Found in the Translation: Five Black Male Choreographers

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These five choreographers use existing canons of concert dance as well as source material from black culture, but they position their research as vital springboards for more expansive movement excursions, frequently joining them with agitprop, esthetic, traditional, or popular culture discourses. They have become masterful at manipulating theatrical devices—scenery, props, costumes, interactive text, and musical scores. In different ways in their dances, their purposeful use of materials reflects the ways experiences of being black and the tradition of dancing “for show” have become elided in American culture. Each choreographer processes the formal and the popular, black and non-black artistic influences in their work in remarkably diverse ways.

In King’s ballet Cante, for example, the cultural notions and prescriptive methods of Western European royal court entertainment—part of classical ballet’s lineage—are shaken loose by the accompaniment of Flamenco palmas. In his current project, People of the Forest, King similarly challenges the expressive limits of Western classical technique through an unlikely wedding of ballet with the music and movement of the Aka (commonly known as Pygmies) from the Central African Republic. In his ongoing exploration of the relationship between form and content, King negotiates the divide between vastly different movement and musical vocabularies. Cultural dissonance proves the mutability of ballet and, as such, reveals how the form can reinvent itself. King’s concept prompts us to question our European-based assumptions about ballet as well as our views of traditional African music and how it may be heard or represented on stage.

Ralph Lemon pushes at other traditional boundaries, those between audience and performer. At one point in Tree, the second part of Lemon’s dance trilogy Geography, rocks drop near dancers’ feet. The potential impact of harm to the dancers’ bodies makes this a nerve-wracking passage. Yet we are compelled to see the effect as actually titillating—making us complicit in a weird watching exercise that dares us both to fear and hope for an injury to take place. Should we care about what happens to dancers’ feet, or should we have faith in the negotiators—the dancers in front of us—possessing more concern for their feet than anyone in the audience? How do we experience choreography that simultaneously stages and avoids immanent disaster? How can we relinquish the language we bring with us to the theatre in order to allow ourselves to fully embrace the language created by Lemon and his dancers on stage? Or is the interpretive conflict that we experience as spectators, between esthetic appreciation and ethical concern, intentional—a way for the author to underscore the pluralist impulse that motivates his work?