How To Do Things with Dance: Performing Change in Postwar America

[ 6 ] The Uses of Action 1: Talley Beatty, Katherine Dunham, and Donald McKayle

. 194 . [  ] The Uses of Action  Talley Beatty, Katherine Dunham, and Donald McKayle There comes a time when every human being must protest in order to retain human dignity. (Katherine Dunham, quoted in Hill 2002, 219)1 Now is the time to move. This is no time to talk; it is a time to act. (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. quoting the Reverend L. Roy Bennett 1958, 46) In 1959, Donald McKayle and his company performed Rainbow ‘Round My Shoulder on national television. The piece portrayed the lives of black men on a chain gang, road builders who break up bedrock with their pickaxes in preparation for laying blacktop; men whose own road leads nowhere, only to more backbreaking labor. To words sung by Leon Bibb, it told a tale of futile lives, dead-end dreams, and stillborn desires, memorializing, through danced embodiment, the loss of the men’s birthright : vitality, dignity, and potency. According to McKayle, Rainbow represented “punishment [that] does not fit the crime. Sometimes the crime was just being a black man and doing what you weren’t supposed to do” (speaking in Reinhart 1990). The dance, therefore, brought into the light of day an unacceptable and untenable situation, representing the historic institution of racial prejudice as wrought on the bodies in question through compulsory labor. In contradictory ways, the dance embodied the condition of the men’s restraint in shackles and chains, and, at the same time, their physical and spiritual agency and resistance to the powers that be. McKayle used the conceit of the dance to construct black men whose coordination, might, and imagination, as capacities for meaningful action, transcended their given status as second-class citizens. With this approach, McKayle’s work took the challenge of actuality to a new level. The dances of Cunningham and Taylor had offered the possibility for real significance in their presentation of dancers as the “authors” of their own actions through the guise of foundness. Yet, seen in the context of the early civil rights movement, McKayle’s cast appeared to perform a protest in which their actions were “made ‘visible’ side by side with the[ir] characters in a Brechtian way” (Schechner 2003, 127). As Richard Schechner has put it, “Where distancing is used a definite social or political consciousness is engaged and the appeal of the performance is not to people as individuals but as participants in larger social units” (ibid.). Throughout this book, I have presented case studies in which modern dances accomplished acts of social and cultural change by challenging normative distinctions between the symbolic and the actual. They not only represented conditions of alterity but enlisted bodies to constitute new ways of being and doing in postwar America. Intensifying this argument , this chapter examines the political efficacy of McKayle’s Rainbow as revealed by two contexts, linked together in the blues aesthetic: modern dance precedents by McKayle himself, Talley Beatty, and Katherine Dunham, and the history of African-American protest at mid-century. In this light, I contend that McKayle’s work made manifest an emerging cultural ethos that saw embodied performance not only as a reflection of cultural transformation but as a vehicle for or substantiation of it. 2 Rainbow ’Round My Shoulder, in particular, refuted a world that would punish men on the basis of the color of their skin, while, at the same time, reconstructing and empowering the black male body through the medium of modern dance. Setting the Stage National television coverage enhanced the social dimensions of the piece. Premiered at the 92nd Street ym-ywha’s Kaufman Auditorium, a central venue for modern dance in New York City, Rainbow attracted the attention of a representative for Camera Three, the cbs Sunday morning show, who called McKayle the next morning asking if he would adapt it for television.3 This was not McKayle’s first such request. A 1952 opportunity to televise Games had ended in disappointment when the producers and sponsors of cbs’s Omnibus asked him to change the lyrical accompaniment and alter the mixed-race casting, even after having issued him a contract for the appearance (McKayle 2002, 49–50). By contrast the offer Uses of Action 1: Beatty, Dunham, & McKayle . 195 How to Do Things with Dance . 196 to perform Rainbow on Camera Three had no stipulations owning to the program’s “secular” and “broad cultural” mandate (117...