This book charts a unique but ubiquitous region in American history: the black dancing body. Using interviews, performance analysis, and personal recollections, I map the endeavors, ordeals, and triumphs of “black” dance and dancers by exploring perceptions, images, and assumptions, past and present. The “embattled territories” of this body are probed chapter by chapter: feet, buttocks, hair, skin color. The whole is reconciled in the final chapters on soul and spirit, which are treated as bodily attributes.
I interviewed Zane Booker, Joan Myers Brown, Ronald Brown, Trisha Brown, Brenda Bufalino, Fernando Bujones, Seán Curran, Chuck Davis, Doug Elkins, Garth Fagan, Rennie Harris, Francesca Harper, Bill T. Jones, Ralph Lemon, Susanne Linke, Bebe Miller, Meredith Monk, Monica Moseley, Wendy Perron, Gus Solomons jr, Merián Soto, Shelley Washington, Marlies Yearby, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. Their comments are included in every chapter.
The 352-page book is divided into three parts and seven chapters. Excerpts follow.
• Pages 8-9 •
When Monica Moseley—assistant curator for the Oral History Archives of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Dance Division and one of the dance field practitioners interviewed for this book—interviewed me for the archives, she characterized me as a translator between black and white communities and between the worlds of performance and academia. This book is the latest effort in my border-crossing pursuit to shed light on the role of African Americans in shaping American consciousness/culture and to investigate the role of racism in this equation. It is the final entry in the trilogy that began with Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Greenwood, 1996) and continued with Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era (St. Martin’s, 2000). The titles give some indication of the territory covered in those works. Now I aim to present a non-linear, unorthodox “history” of this elusive, paradoxical black dancing body (always present, but always on the move, always shifting, but still the same) as geography, rather than chronology. Geography as a metaphor for the sites, states, routes, and milestones of the black dancing body. The body as both body politic and individual signature.
We have created constructs that subliminally or consciously reflect the fallacy of race and drive our actions and reactions along racialized pathways. Black dance is one of these constructs. Taking this line of thinking a step further, the black dancing body exists as a social construct, not a scientific fact. However, this phantom body, just like the phantom concept of a black or white race, has been effective in shaking and moving, shaping and reshaping, American (and now global) cultural production for centuries. It has been courted and scorned—an object of criticism and ridicule as well as a subject of praise and envy.
This work is a cartogram of American history as told through the black dancing body, a map that predicates black history and dance history—two marginalized stories—as central to the formation of American cultural history. Like all maps this one is a social construct created by one individual whose values, needs, and criteria represent a particular culture and politic at a particular time. Just as the map of Africa was changed in the twentieth century to represent more accurately its actual size in relation to Europe (maps from earlier centuries depicted Europe as equal to or larger than Africa), so it is time for the remapping of the black dancing body. Black bodies are as same or as different as any other bodies: what changes is our perception.
