what deserves to be remembered. IBTF answers through artists and nonprofit workers preserving stories and building the stages where audiences can encounter experiences they know as well as ones beyond their own.