The Black Scholar Journal of Black Studies and Research

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Bone-Breaking, Black Social Dance, and Queer Corporeal Orature

Thomas F. DeFrantz

To cite this article: Thomas F. DeFrantz (2016) Bone-Breaking, Black Social Dance, and Queer Corporeal Orature, The Black Scholar, 46:1, 66-74, DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2015.1119624

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2015.1119624

Published online: 03 Feb 2016.

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Download by: [thomas defrantz] Date: 04 February 2016, At: 06:25 Bone-Breaking, Black Social allowing microclimates of dance style to Dance, and Queer Corporeal characterize time and place for varied Orature groups along astonishingly variegated axes of expression. Where and when a dance emerges and gains popularity matters, and THOMAS F. DEFRANTZ communities can recognize age-group and locative affiliations through the practice and The Queer Space: Where Innovation in witnessing of social dancing.2 Black Social Dance Occurs Many of these dances explore contours of lack performance provides privileged gender and sexual identity in their conception space for a resistant queer aesthetic in and practice. Among diverse traditions of B — its structure: queer presence and queer Black social dance including line dances, gesture are foundational to the Black expres- performed by the group moving in unison sive arts. Africanist aesthetic structures of per- along the same direction; couple dances, formance underpin popular forms of African that distinguish roles for each partner; or American music and dance; these aesthetic solo forms, offered up by individuals within — structures value the unprecedented gestures a group dynamic the creative expression of of individual innovation within a movement fluid gendered identity surrounds successful structure recognized by the group.1 Often, performance. Line dances include references the gesture of innovation that defines excel- to gender-specific gestures that are to be per- lence in these social dance forms defies formed by all dancers. Couple forms are often common expectations of normative gender learned and practiced by same-sex duos no or sexual identity. In addition, many African matter the sexuality of the performers. And American–derived social dances emerge solo forms accommodate surprising shifts of from spaces of non-normative identity gendered typographies in their execution, politic. This essay explores the resistance to allowing male dancers to perform tradition- gender conformity that surrounds the devel- ally feminine gestures, and female dancers opment and practice of certain Black social to engage recognizably masculine modes of 3 dances of the twenty-first century, and con- physical expression. “ ” Downloaded by [thomas defrantz] at 06:25 04 February 2016 cerns itself with the engagement of queer Of course, the narration of masculine or “ ” gesture by non-queer dancers—the ways feminine gestures begs exploration; for this that resistant queer aesthetics are routinely essay, all physical gestures are assumed to embodied by African American straights and be available to any dancer, regardless of others eager to enjoy the social possibilities gender identity. However, normative rheto- of queer creativity. rics of gender performance operate through- out Black social dance practices, creating Black Social Dance Praxis: Language, the spaces that certain dancers and dances Queer, Heteronormativity push against in the creation of queer Black Black social dances emerge and recede with dance affect. A circular recoiling of weight persistent regularity within the United States, through the hips acted against a dispersed

© 2016 The Black World Foundation The Black Scholar 2016 Vol. 46, No. 1, 66–74, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2015.1119624 energetic field might constitute a more femi- end leaning on one elbow with legs crossed, nine expression of rhythmic bounce than a head cast back and eyes forward, ready for blockish thrusting of weight sideward and your close-up. The fleeting reference to an downward, driven by a tensed torso and absent female model and her typical mode clenched fists that might be construed as typi- of professional display became popular cally masculine. In this essay, the queer space among straight young men of color as a might be the space of slippage between nor- witty physical exclamation point to floorwork mative presumptions surrounding gendered soloing. The feminine poses held only movement, and the fact of social dance per- fleeting connotations of queer sexual identity, formances that resist those presumptions. but offered a stable demonstration of The awkward literary descriptions of the citational wit as the dancer made reference basic J-setting bounce and a Krumping base to an impossible translocation of social step in the paragraph above demonstrate diffi- identity. culties in writing about Black social dance. B-boys and b-girls could assume the femi- Simple dance gestures commonly understood nine postures of fashion models and be cele- by children and elders alike in everyday prac- brated for their agility and physical flair in tice become difficult to characterize in literary the portrayal because Black social dance (critical?) text. But the importance of Black highly values transformative physical agility. social dance for demonstrating group affilia- Carefully nuanced physicality drives the tion is illustrated daily by the ubiquity of engine of achievement in these expressive these dances that operate, emphatically, modes. While dance surely functions outside, or in excess, of language. outside of normative uses of language, its rec- Because Black social dance doesn’t rely on ognition draws on structures of form that can language for legitimacy, certain aspects of its be likened to oratorical prowess. Dancers practice can evade the stultifying restrictions work through strategies of corporeal orature of hegemonic portrayals. We don’t need to to create sequences of movement that refer- be able to write about a dance, or even talk ence materials far from the site of the about it, for it to do its ephemeral, affective dance.4 As in other modes of Black expressive queer labor. In these dances, movements culture, the ability to reference historical

Downloaded by [thomas defrantz] at 06:25 04 February 2016 that might be considered homoerotic or events, contemporary circumstances, family gender non-normative emerge as demon- affiliations, and demonstrate personal flair strations of physical agility and wit. Three all contribute to the admiration accorded the examples will demonstrate non-normative performer by the group. As with emceeing, gender portrayals taken up by straight church oratory, or jazz musicianship, individ- dancers. First, young b-boys and b-girls in ual style matters in Black performance. In hip hop dance demonstrations of the 1980s dance, these embodied intelligences demon- often ended their physical floorwork inven- strate intersectionalities of expressive agility tions with a highly stylized feminine pose bridging metaphor, social awareness, and that echoed postures assumed by women creative invention.5 Style arrived for early fashion models. After a spin on the back, b-boys as a queer stance—in this case, the

Thomas F. DeFrantz 67 practice of posing. These poses were allowed Indian performers. By 2016, we can find and encouraged in the masculinist spaces of straight white women voguing and waacking b-girling and b-boying floor work because in competition and social dance settings. Het- their execution confirmed healthy, creative, eronormative Asian men might vogue or social flexibility that was valued by the group. waack as part of a dance set. These dances Queer Black stance also emerged in queer retain the distinctive gestural values that spaces to be eventually co-opted into hetero- defined them in the 1970s, but their contem- normative contexts. The explicitly queer porary performance needn’t be linked to modes of Black social dance waacking and queer identity politics. By now, many voguing developed in 1970s private social dancers have access to these forms, within spaces that supported queers of color in explicitly queer contexts as well as hypercom- dance motion.6 These forms, born and mercialized and heterosocial ones. honed in mixed-race brown and Black com- Black social dances that develop in hetero- munities, cast social dance as a competitive normative spaces survive in homosocial con- mode of demonstration executed by many- texts that can easily be seen as queer. gendered performers. Voguing and waacking Consider that the Nae Nae and the Dougie deploy a strongly accented physicality that are each performed as “shine” dances that utilizes freezing and popping gestures, with allow a solo dancer to show off in the muscular tensing of the body connected by context of the group. The Dougie is often per- brief, flowing transition movements that formed as a demonstration of physical cool might be characterized as feminine. Both of and prowess, a courtship dance that allows these forms linger in physical embellishment. its witnesses to appreciate the individual per- Voguers engage stop-action movement former’s style. The Nae Nae offers a celebra- sequences, striking ever-extending series of tory frame for eccentric physical gestures. poses improbably connected by super-fast These two twenty-first-century dances are transition motions. Waacking explores extra- regularly practiced in the same-sex contexts vagant gestures of punching and hitting, but of athletic teams, including football and bas- centers on the preparation for striking rather ketball. On one hand, these homosocial per- than striking itself. When waacking, dancers formances act as “practice sessions” for

Downloaded by [thomas defrantz] at 06:25 04 February 2016 can appear to be executing super-fast heterosocial contexts players will presumably warmup exercises for a physical battle. But enter after leaving the locker room. On the both forms exalt a decorativeness of gesture, other hand, the dances contain their own aligning their practice with normative con- visual and kinesthetic logic among their prac- ceptions of femininity as decorative and titioners and witnesses that ground their per- embellished. formance in assessments of physical ability While voguing and waacking continued to that are, if not homoerotic, at least non-nor- be practiced by queer dancers of color well mative. Video after video documents these into the twenty-first century, these dances dances performed in locker rooms and tight were taken up in international competitions group huddles alongside the playing field by by gender-normative, white, Asian, and same-sex groups of athletes in celebration.

68 TBS • Volume 46 • Number 1 • Spring 2016 These Black social dances arrive as both engagements with queer embodiment. markers of Black difference from a white Queer gender articulations, including those mainstream, and as homosocial renderings performed by non-queer dancers, drive of danced possibilities. Dipping into the Black social dance practices forward. complex wellspring of Black social dance and its ability to ground group cohesion, the Bone-Breaking Nae Nae and the Dougie help college athletes recognize themselves as part of a group, and Now we turn to bone-breaking, an almost celebrate their individual movement styles. exclusively male dance form that trades in Athletes dancing these courtship dances visual illusion and physical agility. Originally ground themselves in the corporeal orature developed within the very social practice of of Black expression, even as they show off dance battling, bone-breaking casts the and practice arousing desire among their ability to render the body in unusual physical same-sex peers. We smile with compassion arrangement as its very achievement. As a and wonder when the women on a college demonstration form of dance, bone-breaking basketball team perform the Nae Nae during thrives in both video distributed by social “school spirit rallies” posted to YouTube.7 media, and close-up, in-person settings of Athletes dance these courtship dances along- dance battles. Bone-breaking transforms the side each other but toward the audience, in very possibility of a stable Black body by choreographed accord, slightly uncomforta- insisting on hyperexcessive flexibility. Its ble at the task, but willing to fulfill the queer practice by young men of color raises impor- call for celebratory Black social dance and tant considerations of Black masculine its complex affiliations within sexually ambig- stance, queering what might be expected in uous homosocial contexts. normative contexts of the contemporary US Queer in this articulation refers to the non- police state. normative flashes of gender performance that Consider the physical assumption of contribute to unexpected renderings of social “hands up, don’t shoot,” that limns a flattened identity. Black social dance trades in this sort body in structural accord. Balanced and of queer performance at every innovative poised, the chalk-line referential image

Downloaded by [thomas defrantz] at 06:25 04 February 2016 turn: in each spontaneous same-sex hand suggests submission with weighted body- dance; each fashion model pose following presence; an opening of energy to another b-boy floorwork; each hypermasculine, more powerful force. In this physical position, aggressive, fighting movement offered up by my hands are empty, fingers open; I confirm straight female Krumpers working through that there are no weapons here, and await expressions of rage. The queerness of physical your direction. Tell me what to do next. expression called upon by dancers in this tra- The poise of the “hands up, don’t shoot” dition does not exceed the terms of social posture stems from its constructed balance. dance; rather, queer affect enhances explora- The arms are to be symmetrically raised tions of dance form. Black social dance grows high, above the head, but nowhere near in volume and effect through these straight. With arms up too high, we seem

Thomas F. DeFrantz 69 too eager. With arms raised too much to one and realign the ligature. Demonstrate side or the other, our submission becomes flexibility in the face of physical trauma. fanciful. Held too low, they suggest non- Self-inflicted dis-tension reconceived as compliance. I am to hold my arms up just artmaking. Bone-breakers practice their so, where they can move to the head easily, modular flexions; they stretch and train, before you handcuff me. I feel the anticipation gaining fluidity in the releasing maneuvers of unknowable action; the directness of my that mark the form. Many of its best body toward an action. The gesture of dancers are extremely flexible to begin “hands up, don’t shoot” begs, “what’s with, and enjoy an affinity with the practice next?”8 If the contemporary police state con- of dislocating their shoulders on demand. structs “hands up” as a habituated posture Bone-breaking thrives on creating illusions for young men of color, the bone-breaker’s of an impossible flexibility, and yet, much movement beyond it shifts the Black male of the art is not illusion at all, but the body—the object of target practice—toward actual demonstration of artful ability and being a subject worthy of perusal. As the agility. object moves, of its own volition, it authors To be Black is to demonstrate the mark of a shifting concatenation of receptions. It the visible pain of being other; to be visibly winds through identities; it becomes a poss- Othered, to be a hurt. We know this in the ible she, or as in bone-breaking, almost context of the United States, where we must always a he, on the way back to the revelation tell each other that Black lives matter, entirely, of a dancing “it.” Passing through a shifty of course, because that isn’t the case. Some vocabulary of nearly-impossible gesture, the Black lives matter, and many don’t seem to; bone-breaker confirms: assumptions of phys- worse, Black bodies offer evidence, in their ical limitation need not always apply. very presence, of continuous mistreatment Bone-breakers overextend their shoulders and unethical social and economic insti- to achieve the illusion of breaking their tutions. Bone-breakers extend the implication bones and realigning their musculatures. of pain our bodies always already bear toward They shift far beyond “hands up, don’t an exquisite artfulness that confounds and shoot” to difficult positions of arms contorted disturbs. ’

Downloaded by [thomas defrantz] at 06:25 04 February 2016 behind the back, and torsos twisting in appar- This dance marks the dancer s production ent distress. As they dance, we can’t see the of discomfort, assumedly in his own perform- pain that their movements create, but we ance, but also in its viewing by the audience. can surely imagine its presence, be intrigued The object turns toward the creation of a by its inevitability, and shrink from its intima- subject through creative animation, the revel- tion. We can’t see the pain, but we know: ation of unanticipated capacity, virtuosity, that’s gotta hurt. wit, self-possession, and physical ability. Bone-breaking cites the persistent pain of This is an entirely queer form of Black social Black life as a source of aesthetic ingenuity. dance, in that it is gender non-normative, The dance suggests: push to the breaking physically resistant, and largely confined to point, then release the joint, circle around, a small group of practitioners.

70 TBS • Volume 46 • Number 1 • Spring 2016 Madonna and the Archive of Black gesture toward artful corporeal orature, the Social Dance demonstrations of them you will find in You- Tube’s archives will be exceptional iterations As Black creativity, bone-breaking arrives prepared after months, if not years, of prac- along with theatricalized social dance forms tice. Like the bone-breaker’s art, Black social including krumping, waacking, and voguing. dance in heavy circulation distends well These forms emerge in local public spheres, past any an easily scalable “social.” The where music and dance arise together, each important point here: depictions of Black driving the other to light. Some dedicated social dance inevitably celebrate its most dancers practice the emerging style until a extravagant practitioners, rather than the repeatable basic form solidifies with a name anonymous people who gave rise to the everyone can remember; this simplified forms. The translocation of the dance across dance travels from neighborhood to neighbor- circumstances is not without cost. hood, until landing, inevitably, in some Bone-breaking bears close family resem- national media orbit. After being exposed on blance to voguing, the dance of posed ges- a national stage, expert practitioners develop tures executed competitively. The two forms incalculable choreographies of the form: trade in visible articulations of queer as a advanced versions of the movements that physical effect and as an assumption of iden- extend its expressive capacities. Meanwhile, tity politic. But these forms emerged in differ- most of us do a very simple version of the ent eras: voguing references the cabaret stage dance for a few months. Some forms and the catwalk, while bone-breaking become more extravagant in their theatrical embraces the camera. Voguing requires a capacity, though, and even more expert community of participants, while bone-break- dancers realize even more eccentric embo- ing needs only a dancer and a witness: died possibilities previously unknown. I say human, analog, or digital. This variance eccentric to underscore the hand-made, matters greatly for how Black social dances extravagantly detailed, expert versions of sustain themselves across generations. Bone- Black social dances that inevitably develop. breaking has generated a powerful niche col- These versions bear little resemblance to the lective of young people who stretch, learn to dance that was briefly practiced by a larger

Downloaded by [thomas defrantz] at 06:25 04 February 2016 distend and sometimes dislocate their population. But these physically burnished, shoulders, create routines, film them, and expert demonstrations become the sedimen- stage their own “how-to” web tutorials. A pro- ted archive that stand for the dance in later foundly twenty-first-century phenomenon, generations. Our examples here are the bone-breaking coheres in a distributed black- filmed records of the Cakewalk, the Snake- ness by the choice of its participants; it hips, the Lindy Hop, early b-boying and b- needn’t foment only from decidedly Black girling, krumping, all manner of voguing, spaces, even as it emerges from them; it and bone-breaking. needn’t depict an unassailably Black world- While each of these Black social dance view, in the ways that Voguing surely did. forms began with simple elaborations of The queerness of bone-breaking might feel

Thomas F. DeFrantz 71 as much like the ludic arrogation of youthful beyond their purview: voguing was per- folly (why would anyone practice causing that formed with unison sequences and without aesthetic distress to their body?) as it does a judges or a participating audience in her dance of freakishness. 1990 “Vogue” video and stage show; krump- Bone-breaking is a physical technique that ing was performed sequentially and in a pre- might be used to construct a longer solo in a determined narrative in Madonna’s 2005 larger whole; it can be an expressive demon- “Hung Up” video; bone-breaking was per- stration form, but usually arrives in snippets of formed as group choreography, as any one to three minutes rather than more modern dance might be, in the 2012 extended sequences. Voguing is a larger cat- “MDNA” stage tour. Moving these dances egory of dance practice, and could include out of their foundational social circumstances bone-breaking among its contents. Both varied their capacity to underscore evolving forms, though, bring us back to the figure of social relationships. Dancing behind Madonna, and the slippery nature of Black Madonna onstage or in her music videos, expressive culture’s archive. these Black and brown dancers, and Black Cultural critic bell hooks has written about social dance forms, became spectacles of the ways in which Madonna appropriates queer Black corporeality. Black cultural expression (and Black people) Madonna’s appropriation of these Black in creating quasi-transgressive, spectacle- social dance forms signals the common ridden sites of white supremacy and patriar- decontextualization that follows the revel- chy.9 hooks’ 1992 essay “Madonna: Planta- ation of excellence within their performance. tion Sister or Soul Sister?” begins with a Again and again, outsiders to Black cultural prescient quote from theorist Susan Bordo: practices “discover” the idiosyncratic, queer “No matter how exciting the ‘destabilizing’ experts in dance, and bring them to a larger potential of texts, bodily or otherwise, public, casting themselves as arbiters of style whether those texts are subversive or recup- and taste among those Othered moving erative or both or neither cannot be deter- bodies. But this change of venue diminishes mined by abstraction from actual social the capacity of these dances to highlight indi- practice.”10 While dance does not arrive as vidualized non-normative, resistant expres-

Downloaded by [thomas defrantz] at 06:25 04 February 2016 text, as it offers lively, unpredictable, shifting sive modes. The dances and their dancers scenes of expression and emotion that exist become dynamic spectacle, valued mostly outside or in excess of language, its place for the novelty of unusual physical gesture. within social practice surely defining its The oppositional force of Black social varied uses and analyses. dance tends to stem from its novelty; from Madonna ported voguing, krumping, and the places where it differs from normative, bone-breaking into her stage spectacles as habituated movement. This is both the demonstrations of her finger-on-the-pulse of problem and the resourcefulness of social Black expressive culture and reified Black dance. Its contents are unstable, even when social dance practice. In each case, her crea- bound by name or genre; its practice tends tive team needed the dances to do things toward the crucial subject category of

72 TBS • Volume 46 • Number 1 • Spring 2016 “expression.” The dancing body is lively and social life regardless of sexual or gender animated, unusual in its portrayal of emotion- identity. al valence tied to physical possibility. To dance, we must be able to “do”: the “doing” speaks of futurity in an embodied manner, of Acknowledgments a practice that is honed, particular, and Thanks to Raquel Monroe and Tara Willis momentarily thrilling. When it is extrava- who read earlier versions of this essay. gantly executed, as bone-breaking tends to be, we pause to acknowledge its particularity and complexity. We pause and hold our breath, as the Notes subject demonstrates other ways to physically be in the world. We hold our breath, wit- 1. See Thomas F. DeFrantz, “Popular Dances nesses to this self-inflicted Othering. Expres- of the 1920 and Early ’30s: From Animal Dance sive Othering. We hold our breath. The Crazes to the Lindy Hop” and “Popular African toxic world around us produces these American Dance of the 1950s and ’60s,” in Ain’t Othered Black bodies. We vogue, we bone- Nothing Like The Real Thing: How the Apollo break. We dance to demonstrate our protest Theater Shaped American Entertainment, eds. to the assumption of a unified subject. Richard Carlin and Kinshasha Holman Conwill (Washington, DC: National Museum of African The failure of queer, narrated with insight American History and Culture, 2010): 66–70 and by José Esteban Muñoz and Judith Halber- 182–6. stam11, creates resistant space in performance 2. See Thomas F. DeFrantz, “Unchecked that refuses to finish itself according to stan- Popularity: Neoliberal Circulations of Black dards of hegemonic appropriateness. Queer Social Dance,” in Neoliberalism and Global Thea- failure suggests that queer may be made mani- tres: Performance Permutations, eds. by Lara fest through a discarding of achievement as Nielson and Patricia Ybarra (New York: Palgrave the result of practice. Or that queer achieve- Macmillan, 2012): 128–40. ment may manifest in a performative failure 3. Many of the dances referenced in this essay that keeps a potentiality, a horizon of social can be seen on YouTube. 4. See Thomas F. DeFrantz, “The Black Beat

Downloaded by [thomas defrantz] at 06:25 04 February 2016 success, always beyond reach. I want to ” suggest here that Black social dance engages Made Visible: Body Power in Hip Hop Dance, in queer potentiality as an achievement of virtu- Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory, ed. Andre Lepecki (Middle- osity, resistance, and social flexibility. The town, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 64–81. dancers of these social forms engage, briefly, 5. See Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Digging the in non-normative stances and non-normative Africanist Presence in American Performance: physical presentation. They demonstrate an Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, CT: Green- abiding presence of queer as a valuable and wood Press, 1996). often preferred mode of expression for Black 6. See Naomi Bragin, “Techniques of Black social dancers, pushing forward expansive Male Re/dress: Corporeal Drag and physical possibilities for expressing Black Kinesthetic Politics in the Rebirth of Waacking/

Thomas F. DeFrantz 73 Punkin’,” Women & Performance 24, no. 1 (2014): Representation (Boston, MA: South End Press, 61–78. 1992): 157–64. 7. Among many videos, see https://www. 10. Susan Bordo, “Postmodern Subjects, youtube.com/watch?v=47Lh1iqIMaE. Postmodern Bodies: Review Essay,” Feminist 8. See Anusha Khedar, “‘Hands up! Don’t Studies 18, no. 1 (1992): 159–75,172,quoted shoot!’: Gesture, Choreography, and Protest in Fer- in hooks. guson” for a different rendering of this gesture: 11. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The http://www.thefeministwire.com/2014/10/protest- Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: in-ferguson/. NYU Press, 2009) and Judith Halberstam, The 9. bell hooks, “Madonna: Plantation Sister or Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke Univer- Soul Sister?” in Black Looks: Race and sity Press, 2011).

Thomas F. DeFrantz is Professor and Chair of African and African American Studies at Duke Univer- sity, and founding member of the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance. He is also director of SLIP- PAGE: Performance, Culture, Technology, a research group that explores emerging technology in live performance applications. His books include Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (2002), Dancing Revelations Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture (2004), and Black Performance Theory, co-edited with Anita Gonzalez (2014). Downloaded by [thomas defrantz] at 06:25 04 February 2016

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