Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches

22. The Transmission of African-American Concert Dance and American Jazz Dance

22 The Transmission of AfricanAmerican Concert Dance and American Jazz Dance Gill Wright Miller In the dark, the faint voices of the spiritual “I’ve Been ’Buked” approach as a circle of light opens on a group of nine dancers center stage, tightly packed, in earth-tone long skirts and bare muscular arms. Their eyes are lifted skyward, arms stretched over head, fingers spread wide. Upper torsos sway like tall grass in the wind, drawing large horizontal circles, taking in all the heavens have to offer. Flat open hands leading , gaze following, torsos yielding. The dancers fold straight down toward the earth, then open their arms wide to take in everything offered back, hovering over the earth with vulture-like lifted elbows, one man in the back snaps to attention, looking out from V-shaped arms, as if to ask, “Are you here, God?” The others follow his lead, scooping up their very hearts and souls, following filled palms rising past their faces and then, with a flick of the fingers, the wrists hyperextend and offer out all the pain, while heads yield back, leaving necks vulnerable, as if to say, “I am offering you my pain. Unburden me.” So starts Alvin Ailey’s Revelations. We recognize in the Ailey work movement set to song lyrics, a tight corps de ballet configuration, wide spread jazz fingers, syncopated rhythms, and emotional expressionism. What genre is this dance? Could this opening from an African-American concert dance be considered an American jazz dance? On the one hand, both forms derive from the same root: African vernacular dance. Perhaps they are distant cousins, clearly born of the same kin. On the other hand, the concert branch of the family may have prided itself on a primary commitment to Eurocentric artistry while the jazz branch might 164 have celebrated an Afrocentric artistry, which led over the years to a difference in kind. These cousins, then, share ancestral kin, but now have little in common. In the absence of a concise yet comprehensive definition,1 “American concert dance” indicates dance works on American “mainstream” stages that are recognized by leading critics. “African-American concert dance” refers to work usually identified as embodying and highlighting an African diaspora heritage. “American jazz dance” refers to work that is rooted in the African vernacular that highlights rhythm and syncopation. African-American Concert Dance In African-American Concert Dance: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, John Perpener reports that several artists contributed to a coherent pattern in “black concert dance.” Perpener discusses important aesthetic elements including “thematic material, movement vocabularies, and music gleaned from the cultures of the African diaspora,” which we will consider in more detail later in this essay. For now, he introduces us to artists who developed “syncretic processes of representing vernacular, ritual, and folk material within a framework of European-American theatrical practices.” Perpener’s framing of these artists helps us understand the category “African-American concert dancer,” but does not simply refer to a person of color who is dancing, but rather to a consciousness about the criteria in the work itself. Perpener contends these dance works were created to “effect socio-political change for African-American people, bring together aesthetic and cultural elements that had, previously, been posed as polar opposites, . . . and create work that was multi-vocal, articulating simultaneously different worldviews.”2 Introducing his anthology Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in AfricanAmerican Dance, Thomas F. DeFrantz also traces criteria for a contemporary African aesthetic, which for him is rooted in the Black Arts movement. He describes for us “qualities of motion” categorized by historian Robert Farris Thompson, whose analysis described “the dominance of a percussive concept of performance; multiple meter; apart playing and dancing; call-andresponse , and, finally, the songs and dances of derision.” DeFrantz says about these qualities, “Movement provokes meta-commentary and suggests narratives outside the physical frame of performance.” More than dance craftpersons , these dance artists are carriers of a culture—the African-American culture.3 Who are the artists of African-American concert dance? With whom did they train? With whom did they collaborate? What works have they done? By selecting a few, we can witness a range of perspectives. The Transmission of African-American Concert Dance and American Jazz Dance · 165 Katherine Dunham (1909–2006) Dunham was a primary founding mother of modern dance who critic Anna Kisselgoff says “exploded the possibilities of modern dance” in the United...