April 19, 2006

black - white dance

Posted by dogpossum on April 19, 2006 4:55 PM in the category lindy hop and other dances

This is a fascinating photo from this book:
Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance. Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1996.

This photo rocks because it emphasises the different culturally informed aesthetics of dance, in different dance traditions.

These dancers are George Balanchine (the white dood), Violetta Verdy and Arthur Mitchell. You may know Balanchine's work from films like Cabin in the Sky]. He was a Russian-born American choreographer who revolutionised concert dance in the States (and internationally) by introducing Africanist themes to white dances like ballet (I have to note: this wouldn't have been possible without the assistance of black dancers, and black dancers wouldn't have been in white ballet schools if it wasn't for the abolition of Jim Crow and other segregationist legislation).
These photos absolutely fascinate me. Check out the angles at Mitchell's hips in the left photo - more exaggerated than Balanchine. Its off-centredness really creates some excellent angles, breaking up the 'straight lines' which are characteristic of white performance dance. And that from a black dood with ballet training - think of Frankie doing a Shorty George for a far more extreme example (or go way extreme and check out 'Snake Hips' Earl Tucker).

Joann Kealiinohomoku reads ballet as a cultural discourse in her article An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance, noting the ways in which "all forms of dance reflect the cultural traditions within which they developed" (533). She describes "the long line of lifted, extended bodies, the total revealing of legs, of small heads and tiny feet for women, slender bodies for both sexes, and the coveted airy quality which is best shown in the lifts and carryings of the female" (545) in ballet. Check it out - you can see those long lines in Verdy's immitation of Balanchine on the right. Note her straight line from hip to ankle, versus Balanchine's serious angleage.

Jacqui Malone writes:

Africans brought to North American were no doubt affirming their ancestral values when they sang a slave song that urged dancers to gimme de kneebone bent. To many western and central Africans, flexed joints represented life and energy, while straightened hips, elbows, and knees epitomized rigidity and death. The bent kneebone symbolized the ability to get down (12).