Found in the Translation: Five Black Male Choreographers

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In Rome and Jules, Rennie Harris Puremovement offers a final example of cross-cultural exploration, as the work layers digital video within the ancient proscenium arch and adds a high-tech, pop-culture dimension to the theater experience—something that has not been available to past generations of dance audiences. At one point during the work, the character Rome checks in mid-soliloquy to see if he is getting the language right. His question, “Am I getting it right, Mr. Harris?” posed to the artistic director seated in the technical booth, is an example of how mercurial the imaginary fourth wall has become to artists in order to accommodate their myriad and highly individual explorations of cultural hybridizing.

While these choreographers reshape the canon through conscious artistic choices, larger cultural forces also affect the grounds on which their work is composed and received. The third millennium context redefines, ideologically and esthetically, the historical standards on which audience members have traditionally depended when seeing black dance, even as traditions are respected, revered, and even emulated. While created a generation apart, there is something shared between Donald McKayle’s Rainbow ‘Round My Shoulder (1959) and Harris’ Rome and Jewels (2000). In each there exists an image of chained men, and there is also a man-child in each dance who hangs onto a paradoxical female apparition. Oppression thickens the environment of both dances. But within each, the stagings of racial, social, and political ills, which have changed little in a generation, are manifested differently. McKayle and Harris choose very different approaches in depicting the divisions between black men who inhabit bodies that are frequently at war with each other. The simple work movements of oppression in Rainbow, reinforced by images of wheelbarrows and pickaxes, become in Rome and Jules a conglomerate of tribal face-offs, hip hop dance moves, music making, and griot-like figures who slyly appropriate Shakespeare’s sixteenth-century language as weapons of assault. As our information and technology based society has become denser, so have the dances produced within it.

Concert dance depends on the attentive and voluntary participation of its viewers. Yet the terms on which we understand physicality, as in Harris’s work, or the ways in which our senses are challenged, as in Lemon’s work, may leave us feeling less than confident to explain the languages used by these choreographers since, on some level, personal stories are embedded within the work they create. While Western critical standards judge a work of art “successful” if it stands alone as an esthetic object, one wonders, to riff on the truism, if we need to learn to dance in another man’s shoes in order to find understanding. This may be the key to learning to translate the virtual—as well as the literal—meaning of the languages being spoken by these five Black American male choreographers.

Arnecia Patterson lives and works in Dayton OH. Over the past 20 years, she has managed dance companies, Dayton Contemporary and Dayton Ballet, and piloted a community-wide outgrowth of the National Endowment for the Arts initiative, Dance On Tour. Patterson can be contacted at arneciap@yahoo.com.