by

Ntongela Masilela

The Black Tradition in American Dance is a beautiful book of photographs covering a wide span of African-American cultural history from the period of the great dancer, William Henry Lane ("Juba"), in the Romantic era, to the great choreographer, Garth Fagan, in our postmodern moment. The text narrates approximately two centuries of black American dance culture. Joe Nash has assembled an astonishing range of photographs traversing this temporal period: those of dancers exemplifying a particular style, those of dance companies or dance ensembles showing specific trends in the language of classical ballet or that of modern dance, and those postersannouncing performances which in one way or another establish historical continuity. Both the narrative text and the photographs complement each other in articulating the logic of the book.

From the time of Juba, who performed in some white minstrel shows, to Hemsley Winfield (who died in 1933 at the age of 27), African-American dance possessed a singular and unified historical consciousness in knowing itself to be about black people and for black people. Even though Juba combined in his dancing the Irish jig and clog-dancing, which in him eventuated in the invention of tap-dancing, he was absolutely certain about what he danced about and for whom. By the time of his death in England in 1852 (there on tour with Pell's Ethiopian Serenaders), Juba was already an extraordinary figure. One English dance critic rhapsodied: ". . . the dancing of Juba exceeded anything ever witnessed in Europe. The style as well as the execution is unlike anything ever seen in this country. The manner in which he beats time with his feet, and the extraordinary command he possesses over them can only be believed by those who have been present at his exhibition." It was probably Juba that Charles Dickens was describing in his American Notes , when hevreferred to a brilliant performance by a black dancer.

By the time of Hemsley Winfield, several profound things had occurred or were occurring within the African-American historicval experience and within the international dance culture. Internationally, the founding of modern dance by Isadora Duncan is the critical event, and nationally within the black experience, the crucial episode is the moment of the Harlem Renaissance (1925-1930). Both these momentous occurrences are governed by the actuality of modernization, modernity and the cultural experience of modernism. Isadora Duncan rebels rebels against the stultified and ossified formalism of classical ballet, and in the process, invents the free form of modern dance. The Harlem Renaissance concerned itself with articulating the views of the "New Negro" in various artistic modes from different perspectives. The book assembled by Alain Locke in 1925, The New Negro , is an eloquent expression of this new cultural and historical consciousness.

One of the consequences of the revolution initiated by Isadora Duncan was the emergence of the American concert-theatrical dance. Among the foremost exponents of this new concert dance, representing the modernist black experience, were Hemsley Duncan, Asadata Dafora, Pearl Primus, Katherine Dunham and Edna Guy. With the exception of the great African dancer from Sierra Leone, Asadata Dafora, the other four brilliant dancers encountered a historical crisis: how could they represent an African-American sensibility or consciousness in a European modernist dance technique? In other words, how could they overcome or resolve the double consciousness which American history required of them or instilled in their artistic sensibility (as blacks within a dominant and hegemonic white culture)? W.E.B. DuBois was the first intellectual to lay open to critical analysis the historical forms of this double consciousness in his magisterial book of 1903, The Souls of Black Folk .

The Harlem Renaissance, which reflected the urbanization of millions and millions of African-Americans and their transformation from rural share-cropper experience in to the experience of the urban proletariat, was to a large extent a cultural movement in search of artistic forms. Pearl Primus and Katherine Dunham began their dance careers in the 1930s under the question: "What Shall the Negro Be About?" They were unware that Langston Hughes in a famous essay of 1926, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain", had already given a response to this question: "Certainly there is, for the American Negro artist who can escape the restrictions the more advanced among his own group would put to him, a great field of unused material ready for his art. Without going outside his race, even among the better classes with their 'white' culture and conscious American manners, but still Negro enough to be different, there is sufficient matter to furnish a black artist with a lifetime of creative work." The arrival of Asdata Dafora in New York in 1929 made this sufficiently clear in the field of dancing. Dafora's stagings of two African operas, 'Kykunkor' and 'Zunguru', respectively in 1934 and in 1938, had an electrifying effect on African-American dance culture. It was this experience which led Katherine Dunham to investigate the survival of African dance culture in Haiti, and Pearl Primus to do likewise in Cuba. They both eventually visited Africa. They wrote extensively on their field trips. Katherine Dunham's classic book, The Dances of Haiti , was also part of this historical research. Their dance companies were founded on solid structures of African dance aesthetics.

It is on seeing Katharine Dunham's dance company in Los Angeles in the late 1940s, that the young Alvin Ailey decided to become a dancer. The rest is history. Ailey studied with first-rate American choreographers and dancers: Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Hanya Holm and Charles Weideman. But his great master was Lester Horton. The historic importance of Alvin Ailey is this: his Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is the depository of great black American choreographic work from Pearl Primus and Katherine Dunham (high modernism), through Eleo Pomare, Talley Beatty and Donald McKayle (late modernism), to Ralph Lemon, Garth Fagan and Bill T. Jones and Ulysses Dove (postmodernism). 2 This company has also produced great dancers like Judith Jamison, who today is the Artistic Director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance theater, taking over immediately after the passing away of Alvin Ailey on December 1, 1989. 3

The Black Tradition in American Dance tells this central story from Juba to Alvin Ailey very well, in the complementary form of photographs and narrative text. There are also other wonderful stories in this truly amazing book: the Broadway dance tradition from Josephine Baker to Sammy Davis, Jr.; the tap-dance tradition from Bill 'Boujangles' Robinson to Gregory Hines; the classical ballet tradition from Helena Justa-De Arms to Arthur Mitchell (and the Dance Theater of Harlem). All in all, an instructive text and a great feast for the eyes.

1 A review of The Black Dance Tradition in America by Richard A. Long. Photographs selected and annotated by Joe Nash. Rizzoli International Publications, New York, 1989, pp.192. The review was commissioned by Isivivane: Journal of Letters and Arts in Africa and the Diaspora in 1991 in West Berlin, but was not published.

2 Ntongela Masilela, "Zur Erinnerung an Alvin Ailey", Tanz Aktuell (Berlin), Marz 1990, s.10-11.

3 Ntongela Masilela, "Die Schonheit der Bewegung verstehen. . . Ntongela Masilela sprach mit Judith Jamison", Tanz Aktuell , Marz 1990, s.11-12.