The Black Dancing Body, cont.

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• Page 27 •

Whatever the constellation of traits, habits, preferences, and variables that make up the black dancing body, it is clear that white dance culture has been fascinated by this construct. In general, the black dancing body has been scrutinized by the dominant culture through the lens and theory of difference. Naturally, the point of origin of any theory largely determines its outcome: differences in the dancing body of an oppressed people were occasionally valued but frequently scrutinized for signs of inferiority. In the white world, dancing bodies were measured against white ideals that ran counter to the aesthetic criteria of “inferior” Africanist cultures, even though the dances performed by white dancing bodies were either solely or partly based on Africanist elements . . . .

Social dance schools, including the legendary Arthur and Katherine Murray academies, and white Broadway and Hollywood choreographers performed similar corrective surgery on the popular African American dances of the swing era and beyond. As an adolescent in the 1950s I recall watching the Murrays’ weekly television show. With not a body of color in sight, this middle-aged couple taught the socially sanctioned, white way to do the latest dances. Models like this made a kid like me feel that black dancing was dirty and white dancing was dull. Still, I wanted to dance. I dreamed of being both correct and sensual. My models were Bambi Lynn and Rod Alexander (the dance team from TV’s Your Show of Shows): squeaky clean but, at least, romantic; and Hollywood’s cool but always sexy Cyd Charisse.

• Page 32 •

Brenda Bufalino addresses some changes in the black dancing body that are eradicating the differences and offers more evidence that, through training, body shapes can change to conform to a given aesthetic code: “You certainly see bone now with Arthur Mitchell’s company [the Dance Theater of Harlem]. . . . I also think you see what you would call more of a white body on blacks now who aren’t doing ethnic dance. I mean, I think that it is the movement that pronounces the shape.”

Joan Myers Brown’s thoughts reinforce the comments made by Solomons and Bufalino, suggesting that dancers’ bodies are shaped by training, not biological imperatives: “The training for dancers has improved so that black dancers are being trained equally as well as white dancers in this generation. Early on, the training that most of us got was in black schools, and that was limited. So I think the comparison to, maybe, the 1950s and 1940s is different from what the comparison is now, because of the training. Maybe [back then] we didn’t know how to do fouetté turns [a particularly challenging ballet turn that is a mark of showmanship and is performed in place with as many as 32 repetitions by the most accomplished ballet dancers]. We saw it and we emulated it, but we weren’t taught how to do it.”

• Page 33 •

Idealized shape and size, so significant in Europeanist forms of concert dance, black or white, take a back seat in traditional Africanist forms such as African dance and hip hop. According to Chuck Davis: “In traditional dance, size is the last thing you worry about. If you can dance, then you can dance. And coming from the tradition, those of us who travel back and forth to Africa know that, in the compound when the drums begin, the person jumping out in the center of the floor does not look down and say, ‘Oh, am I skinny enough to be out there today? Do I have a dancer’s body?’ No! There is a rhythm, and I have to interpret it, and I am interpreting it according to my ethnic heritage, and here I go. Welcome to the real world!”