Found in the Translation: Five Black Male Choreographers

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The reality is that contemporary black choreographers employ a wide variety of influences in diverse ways—including the core movement lexicons derived from classical, modern, postmodern, and folkloric vocabularies. Choreographers may use these idioms as a device, among others, to physically frame their dances. The dances themselves, however, may be inspired by anything from ancient traditions to fairy-tales to narratives about contemporary issues, and they embrace a host of modern sensibilities both abstract and literal in expression.

In the work of these innovators, concert dance traditions don’t limit artistic exploration, but are a feeding ground for developing movement languages that call forth new genres of theatrical dance. Over the past twenty years, black choreographers have produced dances informed by many of the same social, artistic, political, and economic issues contemplated by other, non-black artists. While their work may or may not reflect racial agendas different from those of non-black artists, these choreographers often develop their work from the same source material. There are no hard-and-fast rules that determine “correct” choreographic practice. Brown, Harris, King, Lemon, and Ward are five choreographers who create dances that push beyond traditional views of dance, especially of African American dance.

The revisionist tendencies of these particular artists, however, unfortunately remain meaningless to a substantial portion of contemporary dance audiences. These artists’ works elude racial pigeonholes and popular perceptions of what is—or is not—“black dance.” Oftentimes the contemporary identities they express in their theatrical creations challenge or are at odds with dated ideas of concert dance held by the dominant culture or the critical writing establishment. A picture of what constitutes the “quintessential black experience” is no longer readily accessed in the United States—it certainly is not the Porgy and Bess image of nineteenth-century shantytowns that later became twentieth-century ghettoes. Choreographers such as Brown, Harris, King, Lemon, and Ward entertain and confuse audiences at the beginning of the twenty-first century by using language sources that informed viewers thought they understood but which these artists employ to different effects across a broad spectrum of ideas and subject matter. They make us question cultural fluidity and reflect society’s inability to easily identify what is “black.” This is not to say, however, that their examination of Black American heritage has not yielded its own codified methods. These artists are part of one generation’s inevitable replacement of another.