Teaching African American Dance / History to a “Post-Racial” Class: Yale’s Project O

The authors of this article are members of Yale’s World Performance Project (WPP) creative team. We write together as we make dance-theatre work together—collectively, collaboratively, and experimentally. We seek to change the way in which performance scholarship is created, published, and evaluated. To that end, we are moving beyond the single-author model of traditional humanistic scholarship. We are adopting instead the multiple-author style that is typical of the sciences, whereby all those who participate in the project sign the article and share the credit as well as the labor of producing it. We lay no claim to the specialized empirical methods of scientists, but we want to learn from their social practices of collaborative experimentation, discussion, and publication.

The project about which we write arose out of our shared premise that African American forms represent the mainstream of modern American cultural performance (rather than the “minority,” as they have for too long been characterized by some), and that this powerful general preeminence is particularly evident in popularly mediated dances and dance music from the 1950s and ’60s. To explore this premise, we offered a team-taught seminar-studio course that culminated in a production, applying the research done in and by the class to the creation of a musical that was simultaneously a multimedia event. We assigned readings in social history, dance history, media history, and performance theory. We learned and practiced together the popular dances of the rock ‘n’ roll era: kinesthetic emulation was the object of our research; it was also our method. We also explored myths of musical creativity centered on popular “Orphism”—the charismatic possession of groups by specially gifted performing artists. The course description set forth our intentions:

Studying the historic retellings of the ancient myth of Orpheus—by Peri, Monteverdi, Glück, Offenbach, Cocteau, Williams, Zimmerman, and Ruhl—Project O will revive American popular music and dance forms of the 1950s and ’60s to create and perform a multimedia rock ‘n’ roll version of the doomed love of Orpheus and Eurydice, tentatively titled Classical Grease: Rebel without a Clue. As documented in our readings and in-class presentations on pop music and media theory, televised teen-dance parties in the mold of the long-running American Bandstand transformed youth culture, playing conformism off against rebellion by appropriating African-American rhythm & blues, consciously or unconsciously acting out their cultural future before the disavowed historical backdrop of the Cold War, the Kinsey Report, and the emerging Civil Rights movement. The story of the Orphic singer and his hell-bound bride has inspired many composers, lyricists, and choreographers to stage the dramatic conflict between irreconcilable imperatives—“you can’t look back” and “you must look back”—and it will be restaged again by Project O in collaboration with a simultaneous revival of Monteverdi’s Orfeo by the Department of Music.

As predicated on our own retelling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in the race-conscious idiom of the televised teen-dance parties, therefore, the musical pastiche that resulted from our collective work went through many drafts and conceptual shifts. Most of these changes were contested or, at least, resented by someone in the class of eighteen students and/or the four members of the WPP team, but they led ultimately to the sold-out production of a live/media event titled Don’t Look Back!: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Orpheus.

No one on the WPP team or in the cast would be likely to describe the process as mostly happy or the result as wholly satisfying. Nor could anyone say that the work left him or her without something to think about, even if that only meant thinking more skeptically about the efficacy of challenging long-established norms of teaching classes, researching past and present social problems by acting them out, and making musicals. We could follow many other threads of the story in conveying our experience of this work, but the most intractable...