The Black Dancing Body, cont.

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• Page 36 •

[Bill T.] Jones: See, I find that there is an impulse in my dancing that is to find the heroic shape or the grand path, which I would call “white dance.” And then along the way it is diverted and there are rivulets of this current, this shimmying, this lasciviousness, this undulation or this warrior dance that is what I call the “black dance.” What is the edifice? The edifice I always think is a mental construct or an idea, and I would say that is the white dance, which I have learned to make my dance. My edifice is a white edifice. And then inside of it is populated with--how to say it in the least sentimental way?—black spirits. And they are sometimes male and sometimes female: how the hips are used, how the arms are used.

• Page 104 •

No one assumed that whites couldn’t perform traditionally black dances. Black forms have held sway in defining white popular entertainment since the nineteenth-century minstrel era and the twentieth-century Broadway and nightclub periods through millennial entertainments such as MTV and the live mega-shows of pop recording artists. Stars like Madonna (who, early on, studied dance at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center) not only surrounded themselves with dancers of color, but also incorporated the latest black-derived dance forms in their shows. This current trend parallels the white Virginia Minstrels of the 1840s incorporating their versions of black plantation dances in their staged routines. In the popular arena black dances, separated from black bodies, become the means of production for distilled white versions—modesty-modified imitations—that meet an acceptable white standard before they can be integrated into the white mainstream. (Again, the appropriation-approximation-assimilation model at work.) It is the difference between a one-step performed by Vernon and Irene Castle—the white, turn-of-the-century ballroom team adored by high society, and the same dance done by its Turkey-Trotting originators in black America. Whites have the privilege of appropriating black cultural goods and tailoring them to their culture-specific needs. Up until the 1960s this change predicated modification of Africanist torso articulation (namely, isolating and playing the body parts one against the other so that chest, rib cage, back, belly, pelvis, and buttocks have the option of working independently or separately). In the Protestant Christian underpinnings of mainstream white culture, overt use of the separate parts of the torso reads as sexually suggestive. In black diasporan culture, using the torso is not mainly or necessarily a sexual come-on, but an aesthetic value based on whole-body dancing. This helps explain why black children are encouraged to learn the latest fad dances. They are not being trained by their elders to lead a life of promiscuity, but to carry on a tradition of polycentric, polyrhythmic body fluency.

• Page 131 •

It is noteworthy that the feet seem to hold a key to understanding the dance values of several cultures: African American tapping feet; Indian slapping feet; ballet’s arched feet. To do the dance of each culture correctly does not require an adept to spring fully trained from the womb; instead, enculturation at an early age is the route to success. In each example the feet can be educated and disciplined to the “correct” aesthetic position. To conclude this chapter on the feet we return to the reigning concert dance aesthetic of the millennial era—namely, ballet and ballet-influenced concert dance forms such as modern and postmodern dance. The voices of the dancers tell much of the story—their story—as it is played out on the contemporary concert dance circuit.

• Page 134 •

Clearly, it is not only about the feet, nor only about the black dancing body. Dancers of all callings are expected to have mastered at least the basics of ballet. In some fields, like Broadway show dancing, ballet is the fundamental training technique, along with studio forms of jazz dance. This is borne out by Gus Solomons’s statement about who is admitted into the dance program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he is a master teacher: “The bodies that get into Tisch. . . the first thing that confronts them in the audition is a ballet class. And if they don’t do the ballet class like a ballet dancer, they don’t get through the audition.”