The Black Scholar Journal of Black Studies and Research

ISSN: 0006-4246 (Print) 2162-5387 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtbs20

“Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around”

P. Kimberleigh Jordan

To cite this article: P. Kimberleigh Jordan (2016) “Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around”, The Black Scholar, 46:1, 37-45, DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2015.1119623

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2015.1119623

Published online: 03 Feb 2016.

Submit your article to this journal

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rtbs20

Download by: [pk jordan] Date: 08 February 2016, At: 10:41 “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn century. Each expresses a distinctive response Me Around” to the lived experiences of black people, and the embodied performance that occurs in as Embodied Acts of each period expresses power to resist death- Resistance dealing circumstances and to reach toward possibilities of hope and liberation. I P. KIMBERLEIGH JORDAN examine the embodied performance of the spirituals through a dance analytical lens, fore- or nearly four centuries, people of African grounding the presence of the body and focus- F descent in the Diaspora expressed their ing on ways that black bodies have resisted presence, pain, desires, and hopes through annihilation through faith and spiritual prac- the repertoire of the spirituals.1 Spirituals tice. The spirituals have held a persistent materialize the historic and continuing place in black performance practices through- power and possibility of black existence out the history of the African Diaspora in North through sound, movement, communal and America. The continued powerful and moving spiritual formation, in the face of long histories presence of black bodies in them energizes of racialized oppressions that have violated this study. black bodies, minds, and spirits. By congre- Bernice Johnson Reagon, scholar of gating in performative and spiritually power- African American culture and history and ful ways, black people have connected to founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, “ divine realms and each other, building a foun- describes the spirituals as announc[ing] our ” dation for continued existence in unfamiliar existence culturally and ontologically: and unfriendly lands. My interest in the spirituals departs from the These [spirituals] have to do with stating a usual ethnomusicological analysis, instead worldview, or positioning yourself in the using a dance-analytical lens to engage the world . . . this culture that empowers you as spirituals as embodied black performance. I a unit in the universe and places you, and argue that the spirituals have been significant makes you know you are a child of the uni-

Downloaded by [pk jordan] at 10:41 08 February 2016 sites of spiritual power and resistance in the verse . . . that would give us a chance to be African Diaspora during three overlapping, different from the recipe that brought us interrelated periods of black performance here . . . Black singing is running sound history—the congregational, the concert, through your body. [Y]ou cannot sing a and the Civil Rights protest periods. The con- [spiritual] and not change your condition.2 gregational period had its greatest influence during the colonial and antebellum eras of Within this performative complex, sound and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the movement overlap, enabling the performer to concert period began with the 1871 founding experience personal and communal of the Fisk Jubilee Singers; the Civil Rights “change.” This notion of spirituals effecting protest period began in the mid-twentieth “change” is a primary reason that spirituals

© 2016 The Black World Foundation The Black Scholar 2016 Vol. 46, No. 1, 37–45, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2015.1119623 engage black bodies—both as laboring, suf- understandings. These adapted theologies fering, commodified bodies, and as bodies and practices cosigned their future emancipa- through which divine power can move. The tion, rather than their continued oppression. spirituals exemplify Black communal per- formance of sound running through the Communal and Congregational [moving] body over three performance Spirituals periods. The earliest performances of spirituals in North America were communal perform- The Congregational Period ances by everyday people in out-of-the-way Africans brought to North America in the colo- places like hush arbors, clearings, and praise nial and antebellum periods came from a houses. Sounds and movement reflected the variety of cultures and spiritual backgrounds. diverse Africanist communities that produced Immaterial elements of their cultures and them. Lyrics and tunes were orally trans- backgrounds were not erased by transatlantic mitted, situating the black moving body as passage.3 Though the white people who the repository of performance. Interwoven enslaved them claimed Christianity as their with the sound of spirituals were rhythmically religion, they were minimally effective in and improvisationally moving bodies. initial efforts to convert Africans to Christian- ity. Instead, Africans would, as one of the spiri- The Ring Shout tuals proclaims, “steal away” to private locations to commune before the divine in A significant example of spirituals as commu- their own ways, absent from the gaze of nal sacred performance running sound white owners.4 Such practices included ritual through moving bodies is the Ring Shout. A gatherings with dance, sound, rhythmic per- unique kinesthetic ritual, it combines a formance, call-and-response, spoken and number of embodied expressions: lower and sung words at their core—all elements of upper body movement, singing, rhythm- immaterial Africanist cultures.5 Participating making, and spiritual formation. Its existence

Downloaded by [pk jordan] at 10:41 08 February 2016 in these rituals, early generations of enslaved evidences early generations of diasporan Afri- Africans resisted encroaching Christian hege- cans’ resistance to cultural and spiritual mony, with its notions of how bodies should annihilation, bringing together spiritual prac- and should not worship God. tices from the breadth of Africanist traditions The religious landscape for free and and rematerializing through black bodies. enslaved people of North America began to Native-born Africans and their American- change during the Christian revivalist born progeny practiced the Ring Shout, devel- periods of the mid-18th through the mid- oped it, and passed it on to subsequent 19th centuries. As more enslaved persons generations. were born in North America, more adapted Imagine a group of black people gathered and syncretized Christianity toward embo- in a remote place, away from any authority died worship and liberative theological or audience of slave owners and missionaries.

38 TBS • Volume 46 • Number 1 • Spring 2016 They are standing. They rock, hum, and pray Ring Shout is a fully engaging spiritual prac- lengthy song-prayers for the Spirit to inhabit tice for its participants. their gathering. Eventually a leader “lifts” a song, sometimes called a “runnin’ spiritual.” Concert Spirituals The runnin’ spiritual is up-tempo and accom- panies the Shout’s perambulatory rhythm. As Concert spirituals are the focus of the second “ ” tempo and rhythm quicken, the people performance period. Concert refers to a move into the ring, shuffling in a counter- public performance of music or dance com- clockwise direction, their feet close to the positions previously rehearsed and depen- floor and never crossing their ankles. The dent upon performer technique and training. grounded, linear foot movement creates an Concert spirituals fused Africanist spiritual ongoing baseline rhythm—what James practice and embodiment, as well as Weldon Johnson calls “the fundamental beat western European musical tradition based of the dance.”6 on the diatonic octave scale. This was the A description of a Ring Shout7 in late-nine- post-Emancipation period of Reconstruction, teenth-century Florida: with its historical highs and lows, especially in the struggles of newly freed slaves and the evaporation of promises, proffered to them The Shouters formed in a Ring, men and during Reconstruction, of resources and women alternating, their bodies close equality. Though no longer property, black together, moved round and round on shuf- bodies continued to be in trouble. Where con- fling feet that never left the floor. With the gregational spirituals were birthed in seclu- heel of the right foot, they pounded out the sion, the genesis of concert spirituals was fundamental beat of the dance and with decidedly public. Performed on a proscenium their hands clapped out the varying rhythmi- stage, concert spirituals were sung a capella cal accents of the chant; for the music was, in by virtually immobile performers. Certainly, fact, an African chant and the Shout an running sound through im/mobile black African dance, the whole pagan rite trans- bodies under the gaze of others was planted and adapted to Christian worship. precarious.

Downloaded by [pk jordan] at 10:41 08 February 2016 Round and round the Ring would go: one, two, three, four, five hours, the very monot- ony and sound and motion inducing ecstatic Running Sound through Immobile 8 frenzy. Bodies: Fisk Jubilee Singers

In the tradition,9 this “fundamental Fisk University was founded in 1866 in Nash- beat” is a pulse from the “sticker,” who ville, Tennessee, shortly after the 1863 signing stands with the song leader and strikes out a of the Emancipation Proclamation and the rhythm with a stick on the floor. Staccato 1865 conclusion of the Civil War. By 1871, sounds of handclapping and other body per- Fisk was already in financial trouble and cussion enrich the embodied sonic mix— facing closure. This danger was alleviated by offered in call-and-response style.10 The publicity and fundraising efforts around a

P. Kimberleigh Jordan 39 group of students who came to be known as said, “Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands the Fisk Jubilee Singers. to God”; I believe God has stretched out Their public performances around the his hands to the children of Ethiopia; I nation offered images and embodied clues thank you.11 of what it would take for the formerly enslaved and their progeny to survive in the post-Eman- For Garfield, seeing the still bodies of the cipation, post-Reconstruction world. Their Fisk students on stage conjured images of presence and performance suggested survival their past laboring, suffering, enslaved tools including cultural and aesthetic assimi- bodies. It must also have been evocative to lation, literacy, education, Christian religios- see formerly enslaved men and women per- ity, and an unmoving physical presentation forming their own knowledge of having —all promoted by a nascent black politics of come “up from slavery” through the spirituals. respectability. Their initial concert tour of Using the concert stage to present what had 1871 took them from Nashville to Cincinnati existed only in the private spaces of Africanist to sing at a Christian denominational spiritual formation, the performers invited the meeting and changing the history of black gaze of white audiences. That gaze beheld a sacred performance. The Fisk Jubilee well-groomed, elegant, and decorous group Singers, and later others, attracted critical of young black female and male performers. acclaim and sold-out halls, bringing much- The fact that, a few years earlier, they had needed monies and positive attention to Fisk been enchattled bodies picking cotton and and the broader project of educating freed tobacco, subject to their masters’ advances, men and women. beatings, or both, was concealed behind Over one thousand people, including presi- their dignified attire, precise diction and dential candidate James A. Garfield, attended unmoving bodies. Gone were the rocking, an early performance by Fisk on August 8, swaying, body percussion, and the ring 1880, at the Chautauqua Institution. Following moving counterclockwise. These singers ran the concert, Garfield was introduced to the sound through their no-longer-moving Singers. Before leaving Chautauqua, Garfield bodies. The stillness was significant because, in addition to musical changes in the spiri-

Downloaded by [pk jordan] at 10:41 08 February 2016 responded in a speech: tuals, the now-unmoving bodies marked a I heard yesterday the songs of those who change in the performance of spirituals. As were lately redeemed from slavery, […] singing separated from dance and movement, and I wondered, if the tropical sun had not the body’s presence seemed less significant. distilled its sweetness, and if the sorrows of How did the presentation of motionless centuries of slavery had not distilled its concert spirituals relate to earlier perform- sadness into the voices, which were unutter- ances of congregational spirituals constructed ably sweet. And voices fit to sing the songs of by bodies producing sound and movement? freedom, as they sing them wherever they Dance theorist André Lepecki argues that still- go. I thank the choir for the lessons they ness is not so much a “denial of dance, but a have taught me here. […] The old prophet moment in which there is deep formal

40 TBS • Volume 46 • Number 1 • Spring 2016 probing of the expressive and perceptual massive migration—continuing to press thresholds of dance as a medium due to upon black bodies, African American dance social and political circumstances.” Impor- artists looked to the repertoire of the now tantly he adds, stillness “becomes an action esteemed concert spirituals. With Lepecki’s filled with force.”12 “still act” in mind, what does it mean for On one level, the singers’ stillness can be concert dance to always already constitute a seen as a rejection of earlier embodied “silent act?” What does it cost black dancing sacred performance. On another level, it bodies to be silent in the continuingly racist may be understood as the ultimate perform- ? As most concert dance is tra- ance of survival and a deeply rooted stance ditionally done without speaking, danced of strength. To extend Lepecki’s argument concert spirituals may have taken a toll on toward embodied sacred performance, the black dancers, who no longer expressed the Fisk Jubilee Singers performed their own sound that ran through their bodies. kind of force in stillness—a powerful, resistant Nevertheless, concert spirituals accompa- force. Announcing their existence in a new nying modern dance became a cornerstone way, the Fisk Singers’ concert spirituals thus of the black dance repertoire in the Harlem materialized evidence of black survival, life, Renaissance and beyond.13 An early and potentiality. They represented an histori- example, by dancer and choreographer cal and spiritual journey-as-movement- Edna Guy, illuminates the problems of black through-time-and-space in the African bodies dancing concert spirituals. Reviewing Diaspora. Guy’s work entitled “Danced Spirituals,” per- The Fisk Singers performed resistance by formed in 1931 in the “First Negro Dance standing—still and alive—and running sound Recital in America,”14 John Martin of the through a body that was no longer property. New York Times wrote: To stand and return the white gaze, knowing that Western culture had made its best efforts It is not these dances which echo and imitate to commodify, objectify, and kill them and the manner of the dancers of another race their ancestors through enslavement, was that the Negro dancers are at their best, but

Downloaded by [pk jordan] at 10:41 08 February 2016 powerful performance indeed. in those in which their forthrightness and simplicity have full play. Miss Guy’s group Danced Concert Spirituals of “spirituals” and the primitive ritual dances […] can be counted in this This sound/embodiment equation, though category.15 powerful, separated moving bodies from singing bodies. The onset of the twentieth No longer expressing awe, Martin criticizes century returned movement to the perform- other works on the program for “imitate[ing] ance of spirituals by way of virtuosic, though the manner … of another race,” while back- silent, dancing bodies. With “social and pol- handedly complimenting Guy for, what he itical circumstances”—new forms of domina- misunderstands as, displays of simplicity and tion like lynching, Jim Crow laws, and primitivity.

P. Kimberleigh Jordan 41 Despite problems with reception, a number Civil Rights Protest Performance of black choreographers followed Edna Guy’s footsteps and engaged the repertoire of spiri- During the mid-twentieth-century period of tuals to accompany concert choreography. Civil Rights protests, where black people pub- Arguably the greatest achievement in danced licly asserted resistance and desire for long- spirituals premiered in 1960 with Alvin delayed liberation and equality, the spirituals “ ” Ailey’s Revelations. Ailey used a broad selec- became freedom songs enacted on US tion of songs to describe the arc of history streets as everyday people marched, walked, from enslavement to freedom. Stylized, con- fell, and performed other choreographies of certized, and set within a framework of non-violent resistance. The spirituals changed modern dance techniques, Ailey called Revel- to fit the needs of new generations and circum- stances. What was lifted in the 1870s from ations a “blood memory” of his experiences in 16 communal settings once again was lifted, a Black Baptist church in Texas. now from concert settings, and placed onto Revelations is filled with movements and the moving bodies of everyday Black people shapes culled from African American culture who ran sound through their moving and and religiosity, as well as Martha Graham singing bodies. They announced their exist- and Lester Horton dance techniques. Ailey’s ence through the repertoire of the spirituals in choreography employs a sense of embodied the face of their era’s particular racialized resistance, revealing dancers firmly rooted to oppressions. Scholar/activist Reagon notes: the ground, but reaching plaintively, or bearing each other’s weight and defying the forces of gravity. The dancers struggle to I began to notice how well the old songs we achieve something just beyond their grasp knew fit our current situation. Many of the while avoiding sinking to the ground. These freedom songs we sang we had learned as steps contrast with the airy elevations of clas- spirituals, sacred songs created by slaves. sical ballet, instead grounded in an abiding Our struggle against racism often found us and centered strength—materializing what reaching for connections with those who Fred Moten suggests is the “performative during the nineteenth century fought to end ”17 slavery in this country.18

Downloaded by [pk jordan] at 10:41 08 February 2016 essence of Blackness. Revelations,as the quintessential danced spiritual, evidences a capacity to hope, despite earthly Thus the communal performance of spirituals circumstances. was reinvigorated offstage. From the immobile performances of the As exemplum, in the spring of 1963, protes- Fisk Jubilee Singers to the thoroughly mobile ters in Raleigh, North Carolina demanded full performances of African American modern access to all public accommodations. March- dancers, the concert spirituals have been ers were primarily students from two histori- central to Black religious and performance cally African American colleges—Shaw culture. More than anything, they have been University and St. Augustine’sCollege—and part of a black spiritual and cultural survival the (segregated) J.W. Ligon High School.19 apparatus to resist annihilation in the diaspora. Nightly, protesters marched through the

42 TBS • Volume 46 • Number 1 • Spring 2016 downtown Raleigh streets singing spirituals School of the Americas in Fort Benning, with relevant lyrics. They marched to the led a chapel service at Union Theolo- county Courthouse and segregated businesses. gical Seminary that included a prayerful com- A confrontational freedom song called “I’m missioning and concluded with the spiritual Gonna Tell God How You Treat Me” was “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round.” sung to the tune of the old spiritual, “I’m The song was performed call-and-response Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table,” punctuated style as the soon-to-be-protesters were by marching feet and handclapping rhythms. encircled by the congregation. As the semi- The lyrics serve as a record of local sites of narians sang, they began with the original Civil Rights struggles: lyrics:

I’m gonna tell God how you treat me; Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ’round I’m gonna tell God how you treat me one of [repeat] these days. Hallelujah! I’m gonna keep on walkin,’ keep on talkin’ Marching up to freedom land! [Other verses]: Then the song leader lifted some additional I’m gonna eat those twenty-eight flavors. […] words: ’ … I m gonna work at Sears and Roebuck. [ ] Ain’t gonna let injustice turn me ’round . . . ’ ’ I m gonna dance at the Governor s Ain’t gonna let racism turn me ’round . . . … ’ Mansion. [ ]Were gonna end this Ain’t gonna let no Ferguson turn me … segregation. [ ] ’round.21 I’m gonna sit at the welcome table.20 The song had traversed generations of black Over the next decade, Raleigh, like other performance history in the Diaspora: from southern US cities, desegregated public hush arbor to concert stage to street protest accommodations, businesses, and schools. —now finding itself in a twenty-first-century Yet these victories have not rendered the spiri- chapel and on its way to being “lifted” at the

Downloaded by [pk jordan] at 10:41 08 February 2016 tuals irrelevant, because the black quest for gates of an institution seen as unjust and full freedom continues. Though the Ring oppressive. This time, black and brown Shout is rarely performed, many black bodies (now with some white allies) sing churches perform the spirituals in communal and march, no longer in a counterclockwise styles. Freedom songs continue to be lifted circle, but in long lines through city centers, where there are struggles against racialized by courthouses, over bridges, and to the and other oppressions. gates of injustice.

A Final Scene Acknowledgments

A diverse group of students about to attend a This research was supported by a Postdoctoral large protest demanding justice at the Fellowship from the Ford Foundation.

P. Kimberleigh Jordan 43 Along This Way Notes 6. James Weldon Johnson, (New York: Viking, 1933), 22, quoted in Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and 1. The term “spiritual” refers herein to Africa- the Foundations of Black America (New York: nist and African American singing, sound, hums, Oxford, 1987), 331. moans and embodied communal performance. In 7. McIntosh County Shouters, Kennedy “ ” the musical lexicon, spiritual is a generic name Center, Millennium—Homegrown: The Music of that refers to faith-based content and can be per- America Series, Washington, DC, December 1, formed in diverse locales, from church to cotton 2010, http://www.kennedy-center.org/explorer/ “ ” field. Furthermore, spiritual is not an inherently videos/?id=M4470&type=A. racialized term, as there are both white and Black 8. J.W. Johnson, quoted in Stuckey, Slave “ ” spirituals. The formal definition of spiritual is Culture, 331. eighteenth- or nineteenth-century vocal music 9. For resources on Gullah traditions, see: Ras created in the United States by people of African Michael Brown, African-Atlantic Cultures and the descent, or European descent who settled in Appa- South Carolina Lowcountry, Cambridge Studies on “ lachia. Described as the musical expression of the American South series (New York: Cambridge ” spiritual emotion, spirituals hold a significant University Press, 2012); Margaret Washington place in Black sacred performance traditions. See Creel, A Peculiar People: Slave Religion and Com- Maud Cuney Hare, Negro Musicians and Their munity Culture Among the ,American Music, African American Women Writers series, Social Experience series (New York: NYU, 1989); – 1910 1940, ed. H.L. Gates (New York: G.K. Hall/ LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant, Talking to the Simon Schuster MacMillan; 1936, reprint 1996), Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory Among 68; James Robert Davidson, A Dictionary of Protes- Gullah/Geechee Women (Durham, NC: Duke Uni- tant Music (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1975), versity Press, 2014); and Jason R. Young, Rituals of 294–97. Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and 2. This framework is often repeated by Reagon the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (Baton in the documentary. See Bernice Johnson Reagon, Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007). The Songs are Free with Bernice Johnson Reagon— 10. For additional Ring Shout description, see: Bill Moyers’ Journal, online video, directed by Gail Walter Pitts, Jr., Old Ship of Zion: The Afro- Pellett (February 6, 1991; New York City: PBS), Baptist Ritual in the African Diaspora, Religion in http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11232007/ America series, ed. H.S. Stout (New York: Oxford Downloaded by [pk jordan] at 10:41 08 February 2016 watch3.html. University Press, 1993), 92–7; Raboteau, Slave 3. Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Religion; Bernice Johnson Reagon, T. Bolden, and Country Marks: The Transformation of African L. Pertillar-Brevard, Wade in the Water: African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South American Sacred Music Traditions Educators’ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, Guide, ed. Michaelle Scanlon (Washington, DC: 1998), 98–120. Smithsonian Institution/National Public Radio, 4. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 1994); Art Rosenbaum, Shout Because You’re 98–120, 246–7. Free: The African American Ring Shout Tradition 5. Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The in Coastal Georgia (Athens, GA: University of “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South Georgia Press, 1998); Stuckey, Slave Culture. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978),16–17. Jonathan C. Davis analyzes the Chesapeake

44 TBS • Volume 46 • Number 1 • Spring 2016 tradition of the Shout in Together Let Us Sweetly Dance, Dance in America/Great Performances,” Live: The Singing and Praying Bands, Music in Dance Research Journal 34, no. 1 (Summer America Series (Urbana: University of Illinois 2002): 110. Press, 2007), 7–13, 139–40. 15. John Martin, “Dance Recital Given by 11. New York Tribune, August 10, 1880, n.p. Negro Artists: Edna Guy and Group Prove Interest- 12. André Lepecki, “Undoing the Fantasy of the ing in Primitive Ritual Dances,” New York Times, Dancing Subject: ‘Still Acts’ in Jerome Bel’s The April 30, 1931. Quoted in Richard A. Long, The Last Performance,” in The Salt of the Earth: On Black Tradition in American Dance (London: Dance, Politics and Reality, eds. Steven de Belder Prion, 1989), 25–6. and Koen Tachelet (Brussels: Vlaams Theater Insti- 16. See DeFrantz, Dancing Revelations, 15. tuut, 2001). 17. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of 13. See Thomas F. DeFrantz, Dancing Revel- the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: Univer- ations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African Ameri- sity of Minnesota Press, 2003), 16–18. can Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 18. Bernice Johnson Reagon, If You Don’t Go, 2004), 15, 258 fn17; Susan Manning, Modern Don’t Hinder Me: The African American Sacred Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion (Minneapo- Song Tradition, Abraham Lincoln Lecture series lis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 30–44; (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 104. John O. Perpener III, African-American Concert 19. Clyde R. Appleton, “Singing in the Streets of Dance: The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond Raleigh, 1963: Some Recollections,” Journal of The (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 90– Black Perspective in Music 3 (Autumn 1975): 243– 94, 135, 169, 202. 245. 14. Dance scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild 20. Appleton, 245–6, 252. reflects on Edna Guy: “The thwarted career of 21. At the time of the chapel service, the ques- Edna Guy, African American modern dancer and tion of the indictment of a police officer in Fergu- Denishawn ‘wannabe,’ […] We marvel at how son, MO, who shot Michael Brown, an unarmed Guy survived in the face of unspeakable racism black teenager, was unanswered. See “No Mas, from both whites like St. Denis and blacks that No More! Chapel Led by Students Attending would choose lighter-skinned dancers over this SOA.” Program from the Service of Worship, Thurs- talented, dark-complexioned woman.” See day, November 20, 2014, James Chapel, Union Brenda Dixon Gottschild, review of “Free to Theological Seminary, New York City. Downloaded by [pk jordan] at 10:41 08 February 2016

P. Kimberleigh Jordan is a Lecturer at Fordham University in the Fordham/Alvin Ailey BFA Program. A 2014–15 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, her research focuses on critical dance studies, reli- gion, and womanist theory. She holds a PhD in Performance Studies from NYU, and degrees from Union Theological Seminary (M.Div.) and the University of NC at Chapel Hill (A.B). Jordan has danced at the Metropolitan Opera, and studied in the Dance Theatre of Harlem’s Professional Training Program.

P. Kimberleigh Jordan 45