Choreographing Belonging in the Black Arts Movement

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DIASPORA CITATION: CHOREOGRAPHING BELONGING IN THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT

A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

by Charmian C. Wells December 2018

Examining Committee Members:

Dr. Kariamu Welsh, Advisory Chair, Department of Dance Dr. Mark Franko, Department of Dance Dr. Sherril Dodds, Department of Dance Dr. Thomas DeFrantz, Duke University Dr. Deborah Kapchan, External Member, New York University

ABSTRACT

This dissertation examines the work of concert dance artists within the Black Arts

Movement (1965-75) in order to situate the impact of their work in the present. I use a method of diaspora citation to comprehend their choreographic strategies in articulating forms and critiques of belonging that continue to resonate today. My method builds on

Brent Hayes Edwards’ theorization of diaspora as an articulated, or joined, structure of belonging (Edwards, 2003). This necessitates attending to décalage, or the incommensurable gaps in experience and differentiations of power across lines of nation, class, language, gender, sexuality, etc. My development of diaspora citation departs from

Edwards’ provocative concept metaphor of “articulated joints” as a way to envision diaspora—as the joint is both a place of connection and is necessarily comprises the gaps which allow for movement. I propose that concert dance choreographers in the Black

Arts Movement worked through the articulated joints of choreographic intertexts to build critiques and offer alternative structures of diasporic belonging.

I define diaspora citation as a choreographic strategy that critiques the terms for belonging to the figure of the ‘human,’ conceived in Western modernity through property in the person, as white, Western, heteropatriarchal, propertied Man. Simultaneously, this choreographic strategy works to index, create and affirm alternative forms of belonging, articulated in/as diaspora, that operate on distinct terms. One way in which the practice of diaspora citation occurs is through Signifyin’ or ‘reading,’ a strategy of indirection and critique developed in African American social contexts. Rather than conceiving of movement as a form of property (on the terms of property in the person)

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these artists are driven by a sense of connection, motivated by the forms of assembly and structures of belonging enabled by bodies in motion. In their refusals of the terms for belonging to the ‘human’ (i.e. normative subjectivity), the dance artists of the Black Arts

Movement examined in this dissertation announce a queer capacity to desire differently.

Half a century after the historical Black Arts Movement, this project turns to its manifestations in concert dance as a usable past. The structure of the dissertation moves from 1964 into the present in order to consider the resonances of this past today. Through oral history interviews, performance and archival analysis, and participant observation, this project moves between historical, cultural analysis and embodied knowledge to pursue the choreographic uses of citation developed in Black Arts Movement concert dance contexts that imagined new ways of being human (together) in the world.

DEDICATION

For dance family …

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my committee members, Dr. Kariamu Welsh, Dr. Mark

Franko, Dr. Thomas DeFrantz, Dr. Deborah Kapchan, and Dr. Sherril Dodds. Their teaching and work has deeply impacted my thinking, my teaching, and my life. It has been a privilege to work with Dr./Mama K., a pioneer who has laid the foundations of the field of African/diaspora/black dance studies. Her wealth of embodied knowledge from having lived this history, including as a participant on the Dancemobile, has been invaluable in shaping this dissertation. Mark’s keen insights into theoretical approaches to moving bodies in history and archival research were of key importance as I began to develop the concept of diaspora citation in his research methods course. I am forever grateful. Tommy has written the grounding history for this ‘dance family,’ and I deeply appreciate his mentorship, warm guidance, and incisive honesty as I continue to traverse the rocky politics of my positionality within it. Deborah’s pedagogy of the senses, attuning to the importance of affect and embodied ways of knowing, has shaped the ways in which this dissertation attempts to listen for, and to feel, the priorities of its historical actors, as well as how I have come to understand my own practice in theoretical terms.

Sherril’s perspective on social and popular dance, especially African diasporic practices, has influenced the way I seek to approach the cultural significance of dancing bodies beyond the context of the stage. I am beyond grateful to her for jumping in to join the committee and for her encouragement along my scholarly trajectory more broadly.

I would like to thank the graduate school at Temple University for the Presidential

Fellowship and the Doctoral Dissertation Completion Grant, which gave me the time necessary for thinking and writing. The scholarship of Brenda Dixon Gottschild, and the

two black performance theory courses I took with Tavia Nyong’o, are in certain ways the condition of possibility for this dissertation. To Fatou, my dance sister, whose dissertation inspired mine and who made me know that our dance family, while marginalized in myriad ways, deserves a place and a voice in the academy. To Takiyah, whose dissertation enabled my work by providing a wealth of information on Joan Miller and Carole Johnson in her grounding history of the significant contributions of these black women artists. To Jasmine Johnson, who reminded me when I was choosing a doctoral program to consider the rigor of my practice as important as the rigor of my scholarship. To the queer, black, feminist academic activists and dance studies scholars, whose interventions in what counts as knowledge in the academy made this dissertation possible.

To my writing accountability partners, Uchenna, Danielle, Sophia, and Masi, I am eternally grateful for the regular check-ins and the emotional support. To my cohort,

Amanda, Elisa, Marija (and the honorary members, Macklin and Tara), who provided innumerable phone crisis interventions, thoughtful conversations, and writing dates. To

Amy Larimer, who gave me my first opportunity to teach in the academy. For my queer/chosen family, especially Sarah, my artistic partner in crime. For Connie, who believed in my ability to do this work before I knew it was possible.

My deepest thanks to my Forces dance family: Melissa, Courtney, Nabz, Britney,

Daaimah, Denica, Tricia, Mimi, Ashley, Jason, Jae “Rabbit,” Cimone, Qwa, Aatifa,

’Trese, Jerijah, Vaughn, Imani, Fritz, and to my ‘older sisters,’ Johari, Oneika, Nicole,

Sarae, Maia, Cat, Aimee, Lady Black, Chenoa, Natia, Shawnee, Fatou, Eleanor, and

Chiquita. To Dyane and Abdel, my dance father, who has shaped who I am as a dancer

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and as a mind. To my extended dance family, Donna, Martial, Sheila, Carl, Carole, and

Bess, who welcomed me into their homes, opened their personal archives, made me breakfast, showed me videos, and shared their lived histories with me. To God, the ancestors, Meher Baba, and Murshida. To my mom and dad, who read every word of this dissertation, edited countless drafts, provided the space and time for writing retreats, supported my passion for dance, and raised me with the knowledge that the most important work in this world comes from love. It would not have been possible without you.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ABSTRACT …………………………………………………….………………...…...... iii DEDICATION ……………………………………………………………………..…....v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………..…….vi LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………….……...x

CHAPTER

1. INTRODUCTION: DANCE FAMILY TREES AND DIASPORIC RHIZOMES ………………………………………….………… 1 Notes……………………………………………………………………………..48

2. ELEO POMARE’S CHOREOGRAPHIC THEORY OF VITALITY “HARLEM KNOWS”: EMBODIED CITATION AS EPISTEMOLOGY IN BLUES FOR THE JUNGLE…………………………………………………...... 57 Notes………………………………………………………………………..……83

3. THE MILITANT REFUSALS OF NARCISSUS RISING AND THE VITALITY OF THE HARLEM DIDDY BOP WALK………………...88 Notes……………………………………………………………………………124

4. PASS FE WHITE AND HOMESTRETCH: JOAN MILLER’S SATIRICAL ‘READINGS,’ REFUSALS AND AFFIRMATIONS …………………………….132 Notes……………………………………………………………………………186

5. THE DANCEMOBILE: SPATIAL BELONGING AS ENSEMBLE AND CONSTRUCTING QUEER ‘DANCE FAMILY’ ………………………………196 Notes……………………………………………………………………………247

6. CITING ANCESTRAL SOURCE: ABDEL R. SALAAM’S BLACK AESTHETIC HEALING …………………...…256 Notes……………………………………………………………………………306

7. CONCLUSIONS: THE ARCHIVAL POLITICS OF CITATION AND ‘DIVINING MOVEMENT’……………………………………………………..…314 Notes……………………………………………………………………………329

REFERENCES CITED ……………………………………………………………...…330

APPENDIX (Photographs) ………………………………………………………….…355

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

1. My Sketch of The Dance Family Tree as Rhizome ……………………………..…. 355

2. Eleo Pomare in Narcissus Rising ………………………………………….………..356 Eleo Pomare Dance Company Archive (courtesy Glenn Conner)

3. Eleo Pomare teaching Martial Roumain Narcissus Rising ………………….…….. 356 Eleo Pomare Dance Company Archive (courtesy Glenn Conner)

4. Donna Clark in Narcissus Rising ……………………………………….…………. 357 Eleo Pomare Dance Company Archive (courtesy Glenn Conner)

5. Joan Miller’s Facial Contortion “Millerism” ……………………………………… 358 Martial Roumain Personal Archive

6. Joan Miller watching herself performing “Miss Liz” in Pass Fe White ……….…... 358 Martial Roumain Personal Archive

7. Musicians on Dancemobile ……………………...……………………………..…. 359 Carole Johnson Personal Archive

8. Kids on Dancemobile ………………………...………………………………..….. 359 Carole Johnson Personal Archive

9. South African Gumboot Dance on the Dancemobile …………………………...... 360 Carole Johnson Personal Archive

10. Audience members hanging on the Dancemobile stage ……………………...…... 361 Carole Johnson Personal Archive

11. Audience members at Dancemobile Performance ………………………..…….… 361 Carole Johnson Personal Archive

12. Institutional Review Board (IRB) Determination Letter ………………………..... 362

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: DANCE FAMILY TREES AND DIASPORIC RHIZOMES

As I was organizing material to teach a course on twentieth-century European and

American concert dance history at Lehman College, I resorted to a fairly common paradigm of visual and chronological arrangement: the modern dance family tree. Such a model traces a genealogy of iconic choreographers: Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn

‘give birth’ to Martha Graham; who produces Merce Cunningham; whose theories and studio become the foundation for the Judson Dance Theater postmodern dance artists.1 I pointed out to my students how the role of vernacular or social dance practices and the contributions of dancers are elided in this model’s emphasis on the singular authorship of iconic choreographers. I also drew their attention to the subjective arrangement of historical ‘facts,’ as I had filled in the ‘black dance’ branch of the tree most comprehensively because of my association with this ‘dance family,’ as a dancer with the company Forces of Nature Dance Theatre, which has roots in the Black Arts Movement

(1965-1975).2 The Black Arts Movement was linked to the Black Power Movement in an integral political and cultural ideology that rejected the dominant aesthetic and political terms of U.S. society.3

In the dance history ‘family trees’ and dance history texts that I consulted, Black

Arts Movement choreographers and dancers, such as Eleo Pomare, Talley Beatty, and

Joan Miller were briefly glossed or completely elided. My knowledge of these concert dance artists comes from rehearsals, from my director Abdel Salaam’s oral/embodied practice of citing their influences. His citations refer to movement vocabulary (e.g. a

“Talley drag” referencing Talley Beatty) and historical contributions (e.g. Salaam’s 1

describes his ‘dance mother,’ Joan Miller, as a unique black, feminist postmodern voice).

“You know me, I give citation all the time. I don’t take credit if I’m inspired by somebody … this is why I do that—that’s Talley [Beatty], that’s George [Faison], that’s

Louie [Falco], that’s Jennifer [Muller], that’s Paul Sanasardo, that’s where I got the inspiration to do that. Now, this is not the same step, I’m not going to do that exactly the same way, but the feeling of what you’re doing comes from … Yeah, always give credit where credit is due.”4 In this way, Salaam does dance history in his choreography and rehearsal process. By acknowledging his sources, he makes historical connections legible, while simultaneously keeping the memory of invisibilized figures in concert dance alive by inscribing their contributions into his choreography on dancing bodies in the present. As I first encountered this strategy and first learned of these choreographers in his rehearsal process, Salaam’s voice is an integral intertextual dimension in my elaboration of this practice and the work of these artists. An examination of this omitted genealogy, or ‘dance family,’ of choreographers working in the Black Arts Movement complicates notions of historical belonging in twentieth-century U.S. concert dance.

Methodological Framing: The Practice of Diaspora Citation

Diasporic consciousness describes a sense of belonging to a global collectivity.

How is dance a practice of diasporic consciousness, and how does this awareness manifest in twentieth-century concert dance? I propose that diaspora offers a generative lens to consider the practices of twentieth-century African American concert dance in general, and the work of Black Arts Movement choreographers in particular. The

African diaspora refers to the dispersal of people and their cultural practices from the

African continent across the globe. Diaspora theorist Brent Hayes Edwards, following

Stuart Hall, argues that diaspora is most usefully conceived as articulated, or joined across incommensurable gaps, illustrating continuities through untranslatable differences, or décalage—internal fractures along lines of nation, class, gender, language, etc.5

Through an examination of literary (mis)translations in the rise of 1920s cultures of black internationalism in Harlem, Paris, and throughout the Caribbean, Edwards argues that understanding the African diaspora necessitates attending to this kernel of what cannot be translated.6 He builds on Hall’s suggestion that, in considerations of race and power,

‘articulation’ should be pushed away from its meaning of ‘expression,’ which implies a predetermined hierarchy, “a situation where one factor makes another ‘speak,’” and towards its etymology of ‘joining,’ an embodied metaphor that offers “a more ambivalent, more elusive model.”7 This ambivalent model is necessary because

“societies ‘structured in dominance’ are also the ground of cultural resistance.”8

Edwards offers the concept-metaphor of ‘articulated joints,’ as a way to conceive of diaspora as a complex structure analogous to the body, as a joint is simultaneously a place of linkage and separation.9 The concept-metaphor of ‘articulated joints’ is suggestive for the intersection of dance studies and diaspora studies, and his question,

“What does it mean … that one articulates a joint?” is arguably a central concern of dance studies, a field that considers the significance of articulated joints both metaphorically and literally.10 This dissertation takes Edwards’s answer to his own question—“The connection speaks”—as a point of departure. It examines the articulated joints of dancing bodies as speaking connections, or legible movement intertexts.

Intertexts are quotations that articulate relationships between (con)texts and (re)shape

their meanings. I propose that in African American choreographic practices movement quotations or choreographic intertexts function as articulators of diaspora. These embodied citations join disparate diasporic contexts through moving bodies, attending to diverse subject positions and experiences in diasporic décalage, and creating

“strategically conjoined structures” of diasporic belonging.11 I am further proposing that, in this “ambivalent model” of danced diaspora, intertextual choreographic practices operate as forms of critique, resistance and refusal. Comprehending movement intertexts as articulating a complex structure of diaspora on the concert stage, calls for an understanding of the citational practices of twentieth-century African American choreographers in relation to (dance) history.

I offer the term diaspora citation, as a way to historicize a practice of twentieth- century African American concert dance choreographers. Diaspora citation is a choreographic strategy that critiques the terms for belonging to the figure of the ‘human’ conceived in Western modernity through property in the person as white, Western, heteropatriarchal, propertied Man.12 Simultaneously, this choreographic practice works to index, create and affirm alternative forms of belonging, articulated in/as diaspora, that operate on distinct terms. This dissertation focuses on the distinct manifestations of this practice in the trenchant critiques and generative sites of belonging articulated by Black

Arts Movement choreographers in New York City between 1965-1975.13 Its driving research questions are: How did Black Arts Movement choreographers use diaspora citation to articulate critiques and affirmations of belonging between 1965 and 1975, and what is the resonance of those critiques today?

To answer my research question, I elaborate this methodology of diaspora citation as a theoretical lens throughout this introduction and in the chapters that follow.

In the rest of this introduction, I outline the theoretical contours of diaspora citation in relation to black performance theory. From there, I move to an excavation of the terms for belonging in twentieth-century concert dance, situating these terms in Enlightenment philosophical inheritances of Western modernity, by working through the relationship of property, race, and subjectivity to (post) modern dance. This is followed by a review of dance historical literature that reveals uneven, racialized terms for the reception and production of concert dance across the twentieth century. This in turn opens a consideration of the reproduction of these uneven terms in relation to the family tree model of dance historiography, and the generative possibilities of reconceptualizing this visual metaphor as diasporic rhizome. I then discuss what I see as a distinct move of

Black Arts Movement choreographers: a refusal of the dominant discursive and aesthetic terms for the production and reception of concert dance, as well as an imperative to create forms of belonging on alternative terms from those of belonging to the ‘human.’ Finally,

I move into a discussion of the dissertation chapters. These are structured to build on one another, illuminating distinct dimensions of the use of diaspora citation in Black Arts choreographies of the twentieth century and their resonance in the twenty-first century.

I have integrated my review of secondary literature with my development of diaspora citation as method. My approach treats theory as method, gesturing toward the ways in which diaspora citation offers a generative lens of analysis for my specific research materials. My methodology also includes historiographic methods such as: archival research (photographs, reviews, programs, video and film documentation); oral

history and ethnographic interviews with dancers and choreographers; movement analysis through close readings of both video and live performance; as well as my experiences as a dancer working within this Black Arts Movement genealogy.

Diaspora Citation

The practice of diaspora citation works through embodied citation to critique the terms for belonging to the figure of the ‘human,’ while simultaneously constructing and affirming alternative forms of belonging that operate on distinct terms. The critiques of this practice are aimed at the terms for belonging to the conceptual figure of the

‘human’—defined in Western philosophy and modernity as white, Western, propertied, heteropatriarchal Man—and the way this figure determines belonging within the nation, namely the ongoing internal exclusion of African Americans from full citizenship.

Simultaneously, this citational practice uses embodied references in choreographic constructions that affirm forms of diasporic belonging that reveal distinct terms. These modes of belonging operate in excess of this figuration of the human, forming strategic connections among diverse subject positions in the African diaspora, while acknowledging the incommensurabilities of diasporic décalage. These alternative terms reveal historical, temporal entanglements and ambivalence at the heart of subjectivity.

They conceive of movement primarily as a form of connection, rather than a form of property.

The practice of diaspora citation theorizes connectivities, rather than autonomy, conceptualizing subjectivity and movement as forms of (historical) entanglement.

Comprehending embodied motion and personhood through connections offers an

alternative to liberal humanist conceptions of subjectivity as autonomous (the self as property-in-the-person) and related concepts of autonomous movement in aesthetic modernism—the value placed on ‘original’ movement derived from such a closed self, with no external referents. Autonomy provides the terms of belonging to the ‘human’ in

Euro-American societies structured in dominance: the sovereign subject, figured as white,

Western, heteropatriarchal, propertied Man. This figuration of the human is defined by self-possession, possessive individualism, and the capacity to dispossess others through systems of property in histories of colonization and slavery within Western modernity. In the next sections, I outline the operations of diaspora citation: first, the ways in which it critiques the terms for normative belonging to the ‘human’ and then, the ways in which it constructs and affirms forms of belonging that operate on alternative terms.

Diaspora Citation: Critiques of Belonging

Black Performance and Critiques of (the Terms for Belonging to) the ‘Human’

Black performance theorist Fred Moten argues for an ontological status of black performance. In Moten’s formulation blackness exists through its performance— between the individual/social experience of being ‘blackened’ and the epistemological flights of black performances, the knowledge produced by a freedom drive.14 He proposes that performative discourses of the body, emerging from repertoires of black performance, sound a critique of value, legibility and meaning in relation to the dominant, Eurocentric cultural terms of Western philosophy, particularly in regards to its

‘subject.’

These embodied discourses are the ‘object’ objecting to the systems of property and belonging at the heart of racialized American subject formation, an incisive critique of black performance cutting into the Western ‘universal’ human subject from a radical outside of liberal humanism. Moten’s ontology of black performance (the reproduced aesthetics of the black radical tradition in the recurrent phonic motif of the scream) simultaneously marks (resistance to) historical violence in the African diaspora and black

America and exists in excess of being defined solely by this violence.15 Diaspora citation is a form of this embodied (counter) discourse, critiquing the terms of belonging to the category of the ‘proper’ subject or the ‘human.’ Through the articulated joints of moving bodies, diaspora citation theorizes subjectivity as the result of (historical) entanglements, rather than as an autonomous, sovereign self that is propelled forward in a (national) narrative of linear historical progress.

Embodied Counterdiscourses

Black performance sounds a critique from the position of the unthought—the aporia and limit case that reveals the functioning of systems of subjectivity and the U.S. national project under the terms of capitalist logics (whiteness as private-property-in-the- person) and the ideology of the sovereign self. Black performance theory, as an interdisciplinary area of academic inquiry, typically takes the form of literature. In this literature, however, theorists attend to the histories of black performance in relation to

Western modernity. Racial blackness is a construction of Western modernity. In this history, exclusion from technologies of literacy historically served as a technique for exclusion from the category of the ‘human.’16 Not only did theoretical activity occur

outside of the written word, but in many contexts, this is precisely the position from which black performance delivers its (in)valuable critique of the ‘human.’ These are the conditions under which human embodiment rather than human reason, in (the) rational(izations of) Enlightenment thought, sets the boundaries of knowledge. Diaspora citation engages in this black performative critique of subjectivity by articulating movement quotations to construct and circulate embodied counterdiscourses through performance.

Cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall and Moten have discussed the ways in which the body has served as a site of black counterdiscourses. Hall clarifies: “these cultures have used the body—as if it was, and it often was, the only cultural capital we had … in its rich production of counternarratives … black popular culture has enabled the surfacing

… of elements of a discourse that is different—other forms of life, other traditions of representation.”17 These other forms of life offer alternative forms of belonging, recorded in and disseminated through embodied practices. Because the set of historical circumstances that black-performance-as-theory emerged within included exclusion from literacy as disqualification from full humanity, scholars pay careful attention to the significance of vernacular form in the quotidian.18 Moten adds: “Such embodiment is also bound to the (critique of) reading and writing, oft conceived by clowns and intellectuals as the natural attributes of whoever would hope to be known as human.”19

The embodied counterdiscourses discussed by Hall and Moten are shared repositories of black performance as theory.20

Strategic Ambivalence

The practice of diaspora citation engages intertextual ambivalence with the ambivalence of African American subject formation in strategic articulations that mark power relations in social realms. This practice has an ambivalent relationship to identity, rather than a desire to fix, or more accurately to be fixed by, identity constructs as epistemologies (e.g. the positioning of the black body as an object of knowledge discursively constructed through the white gaze).21 Rather than essential guarantors of knowledge, markers of identity like gender, race, class, and sexuality are best understood as intersecting social formations associated with distributions of power.22 Nahum

Chandler builds on W.E.B. DuBois’s theory of double consciousness (the joining and disjuncture of being African—American) and Hortense Spillers’s theory of ambivalence to understand the social formation of African American subjectivity as an originary displacement, an ambivalent double movement in identity formation:

If by ambivalence we might mean that abeyance of closure, or break in the passage of syntagmatic movement from one more or less stable property to another, as in the radical disjuncture between ‘African’ and ‘American,’ then ambivalence remains not only the privileged and arbitrary judgment of a postmodernist imperative, but also a strategy that names the new cultural situation as a wounding.23

Chandler seeks to demonstrate the ways in which Euro-American and African-American subjectivities are imbricated from their moment of creation, their originary displacement.24 This ambivalence marks racialized formations of subjectivity as a point of entanglement, a historical, cultural wounding. Subject formation is implicated, rather than autonomous, in ways that are not neutral, or “not only the privileged and arbitrary judgment of a postmodernist imperative.”

This important point demonstrates how the choreographic practice of diaspora citation overlaps with poststructuralist intertextual theory and its discontents. The ambivalence of diaspora citation engages with poststructuralist concepts such as: the nonessential nature of identity, the impossibility of locating historical origins along a linear timeline, and the instability of meaning within a text proposed by poststructuralist theories of intertextuality.25 However, these theories also have their discontents, specifically around “privileged and arbitrary” dimensions in the form of critiques from feminist and postcolonial scholars. These scholars’ concern with oppressed experiences means that an intertextual approach which emphasizes ambivalence as neutral plurality or free play of meaning is not necessarily liberatory as it does not account for power relations in the social.26

The body is not a neutral text. Neutrality is impossible in embodied citation, as bodies are the sites on which power relations are played out. In the practice of diaspora citation, the body’s ambivalence is not neutral. Movement citations in this practice function as strategic cuts of meaning making that mark power relations in the social, both the fixing of identities to bodies in distributions of power, as well as radical acts of

(re)claiming and subverting identity.27 These cuts register the historical entanglements of racialized subject formation, in the U.S. and the diaspora, as an ongoing wounding.

Simultaneously, ambivalence reveals that there are infinite possible meanings for a given movement quotation as it shifts contexts. This dimension foregrounds the body’s capacity to subvert fixed identity constructs and/as epistemologies within the unfolding multiplicity of diaspora identities.

Quotation as Appropriation: Double Voicing and Signifyin’

A significant form of diaspora citation’s critique of the exclusive figuration of the

‘human’ occurs through citation as Signifyin’—quotation as appropriation, citation with a difference. Signifyin’ is literary scholar Henry Louis Gates’ intertextual theory about

African American strategies of double voicing.28 Double voiced texts emerge from the perspective of ambivalent double consciousness in African American vernacular discourse.29 While Gates’ scholarship is significant, it is worth noting that he is delineating an extant black performative, theoretical practice of critique (e.g. the

Dozens). Signifyin’ is a form of subterfuge developed in African American communities. While it often takes the form of oral discourse, it also takes part in the embodied counterdiscourses of black performance repertoires discussed by Hall. In

Signifyin’ a citation or intertext means one thing in dominant discourse (a horizontal plane of conventional meaning), while registering alternative meanings in terms of a black vernacular discourse (a vertical plane of rhetorical associations). Signifyin’ as double-voiced critique is also referred to in African American vernacular as ‘reading.’

Cultural studies scholar Kobena Mercer explains: “a double-voicing in the African-

American cultural text … [to] ‘read’ in the vernacular sense …is to utter unremitting social critique.”30 A statement that is ‘reading’ or Signifyin’ registers as neutral on the conventional level, but conveys a trenchant social commentary for an audience familiar with a particular set of associations.

Diaspora Citation: Affirming Belonging on Alternative Terms

[T]he project of liberation for African-Americans has found urgency in two passionate motivations that are twinned—1) to break apart, to rupture violently the laws of American behavior that make such syntax [people-as-property] possible; 2) to introduce a new semantic field/fold more appropriate to his/her own historic movement. —Hortense Spillers

The ambivalence toward identity in diaspora citation’s embodied counterdiscourses arises from resistance to the ways in which the black body is constructed, positioned in discourses as an object of knowledge. Moten theorizes the

‘agency of the thing,’ situated between subject and object, as a fugitive movement of escape, moving against what it means to be positioned in discourse as an object by the

(white) gaze: “An absence of sovereignty where sovereignty implies a kind of autopositioning, a positioning of oneself in relation to oneself, [instead] an autocritical autopositioning that moves against what it is to be positioned, to be posed by another, to be rendered and, as such, to be rendered inhuman.”31 Ambivalence toward identity is resistance to being fixed, placed, positioned and reduced. This ambivalence moves against structures of subjectivity-as-subjection that rend(er) the divide between in/human.32 The practice of diaspora citation constructs, indexes and affirms alternative modes of belonging in/through performance. The attention to emplacement through articulating connections is an ‘autocritical autopositioning’ that moves against the terms of a sovereign self (positioned only in relation to oneself) and dominant renderings of the black body in discourse (what it is to be positioned and rendered inhuman). By foregrounding relations within blackness through embodied practices of referencing,

African American choreographers situate themselves as connected, theorizing subjectivity as entangled in relation to history, place, and other subjects. This 13

choreographic practice involves the appropriation of material places for performance within a black spatial imaginary and deploys the capacity of dancing bodies to make historical and geographic references in order to construct forms of belonging onstage.

Appropriations of a Black Spatial Imaginary

The significance of physical place, particularly in considering the terrain of New

York City within the Black Arts Movement, draws attention to the ways in which property in the person determines the distribution of bodies in racialized urban space.

George Lipsitz has argued that “whiteness is invested in, like property, but it is also a means of accumulating property and keeping it from others.”33 He extends this analysis to a consideration of place, examining the spatialization of race and the racialization of space in urban areas.34 In addition to revealing the spatial dimensions of structural racism constructed through the possessive individualism of a “white spatial imaginary,” he theorizes a “black spatial imaginary”—black performative reimaginings of segregated spaces as sites for congregation and for conceiving a different future. This can be understood as an appropriative strategy of belonging in relation to the material conditions of black life in the U.S., the persistent fact of internal exclusion of African Americans from full citizenship evidenced in the segregation of physical space.

Instead of viewing place and material location as property, in line with possessive individualism, African American choreographers practicing diaspora citation inhabit space differently. Clearing a semantic and physical space for congregation, they use performance as a site to reimagine blackness through the relations of diaspora. As dance scholar Anthea Kraut explains in her discussion of Zora Neale Hurston’s embodied

theory of diaspora, “the notion of diaspora not only troubles stereotypes of black people as unthinking, uncivilized exotics. It also replaces the hierarchies and dichotomies on which primitivism depends with a model of black influences and exchange not wholly dependent on any white arbiter. That is, whereas primitivism views blackness only vis-à- vis whiteness, diaspora foregrounds the relations within blackness.”35 African American choreographers turn to diaspora as a structure of belonging, seeking to communicate with black audiences, in order to imagine alternative terms for personhood and belonging in the world.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the material conditions for African

American concert dance choreographers like Katherine Dunham and Zora Neale Hurston included performing in segregated theaters.36 Kraut notes how congregation was key to conveying Hurston’s embodied theory of diaspora through performance: “Part and parcel of her goal of building a ‘real Negro art theatre,’ the presence of black spectators was key to Hurston’s ability to reach an audience receptive to her embodied theory of a transnational black culture.”37 Kraut argues that Hurston’s embodied theory of diaspora worked under the screen of primitivism, creating a double-voiced text that needed a congregation of witnesses in order to be realized. Signifyin’ within segregated space galvanizes alternative social spaces. It affirms existing structures of belonging through references to cultural resources for survival cultivated in black social life, which become legible in/as shared experiences. It also holds the potential to create new contexts by resignifying dominant terms in the service of inventing new terms, both in the sense of new meanings and new rules of engagement. This repurposing of segregated space constitutes new structures of belonging.

In the second half of the twentieth century, artists working in the Black Arts

Movement claimed the material spaces of urban streets as sites for performance. “In keeping with its ‘revolutionary’ cultural ideas, the Black Arts Theatre took its programs into the streets of Harlem.”38 This evidences a black spatial imaginary that worked through the appropriation of segregated public space in the service of congregation.

These spatial appropriations theorized connectivities between performers and audience, as well as connections between history and the present material conditions of that space.

For example, the sequencing of vignettes in Eleo Pomare’s Blues for the Jungle directly articulates links between the history of U.S. slavery and the logics of segregated space within racialized capitalism that led to the material conditions of the ghettoization of

Harlem. Additionally, Pomare’s use of movement quotations from black social life in

Blues, such as the twitch and lean of the junkie from the streets of Harlem, seeks to connect with black audiences by referencing shared experiences through choreography.

His statement about the Dancemobile both critiques the spatial exclusions of mainstream concert dance and affirms the project’s appropriation of segregated space in the service of congregation: “In lieu of the establishment halls of the august Lincoln Center, the streets of New York in JazzMobiles and DanceMobiles will do.”39 Diaspora citation affirms alternative modes of belonging by appropriating segregated space in the service of collectively reimagining the terms for what constitutes a desirable place. The practice also constructs networks of belonging through the capacity of dancing bodies to make historical, cultural, and geographic references, joining diasporic contexts in/through performance.

Networks of Belonging: Diaspora Citation and History

Choreographers practicing diaspora citation engage with a non-linear conception of history. Rather than investing in a linear (national) narrative of progress—the horizon of liberal humanism—diaspora citation operates in an intertextual, or intertemporal, relationship to history. Saidiya Hartman describes “a way of thinking about the afterlife of slavery in regard to how we inhabit historical time, the sense of temporal entanglement, where the past, the present and the future, are not discrete and cut off from one another, but rather that we live the simultaneity of that entanglement. This is almost common sense for black folk.”40 This orientation toward historical time accounts for the ongoing, performative purchase of the past on the present. Instead of seeking origins, by reversing the telos of historical linear progress narratives, African American choreographers dialogue with the past by using historical movement fragments from distinct locations in the African diaspora as source materials in their choreography.

These movement fragments are used to construct forms of historical belonging in relation to the urgencies of their present moment. “Through embodied movements, the citation operates to recall and reconnect with places elsewhere that, through those very movements, are re-membered; at the same time, a site of diasporic belonging is created.”41 This re-membering is a practice of articulating connections across time and the incommensurable gaps of subject location, geographic location, and socio-historical cultural formations.

Salaam tells a story of a discussion that followed a performance (in which he danced) of the Chuck Davis Dance Company at Festac in Nigeria in 1977. The company performed Guinean dances that Chuck had learned from Les Ballets Africains, the

national company of Guinea. Hamadou, from the Guinean company said to Chuck’s musical director, “Those were good renditions, but these are our dances from Guinea.

What is your dance that tells your story as an African American?” This anecdote underscores the impossibility of notions of ‘return’ in the experience of the incommensurable décalage between African and African American. “This black diasporic décalage among African Americans and Africans, then, is not simply geographical distance, nor is it simply a difference in evolution or consciousness; instead it is a different kind of interface that might not be susceptible to the oppositional terminology of the ‘vanguard’ and the ‘backward.’”42 A signature move of Western philosophical constructions of Africa is to position the entire continent in the past, through the lens of primitivism, or outside of history (e.g. Hegel’s Philosophy of

History). Instead of positioning Africa and North America along a linear timeline, proposing the idea of Africa as a place in the past to which one can ‘return,’ the ambivalent performance by Davis’s company, exists as a complex joining, a simultaneous bridge and gap. Rather than Hamadou’s comment about “our dances” being understood as a possessive attachment to movement, he articulates his social and historical location through his participation in the collective authorship of the dance and the unique lived experiences that inform the movement. His comment illustrates the capacity of movement to situate oneself in a specific historical, cultural positioning.

Salaam relates this story in rehearsals when he is contextualizing the movements that compose his choreographic vocabulary, without collapsing the décalage between his position and those of the creators of the multiple vocabularies upon which he draws. He

makes embodied references to a broad range of diasporic contexts in order to speak to the lived experiences and contemporary exigencies of being African American in the present.

Articulating the Terms of Belonging: Racialized Subjectivity, Property-in-the-Person, and Modern Dance

A quick Google search for the definition of ‘belonging’ brings up a result with a compelling series of meanings: 1. (of a thing) be rightly placed in a specified position 2.

(of a person) fit in a specified place or environment 3. be the property of. The articulation of these three definitions or facets of belonging, in relation to subjectivity, allows for an understanding of the stakes and the operations of diaspora citation as a danced practice of historiography. The history of racial blackness—people treated as property—within the construct of Western modernity blurs these three definitions.43

“The history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist.”44 The history of blackness is the aporia of the entire system of subjectivity based on the terms of belonging to the figure of the ‘human,’ defined in Western modernity as white,

Western, propertied, heteropatriarchal Man.45 This blurring of belonging—a person rightly situated, a thing properly positioned, and property-in/as-the-person—is the location for black performative critiques of systems of subjectivity as systems of subjection.46

The construction of whiteness corresponds to the concept of private-property-in- the-person. This logic has historically enabled the dispossession of Other bodies in modernity through the mechanisms of racialized capitalism. The terms of whiteness are the terms of property. Whiteness affords its ‘holders’ the benefits and rights of property owners: possession and disposition, use and enjoyment, and the right to exclude.47 “In 19

the formulation of modern liberal-democratic theory, with its roots in seventeenth- century conceptions of the individual as the ‘proprietor of his own person or capacities,’ whiteness equals property ownership equals proper subjecthood.”48 Dance scholar

Anthea Kraut has demonstrated the significance of this racialized formulation of subjectivity and/as property in relation to movement in the history of American modern dance. While white women were historically situated outside the figure of the ‘human,’ and exchanged as property, they also strategically deployed their proximity to white male privilege in this history. In their struggles to gain full citizenship, they leveraged their relationship to white propertied Man, specifically through its racialized formulation as property in the person, to gain access to the privileges determined through the figure of the ‘human.’

Kraut explains how white female ‘mothers’ of modern dance, including Loie

Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Martha Graham relied on essentialized racial distinctions between their ‘universal’ artistry and so-called ‘primitive’ dance practices of nonwhite subjects. They participated in early twentieth-century naturalizing discourses of primitivism in order to achieve legitimacy for themselves as artistic agents, rather than sexualized objects, on the theatrical stage: “[R]ace and gender influenced more than the representational conventions and discursive strategies of early white modern dancers; these same axes of difference also critically shaped these dancers’ efforts to position themselves as propertied subjects, entitled not only to wear the mantle of artist but also to own the products of their intellectual and bodily labor …”49 Rather than dismantling systems of sovereignty-as-self-possession, which rely on an outside, an Other than can be dispossessed, early modern dancers sought access to that system of possessive

individualism. In order to sell their bodily and intellectual labor on the market, they leveraged their proximity to this figure of the human, which allowed them to avoid exposure to the “invasive forces of capital” as a “salable body in which others may traffic.”50

Priya Srinivasan has demonstrated the ways in which Ruth St. Denis, one of the

‘mothers’ of modern dance, appropriated movement vocabulary from Indian nautch dancers, but elided their authorship in her narrative of being inspired by a cigarette poster of the Egyptian goddess Isis. St. Denis omits the significance of embodied transmission in her narrative of developing movement vocabulary based on library research.

Srinivasan’s method departs from her own kinesthetic recognition, as a classically trained

Indian dancer, of the tension values in a mudra on the hand of St. Denis. This codified hand gesture from Kathak dance is a movement intertext, which points to another context. Srinivasan excavates the trace of this gesture, which leads her to a Coney Island festival of Nautch dancers attended by St. Denis, the site of embodied transmission. This trafficking in the products of labor produced by subaltern Others allowed St. Denis to claim full citizenship by asserting authorship over the movement as her bodily labor and leveraging her agency as a propertied subject performing in the public sphere.51

These are the terms of belonging to the category of the ‘human’ in racialized capitalism with its conception of subjectivity as property in the person—the fiction of the autonomous self. These are also the conditions of possibility for modern dance as so- called ‘high art,’ a class-based distinction of cultural capital, and its creators’ claim to movement as property—the fiction of autonomous movement, aligned with the European

Romantic notion of the individual genius artist. In their struggle to gain ownership over

the products of their intellectual and bodily labor, early modern dancers deployed aesthetic modernist ideologies of autonomous, essential, or ‘pure’ movement, as the medium of dance.52 They positioned their movement vocabularies as derived from a closed, autonomous self, with internal depth as resource, rather than placed in citational relation to historical sources and referencing diverse cultural influences (closed self = property rights). The conditions of possibility for belonging to the dominant narrative of modern dance, or the terms of inclusion within the ‘family tree,’ are those of racialized subjectivity as property-in-the-person and ‘original’ movement as personal property derived from such a closed subject.

This Enlightenment conception of the autonomous self, or ‘proper subjecthood’ is always at risk of exposure from its ‘outside’: “… the question of ownership, of property and the proper, will always be the field upon which the specifics of these general structures are laid out. Finally, race is the locus of the conceptual and practical protection and the uncontainable endangerment of the proper.”53 The construction of dance as autonomous ‘high art,’ a fiction defined in opposition to racialized, classed, essentialized, and naturalized forms, is also always under threat from its internal outside.

Modern dance’s trafficking in the products of the labor of “salable bodies” open to the

“invasive forces of capital” contains the trace of that labor, even as the movement becomes positioned as personal property.54 That is to say, the movement intertext of the mudra on the hand of Ruth St. Denis threatens to undo the very distinctions leveraged by early modern dancers in positioning modern dance as ‘high art’ and movement as personal property. Diaspora citation operates on a distinct register from this premise of

the closed subject with its autonomous movement vocabularies in modern dance, as a practice that intentionally makes, rather than obscures, references to source.

The Uneven Racialized Terms of Twentieth-Century Concert Dance

The binary black/white structure of race(ism) in the U.S. during the twentieth century led to a divided historiography between black and white concert dance.55 Taken together, dance scholars Anthea Kraut, Susan Manning, and Danielle Goldman, building on the work of Brenda Dixon Gottschild and John Perpener, advance an intercultural, revisionist historiography.56 Their work reveals uneven discursive terms scripted for choreographers and dancers by critics/theorists and producers that created racialized double binds for the production and reception of concert dance across the twentieth century. These double binds are evident, for example, in the ways that when African

Americans performed legibly Africanist vernacular forms, their labor and technical skill was erased in discourses that naturalized those forms, and when they worked in forms that were legible as Europeanist, such as the emergent conventions and vocabularies of modern dance, their contributions were scripted as derivative.57

My use of ‘terms’ refers both to terminology (the language used to discuss performance) and to the rules of engagement. This double meaning reveals the discursive mechanisms which (over)determine perception, specifically the ways in which racialized meanings get attached to bodies in performance. First, white and black artists’ work is overdetermined along a corresponding binary of universal/particular, or un/marked.

Legibly black dancing bodies are perceived as historically, racially, and culturally marked, and therefore particular, while legibly white bodies remain unmarked and

occupy privileged positions in aesthetic categories such as abstraction and universality.

Second, the (post) modernist value of originality and innovation performs a discursive temporalizing function, which secures white artists’ privilege in a progressive scheme

(innovative, vanguard, avant-garde) or out of time (universal, ahistorical, formal, abstract), while positioning black artists as ‘behind’ (traditional, derivative, folk, primitive) or bound to and limited in time (only able to reference historical, culturally specific experiences).58

For example, when Zora Neale Hurston was staging (semi) improvised black vernacular dance, improvisation was viewed as ‘natural’ untrained artistry, playing into

“entrenched racial stereotypes about instinctive black performativity” in the context of the 1920s and 30s high modernist/primitivist discourses.59 However, when white postmodern concert dancers of Judson Church utilized improvisation in the 1960s it was perceived, and written into dominant narratives of dance history, as a cutting edge, transgressive choreographic method, as a radical break from the prescriptive choreographic methods of modern dance forwarded by Louis Horst.60

As discussed earlier, Anthea Kraut has outlined how early modern dancers contrasted their ‘universal’ artistic innovations against the ‘primitive’ natural performativity of Othered dancers in bids for full citizenship in order to claim the products of their labor.61 Although the ‘mothers of modern dance’ occupy a distinct historical period from Judson Dance Theater artists, there is continuity throughout the twentieth century in the persistent racialized double binds, both temporal

(forward/backward) and cultural (un/marked), as the terms for attributing value and belonging in the production and reception of concert dance. In this history, belonging on

the concert stage is established through autonomous movement as property, linked to racialized subjectivity, which is established through proximity to the figure of the human as white Western, propertied Man.

This can be understood as a contradiction of terms versus terms: terminology versus the rules of engagement. While there is mobility in the shifting terminology used to describe concert dance and in choreographic approaches (e.g. the shifting status of improvisation) across the twentieth century, there is stasis in the terms of power relations

(the dominant discursive terms for allocating value and determining artistic standards).

The shifting terminology for black artists moves through various racially marked categories over the twentieth century—Negro, black, African American—while the terminology for Euro-American artists is never racially marked, but rather marked by historical ‘developments’—modern, postmodern, contemporary, etc.62 Manning notes that:

Whereas generational progression structures the historiography of African- American concert dance, generational rebellion structures the historiography of (post) modern dance … my own coinage for the historiographic practice that understands postmodern dance as the latest— and perhaps the most decisive—revolt in a series of rebellions across the twentieth century.63

This coinage reveals continuity in the practices and ideologies of (white) (post) modern dance historiography, despite the conventions of aesthetic modernism, which narrate it as a series of radical breaks from predecessor to iconoclast, with each successive generation claiming to get closer to the essence of movement.64 These two historiographic tendencies describe distinct orientations to the past.

The narrative of (post) modern dance as a series of ruptures is paradoxically a narrative of linear progress. This fits within Western philosophical ideologies of history 25

as a teleological construct. The rebellion narrative of breaks with the predecessor reveals a modernist inheritance in postmodern dance—the formalist aesthetic fantasy of the autonomy of movement.65 This ideology is variously phrased as pure movement, organic movement, natural (acultural) movement, pedestrian movement, or movement for movement’s sake. It focuses on a ‘stripping down’ of movement, as the medium of dance, to its ‘essentials.’66 This progressive paring down of each generation to focus on movement as medium, explored by a ‘neutral body,’ is discursively distributed and attributed according to forms of racial privilege that allow some bodies and not others to move unmarked through the world. It also disavows historical and cultural context in its focus to isolate pure or natural movement as medium. This (post) modernist self- referentiality reinforces the concept of the autonomous subject through the figure of the hermetic artist.

In contrast to this, the generational progression in the historiography of African

American concert dance is paradoxically not a narrative of evolutionary progress (a series of improvements over what the previous generation got wrong) but a referencing of the past, and of various sources, through the citational reworking of material from the past according to the urgencies of the present moment. This is reflected in African American aesthetic strategies of quotation as an intertextual relationship to the past, such as sampling in hip-hop, riffing in jazz, or what dance scholar Thomas DeFrantz refers to as

“‘versioning’ … the generational reworking of aesthetic ideals.” DeFrantz describes versioning:

At once postmodern and as ancient as the hills. Born of transplanted modes of African orature, it has given rise to decades of popular music styles and dances, from ragtime and hip hop to the cakewalk, a nineteenth-century parody of European ballroom processionals … The transformative agility 26

central to versioning is highly prized in African American culture and typically noted in an individual’s ability to switch meanings and tonalities from one moment to the next. Versioning, and its sibling inversion, allow us to critique, to uncover, to rediscover, to realign, to mark the common as personal, to read (as in someone’s beads), to make something work.”67

In the historical orientation of versioning, fragments of material from the past provide a way for artists to articulate entanglements between past and present, and to use material from the past to comment on relations in the present. This orientation is not about rebelling against the past, or improving on what the previous generation ‘got wrong,’ but about consciously appropriating material from the past to be used according to the needs of the present moment of performance. This is the orientation of the practice of diaspora citation towards the past.

The breaks in the rebellion narrative are closely associated with aesthetic (post) modernist ideological values of originality and the new, the experimental. Kraut cites art theorist Rosalind Krauss’ observation that the “‘originality of the avant-garde is a modernist myth’” noting the “complementarity and inextricability of the original and the copy in an ‘aesthetic economy’ … that valorizes the former and discredits the latter.’”68

Combining Manning’s insight in a slight modification of Rosalind Krauss’s formulation,

I suggest that what is reproduced in the rebellion narratives of the (post) modern dance family tree is the (post) modernist myth of the originality of the avant-garde.69 This originality is discursively associated with white choreographers and dependent on forms of non-citation (e.g. St. Denis’s origin myth of the cigarette poster rather than referencing the embodied source of the mudra). It works by disavowing relations to the past and suppressing relations in the present that would account for the multiple sources of movement and choreographic strategies on the concert stage. Diaspora citation’s

alternative temporal terms understand the past as implicated in the present. Through its strategic joining, it proposes “a different kind of interface that might not be susceptible to the oppositional terminology of the ‘vanguard’ and the ‘backward.’”70

The (Post) Modern Dance Family Tree and the Reproduction of White Supremacy

Genealogies are structures of historical belonging created through citing source as a form of articulation. The allocation of cultural capital in the ‘modern dance family tree’ is dependent on a double move of citation and disavowal in (post) modernist dance historiographies. The authority of the predecessor is cited in the genealogical act of linking, (e.g. Cunningham to Graham to Denishawn). In this model, the cultural capital of the predecessor becomes a genealogical inheritance, while sources of movement vocabulary are disavowed in a (post) modernist imperative for originality and the supposed self-referentiality of movement.

In the syllabus I inherited to teach dance history at Lehman College, as in many college dance departments, Sally Banes’s introductory chapter, “Sources of Postmodern

Dance,” is used as the text for the unit on postmodern dance.71 It exemplifies the use of citation in this (post) modern dance paradigm of the rebellion narrative, referencing particular sources (and not others) as paradoxical links-of-rupture in a dominant concert dance genealogy.72 Moving through Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Denishawn, Martha

Graham, and Merce Cunningham to arrive at Judson Dance Theater, Banes cites iconic choreographers as links in dance history, narrating their relationship as a series of radical breaks from the predecessor. Apart from the fact that no artists of color are cited (even the canonical José Limón is elided), what is also missing in this historiographic narrative

are the multiple ‘vernacular’ sources of movement material. These elisions are one way to achieve the (post) modernist myth of the originality of the avant-garde.

Dance scholar Randy Martin observes that, “modern dance develops as a very complex matrix of appropriations of different movement sources, not the least of which are dance expressions generated by those subject to [U.S.] colonization and enslavement.”73 Quotation is a form of appropriation, and taking on elements in intercultural contact is how all cultures are formed. However, questions of misappropriation point to power relations: how and when are citations given and to whom are they (not) given?74 I am not suggesting that movement should or even can be accounted for as coming from a single, locatable point of origin that should always be cited. Rather, I am suggesting that diaspora citation evidences points of connection by giving credit to movement sources, both those of collective authorship, and the influence of individual choreographers on one another.

In one sense, movement gives its own citation, as it contains the trace of the contexts in which it develops. This is the case when Priya Srinivasan pursues a mudra on

Ruth St. Denis’s hand as a movement intertext that evidences the labor of subaltern

Nautch dancers.75 This phenomenon of concert dance exists in ballet as well as modern dance. Brenda Dixon Gottschild has used movement intertexts to trace the relations between Balanchine’s choreography and African American source material that is not credited as the source of Balanchine’s distinctly American form of ballet. She excavates the movement intertext of a Lindy Hop lift, a sudden drop with scissoring legs, in

Balanchine’s Four Temperaments, articulating relations between the contexts of the social dance hall and the concert stage, as well as between African American collective

authorship in vernacular practices and Balanchine’s individual authorship.76 In contrast to the lack of quotation in these instances, I am concerned with the ways in which

African American concert choreographers actively give citation to multiple references, as when Salaam references Senegalese sabar, Joan Miller’s facial contortions, or Earl

“Snake Hips” Tucker’s fluid undulations, as source material in his own choreographic configurations, or when Katherine Dunham credits source material in both her technique and choreography, such as the rippling spine of yonvalou, as derived from dances of

Haitian Vodoun.

Danielle Goldman places Martin’s insight about appropriation in relation to the imperatives laid out by the revisionist intercultural historiographies of Gottschild,

Perpener, Kraut, and Manning: “The challenge now is to take our cues from scholars such as Randy Martin by thinking rigorously about appropriation while also analyzing productive, but often ignored, instances of cross cultural contact.”77 I suggest that diaspora citation offers a strategy to approach this double move in the way it theorizes connections. The practice is both implicated in the vertical genealogical structure of narrating (post) modern U.S. concert dance through relations between choreographers

(e.g. Salaam cites his ‘dance mothers and fathers’), while it simultaneously enables a horizontal approach, which opens the family tree paradigm to considerations of the role of transnational and subaltern forms of collective authorship and labor (Salaam cites sources of collective movement vocabularies such as the U.S. cakewalk and Malian lamban). I see this practice as an answer to Anthea Kraut’s challenge: “Rather than abandoning the term ‘choreographer,’ it should be possible to preserve its ability to allocate artistic credit, especially for those who have historically been denied the

privileges of authorship, without losing sight of the complex, collaborative networks in which all choreographers are situated.”78 Diaspora citation works by articulating complex networks in motion from a particular social location, rather than claiming movement as property from a universalized subject (non)location.

As an alternative to Banes’s paradoxical formula of linking-through-rupture,

Salaam’s choreographic philosophy proposes a paradoxical form of connection: “It’s all an original variation.”79 His formulation disrupts economies of value based on an individual, single author ‘genius’ model. In this way the choreographic practice of diaspora citation is aligned with Kraut’s reformulation of choreography as a

‘metatechnique’ conceived as “the mobilization of existing movement codes.”80 The practice of diaspora citation offers a productive model for (re)thinking American (concert dance) history and historiography, opening new connections by articulating transnational entanglements, accounting for contributions to concert dance from diverse subject positions and locations. At stake are the terms for understanding relations and value in the production, reception, and historiography of concert dance.

From (Post) Modern Dance Family Tree to Diasporic Rhizome

Diaspora citation articulates artistic genealogies as sites of conceptual and historical belonging. These take the structural form of both horizontal relationships in a given historical present and vertical relationships between past and present. In order to share the family tree paradigm with my students, I drew it on a piece of paper and

Xeroxed it. I tried to reconfigure the standard narrative, with lines of connection moving horizontally, indicating peer relationships, such as the collaboration between Katherine

Dunham and George Balanchine on Cabin in the Sky, in addition to vertical relations with authoritative figures of dance ‘mothers’ and ‘fathers.’81 When I shared my drawing with a colleague of mine, she commented that it looked less like a traditional genealogical family tree and more like a rhizome—an underground plant that continuously puts out horizontal shoots and adventitious roots at varying locations. This concept metaphor is the figure that Paul Gilroy uses to reconceive diaspora as a series of fluid connections across national borders.82 My colleague’s comment is suggestive. A rhizome, as a metaphor for conceiving transnational movement genealogies, holds the potential to re(con)figure the vertical exclusions of the traditional genealogical structure of the (post) modern dance family tree. Rather than relying solely on vertical inheritances within a single author model for choreographers (usually in a national framework), diaspora citation articulates historical connections between movement practices and practitioners across global contexts.

Michelle Wright proposes a paradigm shift in black studies, which troubles the exclusionary model of a Middle Passage epistemology, in which authentic blackness in the U.S. only comes through a particular vertical inheritance associated with slavery.83

She insists that in order to fully comprehend the diversity of blackness, or in Edwards’s terms, the constitutive décalage of diaspora, one must account not only for a vertical history, a linear progress narrative, but also for the ways in which a given historical moment involves multiple, complex horizontal or peer relationships. Additionally, she proposes that it is essential to consider the ways in which the past is constructed from the perspective of the present (phenomenological or epiphenomenal time), “in which return is a matter of not simply backtracking along the progress narrative, but recognizing that one

is manifesting the past in the present moment.”84 This resonates with the intertextual, or intertemporal, approach to time that I have noted as a dimension of diaspora citation.

Embodying historical movement quotations is a form of manifesting and constructing the past in relation to the urgencies of the present moment of performance. In pursuing

Gilroy’s visual-conceptual structure of the rhizome, Wright notes that its tangle of horizontal and vertical roots offers a corrective to the family tree model: “[A]ncestral family trees are the result of heavy pruning—some of it deliberate, some unknowingly committed—so an accurate mapping of any one ancestry rapidly becomes a tangled bush.”85 The act of articulation in diaspora citation creates a series of vertical and horizontal connections in movement. It opens productive considerations of subjectivity and movement as relational, through the image of a historically entangled bush, rather than as an autonomous linear inheritance.

Dance Families and Queer Genealogies

Wright notes how Gilroy’s proposition of a rhizomorphic structure in his critique of nationalism opens his text to explicit links with black women and queers of the

Atlantic world, and the diaspora more generally, by working against the ways in which the nation state hierarchizes bodies according to a pathologizing gendered logic that

“’feminizes the working class and racial minorities.”86 An important dimension of

Wright’s argument in relation to the model of the family tree is the tendency for linear progress narratives to consolidate around ‘leader’ figures that are overwhelmingly heterosexual men. “This is the ‘vertical’ logic that dominates our Western narration of human communities almost worldwide: a narrative according to which all communities

can be broken down neatly into heteropatriarchal family units, whether nuclear or extended. If a man is not the primary breadwinner or somehow otherwise head of the household, we have a symptom of a troubled family/community.”87 The dynamic of this heteropatriarchal ‘vertical’ logic is clear in white supremacist discourses that pathologize black sexuality and nonheteronormative family structures, such as the notorious 1965

Moynihan Report, which stigmatized black female-headed households through the figure of ‘the black family’ in disarray.88

Roderick Ferguson has theorized the ways in which Moynihan’s discourse of pathology formed the condition of possibility for the ironic investments of black nationalism in gender and sexual norms proposed and policed by liberal humanist ideology of the nation state.89 This occurred especially in the ways dominant black nationalist voices prioritized the rehabilitation of the figure of the black family, relegated women to second class status, and demonized homosexuality. These reactions to pathologizing discourses point to an internal tension in critiques of normative belonging: radicalism can lead to the desire for norms and a general critique of the proper may lead to (or ironically reproduce) desires for propriety.90

The investment in the gender and sexual norms of the white liberal nation state is evident in dominant forms of heteropatriarchal rhetoric within black nationalism in general, and within the Black Arts Movement in particular, which have been roundly criticized.91 However, the genealogy of Black Arts choreographers examined in this dissertation articulates forms of belonging in ways distinct from a strictly ‘vertical’ model of normative genealogy that marginalizes queers and women of color in a hierarchical and heteropatriarchal organization. Black Arts Movement choreographers Eleo Pomare,

Joan Miller, and Abdel Salaam provide individual research sites, while the research site of the Dancemobile project engages an assemblage of additional artists in this ‘dance family’ including: Dyane Harvey, Carl Paris, Chuck Davis, Carole Johnson, Fred

Benjamin, Ronald Pratt, Rod Rogers, and George Faison.

This ‘dance family’ productively disrupts a monolithic historical narrative that would equate the Black Arts Movement with heteronormativity. Looking at a collective project like the Dancemobile, which was run by women (Carole Johnson and later

Thelma Hill and Jeannie Faulkner) and in which a majority of male ‘leader’ figures engaged in modes of desiring in excess of heteronormativity, paints a picture of an historical lifeworld where the gender and sexual norms that prevailed were quite distinct from the dominant terms of the nation state or portrayals of black nationalism by dominant voices within the Black Arts Movement.

My use of the term queer to describe artists such as Pomare, Miller, and others working on the Dancemobile, does not refer to a fixed box of identity, but rather to: “a mode of queer performativity—that is not the fact of a queer identity but the force of a queer doing.”92 This queer performativity evidences ambivalence toward sexual identity constructs as potential structures of subjectivity-in-subjection. These artists did not use queer as an identitarian label to describe themselves. Indeed, at this historical moment the term ‘queer’ did not have the same valence that it has in its current reclamation as a critique of normative structures, a move which has suggestive resonances with the way in which the term ‘black’ was reclaimed by these artists at this time. Instead of using queer as a fixed sexual identity attributed to these artists (by themselves or others), I locate their queerness at the intersection of their embodied counterdiscourses of normative

subjectivity (their critiques of the terms for belonging to the ‘human’, including the gender and sexual regulation of that category) and their performances (of desire) in everyday life. Eluding the interpellation of subjectivity through sexual labels, they maintained a strategic opacity in relation to the hypervisibility and pathologization of black sexuality in sociological, political, and lay discourses, while living unapologetically outside the bounds of normative sexuality and subjectivity, performing a desire for a radical outside.93 In her formulation of queer diasporas, Nadia Ellis describes this longing as a desire for “an outside of the nation, an outside of empire, an outside of traditional forms of genealogy and family relations, an outside of chronological and spatial limitations.”94

My research sites comprise choreographers whose articulation of their relationships as ‘dance family’ falls outside traditional forms of genealogy and family relations. Dance family, like queer appropriations of family in the houses of voguing and ballroom culture, is chosen rather than given.95 These appropriations of family constitute forms of belonging not dependent on normative gender and sexual roles. The assemblage of artists working on the Dancemobile configure another kind of belonging, another kind of genealogy. In their queer appropriations of family, they chose to belong to each other in ways that did not demand fitting into the hierarchies and roles prescribed by heteronormativity, whether in radical black nationalism or (white) national liberal humanism. These choreographers’ work and lives critique the dominant terms of belonging—in concert dance, to the nation state, and even within dominant heteropatriarchal nationalist rhetoric of the Black Arts Movement—while simultaneously

staging alternative terms for articulating sites of diasporic belonging, in excess of the nation state and its racialized, gendered, and sexual regulations.

Black Arts Movement Concert Dance: The Limit Case as Central to the ‘Human’ities

While linear progress narratives in Black Arts Movement historiographies, which focus on heteropatriarchal male leader figures, elide the contributions of dancers, choreographers, queers, and women of color, linear progress narratives in (post) modern concert dance historiographies center white women and (gay) men, but elide the contributions of choreographers working in the Black Arts Movement and diasporic collectivities.96 In hegemonic concert dance historiographies, the Black Arts Movement has either been ignored or treated as a particular or specialized area of knowledge.

Instead of considering black studies as a ‘particular’ area of knowledge, which is only of interest to certain people, Nahum Chandler argues that this ‘marginal’ perspective, as the limit case, in fact reveals the functioning of the system in general.97 The study of blackness, at the farthest extreme from the center of the ‘human’ities, and particularly the aporia and ambivalence of African American subject formation (in the wake of historical conditions in which people were property) points to the limits, and the historical and conceptual conditions of possibility, of modern, racialized subjectivity in general. It constitutes an aporia, or irresolvable contradiction, which places pressure on the assumptions of philosophy, history/historiography, and political, social, and legal theory.98 Therefore, it should be understood as a central point of departure for a re- reading the ambivalence of modern subjectivity and (American) history more broadly.

My argument runs parallel to Chandler’s at the intersection of historiographies of

(white) concert dance and literary, heteropatriarchal historiographies of the Black Arts

Movement. Considering the ‘particular’ perspective articulated by Black Arts Movement choreographers requires a rethinking of general U.S. history, while also revealing aporias in (post) modern concert dance and Black Arts Movement historiographies from the position of the unthought.99 Black Arts Movement choreographers’ trenchant embodied critiques of the internal, foundational exclusions of the nation state, along with their engagements of diaspora as a structure of belonging in excess of the nation, troubles even their inclusion in the canon of American modern dance, as well as the reproduction of whiteness in American concert dance through the workings of the (post)modern dance family tree. A consideration of their work also complicates the centrality of heteronormativity, and literary and textual contributions, in historical narratives of the

Black Arts Movement, by offering insights into the embodied critical potential of the

“material heterogeneity,” or gender and sexual diversity within the social, historical formation of the Black Arts Movement.100 This heterogeneity could also be understood in Edwards’s terms as indexing the constitutive décalage of diaspora by articulating the incommensurable, diverse and shifting subject positions and experiences of which it is composed, and attending to the power differentials that accompany these diverse socio- historical locations. At stake is not inclusion, but more importantly questioning the very terms of inclusion, the terms for constructing not only visual, but conceptual frameworks for understanding of twentieth-century U.S., concert dance and Black Arts Movement historiography, by (re)examining the conditions of possibility for the history that has been disseminated.

Using diaspora citation to reconfigure the family tree model as rhizome approaches what Sara Ahmed has termed a queer genealogy, where connections do not reside on straightforward, vertical lines of patriarchal inheritance: “A queer genealogy would take the very ‘affects’ of mixing, or coming into contact with things that reside on different lines, as opening up new kinds of connection.”101 This horizontal, offline mixing, located in affective networks and visualized through a rhizomorphic structure, opens up connections in dance history on new terms: considering the presence and value of transnational labor and collective authorship in concert dance and acknowledging the contributions of women of color and queer-of-color choreographers as central to U.S. concert dance and Black Arts Movement historiographies. A rhizomatic model also disrupts the concept of movement as autonomous in relation to other artistic disciplines, a signature move of aesthetic modernism in modern dance. It would attend to horizontal peer relationships, such as those between black and white choreographers (e.g. Joan

Miller and Yvonne Rainer, or Eleo Pomare and Kurt Jooss) and interdisciplinary relations between choreographers and their artistic contemporaries (e.g. engagements with writer

James Baldwin and filmmaker Kenneth Anger in Eleo Pomare’s work).

Thinking through the connectivities theorized by diaspora citation, as a choreographic method and a way to articulate historical entanglements, has the potential to reorganize the vertical, hierarchical assumptions and exclusions in the (post) modern dance history family tree by questioning its conditions of possibility. Simultaneously, understanding the activities and concerns of concert dance choreographers as implicated in linear progress narratives of the Black Arts Movement, would open considerations of queer genealogies and ‘offline’ connections that do not fit neatly within a vertical, linear,

genealogical narrative of progress that prioritizes only the contributions of heterosexual men.102

Diaspora Citation in the Black Arts Movement: In Search of Other Terms

How did Black Arts Movement choreographers use diaspora citation to articulate sites and critiques of belonging between 1965 and 1975? Kraut clarifies the profound consequences of a paradigm shift towards diaspora in twentieth-century conceptions of blackness and black performance: “diaspora foregrounds the relations within blackness.”103 Artists in the Black Arts Movement developed this framework of diaspora as a focus on the relations within blackness through terms like black nationalism (the internal exclusion of a black nation inside the U.S. nation state, alienated from full citizenship) and self-determination (an agency founded on terms that would benefit a black collective).104 Black nationalism, broadly defined, constituted the belief that

African Americans “were a people, a nation, entitled to (needing, really) self- determination of its own destiny.”105 Self-determination troubles the concept of a sovereign self as it refers to the imperative for, and agency of, a black collectivity to operate on different terms than those of white supremacy: “To define ourselves, to name ourselves, speak for ourselves and create for ourselves.”106 This stands in stark contrast to the agency of a self-contained individual.

Artists working in the Black Arts Movement engaged a set of African diasporic historical and cultural references, both within and outside the U.S., articulated in the service of constituting an entirely distinct set of aesthetic and political terms—a black aesthetic.107 Cultural nationalism worked through appropriation-as-quotation assembling

a constellation of African diasporic aesthetic signifiers that referenced an ‘outside’ of racialized, Western aesthetics (e.g. Immanuel Kant’s theory of an autonomous aesthetic).

For example, the holiday Kwanzaa, developed by Maulana Karenga, deploys references to the African continent in a diasporic structure of belonging through referencing signifiers such as kente cloth and Swahili terminology (e.g. Kwanzaa). Dance artists practicing diaspora citation, also engaged in these kinds of citational practices.

Choreographers in “The Black Arts Movement … confront[ed] issues of racial injustice in America … while making clear and well-researched reference to traditional African dance elements in their work.”108

Refusing the dominant terms for normative belonging to the nation and the

‘human’ at this moment also meant resignifying the previously derogatory term ‘black,’ reclaiming it as a term of pride, belonging, and an explicit position of critique of the dominant U.S. culture: black nationalism versus the white nation.109 The term ‘black’ was initially deployed as slur, an assault on the capacity to be a normative subject. Its appropriation, the subversion and refusal of the intended pejorative meaning, enacts terms for belonging other than those of normative subjectivity. It announces a capacity to desire differently, on other terms. This is exemplified in popular slogans of the time such as, “Black is beautiful” and James Brown’s “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud!”

The reclamation of ‘black’ in the Black Arts Movement works through quotation-as- appropriation, shifting the dominant terms of meaning making by creating new contexts for significance. This is a “‘space-clearing gesture’ that is ‘radical in the etymological sense: it attacks the roots of domination’ … to ‘rally’ and realign the term in the ideological ‘service’ … of a new anti-imperialist solidarity.”110 The realignment of the

term ‘black,’ in the service of global anti-imperialist coalitional politics, and the invocation of a ‘black aesthetic’ as a ‘self-determined’ set of aesthetic criteria and references, sought to articulate diaspora as a structure of belonging on alternative terms.

By foregrounding relations within blackness in excess of the pathologizing and oppressive terms of white supremacy, artists in the Black Arts Movement sought to clear space, to create sites, for a new kind of historical, political and aesthetic belonging on different terms than the dominant terms of Western modernity. While earlier twentieth- century African American concert choreographers, such as Hurston and Dunham worked strategically within the dominant cultural terms of legibility for artistic and cultural production, Black Arts Movement choreographers refused these historically uneven racialized terms for allocating cultural capital and attempted to enact alternative terms.

This was not without precedent, particularly in Dunham’s work, but the increasingly explicit nature of critique, the articulation of the relationship between dancers and audiences, and the expansion of spaces for performance, such as the streets of Harlem, indicated a radical departure from previous uses of diaspora citation in twentieth-century concert dance.111 Because of this outright refusal of the dominant uneven racialized terms for belonging in concert dance, perhaps it is not surprising that these choreographers have been absent from dominant narratives.

As a historical moment, the 1960s have been simplified and romanticized, at the expense of acknowledging many individuals, as well as the complex networks and frictions of which it consisted. However, as scholar Roderick Ferguson indicates, it was also a moment of radical, revolutionary potential.112 I propose that the forms of belonging enacted by the ‘dance family’ of Black Arts Movement artists working on the

Dancemobile eschew the exclusions of normative belonging (to the heteropatriarchal nation state and global orders of white supremacy) in favor of a coalitional politics of belonging. This coalitional politics articulates various forms of oppressed experiences under (and in the service of undoing) imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, heteropatriarchy without demanding that the décalage or internal differentiation of these experiences be commensurable or quantifiable.

Outline of the Dissertation: Research Sites and Chapters

I propose that an examination of the work of Pomare, Miller, Salaam, and the

Dancemobile provides an essential critical perspective. This ‘dance family’ is omitted in conventional concert dance historiography, either marked as particular, black, radical and

‘militant’ or “invisibilized.”113 Simultaneously, dancers and choreographers are barely legible in historiographies of the Black Power/Arts Movement, especially the work of female choreographers.114 Subject to multiple (historiographic) exclusions, the ‘queer genealogy’ of Black Arts choreographers examined in this dissertation offers critiques of the normative terms of historical belonging to the figure of the ‘human,’ with its local, national, and global distributions of class, racial, gender and sexual privilege. As marginalized limit cases, they offer an ‘exemplary example’ from which to re-read

‘general’ dance history through the gender and sexual diversity of African American culture in the Black Arts Movement.115 Excavating their constructions and affirmations of alternative structures of belonging, as resources from a ‘usable past,’ offers invaluable information for the present and a glimpse of a radically different (potential) future.

Chapter Two examines the work of Eleo Pomare. In scholarship, Pomare has been situated as paradigmatic of Black Arts Movement ideologies and as a transnational 43

subject in excess of this framework. 116 Born in Columbia, raised in Panama, trained in the U.S. and Europe, Pomare was deeply invested in black liberation struggles. My work seeks to build on this research by locating his transnational experiences in a framework of diasporic belonging within the Black Arts Movement. Through a close reading of his piece Blues for the Jungle (1966), particularly his “Junkie” solo, placed in conversation with a piece on the 1964 Harlem riot by his close friend James Baldwin, I seek to comprehend Pomare’s trenchant choreographic critiques of white supremacy from his diasporic perspective. His choreographic theory of vitality, drawing on and making reference to movement vocabularies derived from everyday black social life, performs an epistemology, “Harlem Knows,” of the U.S. political economy from the lived experience of the 1960s urban ghetto.

Chapter Three explores Pomare’s erotic solo Narcissus Rising (1968), which offers a performance of gender and sexual self-determination. Ultimately, I argue that

Narcissus reveals the décalage in diaspora and black nationalism as articulated structures of belonging by indexing distinct gender and sexual politics in Black Arts Movement concert dance. The solo also works to reference an emergent ‘militant’ structure of feeling across multiple liberation movements, widening the historical scope to situate the

Harlem riot within a larger national context of protest and unrest. These forms of civil disobedience index ‘militant refusals’ to desire the terms for normative subjectivity, defined by the figure of the ‘human,’ by gesturing towards and performing the capacity to desire differently. Pomare’s two signature solos, “Junkie” and Narcissus Rising work through queer ‘outsider’ figures that enable critiques of the normative terms for national(ist) belonging, while the critical potential of the gender and sexual diversity in a

queer 1960s Harlem lifeworld is revealed through a choreographic analysis of the Harlem diddy bop walk, performed by the Pomare company in a 1972 lecture demonstration, which contextualized “Junkie.”

Chapter Four explores the work of Jamaican-American Joan Miller. Her solo

Pass Fe’ White (1968-70) articulates a diasporic critique of the ‘human,’ by connecting colorism in Jamaica and the U.S. through satirical, embodied citation. The solo ‘reads’ the desire to embody whiteness within the complex politics of belonging as (racial) passing. In particular, Miller Signifies on heteropatriarchal ideals of white femininity in the section called “Miss Liz,” referencing Liz Taylor. Miller’s work at Lehman College further expands the historical lens to consider student rebellions occurring in relationship to various liberation struggles in the late 1960s on local, national and global scales. Her choreographic and educational work used the resources of the university as a site for theorizing connectivities and promoting “black study” in the service of sociopolitical change, rather than ‘educating’ students in the (desire for the) status quo. Miller worked to be in rather than of the academic structures of power that turned toward minority difference at this moment of student protest. Her solo Homestretch extends her critique of belonging to national institutions by turning a skeptical ‘side eye’ towards marriage and pedagogies of ‘proper’ racialized/gender roles in national economies of female objecthood. In her performances of everyday life, Miller embodied the capacity to desire beyond these limited prescriptions.

Chapter Five turns to the first two years of the site-specific Dancemobile project

(1967-68), initiated by Pomare. It moves from a consideration of individual artists’ solos to think through the collective labor of choreographers and dancers working together in

the search for new terms in Black Arts Movement concert dance.117 The Dancemobile premiered in Harlem, offering choreography performed by small black dance companies on the back of a flatbed truck across New York City and upstate. Despite the premise of

“cool out” funding from the city to quell riots in the modern formation of the black ghetto, Dancemobile artists appropriated the platform as a vehicle for articulating ensemble, a sense of living in common between (black) artists and audiences. The project served as a site for choreographic critiques of the relationship between property- in-the-person in creating the modern black ghetto—the ways in which racialized urban space materializes the (exclusions of) the figure of the ‘human.’ Simultaneously, the

Dancemobile was a platform on which dance artists articulated diasporic structures of belonging, by joining embodied intertexts from across the diaspora in a collaborative structure. By linking international contexts to a critique of local material conditions, linking the historical context of decolonization to the streets of New York, the project sought to imagine radically distinct terms for belonging in concert dance. In an historical environment where jobs were scarce for black dancers, the survival technique of

“company hopping” forged a queer structure of belonging among the artists, referred to as “dance family.”

Chapter Six investigates how the work of this ‘dance family’ extends into the present through the choreography of Abdel Salaam, a dancer with Joan Miller, Chuck

Davis and several other companies on the Dancemobile. Salaam does black aesthetics on the concert stage, affirming the beauty of diasporic forms (bodies and cultural practices) and honoring the theoretical intelligence embedded in Africanist practices. His piece

Rhythm Legacy (2000) stages a diasporic structure of belonging by juxtaposing

connections through choreographic intertexts from distinct diasporic contexts. It uses ballet and modern dance vocabularies in a critique of racial capitalism, repurposing them in the final section in a statement of diasporic healing. Salaam’s Kulture Seed (2007) questions the role of desire in performing national/ist belonging through racialized movement vocabularies in a Kwanzaa show at the Apollo, deconstructing the ways in which he repurposes movement by asking: Which bodies ‘properly’ belong in which movement vocabularies? Finally, his piece The Healing Sevens (2017) explores the possibilities of transformation through the arrival of spirit, in a construction of diasporic belonging that promotes healing by transfiguring the ‘human’ into his black aesthetic affirmations of black humanity.

My concluding chapter offers a summary of the insights of the previous chapters, the conclusions they have led me to, and implications for further study. It finishes with a meditation on my research process and the institutional politics of archives in relationship to the practice of diaspora citation.

Limitations of the Project

My writing of this history is not comprehensive. That is, it focuses on the Black

Arts Movement within the boundaries of New York City, when in fact this movement was a heterogeneous assemblage of practices across the U.S. with distinct regional variations. Choosing New York City as research site runs the risk of cosmopolitanism or metronormativity. I do not mean to endorse writing the history of New York City as the history of American concert dance. Instead, I am aware that this research may be qualified by research in others urban centers and rural communities.

NOTES

1 Susan Manning traces this dominant narrative of (post) modern dance: “In its most reductive form, the standard narrative relates how early modern dancers Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Mary Wigman reacted against the strictures and spectacle of late-nineteenth-century ballet. Then after 1930 Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey and their peers eschewed what they perceived as the amateurism of the first generation and insisted upon developing codified movement principles and addressing serious themes. During the 1950s Merce Cunningham, Alwin Nickolais, and their peers rejected what they perceived as the heroic narratives of their predecessors and devised depersonalized strategies for composition and presentation. Next choreographers associated with the Judson Dance Theater in the early 1960s reacted against the technical polish of their immediate predecessors and looked toward everyday movement, task procedures, and nontraditional venues. Finally around 1980 the postmodernists reversed their earlier asceticism and embraced narrative spectacle and emotion. Or so the story builds from John Martin’s America Dancing (1936) to Margaret Lloyd’s The Borzoi Book of Modern Dance (1949) to Walter Terry’s The Dance in America (1956) to Don McDonagh’s The Rise and Fall and Rise of Modern Dance (1970) to Marcia Siegel’s The Shapes of Change (1979) to Sally Banes Terpsichore in Sneakers (1980, 1987) to Deborah Jowitt’s Time and the Dancing Image (1988). Although all these chronicles mention a few African American dancers, all tell a predominantly white story.” Susan Manning, Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota), 2004, xxi.

2 ‘Black dance’ is a contested term. See DeFrantz 2002 and Amin 2011b. ‘Dance family’ refers to the ways that practitioners in my study articulate their relationships to one another. This concept is elaborated in Chapter 6.

3 Larry Neal, "The Black Arts Movement," in A Sourcebook of African-American Performance: Plays, People, Movements, edited by Annemarie Bean (London: Routledge, 1999, originally published in The Drama Review 1968), 29.

4 Salaam 2013b.

5 Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP), 2003. The concept of articulation in relation to diaspora builds on Stuart Hall’s essay “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” which theorizes the function of difference in a global capitalist mode of production. See Hall 1980.

6 Edwards, 15. As the term diaspora was not applied to peoples of African descent until the 1950s, Edwards is using the term anachronistically, but also strategically to elucidate the ways in which the practice of diaspora (also the title of his book) in the 1920s prefigures the formalized political and academic discourse of diaspora in the 1950s. See Edwards 2003; Edwards “The Uses of Diaspora” Social Text (66 Vol. 19, No. 1, Spring 2001): 45-73.

7 Edwards 2003, 14-15.

8 Edwards 2003, 12.

9 Hall’s theory combines the structural and the discursive, accounting for structural power relations within the complex structure, or discursive system, of diaspora.

10 Edwards 2003, 15.

11 Hall in Edwards, 2003, 11-12.

12 The critique of this figuration of the ‘human’ builds on black feminist analyses, such as those of Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter elaborated in Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), as well as bell hooks’ articulation of interlocking systems of oppression as: “white supremacist, capitalist, imperialist patriarchy.” bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994).

13 Historiographer James Smethurst locates the Black Arts Movement between 1965-1975. He argues that this periodization does not fully encapsulate the complex prior and after effects, and should be understood as a vexed problem of historiography, rather than a lack of precision in definition. James Edward Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2005).

14 On the epistemological flights of a freedom drive: “But the moment in which you enter into the knowledge of slavery, of yourself as a slave, is the moment you begin to think about freedom, the moment in which you know or begin to know or to produce knowledge of freedom, the moment at which you become a fugitive, the moment at which you begin to escape in ways that trouble the structures of subjection that … overdetermine freedom” Fred Moten, “Taste, Dissonance, Flavor, Escape: Preface for a solo by Miles Davis” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Vol. 17, No. 2, July 2007), 235.

15 Moten theorizes the scream as a sonic trace, extending from the initiation into the knowledge of slavery in Fredrick Douglass’s account of his Aunt Hester’s beating through to the screams of artists like James Brown in “Cold Sweat” and Abbey Lincoln in “Freedom Suite.” In contrast to Ferdinand de Saussure’s claim that noise outside of language has no meaning, Moten argues that this ‘noise’ in fact encodes a history of objection to histories of people being turned into objects (property). Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2003).

16 Lindon Barrett, Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity (Urbana, Chicago, Springfield: University of Illinois Press), 2014.

17 Hall 1992, 27.

18 Hall 1992. Moten 2003. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham: Duke UP, 2003). 19 Moten 2003, 12.

20 This does not collapse theory and practice as analytical categories, but rather provides a way to understand the praxis of black performative theorizing according to the specificities of its context. 21 Frantz Fanon’s phenomenological intervention describing the lived experience of the black body as positioned by the white gaze, within historico-racial and epidermial racial schemas, are of obvious relevance here. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1952).

22 Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. 2004).

23 Spillers quoted in Nahum Chandler, “Originary Displacement,” boundary (27, No. 3, 2000): 270, original emphasis.

24 Chandler specifically critiques implicit assumptions, in Eugene Genovese’s scholarship for example, that white slave masters existed first and formed the system of slavery into which enslaved Africans then were inserted.

25 Contrary to essential notions of identity diaspora citation refers to the ambivalent, entangled conception of subjectivity as socially/historically produced (Chandler 2000); the impossibility of locating origins exists in its orientation toward the past—not a ‘return to Africa,’ but a repurposing of historical movement in the 49

present; and the instability of meaning exists in its strategic appropriations/repurposing of dominant forms (i.e. Signifyin’ Gates 1983). These dimensions are elaborated in the rest of this introduction.

26 Graham Allen, “Situated Readers: Bloom, feminism, postcolonialism” Intertextuality (London: Routledge, 2000).

27 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Williams, Patrick & Laura Chrisman eds. Colonial Discourse & Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Harvester Whaeatsheaf, 1993.

28 Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford UP, 1988).

29 “The core of Gates argument is that African-American writing is double-voiced and self-consciously intertextual in its relation to both Standard English and a black vernacular discourse which historically has been turned into ‘non-speech’ by Eurocentric, white cultural values.” Allen, 164, my emphasis. This resonates with Moten’s formulation of the scream as black performative critique in ‘non-speech’ according to Eurocentric values and philosophical systems, specifically de Saussure’s ‘universal’ structuralist semiotics. Moten 2003.

30 Kobena Mercer, Welcome to The Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), 163.

31 Moten 2007, 229.

32 Moten specifically references both Judith Butler’s (after Althusser) and Saidiya Hartman’s theorizing of the process of entering into subjectivity as a form of subjection. See Moten 2003.

33 This occurs through discriminatory home lending practices, unequal education opportunities, and intergenerational wealth transfers, which support racial hierarchies and maintain the ‘cash value’ of whiteness. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1998), vii-viii.

34 George Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011).

35 Anthea Kraut. Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 146.

36 My reference to Hurston as a concert dance choreographer builds on Kraut’s argument that she should be positioned as such. For more on the distinctions between Hurston and Dunham’s approaches to staging dance, as well as an argument for understanding them together as advancing a project of diaspora on twentieth-century concert stages see Anthea Kraut, “Between Primitivism and Diaspora: The Dance Performances of Josephine Baker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Katherine Dunham” (Theatre Journal, Oct 2003, 55, no. 3): 433-450.

37 Kraut 2008, 151, original emphasis.

38 Neal 1968, 32.

39 Eleo Pomare, "Where Are Black Artists Going?!!!" Remarks 1969, reprinted in Dance Herald [New York] Vol. 1 ed., No. 2, 1975: 3.

40 Saidiya Hartman, “On Working with Archives: An Interview with Writer Saidiya Hartman.” The Creative Independent. By Thora Siemsen, April 18, 2018 https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/saidiya-hartman-on-working-with-archives/ 50

41 Vikki Bell, “Introduction,” in Performativity and Belonging (London: Sage Publications, 1999), 3. 42 Edwards, 2003, 14.

43 Barrett 2014, xii-xiii, 5.

44 Moten, 2003, 1.

45 Chandler, 2000.

46 Moten 2003; Hartman 1997.

47 Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review (Vol. 106, No. 8. 1993), 1731. Lipsitz, 1998.

48 C.B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 3.

49 Anthea Kraut, “White Womanhood, Property Rights, and the Campaign for Choreographic Copyright: Loïe Fuller’s Serpentine Dance.” Dance Research Journal (Vol. 43, No.1. Summer 2011): 7.

50 Eva Cherniavsky has analyzed how a key protection afforded to whites—during slavery but also in its afterlife—is an “inalienable property in the body” (2006, 84). Racialized and colonized people are rendered “fully open to capital” and susceptible to abstraction and exchange” as commodifiable objects, while white people benefit(ted) from the rights of “possessive individualism” (89). White persons are protected “from the invasive forces of capital” so that they “may commodify [their] bodily or intellectual labor, but not [their] flesh” (84). Thus the “status of the body (the difference between selling one’s bodily labor and becoming a salable body in which others may traffic” is a key site of racial division with profound implications. (Kraut 2011, 4).

51 Priya Srinivasan, Sweating Saris: Indian Dance as Transnational Labor (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2011).

52 Mark Franko posits the genealogy of the modern dance family tree, and its rebellion narrative, which I take up later in more detail, as revisions of expressionist theory, each of which further posit the refinement of autonomous movement: “Modernist accounts of modern dance history thus perform the telos of aesthetic modernism itself: a continuous reduction to essentials culminating in irreducible ‘qualities.’” Mark Franko, Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics (Bloomington: Indiana UP), 1995, ix. In relation to my focus on the elision of the Black Arts Movement from the canon of modern dance, Franko indicates how “alternatives obscured by the canon reveal conditions under which canonical work itself was originally shaped.” Franko, x. I argue that racialized ideologies of the autonomous self are linked to modernist ideologies of autonomous movement, in part forming these conditions under which the canonical work, the ‘family tree,’ of (post) modern dance is shaped.

53 Moten, 2007, 224, original emphasis.

54 Kraut 2011, 4.

55 My usage of black and white as racialized terms refers to mutually constitutive and uneven terms: “By ‘blackness’ I mean the social and artistic meanings that adhere to dancing bodies that can be read as marked by the culture and history of Africans in the New World. By ‘whiteness’ I mean the social and artistic privilege that adheres to dancing bodies that can be read as racially unmarked, the legitimizing norm against which bodies of color take their meanings.” Manning, 2004, xv.

56 Kraut 2008; Manning, 2004; Danielle Goldman, I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010); Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996); Perpener 2001.

57 For naturalization see Kraut 2008. For discourses of derivative artistry see Manning 2004. 58 Susan Manning coins the term (post) modern to reference continuities between the supposedly discrete practices of modern and postmodern dance, despite their narration as a series of ruptures in (white) modern dance historiography. Manning, xxi.

59 Kraut, 57.

60 Goldman clarifies this dynamic: “This history [of the roots of non-Western improvisational traditions] makes it hard to ignore the racism embedded in the claim that improvisation somehow lacks rigor or in the equation of improvisational skill with instinct as opposed to intellect, both prevalent notions in the early-to- mid-twentieth century. Even as postmodern dancers during the early 1960s began to incorporate improvisation into their performances, often noting the influence of Zen philosophy or Asian martial arts, they frequently failed to acknowledge the importance of jazz and black social dance traditions in their so- called innovations. Although it is unclear whether this cultural disavowal was self-consciously strategic, it was undoubtedly racially significant.” Goldman 2010, 16.

61 Kraut: “As dance scholars have demonstrated in the past two decades, white female dancers like Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Martha Graham (considered the other ‘mothers’ of modern dance) overturned gender hierarchies to claim leadership positions as choreographers on the public stage, even as they actively reinforced racial hierarchies. On the one hand, these white women ‘projected a kinesthetic power that challenged male viewers to see the female dancer as an expressive subject rather than as an erotic object’ (Manning 1997, 163); on the other hand, they relied on essentialized racial distinctions between their own “universal” artistry and the putatively “primitive” dance practices of nonwhite subjects, often while claiming the right to represent those subjects in their choreography. Actually, to state it in these terms—to imply that the gendered and raced dimensions of early modern dance were parallel rather than inextricably linked operations—misses the point. Differentiating themselves from racialized, sexualized dancing bodies is precisely what enabled these white women to gain legitimacy for themselves as artists (not objects) on the theatrical stage.” Kraut 2011, 7.

62 The shifting terminology used to describe black performance is also related to theorizing and shifts in thinking about identity and representation in black performance practices and discourses, for example the resignification of the term ‘black’ in the Black Arts Movement, which I address later in this introduction. “Negro and colored were terms of paternalistic domination, popular in the nineteenth through the mid- twentieth century. Black and African American represent resistant, dissident self-namings that emerged in response to political activism of the latter half of the twentieth century. And by now, in the twenty-first century, black has stabilized into an international identity of diasporan consciousness” Thomas DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez. Eds. Black Performance Theory: An Anthology of Critical Readings (Durham: Duke UP, 2014), 2.

63 Manning, xxi.

64 “As dance historians have come to recognize, the generation of modern dancers that came of age during the 1930s took as much from Denishawn as they rejected” Manning, xxi. Following Manning, I am suggesting that this is also true of the supposed break between modern and postmodern dance. 65 Mark Franko explores this tendency as a series of revisions in expressionist theory in Dancing Modernism. Also see Sally Banes and Susan Manning exchanges in “Terpsichore in Combat Boots,” in which Banes claims that post modern dance is truly modernist in its focus on medium. In contrast to Banes’ argument for the exceptionalism of Judson Dance Theater, I am claiming that each successive generation of this genealogy has posited their explorations in this way. 52

66 See Ramsay Burt “Undoing postmodern dance history” http://sarma.be/docs/767 for an analysis of this ideology.

67 Thomas DeFrantz, Dancing Revelations (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2004), 82, my emphases. 68 Krauss quoted in Kraut 2008, 60, Kraut 61.

69 I do not mean to suggest that there were no original contributions from these artists, but rather than the discursive framework surrounding their work and attributing cultural capital denies the fact that appropriation and originality also operate in the inextricable economy of the original and the copy mentioned by Krauss.

70 Edwards, 14.

71 Sally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-modern Dance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin), 1980, pp.1-19 . 72 “The history of modern dance is rapidly cyclical: revolution and institution; revolution and institution. The choices for each generation have been either to enter the new academy (but, inevitably, to dilute and trivialize it in doing so), or to create a new establishment. In this system, the importance of the choreographer over the dancer is obvious. The ‘tradition of the new’ demands that every dancer be a potential choreographer.” Banes 1980, 5.

73 Randy Martin, Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 152.

74 E. Patrick Johnson draws attention to the stakes and context of appropriation as a strategy that “offer[s] the cultural context out of which the text emerges as well as the conditions and terms of its production.” Johnson, 226.

75 Srinivasan 2011.

76 Gottschild 1996.

77 Goldman, 14.

78 Kraut 2008, 89.

79 Abdel Salaam. Interview with the author. New York, NY. 22 February 2012. I do not mean to suggest that Salaam does not take ownership over his material. He places his choreographic signature on his pieces and they circulate under his authorship within the economies of concert dance. He operates, as all artists engaging in the marketplace do, under the terms of capitalism. However, the approach to the ownership of movement is distinct and the allocation of credit becomes a site for connection, rather than a threat to his ownership of the movement material as property.

80 Kraut 2008, 61.

81 Gottschild 1996.

82 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993).

83 Michelle M. Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

84 Wright, 74.

85 Wright, 51. “Gilroy also proposes … a rhizomatic structure for interpellation (e.g., a root-like formation that grows both horizontally and vertically) to counteract the effects of the verticality that is found in some Middle Passage epistemologies ‘… which, I argue, share a nationalistic focus that is antithetical to the rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the transcultural, transnational formation I call the Black Atlantic.’” Wright, 58. She also critiques the ways Gilroy’s selection of events surrounding male intellectual figures as examples reinforce a Middle Passage epistemology: “producing the epistemology not as a linear timeline but as moments on that linear timeline that are connected to each other horizontally.” Wright, 59-60.

86 This observation builds on the work of Angela Davis, Patricia Hill Collins, and Iris Marion Young. Wright, 58.

87 Wright, 53.

88 Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby Papa’s Maybe.” Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, originally published 1987).

89 In developing his queer-of-color-critique, Ferguson notes the contradictions at the heart of U.S. liberal capitalism in which the heteropatriarchal norms of liberal humanism exist in tension with capitalism’s need for, and solicitation of, cheap labor in urban centers, which leads to the development of nonheteronormative gender and sexual formations that play out in spatial economies such as vice districts. Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2004).

90 Jared Sexton, “Ante-Anti-Blackness: Afterthoughts,” Lateral 1 (2012).

91 Ferguson 2004, Johnson 2003, Chapter 2, Keeling 2007, Lubiano 1993.

92 Jose Muñoz, “Cruising the Toilet: LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Radical Black Traditions, and Queer Futurity,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 13, no. 2-3, (2007): 354.

93 For more on the importance of strategies of opacity at the intersection of blackness and sexuality see C. Riley Snorton, Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP), 2014.

94 Ellis, 3-4.

95 Johnson 2003, Chapter 3.

96 Although the presence of Alvin Ailey, a queer, black choreographer in the concert dance canon could be seen to trouble this statement, there is a key distinction to be made. Ailey’s work submits to heteropatriarchal terms of gender and sexual performance (DeFrantz 2001) in contrast to Miller and Pomare’s work, which offers trenchant critiques of those terms. In this way, Ailey’s presence in the canon points to the terms of inclusion.

97 “The study of the making of African American identities is one of the best historical sites of study for clarifying the most general social processes of our time, such as those entailed in the making of ‘American’ identities; the most particular and micrological aspects of the making of these identities have some of the most general analytical insights encoded in them” Chandler, 255. “We should generalize and therefore radicalize W.E.B. DuBois’s formulation of the African American sense of identity as ‘a kind of double consciousness,’ experienced under the palpable force of the practice of racial distinction, to American identities as such and to modern subjectivities in general,” Chandler, 250-251.

98 See Chandler 2000 on philosophy (Hegel) and legal theory (Oladuah Equiano as property-transacting- property), Moten 2003 on Marx and de Saussure, Sexton 2010 on Agamben, and Crenshaw 1989, 1991on legal theory. 54

99 “On the one hand the slave is the foundation of the national order, and, on the other, the slave occupies the position of the unthought … the metanarrative thrust is always toward an integration into the national project, and particularly when that project is in crisis, black people are called on to affirm it. So certainly it's about more than the desire for inclusion with in the limited set of possibilities that the national project provides.” Saidiya V Hartman in conversation with Frank B. Wilderson, III, “The Position of the Unthought.” Qui Parle (Vol. 13, No. 2. Spring/Summer 2003): 185, my emphasis.

100 Ferguson clarifies the critical potential of this material heterogeneity in relation to pathologizing discourses of sociology: “Sociology, when incarnated canonically, attempts to discursively suppress an actual material heterogeneity. The material heterogeneity that I've been discussing is one that critically exposes the gender and sexual diversity within racial formations. As canonical sociology suppresses heterogeneity in the name of universality, it becomes an epistemological counterpart to the state's enforcement of universality as the state suppresses nonheteronormative racial difference. Pathologizing the material heterogeneity embodied in African American nonheteronormative formations disciplines its critical possibilities. As a site that arches toward universality, canonical sociology can only obscure the ways that nonheteronormative racial formations point to the contradictions between the promise of equality and the practice of exclusions based on a racialized gender and sexual eccentricity, an eccentricity produced through discourse and articulated in practice.” Ferguson 2004, 21.

101 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke UP), 2006, 155.

102 While historiographer James Smethurst emphasizes the heterogeneity of the various regional manifestations of the Black Arts Movement(s), Angela Davis, makes a similar point about the historicity of black nationalism, proposing that nationalism is more usefully conceived as nationalisms, complicating reductive retrospective histories, especially regarding the role of women, “the activist involvement of vast numbers of black women in movements that are now represented with even greater masculinist contours than they actually exhibited at the time.” Angela Davis, “Afro Images : Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia.” In Soul: Black Power, Politics, and Pleasure. Edited by Guillory, Monique, and Richard C. Green (New York: New York UP, 1998), 30.

103 Kraut 2008, 146.

104 “Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept … the Black Arts Movement proposes a radical reordering of the western cultural aesthetic … The Black Arts and the Black Power concept both relate broadly to the Afro-American’s desire for self-determination and nationhood. Both concepts are nationalistic. One is concerned with the relationship between art and politics; the other with the art of politics.” Neal 1968, 29.

105Smethurst 2005, 15. “Implicit in the Black Arts Movement is the idea that Black people, however dispersed, constitute a nation within the belly of white America,” Neal 1968, 39. 106 http://kwanzaaguide.com/2009/12/self-determination-second-day-of-kwanzaa-kujichagulia-day/; also see Smethurst 2005, 17.

107 According to Neal, a black aesthetic is premised on: African-American cultural tradition, elements of ‘Third World’ culture, and Ethics, which posits a fundamental opposition between the aesthetics of the oppressor and the oppressed. Neal 1968, 35.

108 Angela Gittens, “Black Dance and the Fight for Flight: Sabar and the Transformation and Cultural Significance of Dance from West Africa to Black America (1960-2010).” Journal of Black Studies, 43, No. 1, Special Issue: 1960s Africa in Historical Perspective (January 2012): 57, my emphasis. 55

109 It should be noted that this move to resignify ‘black,’ was not endorsed by all members of ‘the black community’ at this historical moment, pointing to the décalage and heterogeneity of black communities and individuals that constitute this imagined community.

110 Edwards 2003, 33.

111 “For Pittman, it seemed self-evident that Dunham’s performance of diaspora linked struggles for Negro rights at home to struggles for decolonization abroad.” Manning 2004, 152-3.

112 Ferguson, Roderick. The Reorder of Things: The University and It’s Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

113 Gottschild 1996.

114 Smethurst 2005, Amin 2011.

115 Chandler 2000.

116 DeFrantz 1999, Fensham 2013.

117 Although my initial focus on the semi-autobiographical solos of two individual choreographers, Pomare and Miller, might seem to reinforce a single-author/genius choreographer model, their choreographic references position the self-as-soloist as entangled, imbricated in larger histories and networks of belonging.

CHAPTER 2

ELEO POMARE’S CHOREOGRAPHIC THEORY OF VITALITY “HARLEM KNOWS”: EMBODIED CITATION AS EPISTEMOLOGY IN BLUES FOR THE JUNGLE

Eleo Pomare once perched on a barre in a loft studio theater. Small, wiry and black, he held a chunk of watermelon in his hands, biting into it deliberately and, just as deliberately, staring calmly at the audience as he spat out the seeds, one by one. It was an unforgettably powerful moment—in a dance lost in the years of struggling loft performances—but one curiously without malice, demagoguery or false theatrics.1

This early loft performance described by dance critic Jennifer Dunning reveals a strategy that would become a hallmark of Pomare’s work—the use of embodied citation and deliberate exposure to cultivate affective tension in the performance space and raise provocative questions around issues of belonging. His minimalist choreography cites the stereotypes of minstrelsy, tropes that continue to haunt the terms of black performance in the U.S. Pomare deploys the reference by simultaneously embodying it—consuming the watermelon, performing the overdetermined expectation—and exploding it from the inside. He confronts and interpellates the audience through a practice of looking as intensification, while spitting out, slowly and deliberately in disgust, this image from the

“historico-racial schema” that frames appearances and perceptions of black bodies in performance.2 He takes the expectation and flips it back on the viewer, forcing an engagement between audience and performer, but now on the performer’s terms.

Pomare’s critical appropriation stages a choreographic confrontation with the figure of the ‘human,’ through repurposing the dehumanizing imagery of minstrelsy. His choreographic commentary critiques the work this figure performs in the dominant national imagination. 57

This chapter turns to Eleo Pomare’s use of diaspora citation to understand his choreographic strategies in articulating forms and critiques of belonging. Rather than conceiving of movement as a form of property, Pomare’s work is driven by a sense of connection, motivated by the forms of assembly and structures of belonging enabled by bodies in motion. One way in which the practice of diaspora citation occurs is through

Signifyin’ or ‘reading,’ a strategy of indirection developed in African American social contexts.3 The watermelon performance described above illustrates Pomare’s choreographic ‘reading’ of the historical terms that frame black bodies in performance.

The dehumanizing minstrel stereotype is repurposed for his own critical ends. Its meaning is shifted in a choreographic process of Signifyin’.

What follows begins with a consideration of Pomare’s background—how his lived experience of global white supremacy informs his choreographic philosophy. Next,

I explore his choreographic theory of vitality in a speech given to an audience. This theory is exemplified in Pomare’s 1966 piece entitled Blues for the Jungle, which ends with the dancers staging a riot in the audience, a reference to the 1964 Harlem riot. I read the “Riot” section of Blues, and Pomare’s solo “Junkie,” in conjunction with an essay by his close friend James Baldwin about the conditions of possibility for riot entitled “A

Report from Occupied Territory.” Reading Baldwin’s essay with Pomare’s choreography reveals the terms of property-in-the-person to be the conditions of possibility for the 1964

Harlem riot. Baldwin describes an embodied epistemology of the U.S. political economy from the experience of living in Harlem—“Harlem knows.” Pomare’s choreographic theory of vitality uses movement citations to perform this epistemology on the concert stage. He develops a choreographic movement language by working with embodied

nuances—the particular ways of being and knowing cultivated within black social life in

Harlem—to articulate “black oneness” as a structure of diasporic belonging-in-blackness.

His use of diaspora citation joins a choreographic critique of the U.S. political economy to the racism of Western modernity. It affirms shared experiences within blackness and celebrates the cultural resources for survival developed in an anti-black world as evidence of fundamental humanity. Pomare’s desire to form connections with black audiences is ultimately a search for a structure of belonging in excess of subjectivity premised on property in the person.

Background: Be(com)ing Black in the World

The trajectory of Eleo Pomare’s life moves across four continents, articulating distinct contexts that were joined in his embodied experience of be(com)ing black in the world. Pomare was born in South America (Cartagena, Colombia) in 1937 and raised in

Central America (San Andrés, Panama) before moving to North America (Harlem, New

York) in 1947.4 Following his education at La Guardia High School for the Performing

Arts from 1949 to 1953, he went to Europe (Essen, Germany) in 1961 to study with modern dance choreographer Kurt Jooss, on a Whitney Fellowship. He left Germany to work in Amsterdam, before returning to the U.S. during the peak of the Civil Rights

Movement in 1963-64. He also performed significant work in Australia, as Rachel

Fensham has argued, articulating a decolonial, coalitional politics of solidarity with

Aboriginal peoples under an expansive global conception of blackness.5 Although

Pomare did not use the term ‘diaspora’ to refer to his experiences, I argue that his global

sense of blackness, of be(com)ing black in an anti-black world, articulates diaspora as both a critique of the nation and an alternative structure of be(long)ing in the world.

In Cartagena, Colombia, a key port of the Spanish Empire and a major hub in the

TransAtlantic slave trade, a caste system was developed with several levels of ‘color’ to designate one’s place in society. Pomare experienced this colorism at an early age within his own family. He remembers being raised by his domineering grandmother who showed her “disdain for rearing ‘Negro’ children” by “telling him point blank ‘You’re too dark!’”6 This embodied experience forms an early awareness of exclusion—a manifestation of colonial regimes of caste determined by color, within the dynamic of psychological colonization theorized by Frantz Fanon.7 This example of colorism articulates global, historical forces of white supremacy and colonization with the intimate hegemonic social formation charged with reinforcing normative subjectivity—the family unit.8

At the age of six, Pomare was traveling with his father to visit his mother in

Panama. Their boat was torpedoed by a German U-boat.9 Pomare was the only one to survive the event. He was sent at the age of ten to live with an aunt and uncle in Harlem.

In the U.S., at the High School for the Performing Arts, Pomare describes his experience as a “fly in a bowl of milk.”10 Part of his determination to leave the United States was due to experiences of racial discrimination, along with his assessment of the limits for concert dance production and reception within the uneven terms of the binary modern/Negro dance.11 He was also drawn to Europe because of an investment in

European cultural hegemony within the U.S. “I believed the myths that one had to study in Europe to be really educated, and that Europe was more sensitive to black people. I

was looking for a place to work where my complexion didn’t come before my product.”12

He received a Whitney Fellowship to study with German modern dance (Austruckstanz) choreographer Kurt Jooss. Pomare describes being attracted to the intensity in photographs of Jooss’s dancers and the ways in which Jooss’s choreography directly addressed political situations: “It was a tension, a whole way of dealing with things that are a real part of our lives as opposed to escape into some kind of ethereal space which I could never realize.”13 Tension would become a hallmark of his approach to movement, as well as an affective state that he cultivated in performance.

Upon arriving in Europe, however, he realized that an ideology of racial superiority, rather than being absent, was merely configured differently, through a colonial lens of primitivism, which “assumes a hierarchical and evolutionary relationship between Western civilization and savage, racialized Others.”14 Pomare’s departure from

Jooss’s studio is frequently narrated with his quote, “I just couldn’t take that dogmatic bull.”15 Fensham relates this to an argument about demands for Pomare to perform shirtless by ballet choreographer Anthony Tudor, reinforcing modernist/primitivist conceptions of legibly black dancing bodies on the concert stage and in the European imagination.16 Pomare refused to perform the overdetermined role of black exoticized, hypersexualized object prescribed by primitivism. “As a man in Europe, I learned that

Europeans were interested in me, but in my body only. Some very, very hung-up people baby. I am expected to be silent and exotic. ‘Don’t you dare think nigger; just look beautiful, and let us chase after that black Thing.’”17 Pomare’s conjoining of ‘thing’ with blackness points to the objectification secured through the lens of primitivism, to histories of people-as-property, and the ways in which historical discourses

overdetermine the positioning of legibly black bodies in performance. It also recalls the first definition of belonging: a thing properly placed. Pomare refused this ‘proper’ placement in histories of property and propriety. He refused to perform white stereotypes, ‘reading’ the performance conventions, from primitivism to minstrelsy, the dominant terms which sought to prescribe, overdetermine and limit the meaning(s) of his body in performance.

Pomare’s Choreographic Theory of Vitality: Movement Quotations from Black Life

Pomare was keenly sensitive to the role of audience and context in his choreographic articulations of belonging.18 His attention to the role of the audience is clear in the watermelon solo, as well as in his choreographic readings of primitivist expectations from European audiences.19 In a speech given to an audience on the streets of Harlem, Pomare explains his emergent choreographic theory of vitality, or black form.20 His approach to form and movement experimentation is embedded within social, historical and political contexts, eschewing ideas of aesthetic formalism premised on removal from these contexts. Pomare’s theory of vitality works through choreographic citations of embodied nuances drawn from black social life (e.g. the slow lean, drooping mouth, and twitching arm of the junkie on the streets of Harlem). These citations point to context in Pomare’s choreographic strategy to connect with black audiences, to construct a shared sense of belonging through references to performances of everyday life. His theory joins a critique of the material conditions of black life in the U.S. (he specifically mentions people whose ‘vital’ responses to life don’t include the buffers of wealth and

privilege), with affirmations of the beauty in the cultural resources for survival developed within such conditions.

He explains how his experience of performing for audiences in Europe fueled a desire to perform in excess of the racialized terms of Western modernity:

Eventually, I felt Europe wasn’t for me. A Negro dancer is to them a ‘wild thing,’ exotic, you know. The white attitude is the same everywhere … I don’t create works to amuse white crowds, nor do I wish to show them how charming, strong and folksy Negro people are—as whites imagine them— Negroes dancing in the manner of Jerome Robbins or Martha Graham. Instead I’m showing them the Negro experience from the inside: what it’s like to live in Harlem, to be hung-up and uptight and trapped and black and wanting to get out. And I’m saying it in a dance language that originates in Harlem itself. My audiences, some of them very sophisticated, though black, sense this and identify with it in a way no white man ever identifies with most white works.21

He is driven by a yearning to operate on different terms than those of global white supremacy: “the white attitude is the same everywhere.” This desire manifests in his development of choreography that seeks resonance with black audiences through the use of shared movement languages. Pomare was drawn across the globe, to Europe and back, by a desire to escape the constrictions of imposed and limiting definitions of prescribed blackness, as a fixed identity. His investment in a dance language that originates in

Harlem simultaneously reveals a deep appreciation for the profound cultural resources cultivated in forms of black life and the epistemology of the lived experience of blackness, “what it’s like to live in Harlem.”

In his speech, Pomare positions vitality in direct opposition to primitivism, caustically referencing the word ‘primitive’ throughout.22 In contrast, he defines vitality in this way: “Vitality is neither crude, incompetent, nor a by-product of groping ignorance. It is the expression of a people who have a direct and immediate response to

life, people whose ‘art’ is a channel for expressing powerful beliefs, hopes and fears and desires.”23 This concept is so central to his choreographic philosophy that he went on to establish a dance studio called the Vital Arts Foundation. Pomare’s theory of vitality uses

‘black form’ and its vital connection to black social life, the material conditions from which it emerges, as a strategy to communicate urgent messages to black audiences. He is driven by a sense of connection.

However, this sense of connection is not uncomplicated or based on a homogenizing sameness. Pomare connects the décalage of diaspora—the misunderstandings, misrecognitions, and mistranslations across national borders—to his lived experience:

I want to talk about black people coming from across the ocean to Harlem. I want to talk about black people coming from Panama, Jamaica, the West Indies … As an immigrant black, I had a hell of a hard time identifying because the white man had convinced you that we foreign blacks are more monkeys than he has convinced you that you are—you know, banana pickers and the whole shit. I have paid my dues on that level, like at P.S. 184. They laughed my ass off. I think we’re better today; I think we’ve gotten back together; let’s keep it together. It was that little problem which drove me to Europe.24

Pomare’s sense of not belonging drove him to Europe and back. Having been many places, but not feeling quite at home in any of them, his sense of displacement articulates a global sensibility of the exclusions of whiteness and a longing for black connections.

Pomare acknowledges the gaps and misunderstandings of diasporic décalage—“banana pickers and the whole shit”—making a direct appeal to audience members in a call for solidarity against global forms of white supremacy—“let’s keep it together.”

His speech resonates with Cynthia Young’s description of a radical U.S. Third

World Left, a form of coalitional politics and diasporic consciousness developed in the

1960s, that connects the experiences of black people in the U.S., as an internal colony, to decolonization and class struggles worldwide.25

What happened to me in Europe? I learned to love and dig a Third World people … When I decided to come back, I came back for a specific reason, and that was and is to say to black Americans, “I, your brother who came across the ocean to Harlem, am here, baby and I am with you; I am one of you; the whole dark world is one.” I came back to do something, and that is to tell black people that I discovered black oneness in Europe.26

Pomare uses black oneness as a bridge discourse, while simultaneously acknowledging décalage as integral within a complex diasporic structure of belonging-in-blackness. His desire to connect with black audiences in/on black terms draws him back to the U.S.

“This is the kind of experience whites don’t understand, and which I try to communicate to Negro audiences in their own terms.”27 Pomare’s embodied terms are drawn from, and make reference to, epistemologies of black social life through their formal qualities. He repurposes the concert dance stage as a platform to use these terms to communicate with black audiences.

The embodied nuances of ‘vital’ responses to life are imbricated with place, with the material conditions that give rise to specific movement patterns. This recalls the second definition of belonging: of a person fit in a place or environment. “After losing many nights of sleep, I made up my mind that it would be a waste of time and energy to bring dances which are unrelated to the people’s conditions and surroundings to them.”28

Pomare’s unrelenting critiques target the material conditions of Black neighborhoods as sites of the structural violence of internal exclusion from the category of the ‘human.’

Simultaneously, he positions these conditions as a site of affirmation—acknowledging the emergence of black beauty and forms of black joy in the embodied ways of being in the world developed in response to these material conditions. Pomare explains his 65

choreographic process: “I have been working in Black neighborhoods, and my intent, what I’ve been trying to do so far, is to discover black form, black form. You know, there is a way we walk and talk and sing and eat and take a crap.”29 He positions the most mundane and quotidian forms of black life as culturally significant, worthy of and demanding close choreographic attention.

Pomare studies performances of everyday life to elucidate the terms of a black movement aesthetic: “It’s important for me as a choreographer to know how the baby moves, how the father moves, how the mother moves. I must know this if I am going to communicate urgent messages to them in terms of movement. That is the discovery part of my paper, the desire and attempt to define the beauty of or if you insist ‘Art’ of black life.”30 Pomare reorients the concept of aesthetics, as a science of beauty in Art, from its universalist (ethnocentric) European formulations (e.g. Kantian aesthetics, which remove considerations of beauty in art from historical and cultural context in a focus on the metaphysical visual apprehension of a viewer) toward a consideration of the material conditions from which cultural products arise.31 Paul Taylor, in his exploration of black aesthetics as a philosophical tradition, offers a useful performative definition that resonates with Pomare’s choreographic philosophy: “to do black aesthetics is to use art, analysis or criticism to explore the role that expressive objects and practices play in creating and maintaining black life-worlds … artists do this when they draw on the resources of black expressive culture in their work or when they examine the challenges and pleasures of blackness in their work.”32

Pomare’s focus on the nuances of quotidian movement also includes vernacular forms that are more legible as dance, “When I dance like an American black person or

like a West Indian black person or like a black person anyplace, my dance talks to all black people. You know, we all have a kind of rhythm, a similarity of being. (But we don’t have the kind of rhythm THEY think we have. THEY don’t know what it’s about).”33 Here Pomare positions the distinct articulations of joints in different cultural contexts—American is not collapsed with West Indian—as also shared, through a diasporic, Africanist rhythmic sensibility across contexts. Pomare’s declaration “my dance talks to all black people” recalls Edwards’s question, “What does it mean to say … that one articulates a joint?” and his answer “The connection speaks.” Pomare positions the articulated joints of dancing bodies across the diaspora as potential speaking connections.

This shared sensibility simultaneously resists THEIR primitivist constructions that would naturalize complex rhythmic structures of movement or reduce blackness into a homogenizing sameness. As dance scholar Anthea Kraut explains, “the notion of diaspora not only troubles stereotypes of black people as unthinking, uncivilized exotics.

It also replaces the hierarchies and dichotomies on which primitivism depends with a model of black influences and exchange not wholly dependent on any white arbiter. That is, whereas primitivism views blackness only vis-à-vis whiteness, diaspora foregrounds the relations within blackness.”34 The shift towards diaspora, then, is also a shifting of terms, a movement toward self-determination—the capacity to define ourselves, speak for ourselves and operate on the terms of our own choosing. Rejecting THEIR lens for viewing black bodies means centering and articulating the relations within blackness.

This choreographic theory of vitality, as a study of the aesthetics of black life, is also a theory of subjectivity that focuses on the relations within blackness. Pomare

revises European notions of a sovereign individual self, to propose a self that is entangled with other subjectivities in complex histories. “In coming back from Europe, I found it necessary to forget myself as I had wanted to see myself before. You see, the whole

European trip was intended to make me into a unique individual, you know, like Damion.

But this whole Thomas Mann stuff, this whole Gestalt just simply turns out to be unrelated to my reality. Therefore, I came back because I found out I ain’t going nowhere unless all of us go somewhere.”35 Pomare rejects the paradigmatic journey to find his individual self, premised on European philosophies of autonomous subjectivity.36 Instead his journey leads him to an understanding of subjectivity as entangled with others, “all of us.” This “all of us” references a collective sense of self, resonating with the articulations of ‘ourselves’ in concepts of black self-determination, and standing in stark contrast to a sovereign individual with the capacity to dispossess others in the conception of subjectivity through property-in-the-person. The effects of a model of personhood premised on sovereignty are clear in Jose Muñoz’s argument:

… that ideologies that enable empire are shored up by a reification of the individual sovereign subject who can think of itself as differentiated from a larger sense of the commons. Thinking of the self as purely singular enables a mode of imagining the self as not imbricated in a larger circuit of belonging … Such a logic of the singular that eschews plurality is able to self-authorize oneself to dispossess those outside any particular logic of the singular.37

Those who exist in excess of the logic of the singular subjectivity of the ‘human,’ defined through property-in-the-person, have been historically subject to dispossession and disenfranchisement in histories of colonization and slavery.

In his speech Pomare follows his critique of a sovereign self with a favorite anecdote: “With this knowledge, I forgot my unique self and interestingly enough it

drove me to church. The first thing I did after coming back from Europe, was to walk into a little place on 122nd Street right off Morningside Park where, you know, that side of the park is white and this side is black. I walked in and the preacher said, ‘Well, welcome, sinner.’ I thought, “Wow Baby, you must go where you will be exposed; expose yourself.’”38 Pomare’s conception of self is not a hermetically sealed sovereign individual, but promotes exposure as a way of being in the world. His anecdote promotes this self-exposure, while simultaneously performing an exposure of the ways in which property (in the person) divides urban space—“that side of the park is white [Columbia

University] and this side is black [Central Harlem].” His new conception of self is the self as a multiplicity, “I am in constant search of another self now … I’m talking to black people, and I have to know how to be articulate to black people … I study myself as a people.”39 Pomare studies the nuanced articulation of joints in performances of everyday life to create a dance language that originates in Harlem and seeks to speak to and connect (with) black people. To study the self “as a people” reorients the self, conceived as an autonomous, sovereign individual, by positioning personhood as entangled in a matrix of cultural and historical influences (and ethical and political responsibilities), what Muñoz refers to as a “larger circuit of belonging.”

Pomare’s theory of vitality, as a theory of subjectivity, reorients the figure of the

‘human.’ Vitality, or black form, evidences an epistemology of survival and resistance:

Beauty—aesthetics—has to do with the power of expression, and goes deeper than visual appearance. Our moving experiences of life here in America have surrounded us, loomed menacingly in front of us, beaten us, given us little to hope for, beaten us again, and then lynched us. We’ve paid our dues, baby. The nobility of our survival is a testament to our basic humanity… Knowing the reality of all this, in America, circa 1970, every American should be able to say truthfully: black is beautiful.

Pomare’s theory of vitality participates in Fred Moten’s theorization of the aesthetics of the black radical tradition, especially through the evocation of an epistemology of survival—knowledge of freedom produced in conditions of unfreedom—that testifies to fundamental humanity through cultural resources for survival developed in an anti-black nation and world.40 Pomare not only reorients European philosophical discourses of aesthetics, by attending to cultural and historical specificity instead of universality, he also reorients the conceptual figure of the ‘human’ in Western philosophy, by attending to the constitutive humanity of its ‘outside’ and the beauty rendered in/by the experiences of this outside. “Insisting on black beauty, and on the ideological and political dimensions of the stigmatization of black bodies, has been and remains a vital part of the work of black aesthetics.”41

Home to Harlem 1964: Blues for the Jungle

The blues are not worth the dues pai …d in order to produce them, but they are part of the condition of possibility of the end of such extortion. —Fred Moten

Pomare credits his close friend James Baldwin with his return to the United States for the Freedom March in Washington D.C. in 1963. They also organized a march in

Amsterdam in 1964 before Pomare returned to New York, where he would live for the remainder of his life. “I flew home from Amsterdam for the march on Washington, then flew right back for a march in Amsterdam, which I’d worked on with James Baldwin to organize. That was when I made up my mind I was going home. And I came back with one ballet in mind—‘Blues for the Jungle.’ ‘Blues’ came out of my having lived in

Harlem at an impressionable age, and becoming more involved with my blackness—

reflecting on it, learning about it historically—while I lived in Europe.”42 This moment of return, following the 1964 Harlem riot, is a performative act of belonging. He chooses to be in New York at this moment, feeling “strongly that this is where he belongs.”43

Pomare began working on Blues for the Jungle in Europe in 1962, and it premiered in

New York on October 16, 1966 at the 92nd Street Y. His theory of vitality is elaborated in Blues through his use of movement material that emerges from, and is marked by, the material conditions of the ‘jungle’ of Harlem.

Blues articulates a series of six scenes to construct an argument about property-in- the-person as the conditions of possibility for the 1964 Harlem riot: Slave auction.—

Behind prison walls.—Preaching the gospel.—View from a tenement window.—

Junkie.—Riot. Each scene details mechanisms that exclude African Americans from citizenship, society, and the figure of the ‘human,’ culminating in the riot as a collective refusal of these terms. Pomare’s choreographic articulations join: the auction block, which transforms people into property; to prison, as a removal from society and stripping of basic rights; to a critique of the church, in colonizing and pacifying dominated populations with the promise of salvation; to tenements, as the result of housing discrimination in conjunction with a scene of domestic violence; to the internalized self- destruction and social pathology embodied in the figure of the junkie; to the climactic scene in which the dancers stage a riot in the audience.

Blues combines modern dance vocabulary with citations of quotidian movement drawn from repertoires of black social life, joining the street and the concert stage through dancing bodies as sites that articulate forms of belonging. The first section,

“Auction Block,” opens with a man (Chuck Davis in the 1966 filmed version) standing

on a block, performing slow contractions of the rib cage, building tension in his body and the surrounding space. The voice of an auctioneer, appraising the physical characteristics of the ‘property’ resonates menacingly around the dancers. Men enter the space crawling backwards on their knees, arms clasped behind their heads. Women enter, walking backwards, pushing their hands away from their chests, their ribcages contracting in fractured rhythmic pulsations. The narration cries out, “Going, going, gone!”

“Behind Prison Walls” is a men’s trio in striped tank tops. It was originally performed by Pomare, Martial Roumain, and Carl Paris. The music, “I Got a Hammer” is a work/chain gang song, which drives the dancers, resounding in the space with its pressing call and response pattern. The choreography involves modern dance vocabulary, such as deep hinges to the floor, swinging fan kicks, and rapid knee spins.

The section ends with a solo for Pomare. He reaches and lunges, hinging to the floor, rubbing his face into it. There is incredible muscular tension in his body. Simultaneously his fingers remain loose as he holds an imaginary partner in the memory of an embrace.

Sudden movements interrupt the flow—his arm flails behind him, a spastic off-balance passé seems to come from nowhere. The setting of prison and the sonic intertext of the chain gang song indicates the continuities of systemic internal exclusion in the afterlife of slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment banning slavery had a loophole—criminals did not have access to the basic rights of the human or the citizen. This led to the development of discourses of black criminality, and, as many scholars and activists have argued, to the current situation of mass incarceration of black and brown people within the prison industrial complex.44

“Preaching the Gospel” opens with a woman (Carole Johnson in 1966) on a block, wearing a handkerchief and a long sleeved leotard with circle skirt, classical modern dance attire. A man in a deep squat in front of her is shirtless wearing tight pants, and clenching fists in front of his face. The preacher enters, in a suit jacket with a black brimmed hat. Dancers who have entered the stage follow him offstage in tortured convulsions while Carole stays behind for her solo. She holds her elbows, rising onto her toes in a relevé and then drops into a bent-legged attitude turn, shuffling backwards in a circle with extended arms. She kneels, grabbing her own hands, twisting, distorting, pulling to the very edge of her physical capacity. The group returns, and the preacher places the bible over her head.

The next scene opens with a woman twirling her hair (Delores Vanison), sitting in a chair back to back with a man (Ronald Pratt) touching his neck. “View from a

Tenement Window” conveys domestic violence and public intimacy through the blurring of public and private space in close urban quarters. In their dispute, the dancers pull each other close, almost kissing, before roughly shoving one another away. The section culminates with him strangling her and pulling her offstage. This scene stages the publicity of private life in the overcrowded tenements of Harlem-as-ghetto, as well as placing the issue of domestic violence against women center stage, a radical topic to raise in public in 1966, much less to perform on the ‘proper’ concert stage.45

Junkie

In the grainy black and white 1966 version of “Junkie” Pomare wears jeans, a light jacket, a black beret and turtleneck with sunglasses. He cites the singular physical vocabulary and nuances of the addict—mouth drooping at the corners, scratching his forearm, holding his crotch, the shuffling walk, and the almost virtuosic lean, in which the addict is hunched over, eyes closed, inclined just to the point of toppling, without ever quite going over the edge. His body convulses, his fingers grasp for nothing, and he squishes his chin against his shoulder, distorting his facial expression even further. These embodied quotations, drawn from everyday life on the streets of 1960s Harlem are cut with movement more readily recognizable as ‘dance.’ He draws his foot up his leg into a parallel passé, arms reaching in opposition, straining at the very limit of his range of motion. He breaks into a little shuffling tap dance, then gently waves it away, chuckling as he stumbles across the stage. He vaults from the floor into buffalo jumps, displaying incredible strength and rebound as he springs into the air with double attitude bent legs.

His signature fan kick whips around in opposition to a high curving arm above.

The junkie turns into the corner to light a cigarette, grabbing his arm at the elbow and collapsing into an overdose. In some versions he takes off his belt to cinch off the veins in his arm. His body flops on the ground, jerking unpredictably, his feet twitching.

This episode doesn’t end the solo. His recovery performs the cyclical nature of overdose and addiction. Pomare pulls off his sunglasses, revealing his eyes. In one of the most compelling moments of the solo, he softly touches his lips, and his eyes convey the ecstatic state, the escape from this world that the junkie relentlessly pursues. His eyes, fixed on something beautiful that the audience cannot see, reveal his departure, a sublime

state of relief. This blissed out moment is cut with the instability of his stance, facial contortions, and animated talking to an invisible presence. As he leaves the stage, he makes a little dismissive hand gesture, as if to say, ‘Hey man—it’s okay.’ In other versions of the piece, for example in the 1985 documentary Dance Black America, he goes into the audience, directly engaging them, demanding them to satisfy his fix. This version ends with an overdose. Pomare’s head hangs lifelessly off the edge of the opera house stage.

“Junkie” provides a compelling example of Pomare’s use of choreographic citations from black life. The piece cites the singular movement of the junkie in order to critique, or ‘read,’ the effects of structural violence on the body and the psyche. One reviewer notes the psychological dimension embodied in “Junkie”: “Pomare probed deeper into the problem by revealing the deepest destructive result of prejudice, the black man’s self-hate.”46 This internal dimension of the piece resonates with psychologist

Frantz Fanon’s description of the colonization of the mind as a byproduct of oppression.47

Pomare’s describes his experience as a performer, “The thing that I try to reach when I do

‘Junkie’ is articulated anger … as a dancer and a performer it’s a study in self- destruction.”48 In the larger context of Blues, “Junkie” becomes a culmination of self- destruction resulting from the exposure of the self to the historical and political circumstances in the preceding scenes. Pomare’s use of the term “articulated anger” is distinct from his reputation in the white press as the ‘angry black choreographer.’ In response to this reputation he clarifies, “Angry, I wouldn’t call myself angry for seeing these things, just call me alert.”49 The articulated anger he reaches for in “Junkie” is the result of critical analysis. It is the culminating affect produced by the articulation of the

previous scenes of Blues, which, when joined, constitute an alert analysis of systemic racism as the historical and political conditions of possibility for the junkie on the streets of 1960s Harlem.

During the 1950s and 60s Harlem was flooded with hard drugs. When I interviewed dancers Abdel Salaam and Martial Roumain, who grew up in the vice districts of Harlem and Times Square at this time, they were so familiar with the physicality of the addict that they immediately broke into this embodiment, the facial distortions and signature lean.50 Salaam remembered how his elementary school was flooded with heroin. He spoke of children doing it in the fifth grade. The aim of Pomare’s critique in “Junkie” is clear in Wahneema Lubiano’s discussion of the ways that the figures of drug addicts and dealers are deployed to justify increased policing and surveillance of black neighborhoods: “as if drugs and the black underground economy of which they are a part are what is determining the contours of our lives and not the operation of an unfettered and capitalist political economy that has declared war on jobs, poor people, and black people.”51 Blues begins with racialized capitalism—the aporia of people-as-property—and articulates the enduring forms of exclusion and privation determined by this capitalist political economy. It gathers momentum, leading up to

“Junkie” as a figure of black pathology and abject outsider status, a figure that simultaneously refuses pathologization by indexing the structural dimensions of the material conditions from which he arises.

One of the first gestures in “Junkie” is Pomare pointing his finger directly at the audience. Rather than internalizing this social hatred, as the junkie does, Pomare forces it back on the audience, transforming the internalized anger, as a private emotion, into

affective tension in the performance space.52 As Pomare approaches audience members, begging for a fix, he thrusts the scene of the junkie’s abjection, which is passed over in daily life, avoided on the subway train and the street corner, into the concert stage spotlight. The audience is provoked to consider how their subjectivity is entangled with this figure (who is also not just a figure, but a human being) in relation to the larger political economies that create the material conditions for his emergence: the afterlife of slavery in the formation of Harlem-as-ghetto. The embodied references of “Junkie” in conjunction with the preceding scenes, articulate an epistemology of the U.S. political economy, arising from the lived experience of growing up in Harlem.53

“Harlem Knows”: Embodied Epistemology in “A Report from Occupied Territory”

Negroes have always held, the lowest jobs, the most menial jobs, which are now being destroyed by automation. No remote provision has yet been made to absorb this labor surplus. Furthermore, the Negro's education, North and South, remains, almost totally, a segregated education. And, the police treat the Negro like a dog.

—James Baldwin

The development of Blues between 1962 and 1966 is significant. It positions the history of (people as) property in America as the condition of possibility for the 1964

Harlem riot. James Baldwin, Pomare’s close friend and impetus for returning ‘home’ to

New York, was born and raised in Harlem. On July 11, 1966, Baldwin wrote an article for The Nation, entitled “A Report from Occupied Territory,” reflecting on the conditions that led to the 1964 Harlem riot. The piece is a searing indictment of the nation’s ongoing internal exclusion of African Americans, “a deep and dangerous estrangement.”54 Baldwin opens his essay by recounting the brutal thrashing of a salesman on April 17, 1964 because he dared to question why two policemen were 77

beating a child. He connects this incident to the case of the Harlem Six, who similarly tried to defend younger children from police brutality.55

As the article continues, Baldwin links local and global forms of state violence to property interests: the policing of Harlem, as an investment in protecting “white business interests” (the property interests of the economic and political elite) to the Vietnam War as U.S. imperialist aggression in protecting its global interests.56 This link articulates the concrete jungle of Harlem with the geopolitical jungle of Vietnam: “one is also under the necessity of escaping the jungle of one’s situation into any other jungle whatever.”57

Baldwin intimates the growing suspicion in Harlem that police brutality and conscription into service in Vietnam are interrelated ways to deal with the ‘Negro problem.’ He quotes the “bitter prescience” in the observation of one of the boys from the Harlem Six:

“They just don’t want us here, period!”58

This suspicion is connected to a larger epistemology of the U.S. political economy from the lived experience of black social life in the urban ghetto. Baldwin, like Pomare and Lubiano, directs his critique at the capitalist economy that has declared war on jobs, poor people and black people.59 He references this epistemology of the political economy throughout the article: “Harlem knows.” “No one in Harlem will ever believe that The Harlem Six are guilty—God knows their guilt has certainly not been proved.

Harlem knows, though, that they have been abused and possibly destroyed, and Harlem knows why—we have lived with it since our eyes opened on the world.”60 He connects this embodied epistemology to racialized forms of subjectivity conceived through property-in-the-person in his evocation of the “No Knock” and “Stop and Frisk” laws.

The latter allows police to stop and search (certain) bodies on the street, while the former

allows them to enter (some) people’s homes unannounced: “Harlem believes, and I certainly agree, that these laws are directed against Negroes.” Racialized personhood determines which bodies are stopped and searched and which homes will be violated without a warrant.61

Baldwin also conveys the sensory details, the phenomenological dimensions of

‘Harlem knows’ as epistemology: “This means that I also know, in my own flesh, and know, which is worse, in the scars borne by many of those dearest to me, the thunder and fire of the billy club, the paralyzing shock of spittle in the face, and I know what it is to find oneself blinded, on one’s hands and knees, at the bottom of the flight of steps down which one has just been hurled.”62 This intimate corporeal knowledge of the political economy registers at the level of the body, constituting a way of knowing ingrained in/as the flesh.63 In this economy, (white) property (in-the-person) interests are placed above the physical safety and civil rights of black people. Rather than protecting the community that pays taxes for this service, the police are the “hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function … This is why those pious calls to ‘respect the law,’ always to be heard from prominent citizens each time the ghetto explodes, are so obscene.”64 Blues for the Jungle culminates with this explosion.

Riot

The final section of Blues is introduced by the slave auctioneer’s voice—a sonic intertext from the opening auction scene that works to remind the audience of the conditions of possibility for the 1964 Harlem riot, in the temporal entanglements of the

afterlife of slavery. People-as-property forms this national historical aporia. “Riot” opens with a prostitute in a blonde wig, slinking in from the wings. She is followed onstage by a nun, the Salvation Army lady, the boxer, the ‘cool Madison Avenue type,’ the bag lady who shouts epithets at no one, and the policeman, in charge of regulating the scene, maintaining law and order. Pomare, as the junkie, twitches on the ground. He is ignored and stepped over by the others. The general estrangements of African Americans from the nation are underscored in Pomare’s exposure of the fungibility of black life in the

U.S.65

The opening scene of “Riot” is a Harlem populated by, in Pomare’s words

“socially unacceptable types.”66 This distinction between (white) stereotype and

“socially unacceptable type” is a point of confusion across articles and reviews of Blues.

However, it is an important one. Pomare’s technique of drawing on his lived experience of growing up in Harlem, references and critiques the material effects of exclusion manifested in social unacceptability, rather than presenting stereotypes that confirm white expectations of black social pathology. “Every character in my dances has his real life counterpart. They’re not white stereotypes.”67 The distinction here is between the source of pathology: the individual who fails to conform to norms of the ‘human’ and the citizen, versus the structural forms of inequality and exclusion that produce the outside of the citizen and the human, embodied as “socially unacceptable types.”

Reading Blues for the Jungle with “A Report from Occupied Territory” puts the conditions of possibility for the 1964 Harlem riot into sharp relief: “And all of this happened, all of this and a great deal more, just before the ‘long, hot summer’ of 1964 which, to the astonishment of nearly all New Yorkers and nearly all Americans, to the

extremely verbal anguish of The New York Times, and to the bewilderment of the rest of the world, eventually erupted into a race riot. It was the killing of a 15-year-old Negro boy by a white policeman which overflowed the unimaginably bitter cup.”68 Baldwin’s statement continues to resonate, just over fifty years later, with disturbing accuracy in the contemporary activism of the Black Lives Matter movement to end (state sanctioned) police brutality against black people. In one version of Blues, the sequence of events described by Baldwin incites the riot scene. A boy approaches the policeman, shoving a newspaper article in his face. The policeman shoots him, and the dancers stage a riot in the audience, throwing chairs, screaming, and thrusting newspapers in the audience’s faces. Pomare implicates the audience directly in this shooting.69 Baldwin’s and

Pomare’s critiques are aimed at the systemic oppression woven into the social fabric of

American democracy. The threads of liberal humanism and racialized capitalism are intertwined in the (exclusions of the) figure of the proper subject, the ‘human’ defined through property-in-the-person. Baldwin states outright that his report is “a plea for the recognition of our common humanity. Without this recognition, our common humanity will be proved in unutterable ways.”70 Pomare locates humanity in the cultural resources for survival developed in black life: “The nobility of our survival is a testament to our basic humanity.”71 At stake is the definition of the human.

Pomare’s concept of vitality not only provides a critique of structural racism and its material effects, but also conveys a deep appreciation, affirmation and love for black social life, for the collective cultural resources (e.g. jazz, blues, soul, funk) developed in an anti-black nation and world. Baldwin also attests to this dimension. He writes that attempts to leave the material conditions of deprivation and violence of black social life

in the U.S. “will be painfully complicated by the fact that the ways of being, the ways of life of the despised and rejected, nevertheless, contain an incontestable vitality and authority.”72

Pomare’s choreographic theory of vitality in Blues and “Junkie” draws on embodied citations to perform the epistemology of “Harlem knows” on the concert stage.

Deploying the ways of being and knowing derived from black social life in Harlem, he works through a dance language that originates in Harlem—to articulate “black oneness” as a larger structure of diasporic belonging-in-blackness. He uses diasporic citation in his choreographic articulation of a critique of the U.S. political economy situated within the racism of Western modernity. Simultaneously his choreography affirms shared experiences within blackness and celebrates the cultural resources for survival—the

“incontestable authority and vitality” of the despised—developed in an anti-black world as testaments to a fundamental humanity. Pomare’s desire to form connections with and among black audiences is ultimately a search for a structure of belonging in excess of subjectivity premised on property in the person.

NOTES

1 Jennifer Dunning, “Man’s Inhumanity to Man,” New York Times (New York, NY), November 13, 1983.

2 Fanon describes the way his body is framed in advance by “a historico-racial schema … provided by … white man who had woven me out of a thousand details anecdotes, and stories. I thought I was being asked to construct a physiological self, to balance space and localize sensations, when all the time they were clamoring for more.” Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1952), 91.

3 Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford UP, 1988); E. Patrick Johnson, “SNAP! Culture: A Different Kind of ‘Reading,’” Text and Performance Quarterly 15, no. 2 (April 1995): 122-142.

4 Pomare died on August 8, 2008, at the age of 70.

5 Rachel Fensham, “Breakin’ the Rules: Eleo Pomare and the Transcultural Choreographies of Black Modernity” Dance Research Journal. 45, no. 1 (2013): 55. In addition to these four continents, in his later career Pomare worked in South Africa and in Taipei, Taiwan, on an artistic project that is continued today by former Pomare dancer Martial Roumain.

6 Arthur T. Wilson, "Eleo Pomare: "Pomare Power!"-Dance Theater Passion." African American Genius in Modern Dance (Durham, NC: American Dance Festival, 1993): 22.

7 Fanon 1952.

8 Pomare’s piece Las Desenamoradas refers to this negative family experience, especially the domineering matriarch figure. Harvey 2013, Salaam 2013.

9 Ric Estrada, "3 Leading Negro Artists and How They Feel about Dance in the Community: Eleo Pomare, Arthur Mitchell, Pearl Primus," Dance Magazine, November 1968, 45-58; Wilson 1993.

10 In Fensham’s interview this refers to himself, while in Wilson’s it refers to himself and classmate Dudley Williams, later a noted dancer with Alvin Ailey’s company. See Fensham 2013; Wilson 1993. 11 Wilson 1993. Manning 2004.

12 Dunning 1983.

13 Ibid.

14 Kraut 2003, 435.

15 Fensham 2013; Thomas A. Johnson, "'I Must Be Black and Do Black Things'" New York Times (New York, NY), Sept. 7, 1969; Perpener 2005, 209.

16 Fensham, 46.

17 Eleo Pomare, Beginsville Speech. Circa 1970. Eleo Pomare Dance Company Archive (via Glenn Conner).

18 In the documentary Free to Dance Pomare states, “I was very conscious of not wanting to appeal to an audience who was there just to see the beauty of the Negro” followed by a neck roll that signifies an embodied ‘read.’ The terms of that ‘beauty’ are revealed by his gestural critique to be a limited and reductive set of imposed stereotypes. 83

19 Another example of his choreographic ‘reading’ of primitivism in Europe, is his performance at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. Pomare’s ‘reads’ the ignorance of Dutch promoters who ask for more “African” signifiers in his modern dance performance by performing the same modern dance choreography to drums. What Fensham terms a “mimetic pun,” is also a choreographic form of Signifyin’ or reading. Fensham, 46-48.

20 Pomare Beginsville Speech.

21 Estrada 46, my emphasis.

22 His critique of primitivism in the speech, especially the use of the term “primitive” to describe dance practices in excess of ballet, resonates with, anticipating by almost a decade, Joann Kealiinohomoku’s paradigm shifting intervention in dance studies. See Joann Kealiinohomoku, “An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance” 1977 in Moving History/Dancing Cultures: a dance history reader, edited by Ann Cooper Albright and Ann Dils (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001).

23 He notes that, in the U.S., European culture, like ballet and classical music, has been placed in a hierarchy above indigenous American forms, such as modern dance, jazz, and Native American cultural practices: “In America it has been, ironically, the enslaved black man who has developed a music, a dance, so vital that it would affect the total world culture … From the mysterious sufferings of the black man in a foreign land has come the jazz which has revitalized all western music.” Pomare Beginsville speech.

24 Pomare Beginsville speech.

25 Cynthia Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

26 Pomare Beginsville speech.

27 Estrada, 48, my emphasis.

28 Pomare Beginsville speech.

29 Ibid. Rather than understanding this statement as an essentialist formulation in which all black people walk the same, we see that Pomare’s theory of vitality attends to the ways that the unique articulation of joints developed in distinct contexts are simultaneously connected through Africanist, or diasporic, cultural sensibilities.

30 Ibid.

31 Immanuel Kant. “On the combination of taste with genius in products of beautiful art,” in Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

32 Paul Taylor, “Black Aesthetics.” Philosophy Compass, May 1 (2010): 2. Taylor defines black lifeworlds as “creative responses to the burdens of self-creation under the pressures of modern politics, with its constitutive commitments to anti-black racism and white supremacy. Modernity has been built in part on the myth that black people have no culture or civilization and on the related myth—embraced in different forms by anti-black racists and by anti-racists of all colours—that whatever practices black people have are primitive, timeless and homogenous.” Taylor, 4.

33 Pomare Beginsville speech.

34 Anthea Kraut. Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 146. 84

35 Pomare Beginsville speech.

36 This reference is to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.’ Originally published in 1928, it is what the Germans call a Bildungsroman, the story of the educational formation or initiation of a young, usually naive hero.

37 Jose Muñoz, “Race, Sex, and the Incommensurate: Gary Fisher with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick” in Queer Futures: Reconsidering Ethics, Activism, and the Political (Burlington: Ashgate, 2013): 114-115.

38 Pomare repeats this anecdote in several places. See Beginsville speech; Estrada 1968, 48; Dunning 1983. 39 Pomare Beginsville speech.

40 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

41 Taylor, 11.

42 Dunning 1983.

43 Charmaine Warren, “Eleo Pomare Portrait of a Master choreographer,” Black Masks: Spotlight on Black Art. Jan/Feb. 1993. Clippings File NYPAL Library.

44 See Ava Duvernay’s documentary and Michelle Alexander’s book for further explication of these dynamics. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010). Ava Duvernay, 13th Distributed by Netflix. October 7, 2016.

45 In his Beginsville speech, Pomare also attends to décalage across lines of gender, specifically in the case of black women: “I’ve done a lot of pieces on black women … Society does odd things to them.” He gives an example of seeing a woman in Harlem beneath a man poised with his fist ready to strike. Pomare describes his concern and, as he goes to intervene, “I better go get on top of this.” Suddenly she says to the man “‘Go on, hit me … After you do it, you better remember that I’m a woman.’ I said, “O.K., bravo.’ I was looking at a cultural pattern, a style, a way of being.” Pomare states that the closest thing to this choreography of everyday life is Aretha Franklin singing “Respect,” and begins to improvise a dance to “Respect” for the audience as a tribute to black women’s cultural ways of being in the world.

46 Jean Nutchern, “Anger, Sex and Spiritual Storms.” Dance Magazine, Oct. 1974, 31.

47 Fanon 1952.

48 Dance Black America. Pennebaker Hegedus Films, New York, NY 1983.

49 Estrada, 46.

50 Martial Roumain, Conversation with the author. New York, NY. October 15, 2016. Abdel Salaam, Conversation with the author. New York, NY. October 30, 2013.

51 Wahneema Lubiano, “Commonsense Black Nationalism: Policing Ourselves and Others” in The House that Race Built, 249.

52 Pomare’s dismissive reputation in the white press as an “angry black choreographer” treats anger as a private, personal emotion (of a closed self) rather than allowing a consideration of anger as a historical structure of feeling, an affect shared among black people as a result of epistemologies of the U.S. political economy and incisive analyses of structural oppression. Pomare’s commentary on “Junkie” as a study in 85

“self-destruction” also makes clear that this is a permeable self, a psyche that can be damaged, rather than closed autonomous self.

53 The solo choreographically forecasts knowledge of the recent admission by John Ehrlichman, chief of domestic policy in the Nixon administration, that their drug policy was a racially motivated project of criminalization (i.e. the reason why drug addiction was criminalized rather than being treated as a public health crisis). Beginning in 1968 heroin flooded into black communities, and was subsequently criminalized in relation to black people, while marijuana was criminalized in relation to hippies and the anti-war movement. Dan Baum, “Legalize It All: How to Win the War on Drugs” Harper’s Magazine. April, 2016. https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

54 James Baldwin, “A Report from Occupied Territory,” The Nation, July 11, 1966. There are no page numbers in the following references because the archived version of the article is online. https://www.thenation.com/article/report-occupied-territory/

55 Their interventions resonate with Pomare’s discussion of racing across the street to check on the woman defending herself on the street in Harlem. Their actions indicate an ethical imperative to protect vulnerable populations from potential and actual violence, an entangled sense of subjectivity concerned with the welfare of others.

56 Despite Harlem’s renown as an iconic African American neighborhood, the majority of the property holders have never been its black residents.

57 Baldwin, 1966.

58 “There is a very bitter prescience in what this boy—this ‘bad nigger’—is saying, and he was not born knowing it. We taught it to him in seventeen years. He is draft age now, and if he were not in jail, would very probably be on his way to Southeast Asia. Many of his contemporaries are there, and the American Government and the American press are extremely proud of them. They are dying there like flies; they are dying in the streets of all our Harlems far more hideously than flies. A member of my family said to me when we learned of the bombing of the four little girls in the Birmingham Sunday school, ‘Well, they don’t need us for work no more. Where are they building the gas ovens?’” Baldwin, 1966.

59 Baldwin connects the situation in Harlem at this historical moment with similar situations in Northern cities across the nation. Increased African American migration from the South, to escape Jim Crow legal segregation, the terror of lynchings, and the promise of better employment opportunities, was compounded in the North with lack of job opportunities because of automation, exclusion from labor unions, racist hiring practices, and overcrowding in urban areas because of de facto segregation.

60 Baldwin 1966.

61 There is a fundamentally choreographic dimension to these laws, which use the rhetoric of “furtive movements” to justify searches. These laws have since been ruled unconstitutional. https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20150304/midtown/read-memo-see-how-stop-and-frisk-rules-changed- under-new-nypd-edict, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/opinion/sunday/young-black-and-frisked-by- the-nypd.html

62 Baldwin 1966.

63 Here I am referencing Hortense Spillers theory of the flesh, and Alexander Weheliye’s elaboration of this concept, the ways in which the history of slavery reduces black people to flesh-as-property, erasing black personhood through commodification of bodies. Spillers 1987. Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 86

64 Baldwin 1966.

65 For more on the fungibility of black life see Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton, who elaborate Orlando Patterson’s concept of ‘social death,’ in the discourse of Afro Pessimism. Orlando Patterson, Slavery & Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); Frank B. Wilderson, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010); Jared Sexton “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro Pessimism and Black Optimism.” InTensions Journal. York University, 5, (Fall/Winter 2011). http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/jaredsexton.php

66 Pomare describes the figures in Blues as “socially unacceptable types.” Nutchern, 31. He tells an anecdote of filming Blues in Harlem, where Shirley Rushing, who played the prostitute, was changing costumes in a bar, and a real prostitute “wearing a proud African hairdo” shamed her for wearing a blonde wig. This demonstrates Pomare’s value of exposure—emphasizing to the dancers their entangled subjectivity with these socially unacceptable types—this is/could be you. Estrada, 50.

67 Estrada, 50.

68 Baldwin 1966.

69 The incidents that motivated police brutality in Baldwin’s account were far less aggressive than the theatrical conceit of shoving newspaper in the face of police. Both the salesman and the Harlem Six were interceding in situations where the police were beating children. This is why Baldwin terms his essay “Occupied Territory”: “Occupied territory is occupied territory, even though it be found in that New World which the Europeans conquered, and it is axiomatic, in occupied territory, that any act of resistance, even though it be executed by a child, be answered at once, and with the full weight of the occupying forces.” Baldwin 1966.

70 Baldwin 1966.

71 Pomare Beginsville speech.

72 Baldwin, 1966.

CHAPTER 3

THE MILITANT REFUSALS OF NARCISSUS RISING AND THE VITALITY OF THE HARLEM DIDDY BOP WALK

American homosexuality is a waste primarily because, if people were not so frightened of it—if it wouldn’t, you know—it really would cease in effect, as it exists in this country now, to exist. I mean the same way the Negro problem would disappear. People wouldn’t have to spend so much time being defensive—if they weren’t endlessly being condemned. … I know a lot of people who turn into junkies because they’re afraid they might be queer. —James Baldwin

[Pomare] brings in not only the themes of the new militants, but some of the socially aberrant behaviors that had started to invade our community, like drug addiction.

—Katrina Hazzard Gordon

This chapter takes up Gordon’s articulation of “militant” themes with “socially aberrant” behaviors in Pomare’s work, departing from her premise, but moving against her grain to consider the “aberrations in black” that comprise Pomare’s queer of color critique.1 Here I am riffing on the title of Roderick Ferguson’s queer of color critique, in which social aberrations, or deviations from social norms, comprise sites of critique for the contradictions of capital and state. This resonates with the way Pomare’s critiques depart from “socially unacceptable types.” Rather than positioning “socially aberrant” behaviors as external, and therefore invasive, to the community, I follow Baldwin’s evocation of the ways in which the figures of the queer and the junkie resonate with the

“Negro problem” as an articulated critique of the systems which produce them through exclusion and pathologization, through “being endlessly condemned.” In what follows, I turn from one of Pomare’s signature solos, “Junkie,” to consider its relation to Pomare’s

other key solo, Narcissus Rising—another ‘outsider figure’ who illustrates a distinct, but

I will argue integral, facet of the “vitality of the despised.”

Pomare’s leather G-string clad erotic solo Narcissus Rising (1968) offers a queer

(of color) critique of propriety through its performance of gender and sexual self- determination. In this chapter, I consider how the solo’s circulation among different performers offers a vehicle for multiple forms of non-normative desire. I examine three versions performed by Pomare, Martial Roumain and Donna Clark, locating their queer disruptions of heteronormativity not (only) in sexual object choice, but in their relationships to the norms of dominant society.2 From there, I expand the scope to situate Narcissus within a larger historical militant structure of feeling. Narcissus Rising works through embodied tension, both in Pomare’s approach to movement, and by seeking to cultivate affective tension in the performance space through its performative exposure of non-normative desire(s). I argue that this tension embodies and indexes a

‘militant’ structure of feeling among multiple liberation movements at this historical moment in refusals of the dominant terms for belonging: to concert dance, to the nation, to the citizen, and to the ‘human.’ I trace this historical affect in the ‘militant’ refusals of

‘black dance,’ as a black nationalist project within concert dance, as well as in protests and riots breaking out across the U.S. in coterminous ‘militant’ liberation movements:

Black Power and Gay Liberation. These militant refusals emerged from postwar heteronormative, nationalist regulations of the nuclear family as the ‘we’ horizon of the nation and the ‘human.’ I situate the 1965 Moynihan Report, a pathologizing discourse of black gender and sexual nonconformity and the figure of the ‘black family,’ as the condition of possibility for hegemonic black nationalist investments in white nationalist

liberal gender and sexual norms.3 Narcissus Rising’s choreography of nonnormative desire performatively functions as an exposure of tension along gender and sexual lines, revealing the décalage that haunts black nationalism and the Black Arts Movement as complex articulated structures of belonging-in-blackness. In its ‘militant’ refusal of narratives of pathology and the compulsion to desire normative subjectivity, Narcissus

Rising announces the capacity to desire differently.

Finally, I turn to a 1972 lecture demonstration, which serves as an illustration of

Pomare’s choreographic theory of vitality. The dancers perform various Harlem diddy bop walks to frame the way Pomare draws on Harlem’s everyday movement repertoires for “Junkie.” The diddy bop performs the double move of diaspora citation: joining

Pomare’s affirmations of the cultural resources for survival developed in black social life

(the pleasures of black sociality) with his incisive critique of the systemic and material conditions of possibility for the junkie. The performances of gender and sexual diversity conveyed in the bops affirm alternative terms, structures of belonging from a 1960s

Harlem lifeworld, that convey humanity in excess of the terms of property-in-the-person and the heteronormative regulations of white and black nationalisms. Considering

Narcissus and “Junkie” together illuminates Pomare’s strategic use of outsider figures in relation to the policing of the boundaries of the ‘human,’ while the alternative terms announced in the diddy bop walks point to historical traces of other ways of being

(human) (together) in the world.

Eleo’s Performance: Iconographic Quotations and the Queer Appropriations of Leathermen

Heavy boots stomp authoritatively—left foot, right foot—resounding in the space. A spotlight directed in the audience’s eyes begins to glow. The glare both reveals and obscures the gleaming contours, the sinewy curves, of a finely tuned instrument. The body is exposed, with the exception of leather gauntlets, leather boots that cover the ankles, a studded leather aviator cap pulled partially over one eye, and a studded leather G-string. Chains hang down from the G-string, swinging back and forth just below his knees. Dark sunglasses conceal his eyes.4 The tension in the body of the dancer is reflected in the opening music—a montage of motorcycle sounds followed by a siren.5

Pomare’s embodiment in his performance of Narcissus Rising cites the erotic postures of the figure of the leatherman. The leather iconography combined with his deployment of gestural quotations, like fisting and choking, works as a form of choreographic citation. It references his life/style and the historical forms of belonging that emerged in 1950s/60s gay leathermen’s queer sociality, associated with the ‘deviant,’ or socially aberrant, sexual practices of sadomasochism (S&M).

The leather-as-fetish costuming makes (in)direct reference to these historical processes of queer worldmaking, which were themselves based on a kind of citation-as- appropriation. The development of gay male leather clubs took up the outsider, rebel performances of 1950s figures like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and Marlon

Brando in The Wild One, appropriating the hypermasculine iconography of the classic symbols of the American male as erotic imagery for their own pleasurable purposes.6

Peter Hennen’s ethnography of leathermen describes this multilayered historical reference: “The first of these [gay leather organizations in the U.S.] were closely associated with motorcycles and riding during the 1950s and 1960s … since the mid-

1950s, these groups have fostered a hypermasculine image and, through a carefully managed self-presentation that includes various articles of leather clothing (e.g., vests, 91

chaps, caps, pants), a strong association with rough sex, bondage, discipline, and a variety of sadomasochistic practices.”7 The leather accouterments of the eroticized figure in the solo quote this aesthetic, referencing these historical forms of nonnormative belonging—in gay motorcycle clubs and leather bars, as well as ‘deviant’ sexual practices like S&M, which were not necessarily gay, but were certainly beyond the bounds of heteronormativity.

Abdel Salaam, who spent his formative years dancing in the same circles as

Pomare, connects the costuming to Pomare’s performance of community in everyday life:

“The gay community that Eleo hung out with, Eleo used to dress like that … tight leather pants, chaps, chains the whole bit … Sunglasses, black leather gloves, black leather jacket, spikes.”8 One of Pomare’s principal dancers, Dyane Harvey, also noted a detail of his costume: cock rings, which would have gone unnoticed by the uninitiated, but which would perform a kind of wink, an affirmation of belonging for those who recognized the accessory’s reference to sexual practices.9

Here Pomare’s use of choreographic Signifyin’ works through the surface level of

‘biker man’ or ‘tough guy,’ which reviews of Narcissus Rising at the time picked up on, while the second layer of meaning interpellates queer counterpublics by referencing and opening a space of belonging in the performance for those who could read the reference.10 As Kobena Mercer explains “…because homosexuality is not the norm, when images of other men, coded as gay, are received from the public sphere there is something of a validation of gay identity … an important means of saying ‘other gays exist’ … friendships, solidarities, collective identity—can come to the surface.”11 The iconographic quotations of these practices and performances of everyday life both portray

queer forms of belonging and hail audience members who can read them as queer collectivities or counterpublics.

The title, Narcissus Rising also functions as a citation, referencing avant-garde

Greenwich Village-based filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s 1963 queer cult classic Scorpio

Rising.12 The film exemplifies the leathermen’s strategy of appropriating symbols of hypermasculinity for the purposes of developing a queer aesthetic. Its portrayal of an actual (heterosexual) Coney Island biker gang is taken up for Anger’s own purposes as his choices of editing, shots and lighting layer alternative queer readings and references into its documentary-like format.13 Anger’s directorial eye, like Pomare’s careful choreographic attention, deliberately cultivates erotic tension through shots that linger over the naked torsos of men in deliberate acts of exposure, self-conscious posing and preening. Narcissus Rising references and parallels the film’s hailing of queer community through iconographic references to the embodied style of biker outlaw culture and gay leathermen’s appropriation of its hypermasculine erotic posturing.14

Dance critic Don McDonagh notes the confluence of social and erotic energies in the piece, which is “so much a vehicle for Pomare’s own special talents that it might not survive transference to another dancer, but the vividness of its imagery and combination of erotic and social energy make it particularly relevant to Pomare’s body of work.”15

The piece did survive transference to other dancers, and, while Pomare’s rendition makes references to his own life/style, the iterations that followed complicate a singular reading of the piece as strictly autobiographical, essentially gay, and even essentially male. As a vehicle for multiple forms of non-normative desire, the choreography continues to perform a disruptive queerness.

Martial’s Performance: Heterosexual Disruptions of the Heteronormative

The muscles of the arms bulge, as the hands shoot up to the invisible handles of the motorcycle. Like the machine it is riding, this body implies speed, danger, defiance, and seduction. With an easy grip, the wrists rotate, revving the bike, preparing the engine for motion. He settles into a low, wide squat. As his body moves unhurried, from side to side, the hips shift, rocking to the right, and then the left, thigh muscles rippling, slick with the oil that has been massaged into the shining brown skin. The movement of the pelvis is the center of the action, as the chains swing gently between the legs, accentuating each tiny pelvic articulation.

As the solo was transmitted to other bodies, it conveyed a multiplicity of desires in excess of heteronormative prescriptions and proscriptions. Martial Roumain began dancing with Pomare in 1968 and later performed the solo. He notes that in the process of transmission, slight adjustments in nuance, choreography, and intention were made to accommodate the particular dancer who was to embody it: “Eleo, the way he worked with people, is to bring that person’s idea, or inner artistry, or whatever it is he knew within that person, bring it out to that particular moment.”16 In our conversation

Roumain emphasized the “essence” of the character—in control, powerful, and maintaining a strong grip on the audience: “It’s not sexual, well yes it is … It’s for me how you maneuver, becoming a master, you put things to become, how you manipulate things that surround you, how you observe and make everybody do your will.”17

Roumain’s version of the solo maintained this essence of control, seeking to dominate the audience through a performance of erotic power.

While his version preserved the dimension of control, and contained the same iconographic references as Pomare’s to the culture of gay leathermen, Roumain performed a different kind of desire—one that did not necessarily have the same teleology of sexual object choice, but that nevertheless disrupted dominant social 94

heteronormative imperatives. Pomare directed Roumain to: “choose the couples in the audience, and make them move, intimidate them. You know, make the woman wet, make the man feel uncomfortable, even if they’re husband and wife, by the way.”18

Pomare’s instruction to Roumain reveals how, even when the object choice is heterosexual, the solo’s choreography seeks to disrupt heteronormativity in the couple form, sanctified and legalized in (the exclusionary privileged form of) marriage, implicated in the family, and privatized in domestic space, as the site for reproducing the nation and the prevailing social order. Pomare’s direction also upsets gender and sexual norms by centering a woman’s capacity for desire, foregrounding the intention to “make her wet.”

Roumain’s version can be read as referencing sexual practices like polyamory, and forms of sexual pleasure, which exist in excess of the couple form and the reproductive imperatives of the nuclear family. It also offers a ‘read’ on the failures of compulsory heteronormative protocols, in the cruelly optimistic attachment to marriage, as an institution (or a cluster of promises) that fails at least as often as it succeeds.19 This iteration moves the solo outside of a clear cut ‘gay’ identity or fixed sexual subjectivity, yet it remains queer in its relationship to heteronormative prescriptions and proscriptions.

Roumain’s version evidences sexual self-determination in its performance of the capacity to make sexual choices on terms other than those of marriage and reproduction (of the prevailing social order reflected in the nation-as-nuclear family) within compulsory heteronormativity.20 The combination of erotic arousal and discomfort solicited by

Pomare’s instruction also signals his strategy of working through deliberate exposure (of desire) and cultivating affective (erotic) tension in performance.21

Donna’s Version: Maintaining Erotic Power through Performative Withholding

Her hands clap overhead, before separating, one arm pulling slightly back, framing the face, as the other lowers to shoulder height, palm up, the chin slightly jutting out, proud, but simultaneously withdrawn, in control. This gesture is repeated five times, interspersed with measured, commanding walking around the space, slapping the body, riding the bike, and pointing directly at the audience, scanning a single finger across the horizon line.

Donna Clark’s version offers yet another twist, queering the solo further, complicating interpretations of the solo as essentially gay or essentially male. Pomare initially set the piece on her and another woman, Tara El Ibrahim, in the late 1990s in the context of the Alpha Omega Dance Company.22 The first time I witnessed the solo it was

Clark’s commanding performance in 2008 at Pomare’s memorial. She performed it in

September 2016 for the Queer NY International Arts Festival and, most recently, in May

2017 as a part of Dancing While Black at the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance

(BAAD). In stark contrast to heteronormative imperatives for women to be passive, receptive, docile, and submissive (both in social realms and in the sexual act), Clark’s version queers a conventional feminine role in its portrayal of a woman as the dominant figure, in power, on top, in control—of her desire, sexual choices, and the audience. Her interpretation hinges not on the teleology of sexual object choice, but on her embodiment of erotic power, which in turn relies on a carefully calibrated performance of withholding. She does not feminize the role so much as twist the hypermasculine aesthetic from the inside, queering fixed notions of identity and ‘proper’ gender roles.23

Clark echoed Roumain’s comments about the essence of the character: “And now he was making Narcissus, same intention, same story, for a woman … from what I recall, it was still a strong figure in control.”24 Pomare shared this sentiment, insisting that the meaning of the piece did not change with the gender.25 Of course, while the authorial 96

intention of the piece may not have shifted, it is likely that audience readings and perceptions took the performer’s gender into consideration. The insistence on maintaining the character’s ‘essence’ of control also functions as an acknowledgement that feminizing the role might jeopardize the embodiment of power and control in relation to audience perceptions. Clark discusses the way in which she calibrated her performance of gender: “It could have been easy to … do the feminine thing, I guess?

But to sort of erase that and just say person in control. You’d see the nuance change a little bit … that’s the fine line, I think in making it a piece about control versus a woman in this role.”26 The negotiation of that fine line has to do with the distinct regimes of vision for women’s bodies in the public sphere. In this regime, when women are perceived as feminine and sexual, they are frequently not in control of their bodies, their desires, their image and their capacity for sexual self-determination.27 This is particularly true in the socio-historical construction of black women’s sexuality as readily available.28

Clark’s fine-tuned shifts in gestural nuance and posture perform a withholding, a deliberate quietness, in order to maintain her position of power. Karyn Collins’s 2001 review of Clark’s performance picks up on her calibration of overt sexuality in relation to power:

In Clark's interpretation, the bold hip undulations as she rode her imaginary bike were more a dare of anger and danger rather than any sort of sexual seduction that might have been suggested by the black leather … even the quivering legs surrounding the bike's powerful engine [made] a statement about control. This was a woman proudly reveling in showing that she had the upper hand in all things—on and off the bike. Clark … was the twenty- first century embodiment of the 1970s superchick—all defiant glare and stalking feminist power.29

Claudia LaRocco’s 2008 review echoes Collins’ assessment, conveying the effectiveness of Clark’s manipulation of her image, her finely honed negotiation of power and the gaze, 97

as it registered with audience members: “On paper she sounds like a pinup, designed to rev more than just imaginary engines. Onstage she was something far fiercer and stranger, commanding attention whether defiantly grabbing her crotch or forcefully slapping at her body.”30 I provide Collins’s and LaRocco’s reviews as evidence of the reception of the iconic solo in Clark’s rendition. Their comments reveal that, for some spectators at least, Clark was able to subvert a simple objectification of her image—an oiled, black female body in a leather G-string as “pin up.” Through her paradoxical aggressive withholding, “something stranger and fiercer,” she maintained her grip on the audience, undermining the power of the spectatorial position. Her carefully attuned performance of control works through a fine-tuning of gestural tension and intensity.

But unlike Collins, I do see a dimension of sexual seduction in Clark’s performance, one that operates on her terms. As she refuses to occupy a prescribed gender role, Clark claims erotic power in her capacity to be a woman and to be sexual, to perform her desires and to remain in control of her body and her choices. Additionally, I read the resistance toward feminizing her performance (expressed by Clark, Pomare and

Roumain) less as a rejection of femininity in general, and more as a negotiation of power in the act of looking, especially in the way the solo reverses the gaze.31 This reversal means that, while the audience is able to cast lingering gazes over the contours of Clark’s exposed body, the potential for its objectification is complicated by the fact that she is also (a subject) staring back at them, cruising and assessing each and every one of them on her own time, like Pomare’s measured evaluation of the audience in the watermelon piece. In a role made by a man, for a man, referencing a male-dominated world,32

Clark’s performance indexes a gendered dimension of sexual self-determination—the

capacity to make choices beyond prescribed gender roles in the heteronormative imagination, while maintaining autonomy over her body and sexual choices.

Her tactic of withholding also provokes considerations of the role of interior subjectivity and agency over one’s body as autonomy. This is not an autonomous subjectivity (with the capacity to dispossess others), but instead refers to autonomy as control over one’s own body in contrast to (histories where black women were) occupying the status of a body-as-property, open to the invasions of state, capital, and sexual predation. Hortense Spillers has described this transmutation of body into property, and the concomitant openness of the body to sexual violation as the

“ungendering of the flesh.” Black men and women were positioned as “vulnerable, supine bod[ies]” capable of being “invaded/raided” by a woman or man. These bodies were as “ungendered” and separated from their own “active desire.”33 In the historical commodification of black bodies, black people, and especially black women’s, desires were invisibilized as they were simultaneously rendered vulnerable to sexual predation and the invasions of capital. Clark’s performance of gender and sexual determination foregrounds the politics of pleasure by placing a black woman’s desire center stage, and prioritizing her autonomy and control over her body and choices within this larger historical context.

Another dimension of sexual self-determination exists here, in relation to Rachel

Fensham’s argument that Pomare resisted Tudor’s forced exposure of his chest within a primitivist framework.34 In stark contrast to this instance, Pomare’s exposure of his almost completely nude body in Narcissus Rising combined with the character’s

‘essence’ of control, foregrounds his agency in choosing to expose his body, on his terms,

an act of embodied/sexual self-determination. In Pomare, Roumain, and Clark’s interpretations, the solo’s ‘outsider’ figure performs various queer articulations of gender and sexual self-determination—the ability to make sexual and gendered choices on one’s own terms, in excess of compulsory heteronormativity. Their performances of erotic power convey capacities to desire otherwise.

Minimalist Gesture, Intensification, and the Cultivation of Affective Tension

He runs his hand slowly across his body, touching himself from shoulder to crotch. Her body is in profile, but at a slight angle, as her hand snakes down the back of her thigh before slapping the exposed buttock. He grips the shiny, studded belt, as his thighs begin to quiver. A vibration builds throughout her body.

It’s a classic Eleo Pomare work that involves lots of tension … even in the premise behind it. —Donna Clark

The minimalist movement vocabulary in Narcissus Rising—a slow series of lunges, squats body rolls, and suggestive, though subtle, gestures—works through intensification.35 Like the minimalism in “Junkie” and the watermelon piece, the insistent physicality, and deliberate exposure of the choreographic references incite affective tension in the performance space. The tension embodied in the solo is both a hallmark of Pomare’s approach to movement and a performative affective state he sought to cultivate with audiences. Roumain describes how he sought to ensnare the audience through the intensification of minute gestures: “I know I’m onstage. I know the mood that I want to share with you. I had to bring myself into the state, to perform it. [It’s about] how intense you are within the moment. The minimal movement could achieve the tension or the intent.”36 The performer’s intention is to create a state of affective

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tension. This does not require “stretch movement” in Roumain’s words, but rather works through minimal gestures to bring the performer into a “state.” This state extended beyond the performer’s body to create a “mood,” an affective field registering between bodies, beneath the conscious level of signification in citation. The affective dimension of the minimalist choreography is also revealed by Donna Clark’s comment about watching the piece, “It wasn’t a lot of movement. It was this feeling, like I got it, but I’m not sure what I got, and I think that’s part of the allure of the piece. It’s like, I’m not sure what just happened, but I know what just happened.”37 In addition to deploying legible and layered citations, the choreography works through physical intensification, “this feeling” to transmit information on a level beneath conscious awareness.

Pomare’s principal dancer Dyane Harvey describes tension as an integral dimension of his approach to movement: “His movement was like pulling to the last sinew. It was scary and uncomfortable, but there is so much life in that. Living on the edge can become comfortable.”38 Narcissus and “Junkie” convey figures living on the edge of ‘proper’ society. The neighborhoods in which they circulate are the promiscuous racial and sexual economies of vice districts and tenderloins, neighborhoods determined by the extension of property-in-the-person into space.39 Occupying these radical lifeworlds, they point to improvised structures of belonging in the vitality of the despised,

“there is so much life in that … living on the edge.” Their outsider status references a shared erotics of survival in communities under siege, indexing the violence within liberal humanism on bodies that register in excess of the ‘human.’40

Narcissus ends with the sonic intertext of police sirens and the visual effect of the strobe light fracturing the performer’s body in the final ‘crash’ section. Dance critic Don

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McDonagh interprets the strobe as suggestive of police searchlights. He sees the performer as conveying an “outlaw sensibility which is forced to lead an existence beyond the borders of what are considered the normal boundaries of behavior. And who must also pay the price for that rebellion.”41 The reference of police searchlights in conjunction with the price for living in excess of normativity also point to a consideration of the larger historical context—the policing of bodies in excess of the ‘human’ through the criminalization of homosexuality. When placed in its historical context, Narcissus

Rising’s cultivation of affective tension, combined with sirens as aural intertexts and the splintering of the performer’s body in the strobe/searchlights, points to mounting social pressures in this moment: “to actually have a siren, it’s like an alarm, like something’s going to happen, something even did happen, that’s going to happen, or we’re planning for something to happen. It’s like preparation.”42 Narcissus was choreographed in 1968, in the wake and on the cusp of escalating protests and riots across the country.

Embodying Tension: A ‘Militant’ Structure of Feeling

The figure adjusts the hat, deliberately, self-consciously. Turning profile, the dancer’s arm reaches out, pulling an invisible gearshift before facing backward. Strong thighs lower the body into a deep hinge. One arm flies up into a fist, before the dancer turns, looking over their shoulder at the audience. Against the sensuous crooning of the lyrics, “Caress me baby,” the gloved hand slaps the shoulder, then the thigh. The smack is audible.

This part of the story (slaps shoulder and thigh) I’m saying—F you. Yeah, the slap is like I’m in control. This is my life. This is who I am in this moment, and this doesn’t bother me. It might make you uncomfortable. And that’s the other relationship to the audience. This is probably making you slightly uncomfortable. As it should. —Donna Clark

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Narcissus Rising has been described as having a “militant” aesthetic.43 I argue that the solo’s militant aesthetic and embodied tension are imbricated with the tensions of a larger ‘militant’ structure of feeling in this historical moment. ‘Militant’ was a keyword that surfaced frequently in my research.44 It is provocative as a term that is used to pathologize/criminalize, while simultaneously it indexes initial (state and state-sanctioned civil) violence as a form of fighting back. In this second sense it resonates with Angela

Davis’s recent call “to become more militant in our defense of vulnerable populations.”45

I see this second sense as a pervasive theme among 1960s liberation struggles against the dominant social order. This theme of refusal constitutes a ‘militant’ rejection of the terms for subjectivity as property-in-the-person and the violence enacted on bodies that register in excess of this figure of personhood. Clark’s comment about the soloist’s narrative in Narcissus indexes the tension in this militant refusal, “This is my life. This is who I am in this moment, and this doesn’t bother me. It might make you uncomfortable

… As it should.”46 This tension also describes a collective sense of historical feeling through shared sentiments of refusal within and among vulnerable populations at this historical moment.

Raymond Williams’s theory of a structure of feeling provides an historical understanding of affect: “characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity.”47 This generalized feeling within an historical present is most clearly articulated in artistic forms. Williams describes it as “a mode of social formation, explicit and recognizable in specific kinds of art, which is

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distinguishable from other social and semantic formations by its articulation of presence.”48 Williams proposes that in a structure of feeling “the tension is at once lived and articulated in radically new semantic figures.”49 Pomare’s quotations of the junkie’s twitching arm and the erotic, seductive posturing of the leatherman embody radically new semantic figures on the concert stage. The tension embodied in these solos also points to mounting pressures within and beyond the world of concert dance. The historical perspective on affect in a structure of feeling offers a way to understand the shared

‘militant’ feelings of refusal manifesting in the emergence of artistic movements, such as

‘black dance’ in concert dance, which occurred in relation to the Black Arts/Power

Movement.50 In what follows, I examine Pomare’s role in the ‘militant’ refusals of ‘black dance,’ before widening the scope to consider the ways in which Narcissus Rising is implicated in this broader structure of feeling at the intersection of two ‘militant’ liberation movements.

Black Dance Militants

The tenets of the Black Arts/Power Movement, such as self-determination, black nationalism, and the development of a black aesthetic, are laid out in Larry Neal’s 1968 manifesto “The Black Arts Movement.”51 Black nationalism in this context “postulate[s] that there are in fact and in spirit two Americas—one black, one white.”52 A black aesthetic, in Neal’s sense, seeks to establish distinct criteria for black art, apart from the violent Eurocentrism of Western conceptions of the aesthetic and for the purpose of political mobilization.53 Self-determination in the context of the Black Arts Movement can be understood as the imperative for black people to: define themselves, speak for

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themselves and operate on the terms of their own choosing. The ‘self’ here refers to a collective rather than individual.54 It signals a refusal of dominant, white supremacist terms. The late 1960s present a historical moment in which the term ‘black’ was subjected to collective Signifyin’ strategies—a derogatory term in the first half of the twentieth century was reclaimed in the second half in a stunning reversal of meaning.

This move toward self-determination in language is evident in popular slogans of the time such as “Black is Beautiful” and “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud!”

Dance scholar Thomas DeFrantz describes the impact of the Black Arts

Movement in concert dance: “[D]ance created in the context of the Black Arts

Movement, with its constant exploration of a performative dialectic between performer and audience, was to provide a tool for survival.”55 He positions Pomare as exemplifying the ethos of the Black Arts Movement in concert dance. In the first run of Blues, Pomare played the newspaper boy, whose role was shouting the black nationalist rhetoric of Larry

Neal and Huey Newton.56 Within this historical moment of artistic ferment, Pomare was integrally involved in the emergence of what came to be known as ‘black dance’ within concert dance. ‘Black dance’ resonated with the Signifyin’ strategies of blackness in the

Black Arts Movement. Its movement toward self-determination in language rejected the term(s of) ‘Negro dance’ as a paternalistic descriptor that implied an inferior form of concert dance. Harvey describes how “he, Pearl Reynolds, Carole Johnson … and Rod

Rodgers were the first people to actually change the [nomenclature] from Negro dance to black dance … So if that’s not black power or Kujijakaliah [self-determination], I’m going to define who I am. We are no longer going to be called Negroes because that’s

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what you call us. And specifically again this is about funding and about what do critics call us.”57

Critics presented double binds around this terminology, as ‘black dance’ was also appropriated by white dance critics to reinscribe race as an essential marker of difference, eliding the heterogeneity within racial categories, and maintaining separate terms (i.e. criteria) within concert dance discourse, in essence maintaining the terms (i.e. power- relations) of the modern/Negro dance binary with this new use of terminology.58 Indeed, later Pomare would reject the term ‘black dance’ as a limiting phrase that circumscribed the work of black choreographers.59 DeFrantz argues that this dynamic of white critics appropriating the term ‘black dance’ is exemplified in Marcia Siegel’s collection of criticism entitled “Black Dance: A New Separatism.” In the introduction, Siegel makes reference to the “black dance movement and its militant publication The Feet.”60 The

Feet was a publication of M.O.D.E. (Modern Organization for Dance Evolvement) created by Carole Johnson, who danced with Pomare for many years. In the final issue of The Feet, Johnson responds to Siegel’s charge of militancy by calling out white supremacy in concert dance institutions. She insists that the purpose of The Feet is to assure the rightful place of black people in the dance history of the U.S. “If this is revolutionary or militant, then indeed, M.O.D.E. is just that.”61 The Feet’s ‘militancy’ functioned to resist the erasure of black dancers by inscribing their contributions into the

(written) historical record, while it also sought to establish distinct terms for dance criticism.

In her introduction, Siegel also accuses black dance of using riots as a trope: “At one time every black choreographer seemed to have a piece that ended in a riot, with

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people pitching hand grenades out over the footlights as the sirens shrieked.”62 Rather than a trope, I suggest that the sirens in Narcissus and the riot in Blues, along with these tensions manifesting along the fault lines of black/white concert dance, point to a larger

‘militant’ structure of feeling in which refusals of the dominant terms were occurring on multiple fronts.63 ‘Riots’ in ‘black dance’ were both literal and metaphorical. One reviewer describes Pomare in this way, “With dance Pomare is a tender militant, ‘I refuse to perform what might be expected of black dance companies. I don’t do the ‘exotic’ moves that might be expected of us. I won’t be pushed back into pre-civil rights thinking or actions.’”64 The militant refusals of the 1964 Harlem riot are situated within this larger structure of feeling. As Pomare muses, “I wouldn’t call myself angry for seeing these things, just call me alert.”65 Narcissus and Blues offer ‘alert’ choreographic analyses of the initial and originary state/civil violence that gives rise to militant refusals, protests and riots.

Militant Refusals: Black Power and Gay Liberation

What a choreographer should do is to instigate, or be forecasters, of things to come. —Eleo Pomare

Narcissus Rising (1968) and Blues for the Jungle/”Junkie” (1966) are historically situated within the ‘militant’ refusals of ‘black dance.’ Pomare’s critiques, issuing from these figures outside of the ‘human,’ especially in Narcissus, are simultaneously situated at the intersection of two coterminous nascent ‘militant’ liberation struggles: Black

Power and Gay Liberation.66 The late 1960s indicates a historical juncture in which there was a shift from appealing to the state for protection to a critique of the initial systemic state and civil violence enacted on bodies in excess of the figure of the ‘human.’67 This 107

juncture indicates a historical confrontation (crisis) of the limits, or the exhaustion, of strategies for social justice premised on respectability politics.68

As Farah Jasmine Griffin explains, the politics of respectability “seeks to reform the behavior of individuals, and as such takes the emphasis away from the structural forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, and poverty.”69 Respectability politics departs from notions of propriety, which demand that the individual perform normative subjectivity (conformity or proximity to the terms constructing the figure of the

‘human’), or risk exposing their bodies to forms of state and civil violence. Narcissus

Rising’s militant aesthetic and cultivation of tension, along with the sirens and the riot in

Blues, index the refusals, erupting in the form of protests and riots at this historical moment. In this way Pomare performs his choreographic charge in the epigraph for this section—to instigate or forecast things to come.

In what follows, I outline the contours of two coterminous ‘militant’ liberation struggles in which the refusals of Narcissus Rising are implicated. I discuss the aesthetic and strategic departures from respectability politics in these movements’ critiques of originary, systemic state and civil violence enacted on bodies in excess of the figure of the ‘human.’70

In 1966, Stokely Carmichael made a speech in which he announced ‘Black

Power’ in/as a radical departure from Civil Rights strategies.71 In part, these strategies functioned by appealing to the state through performances of normative subjectivity (e.g. protesters were required to wear gender conforming, middle-class attire). The aesthetic departures of Black Power indicate the refusal of the desire for normative subjectivity/citizenship through donning black leather, carrying guns, signaling Third

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World Marxist affiliations through berets, wearing Afros and Kente cloth in cultural nationalism, etc.72 The imagery of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense (founded in

1966) illustrates the dual performativity of ‘militant,’ a term which was implicated in dominant narratives of black pathology/criminality and in Angela Davis’s sense as a radical defense of vulnerable populations. The circulation of images of Panthers as black men with guns, connoting criminality (e.g. in J. Edgar Hoover’s rhetoric) obscures the initial police brutality signaled in the second half of their name: for Self-Defense.73 The ideology of Black Power enabled critiques of the racist state violence of police brutality endemic to American society, along with state-sanctioned civil violence in the form of lynchings.74 The 1964 Harlem riot existed in relation to riots occurring in primarily black urban cities across the country, as Baldwin puts it “in all our Harlems.” These riots exploding across the nation in the mid to late 1960s are often attributed to the assassinations of figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, but they were also a result of chronic black un(der)employment and various other forms of racial discrimination, including housing.75 These critiques, like Baldwin’s essay, continue to resonate in the activism of today’s Black Lives Matter movement to end police brutality against black people.

Between 1966 and 1969 the ‘militant’ gay liberation movement began to manifest itself, signaled by the 1966 Compton Cafeteria Riots in San Francisco and then the better- known 1969 Stonewall rebellion. These ‘militant’ refusals diverged from the homophile movement of the 1950s/60s. The homophile movement appealed to the state for acceptance and citizenship through performances of normative subjectivity. For example, in 1965 homophile protesters appropriating Civil Rights tactics marched outside

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the White House. They wore gender conforming clothing (dresses, suits, and ties) and handed out pamphlets to passersby appealing to their common humanity through their performances of normalcy, through performing proximity to the figure of the ‘human.’76

The aesthetic departures of the ‘militant’ gay liberation movement included the leadership of transwomen of color, like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, in a movement that owed a great deal to the activism of gender-nonconforming folks.77 The literal policing of bodies according to gender norms was evident in the common police practice, at that historical moment, of arresting people who were wearing less than three articles of ‘appropriately gendered’ clothing according to their legal identification.78

These gay ‘militants’ appropriated Black Power tactics in their shouts of “Gay Power!” and Black Pride reconfigured as Gay Pride, as they rallied against the ongoing state violence of the criminalization of homosexuality.79 Their critiques of initial violence were directed at police harassment and state sanctioned civil violence in the form of gay bashing.

Historical Background: The Family as the ‘We Horizon’ of the Nation and the ‘Human’

These militant refusals formed against, and emerged from, the historical backdrop of post WWII attempts to reassemble the nuclear family. These attempts sought to ensure ‘proper’ gender roles in society more broadly through compliance with the gendered divisions of labor in the abstract figure of the heteronormative family. This included the ejection of homosexuals from full citizenship and by extension full humanity, crystallizing in the McCarthy era persecution of homosexuals.80

Simultaneously, the postwar era saw a shift in tactics for justifying African American 110

disenfranchisement, from biological explanations onto cultural patterns, with a specific focus on family and intimate arrangements. Sociological discourses symbolically aligned straight and gay black people through their inability to conform to the (white) model of the heteropatriarchal nuclear family.81 This line of thought was consolidated into policy in the 1965 Moynihan Report. The report offers a sociological discourse of black matriarchy and emasculation within ‘the black family,’ which effectively pathologizes black gender and sexual nonconformity in addition to black family formations.

Wahneema Lubiano’s exploration of black nationalist commonsense notes a reactionary tendency to fetishize the figure of ‘the black family’ within black nationalism.82 She cautions against departing from assumptions of black pathology, such as the supposed deficiencies of the black family outlined in the Moynihan Report, and thereby running the risk of embedding the assumption of pathology within black nationalist critiques of white supremacy. The fetishizing of the black family as a reactionary investment in the white, liberal model of the nuclear family was used to confirm the pathological or ‘deviant’ nature of those that fall outside this model. This approach demonstrates an investment in proximity to the figure of the ‘human,’ collectively figured in the national imagination through the heteronormative nuclear family. This investment in turn signals a desire for inclusion in the privileges (on the terms) of white supremacy, rather than a desire to dismantle this system, which is premised on the exclusion of the majority of black people in the U.S.

Lubiano’s article, “Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense: Policing

Ourselves and Others,” describes how in the 1990s the increased policing of black communities was justified by the figure of the drug addict and the dealer in the War on

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Drugs. She and Ferguson both note how the 1965 Moynihan Report provided a crucial underpinning for the development of subsequent discourses which positioned problems within black communities as racialized pathologies arising from internal sources, such as the subsequent discourses on welfare queens in the Reagan era. These discourses were used to justify increased state surveillance. For example, welfare police searching dirty laundry hampers in the middle of the night looking for black men enacted a continuation of the “No Knock” and “Stop and Frisk” violations premised on property-in-the-person.

Beyond this literal policing by the state, black nationalist reactionary investments in the forms of personhood, premised on/promised by the heteronormative family structure, also functioned as internalized regulatory devices.83 She summarizes this dynamic in a trenchant reverse Q&A: “Answer: the romanticized black patriarchal family and its disciplinary possibilities. Question: what is one way that the state can mobilize blackness to do its repressive work and its policing of civil society?”84

Lubiano notes an eerie resonance between 1990s black nationalist identifications with military style masculinity and the Moynihan Report’s proposal that black men should enlist in the military at the height of the Vietnam War in order to regain their heterosexual masculinity: “popular entertainment ideologically supports—even enforces the following highly problematic and destructive developments: (1) the disproportionate black presence in the military; (2) the increasing popularity in the media and among policy makers of the idea that black males should be subjected to military-style boot camps, ironically giving new force to Senator Moynihan’s twenty-five year old injunction that the military could make ‘men’ out of black males; (3) black American’s increasing fetishization of ‘the family’ as a response to state and civil attacks on ‘the black family’;

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and (4) black love affairs with heroic narratives about powerful male presence.”85

Lubiano’s recollection of Moynihan’s suggestion in 1993 also points to the connection

Baldwin articulates in 1966.86 Baldwin describes the suspicion in Harlem that police brutality and Vietnam are related ways to deal with the ‘Negro problem.’ In conjunction with the timing of Moynihan’s ‘solution’ to the supposed emasculation of black men during the escalation of the Vietnam War, this reveals the way racialized oppression also functions through policing gender and sexuality. Moynihan’s proposal of military conscription to regain heterosexual masculinity is also deeply ironic, considering that the culture of gay leathermen was closely tied to the military, arising from the social displacements of WWII. 87 Lubiano, Ferguson, and Baldwin articulate the workings of state violence in everyday black life in the U.S. Reading them together shows how sociological discourses of black gender and sexual pathology (later embedded and enforced in governmental policy) are linked to the state’s deployment of the junkie and the dealer as figures of internal problems originating from within the black community, that were used to rationalize increasing levels of brutal policing in black communities.

These connections allow an understanding of Pomare’s ‘alert’ analyses of state violence in Narcissus and “Junkie,” which function as ‘outsider’ critiques of the system that produces them through exclusion as figures of pathology.

Roderick Ferguson’s queer-of-color critique examines black nationalism’s ironic investments in white liberal gender and sexual norms in direct relation to the Moynihan

Report’s discourse of pathology.88 This investment is also evident in dominant narratives of the Black Arts Movement. Neal’s text specifically mentions the “sociology of the black family” after which he: rejects homosexuality as white; prioritizes the recovery of

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black masculinity; and describes the ‘black mother’s’ new status as laced with tension and ambivalence.89 Placing Narcissus Rising in the context of the Black Arts movement complicates an understanding of black nationalist investments in heteronormativity and of the relationship (especially the gender and sexual norms) between concert dance artists and the Black Arts Movement broadly conceived.

Lubiano resists a reductive historical depiction of black nationalism insisting that it should be understood as a contested and complex historical formation. She offers a performative definition, focusing on what it enables/how it works, rather than offering a definition of a fixed set of attributes.90 The second part of her definition is of particular interest for conceptualizing belonging in black nationalism through the practice of diaspora citation: “It functions as articulation; it gives language to, and joins together, things that have no necessary belonging in such a way that the joining makes the connection seem inevitable.”91 This performative function implies a seamless joining that moves beyond naming a group to constituting and naturalizing the group as a structure of belonging. However, situating Narcissus Rising within commonsense black nationalism troubles this seamless constitution. By pointing to the tensions and fractures in the joints of this structure, it conjures other senses of a commons within blackness, in excess of the heteronormative regulations of both white and black nationalisms.

Here bringing Edwards’ theory of diasporic décalage together with Lubiano’s concept of black nationalism as an articulated structure of belonging-in-blackness is useful to nuance the apparent “inevitability” of the joining. It allows for an acknowledgement of the tensions and gaps, the uneven power dynamics and misrecognitions, within articulated structures of belonging. Narcissus Rising’s

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performative strategies of embodied tension and deliberate exposure also functions to expose the tension that exists within the décalage of black nationalism as an articulated structure of belonging. The solo’s performance of sexual and gender self-determination provokes the question of the collective self in black nationalist articulations of self- determination—who constitutes the ‘we’? Narcissus Rising probes the ‘we’ horizon of the ‘human’ and the nation.92 It indicates how concert dance artists were operating on distinct gender and sexual terms from hegemonic manifestations of black nationalism and dominant masculinist voices in the Black Arts Movement. Diaspora as a structure of belonging forms an alternative to the heteronormative regulations of the figure of the family, the demand in nationalism to reproduce the nation.

Harlem Diddy Bop: Performing the Vitality of a 1970s Harlem Lifeworld

A grainy black and white film shows Eleo Pomare wearing a floppy hat with a tight black tank top. The straps are stretched across his lean, muscular frame. His distressed jeans are worn with a white studded belt that sparkles as he shifts his weight back and forth, hands on hips. He is barefoot and surrounded by a crowd of seated people. Four dancers, two women (Lillian Coleman and Dyane Harvey) and two men (Frank Ashley and Martial Roumain), stand behind him in street clothes.

Pomare begins his lecture demonstration for the crowd: “Now when I say dance down the avenue, I meet, many, many white folks who say to me, ‘Is it true that in Harlem that you can see people dancing down the street?’ and I say, ‘No baby, what you’re seeing is an attitude that is so damn rhythmic that to you it looks like dancing.’ All the cat is doing is walking gracefully, and showing that he has a body that he’s proud of …” He backs up and takes four steps forward, performing a ‘diddy bop’ walk, slightly sitting in one hip, syncopating the timing of his steps, and gesturing with his hands around his chest to illustrate pride in his body. Eleo moves on: “Now let’s take a girl counterpoint to that, Lillian.” Lillian pauses. “Go on, hit it Lillian.” He snaps, crossing his body, and popping his neck in opposition to the cross.

Lillian shifts her weight into her hip, places her hand between her lower back and hip, juts her chin out and begins to strut forward, slightly bouncing in each step she takes and twisting almost imperceptibly at the end of each step. Eleo calls out, “Now she doesn’t give a hoot about anything, and don’t you touch her either.” On the word “either” Lillian 115

swings her head over her shoulder and looks meaningfully into the audience eliciting laughter as she swaggers away from the camera.

Pomare strolls back to the dancers: “Try another diddy bop walk …” Dyane Harvey begins to walk. One hand rests on her hip, her other arm slightly extended away from her body, swinging loosely, wrist drooping. Eleo responds to the call of her walk, “Uh- huh, uh-huh.” Her chest is puffed out, as she sits in her lower back. She quickly scans the crowd to her right and left. Proudly lifting her head forward for two steps, she glances one last time into the audience, looking coolly down her nose and dropping into her hip as she swivels around the corner. Her back to the camera, she saunters carelessly away. Eleo asks, “What are you doing now Dy?” [unintelligible mumble], “What?” “Cruising.” Eleo: “Now she said she is cruising, I mean,” he breaks into a muted imitation of her walk [audience breaks into laughter] “She’s walking, but she is attracting the attention she wants from someone.”

Pomare continues, “We have still a kind of a colder diddy bop walk, that’s almost no longer a diddy bop walk but it’s sort of almost a—” he interrupts himself meaningfully, “Excuse me Frank”—the dancers behind Eleo turn to Frank Ashley, collapsing in laughter and clapping their hands. “It’s almost bourgeois black breaking into black. He’s catching up on the black scene, and he tends not to be as jaunty. Uh, go Frank …” Frank drops his hands and begins to walk stiffly. He continues walking in a circle within the ring of spectators. His nose is high in the air, his neck only moves slightly, as if there is a metal rod in his spine. His upper body jerks back, and slightly to the side, at the end of each step.

“Now my junkie, the junkie that I do, is like a combination of all of this, except that this cat is stoned …” Eleo begins to walk forward, unevenly, his steps faltering to the left. His elbows are pinned to his sides and slightly behind his body. His hands gesticulate sporadically, a distorted echo of the broken wrist of the ‘diddy bop’ walks that came before. He narrates himself, “See his whole thing is, uh … there.” Backing up, he looks into the audience to his left, and abruptly staggers to the right. His head bobs atop his lurching body. “You see uh, he’s sort of uh, a bit on the nervous side” [laughter from the audience] His shoulders are tense and uneven “and that kind of thing.”93

The lecture demonstration takes place in Adelaide, Australia, in 1972. The dancers’ quotations of the Harlem diddy bop walk set up the way Pomare’s choreography draws on the movement vocabulary of everyday life in “Junkie,” a demonstration of his theory of vitality. The performances of the diddy bop walks embody a range of subjectivities—the ‘attitude’ of the grand diva, the cool seduction of the feminine cruiser, the stiffness of the ‘black bougie’ walk, and the performative gesture of the snap queen.94 116

Despite his overt claim that this walk is not “dancing down the avenue,” Pomare’s performance of the rhythmic syncopation and the singular shifts of weight in the walk, reveals its choreographic nuances—a two-step of everyday life. In the lecture demonstration, Pomare moves from his typical posture into a conscious four-step quotation of the Harlem diddy bop walk. His statement about the walk as ‘attitude’ rather than dancing, contradicts the way in which his embodied quotation reveals the embodied labor of performing belonging on the streets of Harlem, a labor which becomes naturalized as “attitude.” Pomare moved to Harlem as a cultural outsider and was very conscious of the cultural nuances he was taking on.95 His choreographic framing of

Harlem habitus in the format of a lecture demonstration, raises it to conscious perception by isolating the nuanced movement, revealing Pomare’s keen eye for the details of quotidian motion. His attention to the technical dimensions of everyday movement is an integral dimension of his choreographic theory of vitality, using dance as a medium of communication to deliver ‘urgent’ political messages.

In his 1935 essay “Techniques of the Body,” anthropologist Marcel Mauss argues that everyday movements that tend to become naturalized, or explained in essentialist or biological terms, in fact contain complex and significant cultural information. Walking, in particular, is noted as both a naturalized phenomenon that fades into the background of perception and as a choreography that can be taken on, or appropriated, when its technical dimensions are foregrounded.96 Pomare’s framing of walking denaturalizes this everyday movement, demonstrating the embodied capacity to take on cultural nuances as a kind of choreographic quotation. He performs a cultural belonging to African

Americanness, to blackness as it is configured on the singular terrain of Harlem, by

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quoting—both appropriating and framing—his diddy bop walk in the lecture demonstration.

Pomare introduces Lillian’s walk with the choreographic intertext of the SNAP!

This moment articulates gendered and sexual practices of embodied assertion through the diva’s dance on the streets of Harlem. The assertive quality also references context, as in potential sexual harassment on the street, “Don’t you touch her either!”, as well as her grand status as untouchable. Performance studies scholar E. Patrick Johnson explores snapping as a complex performative gesture, a choreographic intertext of (vitality in) black social life, or “an expressive form within the communicative repertoire of African-

American culture.”97 This gesture works as citation, in several ways: (1) the SNAP! frequently accentuates or serves as a form of ‘reading’ or Signifyin’; (2) as a technology of reading it performs a communal function by galvanizing social space through recognition of its coded functions; (3) it is a movement intertext that can be appropriated

(although the criteria of ‘performer competence’ means it is not easily appropriated); (4) as a movement intertext it articulates realms of everyday gendered and sexualized cultural performances.98 Like Pomare’s comment that the diddy bop walk is attitude rather than dancing, Johnson recognizes the choreographically constructed role of

“attitude” in the walk of the “SNAP! Diva,” a term he associates with African American women:

With this perception also comes a type of attitude—a performance, if you will—exemplified by the diva … Some of these signifiers are a stately walk or carriage, a head held high, and an arrogant attitude. These performative signifiers are often associated with African-American women … The SNAP! Diva, however, is an instance where gay men have transformed the role into someone who is an astute snapper, who carries much attitude, and who is particularly ‘grand’ … The attitude, adopted from black women … communicates, “Don’t fuck with me or I’ll snap you out of existence.”99 118

The framing of the walks as quotations from the streets of Harlem reveals the choreographic labor of belonging involved in these gendered and sexualized performances. These overlapping and distinct (per)form(ance)s of femininity, both convey and embrace the gender and sexual diversity of the Harlem lifeworld from which the diddy bop walk emerges. They reflect the diverse interpretations of performative swagger as a cultural resource. Pomare uses the snap as a compliment rather than a

‘read’: “Go on, hit it Lillian!”100 Pomare’s snap conjoined with Lillian’s strut references a communal sociality, an intimate, knowing citation of the ‘vital’ choreography of the grand diva on the avenues of Harlem.

Dyane’s walk, cruising the audience members, reverses the gaze. Rather than a diva walk that resists potential sexual advances—“Don’t you touch her either!”—Dyane flips the script. She is on the prowl, still cool, but with the agency and intent of sexual pursuit. As Eleo breaks into her walk, placing one hand on hip, the other gracefully drooping to the side, he appropriates her technique of the body—her feminized cruising—setting naturalized gendered performances into ambivalent motion by revealing their performed and performative nature. This exchange also points to the multiplicity of gendered and sexual economies on the streets of Harlem.

Frank has clearly been singled out for his walk down the avenue runway. The way in which the dancers dissolve into giggles, combined with the way in which Pomare calls out his name, signifies a particular kind of ‘read,’ or intertext embedded in this moment. “[Reading] may have a communal effect if it is done within an intimate and familiar social sphere. For instance, if it is clear to the person to whom a comment is directed that the intent of the comment is playful, the dissing is taken in good spirit.”101 119

Pomare is ‘reading’ Frank by referencing his particular ability to portray this walk, which is clearly an inside joke within the company.102 Walking, as a technique of the body, is

“not simply a matter of class division of labor, but of the ways in which individuals are choreographed into their class through a variety of naturalized quotidian movements.”103

Pomare, while ‘reading’ Frank in a teasing, intimate way, is also ‘reading’ the implication of black upper/middle class values in respectability politics, wherein white liberal gender, sexual and class norms set the terms of value and cultural behavior. In this case, the

“bougie black … tends not to be as jaunty,” in Pomare’s words, as he has adopted a more ostensibly neutral walk, conforming to (white) middle and upper class comportments of the body: “it’s just a bourgeoisie mentality –some kind of we need to get away from this base behavior and move towards something that is more acceptable or ‘white.’”104 Class mobility thus also depends on one’s ability to recondition/discipline one’s cultural (and racialized) everyday movement techniques.

Yet Pomare’s ‘read’ of the black bougie walk does not propose that authentic blackness is exclusively determined by class. Blackness as a (diasporic) structure of belonging is constructed as inclusive: “bourgeois black breaking into black … He is catching up on the black scene.” This framing holds the potential for Frank to move into his own ‘diddy bop walk,’ signaling an inclusive sense of blackness, as in Pomare’s own lived experience learning the gestural nuances of black social life in Harlem coming from other diasporic contexts. This sense of blackness is not natural or essential, but reveals a dimension of embodied labor in performing belonging, a labor that operates in conjunction with considerations of the material conditions in which such embodied practices arise. Rather than an attempt to police authentic blackness by associating it

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exclusively with working class culture, Pomare’s critique is directed at middle class respectability politics that reject, or attempt to erase, the embodied nuances developed in forms of black working class, urban social life. Simultaneously, Frank’s walk performs the diversity of class backgrounds and lived experiences on the streets of a 1970s Harlem lifeworld.

Man’s Essential Strut versus the Vitality of the Despised

The very essence of man is to strut. —The Moynihan Report

The performativity of belonging cites the norms that make up the community. —Vicki Bell

The performativity of the lecture demonstration reveals traces of the material heterogeneity, or gender, sexual and class diversity, of African American culture in a

1970s Harlem lifeworld through the dancers’ embodied quotations of various walking practices. Ferguson describes this material heterogeneity as a site for locating critiques of the contradictions and unfulfilled promises of the nation state and capital—the promise of political emancipation and full citizenship coterminous with the realities of disenfranchisement and economic exploitation.105 Pomare’s signature solos, Narcissus

Rising and “Junkie,” use outsider figures to perform critiques of these contradictions within the hegemonic gender and sexual terms of white and black nationalisms. They extend Pomare’s theory of vitality by drawing on a gestural vocabulary that references the “vitality of the despised”—in Baldwin’s terms, those excluded from social norms that determine the ‘we-horizon’ of the citizen and the ‘human.’

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Ferguson argues that “The Moynihan Report draws on a notion that masculinity is innate to men and biologically driven, declaring that ‘the very essence of man is to strut.’” He continues, “For Moynihan this masculinity is integral to American national character. Hence the history of racist violence has castrated African American men, preventing them from realizing a masculinity that is fundamental to all men … and therefore bereft of heteropatriarchal entitlements.”106 Moynihan’s formulation naturalizes gender and nationalizes bodies—upholding racial and gendered hierarchies within a frame of exclusionary criteria for ‘proper’ citizenship. Pomare’s revelation of the choreographic dimensions of walking troubles essentialist notions of identity integral to “man’s essential strut” in Moynihan’s formulation of walking. A strut is certainly conveyed in both Lillian’s grand diva walk and Pomare’s SNAP! diva introduction of her walk. However, these choreographies do not reveal an embodiment of an essential identity, nor are they the epitome of masculinity-as-the-nation. The dancers demonstrate walking as a performance of everyday life, not as Moynihan’s essential, manly strut, revealing the performative nature of gender, sexuality, class, and race. The diddy bop performances articulate and affirm the gender and sexual diversity of African American culture, pointing to alternative structures of belonging, in excess of the figure of Man and the heteropatriarchal family as the image of the nation.107

Finally, the lecture demonstration performs the double move of diaspora citation.

It joins Pomare’s affirmations of the cultural resources for survival developed in black social life—the beauty in the diverse subjectivities and convivial sociality conveyed in the performances of the Harlem diddy bop strut—with an incisive critique of the material conditions of possibility for the junkie, as the abject outsider figure of the ‘human.’

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These cultural ways of being in the world, “vital” responses to life in Harlem, provide insight into the repurposing of those material conditions of privation into a kind of beautiful unencompassable sociality of black life, within a Harlem lifeworld. The performance reveals and revels in the gender and sexual diversity of African American culture. The diversity of the walks affirms alternative terms, structures of belonging operating in excess of property-in-the-person, by performing other ways of being

(human) (together) in the world.

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NOTES

1 Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. 2004).

2 I position the solo as queer, rather than essentially gay, as its circulation troubles identity, and its articulation of desires is not (only) about sexual object choice, but the relationship of the subject(s) to dominant society. I do not position ‘queer’ in opposition to ‘gay,’ but locate in queerness an interest in sexual subjectivities that do not neatly align with fixed identity constructs as well as a critique of heteronormativity.

3 Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. 2004). Notably, he builds his queer of color critique on black feminist theory, in particular Hortense Spillers’ analysis of Moynihan Report. See Spillers 1987.

4 In “Junkie” Pomare also wears sunglasses. The other dancers who performed Narcissus did not. His approach, like in the watermelon piece, deflects, withholds and reverses the gaze back onto the audience, so that they become the object of beholding/contemplation.

5 The sound score for Narcissus was created by Michael Levy, Pomare’s company manager and longtime partner.

6 “This narrative was articulated repeatedly throughout my research with reference to the 1954 Marlon Brando film The Wild One. The film was mentioned explicitly by two of my interview subjects as a formative influence on early gay leather culture, and references to the film popped up repeatedly in other research sources … In the film, Brando is cast as Johnny, the leader of the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club. The film was extremely controversial and banned in England until 1968 because of its perceived antisocial message.” Peter Hennen, Faeries, Bears, and Leathermen: Men in Community Queering the Masculine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 139.

7 Hennen, 135.

8 Abdel Salaam. Conversation with the author. New York, NY. October 30, 2013.

9 Dyane Harvey. Conversation with the author. New York, NY. October 31, 2013.

10 Jack Anderson, "Eleo Pomare Dance Co." Dance Magazine, June 1968, 88. Even as late as 1991, reviewers focused on this dimension rather than discussing the piece’s queer subtext. Gus, Jr. Solomons, "Splash," The Village Voice, November 12, 1991, 102.

11 Kobena Mercer, Welcome to The Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), 136.

12 Arthur T. Wilson, "Eleo Pomare: "Pomare Power!" Dance Theater Passion." African American Genius in Modern Dance, (Durham, NC: American Dance Festival, 1993), 22. Also see Estrada, 45.

13 One “magick coincidence” Anger noted was the fact that the lead character Scorpio had pictures of James Dean on his wall, and The Wild One was playing on his TV set during the filming. This coincidence allowed Anger to exploit these references to queer lifeworlds within the structure of the film. Director’s commentary Scorpio Rising.

14 The figure of Narcissus, from Greek mythology, also contains references to Western art practices: “The figure of Narcissus as an image has a history of use by homosexual artists that goes back to Caravaggio”— a reference that contains a moral dimension: “For transgressing social norms, Narcissus is punished.” 124

Ramsay Burt, “Nijinsky: Modernism and Heterodox Representations of Masculinity,” The Routledge Dance Studies Reader, eds. Alexandra Carter and Janet O’Shea (London: Routledge, 2010): 224. Burt also references a 1967 text by Mario Praz on the combination of the imagery of Narcissus with Romantic obsessions with S&M. It is possible that Pomare was also engaging these references, as Narcissus Rising was choreographed the following year in 1968.

15 Don McDonagh, "Eleo Pomare," in The Complete Guide to Modern Dance (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), 236. Hennen also describes leather culture as a combination of erotic desire and social desires around belonging: “[T]he attraction of leather culture was (at least initially) social rather than erotic … if the attraction of leather groups as social groups is being obscured, then so too may be the process of the social construction (or amplification) of certain kinds of desire generated within these solidary groups” Hennen, 142.

16 Martial Roumain. Conversation with the author. New York, NY. October 15, 2016.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Lauren Berlant has theorized cruel optimism as ongoing attachments to ideals and institutions, especially fantasies and promises of ‘the good life’ that continue to fail. Lauren Berlant. Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

20 Michelle Wright notes the ways in which the nation state reproduces the prevailing social order through the form of the heteropatriarchal family: “This is the ‘vertical’ logic that dominates our Western narration of human communities almost worldwide: a narrative according to which all communities can be broken down neatly into heteropatriarchal family units, whether nuclear or extended. If a man is not the primary breadwinner or somehow otherwise head of the household, we have a symptom of a troubled family/community.” Michelle M. Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 53.

21 There is also a dimension of Pomare’s theory of choreographic vitality, transposed from black to queer lifeworlds, in his transmission of the solo to Roumain. Martial discussed how Eleo would take him to leather bars, so that he could observe the detailed gestural and embodied nuances of social interactions in these queer spaces: “When he passed on Narcissus to me, like I told you, he took me to that place to have that type of relationship with somebody at the bar. Just to see me become …” Martial Roumain. Conversation with the author. New York, NY. April 20, 2017.

22 Alpha Omega Theatrical Dance Company was started by Pomare’s dancers Delores Vanison and Ronald Pratt. They were the original cast members of “View from a Tenement Window” in Blues for the Jungle. 23 In line with Peter Hennen’s argument that the hypermasculine aesthetic of leathermen did not fully shake off the specter of effeminacy, Salaam noted a ‘reading’ of the gender trouble in Narcissus Rising. Despite its hyper masculine posturing, the piece was also colloquially referred to as “Sissy Riding,” conveying the association of its queer references with femininity. Hennen 2008. Abdel Salaam. Conversation with the author. New York, NY, July 22, 2017.

24 Donna Clark. Conversation with the author. New York, NY. December 7, 2016.

25 “Pomare, in an interview prior to the performance, said he didn't see the meaning changing because of the dancer's gender.” Karyn D. Collins. "Pomare Power Enlivens Omega Evening." Dance Magazine, October 2001, 96-97.

26 Clark 2016.

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27 Roumain, as the former artistic director of Alpha Omega, also directed Clark in the piece. He indicated this dimension of the choreography as recontextualized on a woman’s body: “But that is not that sexual, for a woman because then she becomes a slut. It is very minute, the line of how you play the character. You are in charge of yourself, if it’s too much, you become subservient.” Roumain also indicates the ways in which her performance of the piece exceeds a fixed sexual subjectivity or gay identity, frustrating a singular reading of the piece: “Seeing it done on a woman, doesn’t have to be a homosexual. She doesn’t have to be gay.” Roumain, October 15, 2016.

28 For more on the social construction of black women’s sexuality as readily available see Hortense Spillers’ theory of pornotroping (e.g. Sapphire, Peaches, etc.). Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987) in Black, White and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

29 Collins 2001.

30 Claudia LaRocco, “Rev Your Engine, Biker Chick, and Wear Your Anger Proudly,” New York Times, Nov. 2, 2008.

31 Marya Wethers, who curated Clark’s most recent performance of the solo in the 2016 Queer New York International Arts Festival, noted this dimension: “It didn’t seem like it was feminized, even though it was on a woman’s body. But it also didn’t feel like she was not being herself as a woman in it, in this way, whatever that means, but it felt—and that was super interesting to me. What is that negotiation?” Marya Wethers. Conversation with the author. New York, NY. December 7, 2016.

32 Gay leathermen’s culture sought to refute the equation of effeminacy with homosexuality by appropriating tropes of heterosexual masculinity. Hennen argues that this potentially veers into an investment in hegemonic masculinity. Hennen 2008.

33 Spillers 1987, 77, 68. Ungendering also refers to the historical racialized dimensions of American genders in which white women’s sexuality was protected as the property of white men. This concept is elaborated in Chapter 4.

34 Fensham 2013.

35 According to Collins, some reviews in the 1960s did not even think the minimalist vocabulary qualified as choreography. “The simple choreography (some in the 1960s argued the choreography was nonexistent) is more attitude than anything else, as the biker preens in the spotlight, "riding" his/her bike in a series of slow lunges, leans, and body rolls” (Collins 2001). This description of ‘simple choreography’ resonates with Pomare’s later description of the diddy bop walk’s nuances as attitude, and points toward a consideration of his attention to gestural nuance as a kind of minimalism.

36 Roumain 2016.

37 Clark 2016.

38 Harvey 2013.

39 See Ferguson 2004, Chapter 3 for a discussion of Harlem as vice district. Baldwin’s novel Another Country conveys the connections between the promiscuous racial and sexual economies of the 1950s/60s vice districts of Harlem, Times Square and Greenwich Village. James Baldwin, Another Country (New York: Dial Press, 1962).

40 The cultivation of erotic tension with the audience in Narcissus can also be read a kind of Signifyin’ on social deviants as ‘undesirables.’ The seduction of audience members, evoking and inciting desire for a 126

figure deemed ‘undesirable,’ performs a ‘reading’ of the norms of desirability according to dominant society.

41 McDonagh, 236. Here we see again the reference to the figure of Narcissus, as homosexual: “For transgressing social norms, Narcissus is punished.” Burt, 224.

42 Donna Clark. Conversation with the author. December 7, 2016.

43 “In 1968, when Eleo Pomare created “Narcissus Rising,” the sexually aggressive, militant solo that would become his signature dance …” LaRocco 2008.

44 I am referencing Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford UP, 1976), in which he argues that certain key words take on new meanings and that these changes reflect the political bent and values of society.

45 Angela Davis. Speech given at 2017 Women’s March on Washington. Washington D.C., January 21, 2017. Accessed January 24, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTB-m2NxWzA

46 Carl Paris shared a similar sentiment about the alternative terms Narcissus Rising was enacting: “Watching it was like watching someone tell you that everything that you expected about anything was up for grabs here … It also had a kind of ironic edge to it too. It’s almost like it was laughing at the audience too. You came in, you’re expecting this, but that’s not how it’s going to turn out.” Carl Paris. Conversation with the author. New York, NY. June 19, 2014.

47 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132.

48 Williams, 135, original emphasis. This idea of an “articulation of presence” can also be seen beyond the temporal definition of an historical ‘present,’ in a spatial claiming of presence by these vulnerable groups in protests and riots (i.e. chanting and marching in the streets and claiming public space in demands for full citizenship).

49 Williams, 134-5.

50 ‘Black dance’ is a highly contested term. See DeFrantz 2002; and Takiyah Nur Amin, “A Terminology of Difference: Making the Case for Black Dance in the 21st Century and Beyond.” Journal of Pan African Studies 4, no. 6 (2011): 7 - 15.

51 Larry Neal, "The Black Arts Movement," in A Sourcebook of African-American Performance: Plays, People, Movements, ed. Annemarie Bean (London: Routledge [originally, published 1967 in TDR], 1999), 55-67.

52 Neal, 55.

53 Addison Gayle, “the harlem renaissance: towards a black aesthetic,” Midcontinent American Studies Journal, 11, no. 2, Perceptions of Black America (Fall 1970), pp. 78-87. Addison Gayle, The Black Aesthetic (New York: Doubleday, 1971). LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: William Morrow, 1963). Amiri Baraka, Black Music (New York: William Morrow, 1968).

54 “The Black Arts and Black Power concept both relate broadly to the Afro-American’s desire for self- determination and nationhood … A main tenet of Black Power is the necessity for Black people to define the world in their own terms. The Black artist has made the same point in the context of aesthetics. The two movements postulate that there are in fact and in two Americas—one black, one white … Implicit in this re-evaluation is the need to develop a ‘black aesthetic’” Neal, 55.

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55 Thomas DeFrantz, "To Make Black Bodies Strange: Social Critiques in Concert Dance of the Black Arts Movement," in A Sourcebook of African-American Performance: Plays, People, Movements, ed. Annemarie Bean (London: Routledge, 1999), 84, 86.

56 Wilson 1993.

57 Dyane Harvey. Conversation with the author. October 31, 2013. Pomare’s language shifted from Negro to black between 1968-69. See Estrada 1968; Eleo Pomare, "Where Are Black Artists Going?!!!" Remarks 1969, reprinted in Dance Herald (New York, NY Vol. 1 ed., No. 2 sec.: 3), 1975; and Thomas A. Johnson, "'I Must Be Black and Do Black Things,’" New York Times. Sept. 7, 1969.

58 DeFrantz, 2002.

59 Zita Allen, "Black Dance Doesn't Exist." Dance Magazine, May 1976: 110-112. Zita Allen, “What is Black Dance?” In this way ‘black dance’ also functions as a keyword in Raymond Williams’s sense.

60 “The black dance movement and its militant publication The Feet boosts all black dance and puts down nearly all white dance.” Marcia Siegel, “Black Dance: A New Separatism.” In At the Vanishing Point: A Critic Looks at Dance (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972), 138. DeFrantz describes The Feet as a site for the promotion of a black nationalist agenda within concert dance. DeFrantz 1999.

61 Johnson states: “The majority of black people do not feel welcome or that they have the power to make changes in the larger more established dance institutions.” In this same issue she cites the lack of support, infrastructure and funding as the reason the publication closed. DeFrantz 1999, 91-92. This stands in stark contrast to Siegel’s claim that black dance is well supported through “conscience money” because of “white guilt.” Siegel, 138. These material economic conditions ultimately meant that ‘black dance’ was unable to sustain completely separate terms, critical or otherwise.

62 Siegel, 139.

63 “The black dance movement and its militant publication The Feet boosts all black dance and puts down nearly all white dance. What kind of standards lie beneath this bravado? … Until blacks themselves are able to make basic distinctions about quality and originality, I don’t see how the distinctions made by whites can be declared invalid.” Siegel, 138. “White critics are too far removed from the black experience to really criticize what we do … They try to judge what I do by their own past experiences, in terms of their own values. We don’t need critics or reviewers—they could kill an artist through bias, or worse through ignorance.” Pomare quoted in Johnson 1969.

64 Charles Seaton, “There is a message in his dance,” New York Daily News, May 5, 1983.

65 Estrada, 46.

66 I don’t seek to collapse the tensions within or between these movements, which are significant, but rather to locate an historical structure of feeling across them.

67 Roderick Ferguson describes the Black Power and Black Panther Party responses to the presumption that Voting Rights Act of 1966 represented the consummation of civil rights and emancipation: “noting the ways in which civil rights reform works to preserve a fundamentally racist legal and economic system rather than abolish it” Ferguson, 112.

68 These ‘militant’ departures built on, and extending beyond, the tactics and strategies of the civil rights struggles that preceded them (i.e. Civil Rights/Black Power, first/second wave feminism, homophile/gay liberation). Williams describes this dynamic, “it is primarily to emergent formations (though often in the form of modification or disturbance in older forms) that the structure of feeling, as solution, relates.” Williams, 134. 128

69 Farah Jasmine Griffin If You Can’t be Free Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (New York: Random House, 2001) 72.

70 The women’s liberation movement within second wave feminism is also relevant to this discussion, particularly in the ‘militant’ refusals of ‘bra burning’ at the 1968 Miss America Pageant.

71 Peniel Joseph, The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era (New York: Routledge, 2006. Joseph argues for continuities between these two movements, which constitutes an important intervention. I am not trying to elide those continuities, but rather to delineate the departures of Black Power in order to clarify what is distinct about what I identify as a new ‘militant’ structure of feeling.

72 Karyn Collins’ retrospective 2000 review of Narcissus points to an interesting joining of these militant struggles for racial and sexual liberation through the intertext of black leather: “The man of Narcissus Rising seemed to be the embodiment of Black Power and a celebration of fetishism and sadomasochism.” This double affirmation is also a provocative joining, as I will indicate later, provoking the question of the ‘we’ in the collective self of self-determination.

73 My use of the Black Panther Party in conjunction with Black Power and black nationalism is not intended as a synecdoche. James Smethurst usefully elaborates some of the distinctions made among black nationalist groups as this time (e.g. religious nationalists (e.g. the NOI), political nationalists, revolutionary nationalists (e.g. the BPP), economic nationalists (e.g. the black cooperative movement), and cultural nationalists (i.e. US), as well as the instability of these distinctions and the impossibility of clear, categorical definitions: “Like ‘cultural nationalist,’ ‘revolutionary nationalist’ is an elastic term that includes a range of often conflicting ideological positions” James Edward Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2005), 16.

74 Discourses of black male criminality point to the entanglements of property in the person, as the justifications for many lynchings were premised on myths of black criminality figured through black male sexual predation of white women. At stake in these accusations was the violation of the property of white men. Mercer 1994.

75 James A. Tyner, “Urban Revolutions and the Space of Black Radicalism.” In Black Geographies and the Politics of Place. Edited by Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Adrian Woods, 218-232 (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2007). 76 Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Penguin, 1993). Before Stonewall. Directed by Greta Schiller. PBS, 1985.

77 This radical leadership was not always legible as such at the time. See Sylvia Rivera addressing this issue in 1973: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QiigzZCEtQ Their work with STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) was groundbreaking.

78 Duberman, 235. The 1969 Gay Manifesto discusses the “homophile tendency to revile queens” who are “our first martyrs … it is straight society we must indict not the queens.” Hennen, 12.

79 “As Audre Lorde points out in the film [Before Stonewall], the black struggle became the prototype for all the new social movements of the time—from women’s and gay liberation, to the peace, antiwar and ecology movements as well. But although white gays derived inspiration from the symbols of black liberation—Black Pride being translated into Gay Pride, for example—they failed to return the symbolic debt, as it were, as there was a lack of reciprocity and mutual exchange between racial and sexual politics in the 1970s.” Mercer, 132.

80 In this socio-historical political context “formalized mechanisms to regulate American sexuality were institutionalized into various policies: the 1944 G.I. Bill, which Margot Canady describes as ‘the first federal policy that explicitly excluded gays and lesbi129ans from the welfare state’; various ‘sexual

psychopath’ and sodomy laws, nominally intended to protect women and children from assault but substantively used to pathologize and incarcerate gay men in cities ranging from Miami to Iowa City to Boise.” Whitney Strub, “The Clearly Obscene and the Queerly Obscene: Heteronormativity and Obscenity in Cold War Los Angeles.” American Quarterly (60, no. 2, June 2008): 374. “Cold war America saw one of the most effective political deployments of effeminacy with McCarthyism’s portrait of the homosexual as ‘security risk.’” Hennen, 136.

81 “Racialized eroticization … outside the rationalized (i.e. heteronormative) household symbolically aligned black straight and gay persons. A taxonomy of black nonheteronormativity, especially as it was imagined in the postwar era is instructive: common law marriages, out-of-wedlock births, lodgers, single- headed families, nonmonogamous sexual relationships, unmarried persons, and homosexual persons and relationships … all related because they fail to conform to a heteropatriarchal household legalized through marriage.” Ferguson, 87.

82 Wahneema Lubiano,“Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense: Policing Ourselves and Others,” in The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997).

83 “The Moynihan Report actually is an important genealogical node in successive and hegemonic discourses about minority communities within the United States. These discourses, George Lipsitz argues, emerged after the passage of the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts. Such discourses suggested that ‘the problems facing communities of color no longer stem primarily from discrimination, but from the characteristics of those communities themselves, from unrestrained sexual behavior and childbirths out of wedlock, crime, welfare dependency, and a perverse sense of group identity and group entitlement. These discourses owe their origin and coherence to the Moynihan Report” Ferguson, 123.

84 Lubiano, 245.

85 Ibid, 244.

86 Baldwin 1966.

87 Hennen 2008, 138-9.

88 Ferguson 2004.

89 Neal, 66.

90 “I argue here that black nationalism is plural, flexible, and contested; that its most hegemonic appearances and manifestations have been masculinist and homophobic; that its circulation has acted both as a bulwark against racism and as disciplinary activity within the group.” Lubiano, 232.

91 Lubiano, 233, my emphases.

92 In her exploration of radical worlds within the global spread of liberal nationalism, Elizabeth Povinelli explains, “the liberal national form seems continually to reconstitute some nominal, and normative, we- horizon … the we-horizons of the nation and the human … what constitutes public understandings of the good, the tolerable, the abhorrent, and the just.” She also argues that “those radical worlds that turn inward (i.e. separatism) or away or refuse to dilate to the sympathy of the Same are treated to as Durkheim once described the treatment of those who seek to free themselves from the norms of all thought, ‘Does a mind seek to free itself from the norms of all thought? Society no longer considers this a human mind in the full sense, and treats it accordingly’” Elizabeth Povinelli, “Radical Worlds: The Anthropology of Incommensurability and Inconceivability,” Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001): 327, 329.

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93 This footage is available on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhLmhuZBshs

94 E. Patrick Johnson, “SNAP! Culture: A Different Kind of ‘Reading,’” Text and Performance Quarterly 15 (1995): 122-142.

95 “When I was finally put on the train to New York, I was given collard greens and fried chicken. In a way, my inauguration into Afro-American culture began the moment I got off the plane.” Pomare quoted in Wilson, 22.

96 Mauss gives the example of seeing French nurses walking down the hallway from his hospital bed and recognizing their walk as adopted from the strut of American actresses in Hollywood films. Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” in Techniques, Technology and Civilisation. Ed. Nathan Schlanger. 2006. Originally published in Journal de psychologie normal et patholigique XXXII (1935): 271-293.

97 Johnson, 123.

98 “I place snapping under the larger category of verbal and nonverbal art known as Signifying.” Johnson, 124. “[I]t is the shared cultural knowledge of its use in this context that makes it communal.” Johnson 125. “[S]napping and vogueing are too complex to be fully robbed of their indigenous usage within African- American gay communities [and African American women] … the complexity of the behavior, together with its history, transforms it into a discourse that does not lend itself easily to appropriation; therefore the elements of the behavior that make it empowering for its originators remain intact.” Johnson, 140.

99 Johnson 132.

100Johnson comments, “Personally, I’ve seen black women snap more in the realm of compliment … One of them might comment … ‘Work, girl. Work! (SNAP! SNAP! SNAP!).’” Johnson, 132.

101 Johnson 126.

102 In a 1968 interview, Pomare mentions the ways in which he articulates everyday life with his choreographic choices: “Take Strody Meekins who danced the cool Madison Avenue type Negro in Blues. It almost killed him. Why? Because in real life Strody is precisely the type I was mocking. He’s clean- cut, wears a Brooks Brothers suit, and works in Wall Street. In the end he understood something about himself and the Negro’s dangerous dual position in a white society.” Estrada, 50.

103 “I’m suggesting that seeing the connections between the quotidian movements of sex and work and that movement more easily construed as “dance” is an inherently politicized project” Barbara Browning, “She Attempted to Take Over the Choreography of the Sex Act: Dance Ethnography and the Movement Vocabulary of Sex and Labor” in The SAGE Handbook of Performance Studies, eds. D. Soyini Madison and Judith Hamera, 385-396 (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2006).

104 Johnson’s interviewee describes snapping as “common” from a middle class perspective. Johnson, 130- 131.

105 Ferguson 2004.

106 Ferguson, 16, 121-122.

107 Michelle Wright has described the nation state hierarchizes bodies by feminizing working class and racial minorities and reproducing the prevailing social order through the form of the heteropatriarchal family in “a narrative according to which all communities can be broken down neatly into heteropatriarchal family units, whether nuclear or extended. If a man is not the primary breadwinner or somehow otherwise head of the household, we have a symptom of a troubled family/community.” Wright, 53. 131

CHAPTER 4

PASS FE WHITE AND HOMESTRETCH: JOAN MILLER’S SATIRICAL ‘READINGS,’ REFUSALS AND AFFIRMATIONS

The thing is, [with Eleo] it was not only the shocking part, but the reality of things that happened, that people were hiding behind walls. Breaking the walls and the barriers, opening the blinds—the reality comes. And Joan, the same. But with Joan it was—how do you call it in school?—an academic truth, and she made fun of it, telling you exactly what the truth is.

—Martial Roumain

He begins singing in a low baritone. “My country ‘tis of thee.” As he continues, he begins to stutter, stumbling over the words, “Work land of misery. Of thee I moooaaaan.” He exhales a labored sigh. Following the lines, “Land where my fathers died. Land of the pilgrim’s pride,” his face slides into a sardonic expression. This trace of Chuck Davis performing Joan Miller’s ‘reading’ of the nation captures Miller’s satirical sensibility in her use of embodied citation for trenchant choreographic commentary. She (mis)quotes a performance of patriotic pride. Her citation repurposes this pedagogical tool of citizenship— aimed at educating citizens on the foundational

American national value of freedom —for her own ironic analysis, Signifyin’ on its internal contradictions. In Miller’s ‘reading,’ misery is substituted for liberty, as the freedom that the song would let ring remains elusive in a land haunted by its history of exploited labor.

Joan Miller used a satirical form of diaspora citation to critique desires for normative subjectivity. Her satires quoted aspirational, interconnected structures for accessing belonging to the figure of the ‘human’ through ‘proper’ citizenship: whiteness, 132

marriage, celebrity, and education. Miller appropriated these national institutions in her choreography, like the sarcastic solo for Davis, deconstructing their ‘natural’ character by humorously and incisively ‘reading’ contradictions at the foundation of the status quo.

Attending to the racialized and gendered exclusions of the figure of the ‘human,’ her choreographic juxtapositions revealed how desires for normativity reproduce a violent, naturalized social order.

Miller also used diaspora citation to affirm the capacity to desire differently, through her rejections of the aspirational structures of normative subjectivity and ‘proper’ national citizenship. Her experimental, multimedia approach to movement improvised through quotations of post/modern dance, social dance, quotidian movement, ballet, and her own quirky gestural vocabulary, “Millerisms,” to reimagine concert dance’s

‘universal/abstract’ subject as black and female, situated within a diasporic structure of belonging. Repurposing citations of historical movement vocabularies in the present, her choreographic imagination extended into a future beyond the reproduction of accepted thought, while simultaneously manifesting that future in the historical present of her black avant-garde performances. She lived her choreographic theorizations in everyday life by exceeding conventional gender roles, improvising pedagogies beyond institutional requirements, and pursuing queer desires beyond the dominant black and white nationalist gender and sexual logics of her historical moment.

I consider Miller’s work through close readings of her semi-autobiographical solos Pass Fe White (1970) and Homestretch (1973), which explore issues of belonging in relation to nationalism, diaspora, race, gender, and the Black Arts Movement in the context of the university during a moment of student rebellions on local, national and

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global scales. Miller’s satirical citations critiqued the desire for ‘proper’ placement within a system that reproduces social inequity. She refused to be ‘properly’ placed in the racial, gender and sexual hierarchies of female objecthood in the nation, and she refused to reproduce them through institutional education. Her choreographies perform the capacity to desire differently, provoking considerations of other ways of being (human)

(together) in the world.

Background: Refusing the ‘Rote’

Joan Miller was born in 1936 in Harlem, New York to middle-class immigrant parents from the Caribbean. Her mother was Jamaican, and her father was from St.

Lucia.1 She remembers her Catholic school education as a conditioning into, and reproduction of, social norms. “[T]he whole rote thing … I didn‘t know what I was saying. The catechism. You just repeat. And I was good at it, which was why I never raised my hand when I got to college, because I didn’t know that I could say anything … ask me about what was on the page and did [I] have an opinion about it and would [I] have done something differently. No. I just do what I’m told.”2 After high school,

Miller’s parents encouraged her to pursue a ‘stable’ occupation as an educator.3 She graduated from Brooklyn College in 1958 with an undergraduate degree in physical education; a master’s degree in dance education from Columbia Teacher’s College in

1960; directly followed by attending Julliard with a John Hay Whitney fellowship.

During the summers, she had begun to study with modern dance choreographers Doris

Humphrey and José Limón at Connecticut College, and with Louis Horst in New York.4

After a one-year appointment at Smith College, in 1963 she was hired to teach modern

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and folk dance at Hunter College’s Bronx campus (which became Lehman College in

1968), where she would be the director of the dance program for the next thirty years.5

In 1969 she began to develop, Robot Game, a critique of assimilation to normative modes of behavior, which articulates the ‘rote’ conditioning of her Catholic school education with the performance of everyday life. She describes the piece as exploring “the rote aspect of living, the inability to be creative, the inability to be daring, the inability to get out of the box.”6 In 1970 Miller became the director of Lehman’s dance program, implementing a B.A. and B.F.A. at the first CUNY school to have a dance program.7 That same year, she founded her company, The Joan Miller Chamber

Arts/Dance Players, and premiered her signature solo Pass Fe White, which she had been working on since 1968. Pass Fe White has four sections: “Miss Jane,” “Miss Liz,” “Miss

Mercy,” and “Miss Me.” Each section is set to a poem (sometimes performed live, sometimes recorded) and accompanied by music and other media, such as slide projections.

“Miss Jane” & Decolonizing Desire Pass Fe White by Louise Bennett

Miller’s dancing body is clothed from head to toe in white. She wears a white bathing cap, or hood, with goggles strapped to her head, a white motorcycle jacket and pants, or white coveralls. Regarding her approach to this solo Miller states, “When I did the actual movement, none of the movement had anything to do with [narrative], and I loved it, and I still love it. I never actually did a―passing—a person passing for white and they want to be black.”8 Miller’s choreographic approach juxtaposed movement and text, rather than acting out the narrative. The resonance of this strategy is evidenced in 135

Deborah Jowitt’s 1971 review: “Part of the reason for the strength is that while the taped voice reads a poem about ‘passing,’ the dancer in white racing outfit and goggles steams along her own track. She doesn’t attempt to illustrate the poem, and as a result she illumines it.”9 My approach in reading Miller’s solo mirrors her juxtapositional method, suggesting resonances rather than literal relationships between the movement, text, and other media that she placed in conversation.

“Miss Jane” begins with the dancer launching repeatedly into a handstand against a black wall. She crashes back down, before hurling herself at it again. The last time she suspends herself upside down. She alternates bending one knee at a time, shifting, switching back and forth. Joan describes this image of herself in this way, “I was the motorcycle upside down trying to right itself with the wheels spinning and trying to find himself and wasn’t able.”10 The movement physicalizes, without literalizing, the

(im)possibility of belonging in a situation of racial passing. Her wheels spin in the frustration of the paradoxical knowledge of (not) belonging. Dyane Harvey conveys her experience of this moment as a performer: “no text, no language, no wording, nothing.

Just you and the wall. You and the wall. You and the wall. And showing the effort of it, and the frustration of it.”11 The dancer faces off with the wall. The desire to pass into whiteness, out of blackness—to advance one’s social status in a racist system by performing belonging on the terms of the ‘human’—is rendered as a contradictory frustration. One cannot right oneself, find oneself (in relation to others). “It was about being in this other space of not knowing who you are, where you are, where you’re supposed to fit in, kind of floating, trying to figure it out.”12 The dancer’s inversions convey a sense of belonging as elusive.

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The history of black people passing in white America places issues of national belonging in stark relief, illuminating the stakes of what W.E.B. DuBois termed the problem of the twentieth century—“the problem of the colorline.”13 Racial passing is a form of ethnic impersonation and identity transformation that has occurred in the

American context for at least as long as people of African descent have had sexual unions with people of European descent.14 It is traditionally understood as an enactment that occurs when people who are legally black choose to live or “pass” as white, and it is premised on the assumption of stable, impermeable racial categories as binaries and legible, fixed racial signifiers, such as culture and phenotype.15 Individuals passed in this way in order to enjoy the opportunities and privileges of whiteness. Simultaneously, the gains that people anticipated for leaving their black identity behind were fraught with anxieties about being found out and consequent financial and social ruin.

While the practice of exposing people who were passing was uncommon in black communities, for both the individual and his or her family, passing was tantamount to a kind of social suicide. People missed family funerals rather than expose their secret.16

Allyson Hobbs points out that, “To write a history of passing is to write a history of loss.

Loss of self. Loss of family. Loss of community. Loss of the ability to answer honestly the question black people have been asking each other since before Emancipation: ‘Who are your people?’”17 The gains secured by passing inevitably entailed loss, especially around a sense of belonging in relation to history and intimate relationships. On this complex issue Adrian Piper observes, “[I]n thinking about those many members of my own family who have chosen to pass for white—a person who desires personal and social advantage and acceptance within the white community so much that she is willing to

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repudiate her family, her past, her history, and her personal connections within the

African-American community in order to get them is someone who is already in so much pain that it's just not possible to do something that you know is going to cause her any more.”18 Although Jet Magazine announced that passing was becoming passé in 1952, the practice endured for several years.19

Pass Fe White plays with binaries throughout: internal/external, black/white, in/visible. For Harvey, as a performer, the goggles referenced the binary of in/visibility:

“Visibility and invisibility, and children when they’re little, you know, they play the peek-a-boo game, but when the hand is in front of the eyes, it means I’m invisible. You don’t see me.”20 Harvey noted that the hands and hair were also concealed as factors that could lead to external identification/detection.21 The disoriented image of Miller upside down, spinning her wheels is followed by the juxtaposition of her moving body against her recorded voice reading Louise Bennett’s poem “Pass Fe White.”

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Miss Jane jus’ hear from ‘Merica Miss Jane just heard from America Her daughta proudly write Her daughter proudly writes Fe say she fail her exam but To say that she failed her exam but She passin‘ dere fe wite! She’s passing there for white!

She say fe tell de truth she know She says to tell the truth she knows Her brain part not so bright, Her brain is not so bright She couldn‘t pass tru college She couldn’t pass through college So she try pass fe wite. So she tries to pass for white

She passin wid her work-mate dem, She’s passing with her workmates She passin wid her boss, She’s passing with her boss, An a nice wite bwoy she love, dah– And a nice white boy she loves, that’s Gwan wid her like say she pass. Going with her, says she passes

But sometime she get fretful an But sometimes she gets fretful and Her heart start gallop fas' Her heart starts to gallop fast An she bruk out eena cole-sweat And she breaks out in a cold sweat Jus a-wonder ef she pass! Just wondering if she passes!

Jane get bex, sey she sen de gal Jane gets vexed, says she sent the girl Fe learn bout edication, To learn about education It look like sey de gal gawn weh It looks like, she says, the girl went away Gwan work pon her complexion. To work on her complexion

She noh haffe tan a foreign She doesn’t have a foreign tan Under dat deh strain an fright Under that there strain and fright For plenty copper-colour gal For plenty of copper-colored girls Deh home yah dah-play wite. When they’re at home play white

Her fambily is nayga, but Her family is black, but Dem pedigree is right, Their pedigree is right She hope de gal noh gawn an tun She hopes the girl has not gone and turned No boogooyagga wite. No good-for-nothing white

De gal pupa dah-laugh an sey The girl’s father laughs and says It serve 'Merica right It serves America right Five year back dem Five years back they Jim-Crow him now Jim-Crow-ed him, now Dem pass him pickney wite. They pass his child as white

Him dah-boas' all bout de districk He boasts all about the district How him daughta is fus-class How his daughter is first class How she smarter dan American How she is smarter than Americans An over deh dah-pass! And over there, she passes!

Some people tink she pass B.A. Some people think she passed B.A. Some tink she pass D.R. Some think she passed Dr. Wait till dem fine out sey she ongle Wait til they find out, she only Pass de colour-bar Passed the color-bar

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Pass Fe White: Diasporic Articulations and ‘Reading’ Aspirations toward Whiteness

The poem was originally published in the groundbreaking 1966 collection,

Jamaica Labrish: Jamaican Dialect Poems.1 In the poem, Miss Jane is labrishing

(gossiping in Patois) about how her daughter, whom she sent to college in America, is passing for white. Joan’s recorded voice begins to read the poem. Her lilting intonation cites the vernacular nuances of Patois inflection, providing a sonic, rhythmic soundscape for the movement.2 Miller’s cadences in her oral performance reference the rhythmic soundscape of her past, the way her mother’s Jamaican accent carried historical sonic traces of diaspora that filled Miller’s childhood home in America. The aural texture of the language in Miller’s voice creates a link across space-time to Jamaica, an acoustic diasporic formation connects a postcolonial Jamaica to a segregated U.S. The text of the poem connects issues of colorism, what Bennett termed the “white bias mentality” across these contexts.3 Bennett’s vernacular poetry was a political intervention at the intersection of language, class, race, and respectability politics in postcolonial Jamaica, which formally gained independence in 1962, four years before Jamaica Labrish was published.4

Miller used satire as a form of citational ‘reading.’ She quotes the social norm of the color line, recontextualizing it within her choreographic framework to critique its inherent absurdity. Through ironic juxtaposition she exposes racial classification as an irrational tool of racist ideologies. Miller used satire’s subversive edge to reveal contradictions within accepted thought and institutions, a form of social study for the performative purpose of social transformation. “In satire, irony is militant.”5 Miller’s student and former company member Abdel Salaam observes that, “she probably had one

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of the most amazing satirical voices that I have ever witnessed in dance. But again, for the purpose of constantly posing questions, provoking thought, hoping to stimulate change through deconstruction and renovation.”6

Miller’s satirical sensibility resonates with Bennett’s poetic rhetoric. Bennett’s also worked through satire in the service of social justice.7 In “Miss Jane,” Joan performs

Bennett’s satirical ‘read’ of the daughter’s misuse of educational opportunity. Miller reveals the urgency embedded in her use of the poem’s satire: “For instance there was a line that says—she sent her daughter to America to look around her education, and she tried to work on her complexion instead. So … it’s a humorous line, but the piece is dead serious.”8 The deadly serious critique of the desire to pass out of blackness and black communities of belonging, and into whiteness, on the terms of possessive individualism,

‘reads’ the desire for social status accessed through proximity to the figure of the

‘human.’ The satirical ‘read’ renders the daughter’s desire for whiteness equivalent to stupidity: “fail her exam,” “brain part not so bright,” “couldn’t pass college.”

The figure in white drops into a deep crouch, exaggerating the planes of her already angular body. Her hips swing to the side of her arms, as she faces the audience.

She moves sideways, shifting the broken shapes of her asymmetrically bent elbows and knees, while switching her hips back and forth to propel her along her trajectory.

Returning to the deep crouch, she balances on the ball of one foot. The other leg trails behind her in a low bent-legged attitude. She propels herself in circles, rapidly scooting around on her hands.

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Jamaica—U.S. Décalage: Colorism and Segregation

While Miller articulates U.S. and Jamaican contexts through her vocal performance of the vernacular poetic text, her use of diaspora citation also reveals the décalage—the distinct perspectives and power dimensions—of these milieus. “Miss

Jane” embodies an incisive critique of the desire for (the privileges of) whiteness.

“[W]hiteness is an ideologically and culturally constructed trope that is endowed with real world consequences: those who don the cloak of whiteness assume the mantle of entitlement and power.”9 The desire for whiteness surfaces the shared issues around colorism across these contexts, while the décalage becomes evident in the legal enforcement of racial lines in the U.S. through segregation at this historical moment, which was distinct from the Jamaican context.10 In the poem, the father celebrates his daughter’s passing as subverting Jim Crow segregation laws. “The racist laws, ‘Jim

Crow’, had turned down his immigration some years ago. Now his daughter has cheated

America … His daughter’s ‘success’ is his revenge.”11 These simultaneous joints and gaps enable the piece’s critiques of the nation and the terms of belonging to the ‘human.’

In contrast to the father’s celebration, Miss Jane’s Jamaican perspective asserts the family’s upper-class status, “dem pedigree is right,” in her preference for an educated daughter, rather than a “boogooyagga” (good-for-nothing) white.12 Miss Jane’s perspective also foregrounds the gendered dimensions of the poem’s critique of white womanhood: “Her apprehensions resume her prejudices against white women: they misuse their relation with men in order to promote their career … they are superficial and only concerned with their appearance.”13 Miss Jane critically observes how white

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women exploit their structural relationship with white men, through their appearance and the access to power it affords, in compliance with the dominant terms for ‘success.’

The next section of the solo, “Miss Liz,” elaborates Miller’s satirical critique of white womanhood in relation to (the desire for) normative subjectivity. Joan questions, not only the desirability of possessing white womanhood as the national standard of femininity, but the imbricated terms of possessive individualism and sexual exploitation that underpin its foundation—the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in the U.S.

Before turning to “Miss Liz,” I offer a brief consideration of property-in-the-person as the condition of possibility for the color line and the construction of racially inflected

American genders and sexuality. This dimension illuminates the structural nature of

Miller’s satirical critiques, and her skepticism toward the institutions that underpin and reproduce the terms of subjectivity through property in the person.

Passing the Color Bar: The Gender and Racial Contradictions of Patrimony

How to pass the color bar. Bar being the limbo bar, which, when you look at people who are playing limbo, they’re in a deep, deep, deep lunge, or a hinge, and they’re traveling underneath this bar, but then it’s also, as you said, about the legal bar exams. —Dyane Harvey

The dancer descends to the floor, shooting her body forward into space, straight and taut like a board, supported by her hands. Pressing forward, low and quick, she runs on her hands and feet, her knees hiking up towards her face. Her hands push against the floor, thrusting her back into a deep squat, with one leg extended in front of her. Her arms reach out into space above her leg. She is suspended in this position. Abruptly, she pushes back to sit, her legs sticking straight out in front of her. She begins to shift her hips, walking forward awkwardly on her butt. 143

In Pass Fe White, Miller’s satire points to the inherent contradictions in legal systems of racial classification. Passing the ‘color bar’ implies passing beneath notice into the unmarked position of whiteness. The satirical double play “Wait til dem find out, she ongle pass de color bar”—following B.A. and D.R. (bachelor’s and doctoral degrees)—also indexes law school bar exams. Passing the color bar brings to the fore the legal implications of passing in relation to property in the person—the vigilant maintenance of the color line enshrined in the U.S. through Jim Crow and anti- miscegenation laws.14

F. James Davis clarifies how the sexual and gendered dimensions of property-in- the-person determined the lines upon which segregation would be drawn. He reveals the double standards and contradictions of the “one-drop” rule—the initially legal, and later de facto, classification of a person with any African ancestry as black—which preserved the status of white, heteropatriarchal, propertied Man:

This [one-drop] definition of who is black was crucial to maintaining the social system of white domination in which widespread miscegenation, not racial purity, prevailed. White womanhood was the highly charged emotional symbol, but the system protected white economic, political, legal, education and other institutional advantages for whites … American slave owners wanted to keep all racially mixed children born to slave women under their control, for economic and sexual gains … It was intolerable for white women to have mixed children, so the one-drop rule favored the sexual freedom of white males, protecting the double standard of sexual morality as well as slavery … By defining all mixed children as black and compelling them to live in the black community, the rule made possible the incredible myth among whites that miscegenation had not occurred, that the races had been kept pure in the South.15

The enforcement of the legal boundaries of the figure of the ‘human’ through the “one- drop” rule exists at the intersection of sexual and legal violence.16 Hortense Spillers has brilliantly theorized the “economic and sexual gains” in the rape of enslaved black

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women by white men as a form of violent domination, which combined the reproduction of (people as) property and free labor.17 Spillers argues that American genders are also always a racialized two genders. The highly charged emotional symbol of sexual purity embodied in white womanhood, combined with constructions of the threatening specter of black male sexuality, were used as rationalizations for the domestic terrorism of lynching.18 At stake in the “incredible myth” that miscegenation had not occurred— belied by the vigilant(e) enforcement of anti-miscegenation laws—were issues of legal dis/inheritance, which secured the transfer of literal wealth within white families and the privileges of whiteness through maintaining the social order of property-in-the-person.

The historicity of miscegenation, embodied in biracial children and the performative act of passing, threatened the security of the established social order, which was premised on notions of racial purity, by raising the specter of (inter)racial, patriarchal contradictions.

Pass Fe White was choreographed in the wake of legal segregation, in the afterlife of slavery.19 The piece makes ironic meta-commentary on this system of racial classification, founded on the contradictions of possessive individualism and patriarchal self-interest. In the poem, the daughter’s ambivalent positioning—between black and white, between Jamaica and the U.S.—troubles the accepted foundations of these social norms of the nation. Adrian Piper remarks that the “one-drop” rule is distinct from racial classifications in other countries. She notes this décalage in relation to Jamaica, mentioning the ways in which her upper-class Jamaican mother (like Miss Jane) refused the second-class citizen treatment she received when she moved to the segregated U.S.20

The one-drop rule is also distinct from other minority groups in the U.S. Piper gives the example of Native Americans, who must be able to prove that they are at least one-eighth

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indigenous because this legal classification entitles them to financial benefits from the government. On the other hand:

A legally certifiable black person is disentitled to financial, social, and inheritance benefits from his white family of origin, so obtaining this certification is not just easy but automatic. Racial classification in this country functions to restrict the distribution of goods, entitlements, and status as narrowly as possible to those whose power is already entrenched. Of course this institutionalized disentitlement presupposes that two persons of different racial classifications cannot be biologically related, which is absurd … But the issues of family entitlements and inheritance rights are not uppermost in the minds of most white Americans … What they have to lose, of course is social status—and, insofar as their self-esteem is based on their social status as whites, self-esteem as well.21

Piper notes that the contradiction of status quo racial classification—the false assumption that two people of different races cannot be related—is at the heart of property laws designed to secure and reproduce white wealth. This wealth is also converted into privilege, social status and a more abstract sense of self-esteem. In the program note for

Pass Fe White Miller states, “The progression of poems and solos represents one person’s journey towards self-esteem.”22 The solo constitutes a series of movements away from the forms of self-esteem premised on the exclusive construct of the figure of the ‘human.’ The self-esteem afforded to this form of personhood has its legal and epistemological foundations in a violent history of gendered and sexual hierarchies of people as property, specifically women as various forms of racialized property.

The juxtaposition of slides, the sonic and textual information of the poetry, and

Miller’s non-narrative movement ‘reads’ aspirations toward whiteness as the property of

‘proper’ persons in the U.S. This patrimony is an undesirable inheritance. Returning to face the audience, she smacks the ground with open palms. Her bent elbows create a frame for her folded knees, which she whips briskly from side to side. She turns away from the

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audience, kneeling to face the back. In slow motion, she brings her hands to her head. The transition to the next section juxtaposes spare piano chords resounding against a loud thumping—a sound score composed by Joan’s long-term collaborator Gwendolyn Watson.

Miller’s career straddled the formal, legal transition from segregation to

‘integration.’23 In a 1989 interview, she was asked if the concept of passing was still relevant. She replied, “Not so much passing, I don’t think anymore, but the struggle is still there.”24 This struggle is the persistence of the dominant historical terms of white supremacy in the “afterlife of property.”25 On these terms, the desire for whiteness is also the desire to occupy an abstract position, which denotes full humanity in the ongoing purchase of histories of slavery and segregation on the present.

“Miss Liz” Poem for Half White College Students by LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka

“Miss Liz” picks up Miss Jane’s critique of white womanhood in the fracture between racialized American genders conceived on the terms of the ‘human.’ Performed to LeRoi Jones’s (later Amiri Baraka) Poem for Half White College Students, “Miss Liz” interrogates Elizabeth Taylor as the paragon of (white) femininity. Choreographer Rod

Rogers, in whose company Joan danced between 1964 and 1968, reads Jones’s/Baraka’s poem aloud:

Who are you, listening to me, who are you listening to yourself? Are you white or black, or does that have anything to do with it? Can you pop your fingers to no music, except those wild monkies go on in your head, can you jerk, to no melody, except finger poppers get it together when you turn from starchecking to checking yourself. How do you sound, your words, are they yours? The ghost you see in the mirror, is it really 147

you, can you swear you are not an imitation greyboy, can you look right next to you in that chair, and swear, that the sister you have your hand on is not really so full of Elizabeth Taylor, ‘til Richard Burton is coming out of her ears. You may even have to be Richard with a white shirt and face, and four million negroes think you cute, you may have to be Elizabeth Taylor, old lady, if you want to sit up in your crazy spot dreaming about dresses, and the sway of certain porters' hips. Check yourself, learn who it is speaking, when you make some ultrasophisticated point, check yourself, when you find yourself gesturing like Steve McQueen, check it out, ask in your black heart who it is you are, and is that image black or white, you might be surprised right out the window, whistling dixie on the way in.26

Miller’s use of this poem references the historical moment of the piece’s creation during the Black Arts Movement (1965-1975). Jones/Baraka was a seminal figure in the movement, theorizing principles of a black aesthetic and the propagation of nationalist ideas through artistic forms.27 Her use of this poem cites Baraka, and references thematic interests of the Black Arts Movement, while Miller’s central choreographic concern with gender in this section, offers a distinct perspective from hegemonic discourses of Black

Power and the Black Arts Movement.28

An enormous close up of Joan’s face is projected on the wall behind her. Her eyes are wide, her expression an exaggerated mask of horrified disapproval as she stares down at her own performance of propriety. She stands in front of the projection, upstage left, slightly tipped forward at the waist. Her bent arms form a hanger for a white jacket, which hides her body from view, revealing only her lower legs. She moves sideways by alternately lifting her heels and toes, rotating them in and out, doing “the Uncle Willy,” as she shuffles and shimmies across the upstage panel. As she tosses the jacket aside, her body is revealed. She is clothed in a white tunic, gathered at the waist, wearing long white gloves, and a short, blonde wig. The piece ends with her tossing the blonde wig 148

onto the ground, physicalizing the undesirability of occupying this fetishized version of white womanhood. Harvey noted, “Oh yeah, it was a nasty wig. I mean it was clean and everything, but it wasn’t styled. It was unkempt.”29 Miller’s satirical choreographic citation ‘reads’ the tropes of idealized white femininity.

Of particular interest to Joan was the line referencing Elizabeth Taylor. Johari

Mayfield, who learned and later performed the solo remarked, “She really wanted to see that, the embodiment of that line.”30 Miller cites, and ‘reads’ Elizabeth Taylor—the figure of the Hollywood celebrity as the American cultural ideal of unmarked femininity—the abstracted figure of ‘woman,’ in Joan’s words “that all other women, regardless of race, should aspire to.”31 While Elizabeth Taylor is foregrounded as an intertext from the poem, my interviews revealed that this section of the piece was also informed by the 1959 film Imitation of Life. Elizabeth Taylor rarely sported blonde hair, but in the movie, Lana Turner embodies the national blonde archetype of the Hollywood starlet. Baraka’s citation/’read’ of Elizabeth Taylor as a fetishized version of ‘woman’ promoted within white patriarchy (“’til Richard Burton is coming out of her ears”) parallels Turner’s role in the movie. These icons of the silver screen articulate the

‘proper’ performance of idealized white femininity embodied in the cult of the

Hollywood celebrity. My reading turns to consider the historical context of Pass Fe

White through the blonde wig as an intertextual reference to Imitation of Life. Joan’s former students (and later colleagues) Sheila Kaminsky and Martial Roumain emphasized the historical significance of the movie in relation to the solo. Kaminsky states, “It was about how to get ahead at that time,” and Roumain adds, “and the daughter passing for white.”32 Joan’s reference to this complex cultural text, engages the terms for getting

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ahead, for advancing one’s (feminized) social status in/on the terms of the nation. In her satirical critique of normative desire, Miller refuses to desire the advancement of social status through white, feminine objecthood, configured on the terms of property-in-the- person.

Imitation of Life: Deconstructing (National) White Womanhood

Imitation of Life exists in three versions—the 1933 Fannie Hurst novel, the 1934

John Stahl film, and the Douglas Sirk 1959 film remake, which is the most relevant to the creation of Pass Fe White. The narrative links the struggles of a Euro- and an African-

American woman, both single with a daughter, to a tale of economic success. The white woman achieves Hollywood fame while living with the black woman, who does the domestic work, and her light-skinned daughter, who tries to pass for white.

Lauren Berlant characterizes this women’s world, and its critique of white womanhood within the larger frame of a man’s world, as a failed “experiment in female refunctioning of the national public sphere.”33 She argues that the women’s problems are the result of the fact that the supposedly abstract citizen enshrined in Constitutional law was designed solely to be occupied by white, heteropatriarchal, propertied Man: “in

American culture legitimacy derives from the privilege to suppress and protect the body; the fetishization of the abstract or artificial ‘person’ is constitutional law, and is also the means by which whiteness and maleness were established simultaneously as ‘nothing’ and ‘everything.’”34

This irony—white manhood as everything and nothing—is embedded in

Constitutional law as the contradictory condition of possibility for citizenship in national

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definitions of full personhood, conceived through property in the person as self- ownership. Berlant points out that, “technically, in the beginning, property ownership was as much a factor in citizenship as any corporeal schema … the implicit whiteness and maleness of the original American citizen is thus itself protected by national identity: this is a paradox, because … one effect of these privileges is to appear to be disembodied or abstract while retaining cultural authority.”35 American values tend toward this abstraction, the embodiment of neutrality as an unmarked position. This stands in contrast to what Berlant describes as the historical “overembodiment” of women in general and African American women in particular: “American women and African

Americans have never had the privilege to suppress the body, and thus the ‘subject who wants to pass’ is the fiercest of juridical self parodies as yet created by the American system.”36 The U.S. legal system is premised on the contradiction of the equality of the individual and the exclusions of ‘proper’ citizenship, making the figure of the mulatta

“the paradigm problem citizen.”37 Miller’s focus on this paradigm problem citizen, located at the aporia of national personhood, cites and ‘reads’ this juridical self-parody, recalling Chuck Davis in Miller’s satirical ‘reading’ of the nation’s contradictory promise of freedom.

Building on Hortense Spillers’ argument that American genders are always a racially inflected two genders, Berlant argues that the film “crystallizes the distances between the nation’s promise of prophylaxis to the ‘person’ and the variety of female genders it creates.”38 Black and white women are subject to distinct (discursive and material) regimes in the histories of property that (over)determine social codings of gender and sexuality. In the film, the figure of the white, blonde celebrity “condenses the

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national identity of [the masses’] taste and their desire in the surplus corporeality of Lora

Meredith [played by Lana Turner] … transforming its public iconicity, its stereotypicality into a national problem.”39 This problematic dynamic of national desirability plays out in the light-skinned daughter, Sarah Jane’s, performance of passing, which is simultaneously sexually aggressive and theatrical. She imitates the blonde woman’s success “in an understanding that physical allure is the capital a woman must use to gain a public body.”40 Sarah Jane mimics Lora on a distinct class register, becoming a white showgirl and disavowing her dark-skinned mother in the process. This “perverse opportunity to capitalize on racist patriarchal culture … reminds us that the nation holds out a promise of emancipation and a pornographic culture both.”41

Joan’s critique in “Miss Liz” references and refuses these terms for success.

Tossing the blonde wig to the floor, she turns a critical ‘side-eye’ toward the desirability of sexual objecthood in economies established by white (heteropatriarchal) men. White womanhood offers limited agency, on the terms of property-in-the-person, which deny recognition of the full humanity of women. The pinnacle of success on these terms for white women, and women of color who aspire to whiteness, is to exist as a kind of glorified object in national economies of capitalist consumption. This formula for success is complicit with the status quo oppression of women of color in national economies of desire in which black women are not figured as beautiful and in national labor economies where domestic work is defined as a ‘natural’ place for black women, a place established in the gendered labor economy of slavery.

Miller rejects this mode of personhood. Not only is white femininity not her goal, but the sovereign sense of self it reinforces, and the emancipation it promises, turn out to

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be undesirable. “Americans in the text equate personal emancipation through [self commodification] with shedding the collectively shared body of pain to gain a solitary protected self … she [Lora] ends up alone, enfranchised but not empowered.” Although

Joan was also a recipient of the national education that promotes this desire for self- commodification, she desired something else—a version of personhood that is not privatized, a sense of empowerment achieved through a sense of the self as connected.

Miss Liz moves through her quirky shuffling and Joan’s unique gestural moves,

“Millerisms.” Exaggerated, feminine hand gestures, accentuated by the white gloves, are subjected to a breakdown. The broken wrists devolve into chicken wings. Her thin angular arms break at the elbows, as they crash into her body, rebounding off of her ribcage, making a circular motion with the bent elbows hanging like broken wings at her side. She pivots around the back corner in a low, bent-legged attitude, which develops into a long, full sweeping extension arriving at the diagonal in front of her. Sliding into a crossed fourth position, her long arms extend upwards, before breaking at the wrists. Her pointer fingers trace the space around her, as her leg extends behind her into a long arabesque. She skips forward, a low chugging motion which propels her pelvis as her arms swing out in front of her.

Joan ‘reads’ the proper performance of idealized white femininity embodied in the cult of the Hollywood celebrity. She quotes the signatures—the blonde hair, the long white glamorous gloves, the dainty broken wrists—before subjecting them to a physical, theoretical deconstruction. As the voice reads “Check Yourself,” she pulls open the neckline of the tunic, peeking into her dress. She yanks off the short blonde wig, chucking it to the ground.

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Berlant suggests that part of the problem for the historically “overembodied,” is that it “thwarts her desire … to move unconsciously and unobstructed through the public sphere.”42 The contrast between the disembodied, abstract citizen and the lived experience of the historically overembodied registers in the ease of mobility through public space. This sense of embodied (im)mobility ushers us into Miss Mercy’s black walk.

“Miss Mercy”: ‘Reading’ Overembodiment One Thousand Nine Hundred & Sixty-Eight Winters by Jackie Earley

Joan describes the third section, entitled “Miss Mercy,” as minimalist: “That was my minimal piece because the poem was read three times [with] cello accompaniment and all I did was walk down from upstage to downstage and you know how long that took … I put on a black jumpsuit during the walk. And that was it. No dancing.”43

Got up this morning Feeling good & Black Thinking black thoughts Did black things Played all my black records And minded my own black bidness!

Put on my best black clothes Walked out my door And … Lord have Mercy! White Snow!

The dancer enters the space in a nude leotard. She picks up a pair of black pants and begins to slide into them. As she pulls them up, they become a one-piece, floor length black jumpsuit. Touching her hair, she begins a sultry walk upstage, away from the audience. She sinks slightly into each hip, ‘feeling’ her(black)self. Minding her own 154

black business, she zips up the jumpsuit, facing upstage. She turns deliberately to face the audience, sitting in one hip as she pivots to walk towards them. The punchline of the poem—“Lord have Mercy!”—is repeated three times, intensifying from a slow drawl to an emphatic exclamation, before dropping to a hushed tone on, “White Snow!” The dancer points to the ground in front of her, emphatically snaps her head up, shooting a quizzical gaze directly at the audience, as if to say, “Oh really?!” and abruptly walks offstage. Soft chuckles are audible from the audience.

Initially this section was accompanied by cellist Gwendolyn Watson. In a later version, it was accompanied by a group of live musicians, a jazz quartet and djembe player, who occupied the upstage right corner. They improvised with the dancer and the performer reading the poetry live.44 In Miller’s multimedia, interdisciplinary choreography, Miss Mercy’s action exists in relation to the presence of the other bodies onstage. It also exists in a social relationship to the audience. The coded significance of the simple point-and-look also points out their relationship to the white world, the context that ultimately envelops Miss Mercy, the audience, and the theater.

The dancer’s subtle funky walk, set against the poem’s text, conveys a desire to wrap oneself in blackness, to imbue one’s being with blackness, a departure from the desire for whiteness explored in the previous sections. The title’s indexing of the historical moment, 1968, combined with the poem’s use of African American vernacular, reflects black aesthetic imperatives in the Black Arts era to attend to black people’s ways of knowing and being in the world.45 The “dead serious” satirical ending surfaces the limits of separatism—black nationalist and Black Arts Movement demands for distinct terms apart from national norms. Despite Miss Mercy’s efforts to create a space

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completely apart from white influences, she is confronted with those terms the minute she steps out of her house. Though ‘white snow’ might initially appear to reference nature rather than the social construct of race, her ironic look confronts the audience, Signifyin’ on ‘snow’ by referencing the terms whiteness that envelop the social milieu beyond her doorstep. Miss Mercy’s “overembodied” black walk is burdened by being legible as both black and woman, in contrast to the disembodied pedestrian activity of the abstract citizen (‘human’). Her walk calls attention to whiteness as a structuring norm of national public space.

‘Reading’ the fiction of the abstract/neutral/universal body, Miller marks whiteness as the unmarked background of the national public sphere. She also surfaces the contradiction of the supposed opposition between public and private spheres: Here I am trying to create this black world alone in my room, but because the public and the private are mutually structuring, even the privacy of my mind, my black thoughts, are ultimately interrupted by the larger terms of the white world. The poem, in conjunction with Miss Mercy’s walk, ‘reads’ the public sphere, which is supposedly equally accessible to all citizens, by marking its condition of uninhibited mobility: whiteness and maleness.46 Miss Mercy’s performance of what Berlant calls the historically

“overembodied”—her thwarted desire to move unhindered and unselfconsciously through public space—‘reads’ the limits of black nationalist separatism within the white nationalist exclusions of ‘abstract’ citizenship. These limitations of the nation as a structure of belonging lead into the final section in Miller’s (re)turn to diaspora.

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“Miss Me”: Black Feminist Diasporic Belonging Ego-Tripping (there may be a reason why.) by Nikki Giovanni

Miller wears a green unitard. Moving on the diagonal, she stretches her arms in opposition, a long leg extended behind her in arabesque. She takes off in a jump, her leg slicing sideways, ascending to the ceiling as her bottom foot stretches away leaving the ground in a moment of expansive flight. She slides out to a scissor cross-legged fourth position, breaking her wrists at the top of the arc of motion. Giovanni’s poem accompanies her celebratory, buoyant movement.

I was born in the Congo I walked to the fertile crescent and built the sphinx I designed a pyramid so tough that a star that only glows every one hundred years falls into the center giving divine perfect light I am bad

I sat on the throne drinking nectar with Allah I got hot and sent an ice age to europe to cool my thirst My oldest daughter is nefertiti the tears from my birth pains created the nile I am a beautiful woman

I gazed on the forest and burned out the sahara desert with a packet of goat's meat and a change of clothes I crossed it in two hours I am a gazelle so swift so swift you can't catch me

For a birthday present when he was three I gave my son Hannibal an elephant He gave me rome for mother's day My strength flows ever on

My son noah built new/ark and 157

I stood proudly at the helm as we sailed on a soft summer day I turned myself into myself and was jesus men intone my loving name All praises All praises I am the one who would save

I sowed diamonds in my back yard My bowels deliver uranium the filings from my fingernails are semi-precious jewels On a trip north I caught a cold and blew My nose giving oil to the arab world

I am so hip even my errors are correct I sailed west to reach east and had to round off the earth as I went The hair from my head thinned and gold was laid across three continents

I am so perfect, so divine, so ethereal, so surreal I cannot be comprehended except by my permission

I mean ... I ... can fly like a bird in the sky ...

“Miss Me” shifts from Miller’s critiques toward her imaginative capacity to desire differently. Signifyin’ is still present in the poem’s vernacular appropriation of dominant meanings—“I am bad” (meaning good) and “so hip even my errors are correct”—but now the humor operates as an affirmation of a black female figuration of personhood.47

In “Miss Me,” Miller proposes a consideration of black womanness as a central, rather than particular, mode of subjectivity and a foundational point of departure for constructing diasporic belonging. This figure Signifies on Western and white nationalist deployments of the figure of the ‘human’ as the ‘proper’ subject of History.

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The poem’s intertemporal references create links between the past and the present. Sites of African historical civilizations—the Congo, the fertile crescent, the pyramids, the Nile—are articulated with affirmative black American vernacular of the

1960s/70s historical present. This (re)framing of history is imaginative and speculative.

It constructs belonging through articulating the poetic imagery of historical reference points in the present, rather than constructing a linear historiography based on empirical evidence of ‘progress.’ Bound by neither space nor time, Miss Me’s flights of historical fantasy are in pursuit of something in excess of the limitations of the present determined by a reproductive logic of the status quo, which reinforces that the ways things are is the only way they can be, based on some kind of ‘natural’ order. Dyane Harvey described the movement as “being like what I wanted to do. Break out. Break me out. Let me dance. Let me dance.”48 Harvey situated this feeling within a paradigm of diasporic belonging. Her interior journey as a performer through the poem’s references enabled a

“sense of a global blackness.”49 Miss Me ‘breaking out’ in this sense of global blackness, performs the impulse of queer diasporic belonging described by Nadia Ellis as “an urgent desire for an outside—an outside of the nation, an outside of empire, an outside of traditional forms of genealogy and family relations, an outside of chronological and spatial limitations.”50

In this section, Miller performs a desire for a world in which the contributions, power and beauty of black women are not only acknowledged, but understood as foundational. Pass Fe White was initially performed in four sections by Miller. As she set it on other dancers, “Miss Me” became a group section with the three soloists from the previous sections. Here ‘me’ refers to a multiplicity, an expansion beyond the individual

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self into a world of black women. (T)He(i)r performance of dancing black, femme joy realizes this desire as a practice of black women creating beauty in a world that insisted that they had nothing to do with it.51 Saidiya Hartman says that the “autobiographical example is not a personal story that folds onto itself; it’s not about navel gazing, it’s really about trying to look at historical and social processes and one’s own formation as a window onto social and historical processes, as an example of them to tell a story capable of engaging and countering the violence of abstraction.”52 Miss Me counters the violent abstraction of humanity into the ‘human’ and the abstraction of ‘beauty’ into white femininity.

Johari Mayfield performed “Miss Jane,” “Miss Liz” and “Miss Me.” She describes the first three sections as an examination that moves between various binaries—black/white, inside/outside—and the performance of personas associated with those prescribed, fixed oppositions. In contrast, she describes “Miss Me” as a movement beyond those limitations, where one gets to “graduate to being human.”53 This figuration of the human is not the ‘abstract’ citizen as ‘human,’ but a reimagining of world history premised on a fantastical poetic embodiment of African American women’s lived experiences and ways of knowing. In this world, the soloist(s) can dance without having to continually question the placement and significance of (t)h(ei)r body/ies in space.

They occupy a world in which black women move freely across space and time, in which their knowledge and contributions are understood as foundational. “Miss Me” moves away from Miss Mercy’s confrontation with the dominant terms of the external present— the abstract citizen as ‘human’ in the national public sphere—toward a speculative time warp of global, feminine blackness. Miller’s approach to diaspora citation in “Miss Me”

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repurposes forms of the past for the urgency of present, in order to imagine a future beyond the reproduction of the status quo.

Black Avant-Garde Diasporic Remixing: Repurposing Concert Dance Forms

[T]o be able to be in two times in the same place … the future in the present—and classically, the prophet has access to both of those. The prophet is the one who tells the brutal truth, who has the capacity to see the absolute brutality of the already-existing and to point it out and to tell that truth, but also to see the other way, to see what it could be. —Fred Moten

Miller did not reject her past training in the post/modern imperative of the rebellion narrative of (white) concert dance historiography: to get closer to the ‘natural’ stripped down ‘essence’ of movement performed by an ‘abstract’ dancing body.54

Instead she affirmed its usefulness by repurposing Western concert dance forms to affirm the beauty and power of black women as a central subject in/of history. Joan’s choreographic method of movement citation in “Miss Me”/Pass Fe White quotes forms of the past and her historical present. These quotations include: classical ballet, classical modern dance (Limón, Humphrey, Graham), social dance (disco), ‘pedestrian’ walking and minimalism (often attributed to postmodern dance), and Millerisms (her idiosyncratic, quirky gestural vocabulary).55 She cites these forms, reconfiguring them in a radical reordering for her own performative purposes—to move into a (queer) black avant-garde beyond.

Miller’s student and protégé Abdel Salaam explained Miller’s avant-garde approach to movement through an allegory of his experience watching/listening to John

Coltrane’s experimental, deconstructive riffs on the jazz standard “My Favorite Things.”

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He starts it with some shit that is predictable. It comes out of his past training. He’s making the chord changes. You see the bop references. You see the classical references. He’s in this—whatever the chord was, and then he starts extending the key from the seventh to the ninth to the thirteenth and then it intersects and becomes other keys and, after a while, there’s this totally different harmonic structure. That’s what Joan did … In that one solo—from where she came to the projection of where she’s trying to go— that was Joan. In one dance, you saw her influences … She would reference all of that.56

Salaam describes people leaving the theater in disgust during ’Trane’s performance. But what he remembers most vividly from this performance, in relation to Miller’s work, is his friend’s comment, “I just thought maybe I didn’t understand it yet.”57 The breadth of

Joan’s experimental approach to movement—her black avant-garde remixing of codified concert dance vocabularies with quotidian movement and Millerisms, set against a broad range of media—meant that Miller’s work occupied a queer space of belonging that did not fit neatly in the ‘scenes’ and generic categories of concert dance at the time.

She reflects on this dynamic, “If I was part of the mainstream Black Aesthetic, I would have had more gigs … I wasn’t asked because … I addressed none of [our pool of subjects] in a way that you knew this was a slave ship and we were all rowing. I realized it was because I was so oddball that I didn’t fit into any of the—It didn’t [clapping hands] do that you know?”58 Like ’Trane’s black avant-garde de/re/constructions, Miller’s work did not inspire mass audience approval. Although her choreography was well received by critics, it did not circulate widely, and/as it resisted easy categorization.59 Carl Paris notes that “she was one of the first African Americans to combine explicit references to race, gender and social conflict with postmodern aesthetics derived from the Judson

Church.”60 He elaborates on her queer belonging as an affirmation that exceeded genre distinctions: “She was doing [dance] within the context that still affirmed who she was …

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She would not have fit with sort of the mainstream postmodern ethos—because she was too black and too woman and too outspoken about both. And then she wouldn’t really fit with traditional perspectives around black dance because the work was too satirist and postmodern. During that time on the black side if you weren’t toeing the nationalistic line, you didn’t get no props.”61

Miller’s Queer Black Nationalist Belonging

In his exploration of aesthetic radicalism in Modern Black Nationalism, Gershun

Avilez defines disruptive inhabiting as a strategy of artists who convey investments in black nationalist rhetoric, while simultaneously questioning traditional conceptions of black identity, particularly reinscriptions of normative gender and sexuality. “Disruptive inhabiting moves beyond binaristic models of engagement or rejection to conceptualize strategic incorporation that is linked to reimagining. It is a version of engaged critique that results in formal experimentation.”62 In his surprising articulation—joining Larry

Neal’s demand for a “radical reordering” of the Western aesthetic in the Black Arts

Movement with Marlon Riggs’s call to “pervert the language”—Avilez locates “radical reordering” as a technique of black queer collage in a disruptive inhabiting of nationalist discourses. Miller’s use of diaspora citation in “Miss Me” demonstrates this technique of black, queer collage as strategic incorporation. Miller cites Nikki Giovanni, a black feminist voice within the Black Arts Movement. This reference simultaneously implicates Joan’s work in black nationalist aesthetics/rhetoric and complicates hegemonic or singular notions of black nationalist gender politics as masculinist. In “Miss Me,” her appropriation of Western concert dance forms, along with her disruptive inhabiting of

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nationalist rhetoric, results in formal experimentation, as well as historical and generic illegibility—hovering between the realms of ‘black dance’ and postmodern dance.

Miller’s choreographic work conveys a radical queer, feminist sensibility within radical black nationalism.

Jasbir Puar has described a queer method as “the denaturalizing of expectation through the juxtaposition of the seemingly unrelated.”63 Miller’s juxtapositions in “Miss

Me” function as a technique of connection, of articulation. By putting apparently disparate things into relation, such as Graham technique and radical black nationalist rhetoric (claiming black womanhood as beautiful was certainly radical at this historical moment), she creates a new context to understand their relation, repurposing this way of moving. In “Miss Me,” she claims these ways of moving as a part of a structure of queer, black, feminist African diasporic belonging, offering a radical alternative to national logics of normative, abstract citizenship. Salaam remembers that

She destroyed everything that I thought of that was supposed to be proper. She just dismantled it. She deconstructed it. And that’s what Joan was. That’s why sometimes I say that she was either a postmodernist or a modern dance deconstructionist, before we even started using those terms, and probably avant-garde is an even better term. She was ahead of her time, which is probably why she never rose to the height she could’ve risen to. She was making socio-political statements on society and marriage and gender exploration, and Wall Street, and the violations of what ultimately become the 1% over the 99% before people even had defined it as such.64

Deconstructing the Proper: Unlearning Institutional Education

Educate is a bad word … I never went in there to teach them anything, you know what I mean? I went to expose them to my way of thinking … advising and exposing.

—Joan Miller

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In addition to exploring issues of belonging in relation to nationalism, diaspora, gender and the Black Arts Movement, Pass Fe White offers a critique of university education. Miller comments on her own position in the university and the academy’s implication in structures of power. She critically engages the figure of the international college student in “Miss Jane”; the ‘halfwhite’ college student’s desire for whiteness in

“Miss Liz”; and Signifyin’ on Western/white nationalist versions of History in “Miss

Me.”65 I argue that Miller appropriated the university as a site for gathering, for stimulating collective embodied thought in the service of sociopolitical change, rather than educating students in the (desire for the) status quo. Her thinking was deeply engaged in broader currents of thought circulating at this pivotal historical moment—a moment of disrupting the institutional knowledge configured around the ‘human,’ as minorities fought for their knowledges to become legible in the academy.

Pass Fe White was choreographed between 1968 and 1970, a moment of student rebellions occurring on local, national, and global scales. The historical shifts in consciousness around the ‘militant’ liberation struggles discussed in the previous chapter—Black Power, women’s and gay liberation movements—informed the student rebellions. Broadly speaking, the student movements shared a goal of disrupting the knowledge formation of the ‘human’ities, which had consolidated around the figure of white, Western, heteropatriarchal Man.66 Their interventions in university knowledge production and dissemination would lead to the establishment of women’s studies, black studies, and later to gay and lesbian studies and queer theory. Joan lived and danced her minoritized knowledge, rather than implementing it in formal curricula. Evidencing a skepticism towards institutions (the university, citizenship, marriage), she worked to be in

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rather than of the academic structures of power that turned toward minority difference at this historical moment. Refusing to be for or against the university, Miller remained elusive and illegible in a moment when power sought to make minority difference quantifiable, fixing and neutralizing the dynamic reorganization of knowledge promoted by the student movements.

Gathering in the University: Theorizing Connectivities at Lehman College

Miller used her position as the director of Lehman College’s dance program to gather a broad range of teaching artists and guest choreographers, exposing her students to an expansive sense of approaches to concert dance. Yon Martin came to teach ballet.

Louie Falco and Juan Antonio taught their interpretations of Limón technique. Miller taught all of these, Graham technique, and more.67 Miguel Godreau and John Parks of the Ailey company were teachers in the program along with Chuck Davis. Rudy Perez, of

Judson Dance Theater, and Nancy Topf, from Merce Cunningham’s company, taught the emergent approaches of postmodern dance in workshops and choreography classes.68

Eleo Pomare set work on students at Lehman, and a young Alvin Ailey set his seminal piece Revelations on the student company.69 This diversity is reflected in the array of movement citations in Pass Fe White.

Miller’s appropriation of university space and resources to bring these diverse dance artists together participates in the genealogy of African American female choreographers whose work Thomas DeFrantz has characterized as “theorizing connectivities.”70 It is important to note the risk, as DeFrantz does, that emphasizing black women’s pedagogical work may reinscribe them as essentialized nurturers, eliding

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their significant intellectual and choreographic contributions in artistic economies of authorship that tend to value ‘original’ compositions of men.71 DeFrantz’s analytical framework enables an understanding of Miller’s teaching work as curatorial, theoretical, and coalitional cultural labor: “[I]n order to recognize collective subjectivities as a basis of analysis … I look here to acts of connection and coherence to appreciate a Black

Feminist articulation of world-building in dance. Here, I pay attention to coalition- building and strategies of connectivity … in the places where those engaged in communication recognize and acknowledge each other; where people converge to replenish.”72 The (black feminist) world of dance that Miller created at Lehman offered a space for recognizing and actualizing a broad network of approaches to concert dance across New York, traversing uptown and downtown, classical and postmodern. The connections Miller created and sustained across the dance field enabled her students to be exposed to this diversity. In part, the network of artists at Lehman also articulated the emergent field of ‘black dance,’ through the work of Fred Benjamin, Chuck Davis, John

Parks, Eleo Pomare and Alvin Ailey.73

‘Black dance,’ as a structure of belonging was also subject to Miller’s interrogations in her refusal to replicate the status quo. “Abdel R. Salaam came to dance almost accidentally as a student and athlete at Lehman College in the 1970s. But it didn't take him long to ponder why his college dance teacher talked about the predictability of black students like Mr. Salaam recycling Alvin Ailey in their choreography classes. Why then, he wondered, was it permissible for white students to redo Twyla Tharp? Mr.

Salaam likes to think about what lies behind accepted truths.”74 Salaam attributes his ability to deconstruct (including this deconstruction of her critiques of his early work) to

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Joan’s approach to teaching.75 She did not seek to educate as a form of indoctrination, forcing her students to replicate her own interests and aesthetic preferences, to reproduce her lineage. Instead, she placed pressure on unthinking choreographic reproductions, especially those that would impose or reinforce limitations upon black dancers and choreographers by replicating a monolithic vision of ‘black dance.’ Pushing students beyond replicating Ailey as a singular paradigm for black choreographers, Miller problematized univocal ideas of blackness in concert dance, urging her students to consider dance as a vehicle for exploring the heterogeneous, and infinitely unfolding, black subjectivities that constitute diaspora.

Miller’s former student Sheila Kaminsky emphasized Joan’s imperative for exploration in the creative process: “You could have done the strangest things in the world … she used to say, ‘Never say one word. What did you see? Student would say: weird. There’s no such word as weird in dance. You better find a way to explain yourself.’ That alone was brilliant—to not let people get away with that—oh I don’t know what it is, so it’s weird. So, no.” Miller encouraged speculation beyond the known, beyond the reproduction of the familiar. She urged students to imagine beyond the normative, moving into a queer realm to explore what might be initially illegible, or

“weird,” because it was unknown.

Miller looked to interdisciplinary collaborations, across artistic genres and academic disciplines. Kaminsky shared that “She always fought for the fact that we should be integrated with everything … film classes, everything … And they would just say no, you’re under the Phys Ed Program. It’s a sport. Dance is a sport.” Martial

Roumain added, “Drama. That was very important to her.”76 Miller’s desire to put

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artistic and academic disciplines in conversation resonates with her choreographic experimentations, which juxtaposed movement citations and diverse media in order to see what might emerge. In pursuing this desire, Miller ran up against the institutional limits that sought to divide knowledges, artistic genres, and academic disciplines. The relegation of dance to Physical Education/Health and Recreation is informed by the conventions of the Cartesian mind/body divide in the academy of the Enlightenment.

This chafed against Miller’s comprehension of dance’s intellectual capacity, “with Joan, it was about the mind of dance.”77 Her intellectual investigations across media and artistic genres engaged her students in thinking together through dance: “She was not about an ‘I.’ I did this, and duh, duh, duh. We talked dance a lot, but we talked about things that we saw—what we didn’t like, or what we did like, or what we hoped would happen for certain things, you know, the philosophy almost.”78 Key to her philosophy was bringing artists and people together in collective thought for the purposes of transformation. Salaam describes the performative thrust of her interdisciplinary, collaborative structures: “Joan’s company was The Joan Miller Dance Players, as opposed to the Joan Miller Dance Company, because she believed in music and poetry and prose and arts integration, the integration of the arts, that all of these things were a part of this whole social empowerment.”79 Through the breadth of her own experience and interests, Miller sought to expose her students, as future dancers and dance makers to the intelligence of diverse approaches to concert dance and beyond: “She loved her

Saturday Night Fever stuff.”80

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Informal Pedagogy: Miller’s Black Study as Collective Speculative Practice

In addition to her work at Lehman, Miller facilitated informal study in her home.

She created spaces for her dancers and students to engage in conversation, debate, dancing, drinking, and cooking, in ways that exceeded the profession and were illegible to institutional university structures.81 These parties were also opportunities for informal instruction. The ways in which Miller supported dancers in finding their voices and agency in her composition classes, extended to advising their choreographic approaches while sitting around the dinner table.82 Her advising also interrogated their assumptions based on patterns that reproduced normative thought. “Joan was in a constant state of debate with her students.”83 Salaam describes the range of their informal study—both its intersection with the historical moment of militant liberation and student movements, and the ways it troubled the reproduction of norms within these oppositional movements:

But what happened at Lehman, because I was up at Joan’s house on Riverside, and we would spend hours sometimes just arguing and debating about what was correct versus what was not correct, and what was acceptable and what was not supposed to be acceptable, what was the norm, and ethical and moral, you know, all of that … Joan is in the mindset of those women that ultimately give birth to the codification of [feminism]. And coursework, and that you can get a degree in it. She’s pre-women’s studies … when I say the first, black, female, lesbian postmodernist—like LGBT before there was an LGBT. And Joan and I used to have vehement arguments, about gender preference and choice, and you know whether homosexuality was a valid choice, sexual choice, because remember I’m coming from my influence in the Nation [of Islam] … Because now, I’m nineteen and twenty. I’m starting to have fixed ideas and fixed ethics and fixed morals, and there’s the Islam and the Nation, and Malcolm and Farrakhan …84

Miller’s informal study with Salaam engaged him in debates about how his education into Islamic patriarchal values and norms, embedded in the black nationalist thought of the Nation of Islam, reproduced a social order founded on gendered and sexual inequity.

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Miller clearly engages black nationalist rhetoric and ideas circulating in the Black Arts

Movement era in her choreography. “She’s referring to the Movement. They are a part of who she is. She is a black woman. She references it and all of that.”85 However, she was also attuned to the internal contradictions of the ways in which hegemonic forms of black nationalism reproduced the nation’s gendered, heteronormative hierarchies. “We were both making references to the same thing, except for me as a young mind, pulling from the positive side of it, as to how it was empowering me as a black man … because I don’t see, yet, the contradictions within some of that … and from her, pulling from the critical side of it …”86

As Salaam notes, this was pre-women’s studies. They met in 1969, and the first women’s studies programs, interrogating patriarchy and normative gender and sexuality were formed in 1970.87 Salaam’s national, institutional education extended beyond formal school-based curricula into religion, and (white and black) nationalist commonsense, including naturalized gender roles, heterosexuality, and marriage.

A big word, and what was natural. And I remember one time, me saying to her, I was all of nineteen years old, “Yeah, well it’s just not natural.” And we had this back and forth, and of course I’m coming from my Judeo- Christian-Islamic context … and she would laugh and shake her head, but gradually and patiently, seeing that I was a young mind, that I was fertile— that I was open enough to have some of these kinds of conversations, that I wasn’t fixed. That even though I came out of all of the norms, all of the so- called fixed heteronormatives of society, that we’re all raised with. That I was someone in the dance world, that, if not for my own personal sense of sexual exploration, at least to be able to understand what was happening …88

Here, Salaam directly connects Miller’s lessons on deconstructing naturalized, normative forms of subjectivity to imperatives to understand the historical moment in relation to the dance world. Her patient and humorous, yet urgent, deconstructions reveal how Miller

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engaged her students in black study. Black study is characterized by Fred Moten and

Stefano Harney as gathering for collective thought—a mode of thinking with others, across in/formal sites of analysis, in excess of institutional requirements. Harney’s description of black study resonates with Abdel’s description of Joan’s informal pedagogy: “Because that’s a moment where your pre-maturity, your immaturity, your not-being-ready, is also kind of an openness to being affected by others, dispossessed and possessed by others … entering with the student into that moment, at that affective level.”89 This affective sense of connection in black study disturbs the foundations of a closed sovereign self and the hierarchies of teacher-student power dynamics.

Miller recognized black nationalism’s simultaneous liberatory potential for black people and its heteronormative contradictions, through an affective form of pedagogy, feeling with and for Salaam’s grappling with overlapping racist, misogynist, and homophobic social norms. “When I say ‘with and for’ I mean studying with people rather than teaching them ...”90 Miller’s description of her own approach to pedagogy resonates with Harney’s description: “I never went in there to teach them anything, you know? I went in there to expose them to my way of thinking.”91 This exposure was at the heart of her patient deconstructions of Judeo/Christian/Islamic nationalist contradictions with

Abdel. This pedagogical approach is echoed in her choreography, suggesting that her choreographic deconstructions are themselves a form of pedagogy, opportunities for informal study with her audiences. For example, in “Miss Me,” she cites Giovanni’s

Black Arts Movement rhetoric, which also ‘reads’ Judeo-Christian-Islamic History by

Signifyin’ on patriarchal origin myths.92

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Moten describes black study as a mode of thinking together across in/formal capacities: “… study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of rehearsal—being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory—there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present … To do these things is to be involved in a kind of common intellectual practice.”93 For Joan, dance was an intellectual, embodied practice performed with others. Even her ‘solo’ is accompanied by recorded and live poetry readings and the co-presence of musicians. Despite, or maybe because of, dance’s illegibility in university structures that relegated the body to the ‘unthinking’ realm of ‘recreation,’ she used dance to engage and interrogate the intellectual and political debates of her historical moment.

Her improvisational experimentations, and informal instruction, sought to imagine, with and for her students and her audiences, a world beyond the reproduction of the existing terms of the ‘human’—an “ongoing experiment with the informal, carried out by and on the means of social reproduction, as the to come of the forms of life … not fishing or dancing or teaching or loving, but the ceaseless experiment with the futurial presence of the forms of life that make such activities possible.”94 Miller’s experimentation with forms of the past, to imagine a future performed in the present, deconstructed and refused (the social reproduction of the desire to belong according to) the terms of the ‘human.’ She did so during a historical moment when the student

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movements sought to displace this figure as the center of knowledge production. This was also a moment when the university turned an affirmative eye toward minority difference.

Student Movements, the ‘Human’ities and Academic Affirmations

Roderick Ferguson analyzes the student movements of the late 1960s/early 1970s, and their absorption by the university, using Michel Foucault’s theory of the affirmative dimensions of power, developed in The History of Sexuality.95 This perspective proposes that power does not merely discipline or produce repression, but that it “‘produced effects at the level of desire—and also at the level of knowledge.’”96 In The Order of Things,

Foucault historicizes the humanities (human sciences) as arising in the eighteenth century from the epistemological object of Western Man. In relation to the ‘militant’ movements discussed in the previous chapter on Narcissus Rising, Ferguson notes that “Given the enormous diversity between social movements of the fifties, sixties and seventies, they were all joined by a critique and displacement of Western man and by the great reclamation of tongues and histories besides those of the master.”97

Students and radical professors embedded within these social movements sought to disrupt the status quo underpinned by the figure of Western Man—the abstraction of humanity into the figure of the ‘human’—in the knowledge formation of the humanities.

“San Francisco State student strikes of 1969 advocated a ‘Third World revolution’ that would displace and provide an alternative to racial inequality on that campus. That same year, 269 similar protests erupted across the country.”98 Protests, sit-ins, and various other embodied tactics were deployed in the fight for the belonging of different bodies,

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along with their histories, knowledges, and languages, to become legible and take their place in university power structures that determine what ‘counts’ as knowledge.

In October 1969, in Harlem, New York, approximately two hundred African

American and Puerto Rican students locked the south campus gates of CUNY’s City

College, for two weeks until the university administration gave into their demands.99

Eventually, the Board of Education agreed to establish an open admissions policy—

“every high school graduate could matriculate in a CUNY school [which was] transformed from a predominantly white institution into one made up of a majority black and brown students.”100 A young professor at City College, June Jordan, wrote an essay on the Open Admissions Movement entitled, “Black Studies: Bringing Back the Person.”

In the essay, she theorizes the university as the site for reproducing the naturalized, national social order. “What is the university until we arrive? Is it where the teachers of children receive their training? It is where the powerful become more powerful. It is where the norms of this abnormal power, this America, receive the ultimate worship of propagation.”101 The university propagates the ideology of possessive individualism through knowledge (re)production centered on the figure of the ‘human,’ in a racial genealogy of slavery and colonization.102

Jordan’s writing portrays “African Americans and Puerto Ricans as witnesses to the horrors and deformations of Western progress. As she figures those terrors through the liberal self, she frustrates the assumptions that the Western individual is the benevolent horizon of achievement and agency.”103 Jordan’s essay articulates the stakes of the student movements in an historical critique of personhood, conceptualized through

(private) property in the person. Her critical perspective on the academy as a site for

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reproducing social inequality resonates with the choreographic critiques and informal pedagogies that Miller was practicing just five miles away. This proliferation of normative subjectivity in and through the university recalls Joan’s use of Baraka’s admonition to the figure of the halfwhite college student—“Check yourself!”—before buying into and reproducing this system of values.

Salaam remembers the ways that the Open Admissions movement at CUNY’s

City College in Harlem impacted the environment at Lehman, CUNY’s Bronx campus.

Salaam remembers that “some people tried to burn down the library, and some people tried to chain up the doors … It was done at City College and then worked its way up to

Lehman, and [they] tried to take out the European history section.”104 Sheila Kaminsky echoed this sense of the historical environment: “And we did lock down the school with the important folks who made decisions … We locked Schuster Hall.”105 As a sophomore, Salaam joined the Kumbanbanya, a black nationalist outgrowth of the Black

Student Organization. Inspired by the demands of the Open Admissions Movement, he and a woman named Rose (with the leadership of elder students who had been banned from campus) negotiated the first Black and Puerto Rican studies programs at Lehman

College.106

Even as the student movements were successful in establishing women’s and ethnic studies programs and departments, Ferguson reveals the contradictory nature of their investments in institutional recognition. He specifically relates the act of taking over university buildings to national liberation movements, which captured not only state offices, but the state form itself, ironically participating in and perpetuating, the very structures these oppositional formations sought to dismantle.107 The process of making

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minority knowledges legible to administrative procedures worked to quantify race, making it into ahistorical, calculable units of measurement, rather than historical points of departure, effectively institutionalizing essentialism.108 “Hence the open admissions movement—like many other student movements—was founded on a contradiction: the dynamism of minority communities, on the one hand, and the desire for institutional forms that would ultimately restrict and arrest that dynamism, on the other.”109 In this historical context, the desire for legible identity and ‘proper’ placement within institutional structures, what Ferguson terms the will to institutionality, was a phenomenon that Joan Miller not only resisted, but actively deconstructed, with both her students and audiences.

Operating in rather than of the university, Miller participated in the deconstruction of the ‘human’ities taking place at universities across the nation and the world. She referenced the concerns articulated by militant liberation struggles and student revolts, but on a distinct register, appealing to her students and audiences in forms of black study that exceeded the choice of being for or against the institution, with its affirmative solicitations to be included and neutralized.110 Rather than making demands of the institution, Moten suggests: “consider this notion of the demand as an appeal, as a claim, where you’re not appealing to the state but appealing to one another … You’re an ensemble, and that’s bound up with that notion of study and sociality that we’ve been talking about.”111 Miller appealed to her students and audiences through discussions, classes, rehearsals, workshops, and choreographic messages in claims to ensemble.

Salaam describes how, “She was teaching feminist principles, what became feminist principles, to this man.”112 She articulated the concerns of the various student/militant

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movements (black, women’s, and gay liberation struggles), joining them in her conversations with her students. Miller was performing, practicing, living, and dancing intersectional feminism twenty years before the term was coined in the academy.113

Joan theorized horizontal connectivities, rather than a demand for institutional belonging. She resisted disciplinary labels and generic boundaries. She practiced these connectivities by creating spaces for gathering, for collective, embodied thought in the university, while simultaneously problematizing homogenous/singular ideas of ‘black dance’ and black subjectivity. Miller performed black study as a speculative practice in order to move beyond reproducing the values of possessive individualism. “To undermine the reproduction of hegemony in those little acts of production—reading, writing, teaching, and advising … such are the little things that we can deploy in order to imagine critical forms of community, forms in which minoritized subjects become the agents rather than the silent objects of knowledge formations and institutional practices.”114 Instead of capturing buildings, and potentially reproducing the (racist, heteropatriarchal) state form, Miller appealed to her students and audiences to consider and imagine other ways to be(long) in the world, clearing queer pathways to choose otherwise, to desire differently. Marriage, as the culmination of ‘proper’ gender performance in nation structures, was among the institutions that Miller refused to desire.

She also subjected this national structure of legal belonging to her critical choreographic lens.

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Homestretch: ‘Reading’ Gender Pedagogy and Refusing Marriage

In 1973, Miller created a follow up solo to Pass Fe White entitled Homestretch.

In the solo, Joan performs a satirical ‘reading’ of education into normative gender roles and marriage—the ‘proper’ placement for women in the nation’s hierarchies of citizenship (and objecthood). Salaam describes this solo as “the next level of Pass Fe

White … it was a commentary, to a certain degree an attack, on predefined or predetermined gender roles: what a woman should do, what the arc of a woman’s life should be based upon, societal norms and guidance. Marriage, of course, being one of those things. And she did some things about education.”115 There are very few archival remnants of Homestretch, but among them are these two reviews. From the reviews, it becomes apparent that, like Pass Fe White, when Miller set the solo on other dancers, it became (an) ensemble work.

No doubt about Joan Miller’s ‘Homestretch’—a Women’s Lib piece for sure. Out stride three women, in bridal dress, graduation cap and gown and ratty bathrobe. While Sawako Yoshida runs in circles, Wanda Ward reads, “See Dick run. Dick runs a lot. Jane watches Dick run.” Ward does a whole masculine number, from cool pop dances to Mr. America muscle flexing. Rapid-fire slides of a bikini-clad woman, Virginia Slims ad and Superman and snatches of the song “I’m Your Puppet.”116

In another sequence, Yon Martin performs for Jane Lombardi, shouting “See Dick run. Dick runs fast. See big Dick…See Jane run. Jane runs …” Except Jane isn’t running. She’s sitting looking bored and frustrated. He coaxes her, performs a display of energetic masculine leaps and bounds across the stage: “See Dick run and jump and fly.” Finally Lombardi puts on a blond wig [and says]: “I’m Barbara. Fly me.”117

In Homestretch, Miller cites and ‘reads’ the essentialized, gendered worldview imparted through the Dick and Jane books in national educational curricula. Her satirical sensibility is evident in her (mis)quotation of the uneven distribution of embodied agency transmitted through this education: “See Dick run … Jane watches Dick run … See big 179

Dick.” This is also reflected in the (mis)quotations of gendered embodiment. The

“masculine number” performed on a woman’s body, denaturalizes quotidian gender performances, while the multimedia juxtapositions comment on objectified images of women as puppets.

The line “I’m Barbara. Fly me,” accompanied by the blonde wig, is a choreographic intertext referencing a 1971 National Airlines ad campaign. The ads interchanged various white female stewardesses, with the tagline, “I’m ____. Fly me.”

The airline emblazoned the women’s names onto the planes and forced the flight attendants to wear buttons onboard that said: “Fly Me.” Despite the National

Organization of Women’s attempt to get a legal injunction against the ads, the campaign produced a twenty-three percent increase in business.118 This National Airlines commercial reflects the national, capitalist space of fantasy consumption, in which desire is condensed into the corporeality of white female sexual objects. The status quo that

Joan critiqued in her work included naturalized racial, gender, and sexual violence—the commonsense objectification of women in rape culture as part of a naturalized patriarchal social order.

The reviews convey the way Miller quotes female archetypes/stereotypes as

‘proper’ placements for women that reproduce national racial and gendered hierarchies of labor: a wedding dress, cap and gown, and ratty bathrobe. These roles circumscribe the possibilities for (black) women at this historical moment. bell hooks relates, “Black girls from working class backgrounds had three career choices. We could marry. We could work as maids. We could become school teachers. And since, according to the sexist thinking of the time, men did not really desire ‘smart’ women, it was assumed that signs

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of intelligence sealed one’s fate.”119 These historical constraints are also reflected in

Imitation of Life (1959). The only work that the dark-skinned mother Annie is eligible for in national labor economies was domestic work as a maid—the naturalized role of caretaker, haunted by the figure of the mammy in general, and Aunt Jemima in particular.120 The conditions of possibility for the color line and segregation also shape(d) national labor markets in the reproduction of economies founded on property in the person. Homestretch reveals the imbrication of the supposedly distinct public and private spheres: Stewardesses are offered as sexual objects in the American national economy of capitalist consumption. Thinking about black women’s domestic work as maids in relation to white women’s domestic work as housewives, referenced by the ratty bathrobe, also complicates labor distinctions between the public and private spheres, in

‘proper’ placements for women in the hierarchical structure of American racialized genders.121

Finally, the solo takes on women’s ‘proper’ placement in the nation through marriage. Historically, for women the institution of marriage offers proximity to the agency of the abstract national citizen. Berlant notes, “The way women have usually tried

[miming the prophylaxis of citizenship] is heterosexual, but marriage turns out to embody and violate the woman more than it is worth.”122 The critique of marriage in Homestretch also references Joan’s personal history. “She had a marriage that didn’t work out.”123 The title, Homestretch, can simultaneously be read as the (unworkable) stretch to fit into domestic labor economies through the institutional form of marriage and as the final stretch of a race to the finish line of her own marriage. “She would start out with this very familiar thing that people would relate to and almost be comfortable with, and then

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she would start to just rip apart—through images, through slides, through commentary, through poetry … She would take a whack at traditional marriage, at gender preference, throughout her entire career.”124

Miller emerges in a white wedding dress, holding a bouquet. As she begins to move, the bouncing hemline of the dress reveals a pair of sneakers. Her casual, quotidian movements are remixed with Millerisms—a hand pulling off an astonished face, a fist twisting into an opened mouth. She strips off the wedding dress, tossing the flowers and the dress aside. Clothed in a nude leotard, she chooses differently. “Through the arc of the intellect of the work, she’s leading you into this different thought."125 Joan’s queer desires operated in excess of commonsense expectations for what might constitute a livable life for a woman. Her satirical choreographic critique of women’s education into their proper placement in national, racial hierarchies of female objecthood opens a consideration of how life might be lived differently.

Steaming Along on Her Own Track: Performing the Capacity to Desire Differently126

In closing, I want to dwell on a set of quotidian choreographic images from

Miller’s performance(s) of everyday life. This queer archival fragment comes to me through Salaam’s memory, rather than from evidence found in the Performing Arts library archive. Its traces are also archived in her choreography, residing in

Homestretch’s refusals of pre/proscriptions for the form women’s desires should take.127

Salaam reminisces, “She wasn’t standing on a soapbox saying, ‘I’m gay, I’m gay, I’m gay.’ But she drove a truck. She and Gwen would walk down the street holding hands and smooch and kiss and cuddle in public and stuff like that. And this was back in the 182

fucking 60s and 70s. So there were some people who set precedents.”128 Thinking of

Miller driving around in her truck conjures a scandalous performance of gender nonconformity in the 1960/70s. She lived her queer desires, eschewing the ‘proper’ gender roles satirically deconstructed in Homestretch. Joan did not broadcast a sexual identity in language, confining her personhood to a label in a national context where black women’s gender and sexuality is subject to hypervisibility—discursively overexposed and overdetermined.129 Instead, she lived and practiced her desires, performing them through embodied actions that cleared a (historical) path through public space.

Gwendolyn Watson was Joan’s collaborator. She was the original cellist in Pass

Fe White, and she improvised the music for Joan’s dance classes at Lehman, as well as modern dance classes across New York City.130 She is also a white woman. In 1973, they hosted a conference whose theme, riffing on race and multi-media collaborations, was entitled, “Music and Dance or ‘Integration is a Bitch.’”131 In their artistic and personal collaborations, their improvisations of and through relation, Joan and Gwen enact an excess of women’s racial, gendered and sexual ‘proper’ placement in the nation.

The image of their tender, affectionate exchanges, relayed by Salaam, occurred in the years directly following the legal prohibition of interracial marriage (and/as sex) in the transition from segregation to ‘integration.’132 Even after interracial intimacy became legalized through the institution of marriage, anti-miscegenation as a social logic continued to be reproduced through the cultural hegemony of whiteness—the status quo that Joan sought to deconstruct through her choreographic black studies. Miller rejected

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the commonsense logic of desire inherited from the legal structures of the nation: same race, ‘opposite’ sex.

The fracture between American racialized genders means that these genders have been structurally positioned as mutually defining opposites in hierarchical, heteropatriarchal economies of women as property. According to this structure of female objecthood, black and white women’s subjectivities are positioned as parallel lines that should not meet, or should only meet in hierarchical transactions in the economies determined by property in the person (e.g. domestic labor). Joan and Gwen’s queer choreography, a black woman and a white woman exchanging gestures of tender intimacy in public, involves the intentional proximity of bodies in particular socially coded gestures. “It is the proximity of these bodies that produces a queer effect … proximity between those who are supposed to live on parallel lines, as points that should not meet.”133 It matters that this happens in public, traditionally the domain of men. I argue that this moment offers a queer “experiment in female refunctioning of the national public sphere.”134 Joan practiced desiring differently, longing for forms of connection beyond racialized structures of female objecthood. The choreographic act of black and white women reaching across national, gendered color lines, determined by property in the person, clears a path with its gestures of tenderness performed in public, improvising ways of being (human) together through difference. As Salaam notes, “There were some people who set precedents.” Imagining a radical outside of national laws and logics of belonging in/to the nation—a future way of being in the present—Miller set precedents, clearing a path.135

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Miller’s satirical use of diaspora citation critiqued desires for normative subjectivity, the desire to occupy the position of the abstract citizen conceived through the figure of the ‘human.’ “For, if we are lucky, we live in the knowledge that the wake

[of slavery] has positioned us as no-citizen. If we are lucky, the knowledge of this positioning avails us to particular ways of re/seeing, re/inhabiting, and re/imagining the world.”136 Miller lived in this knowledge. ‘Reading’ institutional structures for belonging to the ‘human’ through the nation, such as whiteness and marriage, she sought to denaturalize the contradictions at the heart of a violent, national social order. Her experimental, multimedia approach improvised through quotation, repurposing movement forms of the past in order to imagine a distinct future/world, a black feminist diasporic belonging, manifested in the moment of performance. The image that opens this chapter, her satirical choreography for Chuck Davis, ‘reads’ the figure of the patriotic citizen, who belongs to a nation that has yet to live up to its ideal of freedom, as an insufficient mode for belonging in the world. Joan’s work demands attending to the ways in which she re/saw, re/inhabited, and re/imagined belonging in/to the world: queer, black, feminist diasporic forms of (be)longing that recognize black women’s knowledge in the ecstatic figure of Miss Me dancing black joy.

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NOTES

1 Carl Paris, “Defining the African American Presence in Postmodern Dance from the Judson Church Era to the 1990s.” (presentation at the Annual Congress on Research in Dance Conference, New York, NY, October 26-28, 2001), 236-7. Miller died on March 23, 2014, at the age of 77. 2 Takiyah Amin. “Dancing Black Power? Joan Miller, Carole Johnson and the Black Aesthetic, 1960- 1975.” (Dissertation, Temple University, 2011), 118. 3 Amin, 65. This desire for stability is indicative of immigrant aspirations for success in relation to the vocational opportunities available to black women at this historical moment. Joan comments on this in her solo Homestretch. 4 Lewis Ferguson, Julinda. “Joan Miller.” Free to Dance: Biographies. Accessed May 2017. http://www.thirteen.org/freetodance/biographies/jmiller.html 5 Paris, 237. 6 Amin, 67. 7 Sheila Kaminsky. Conversation with the author. April 20, 2017. 8 Amin, 74. Although this might seem like a contradictory statement—despite passing for white, the person desires to be black—it aligns with the piece’s critique of the assumption that desire ‘naturally’ tends towards whiteness. 9 Ibid, 80. 10 Ibid, 73. Her gender slippage of “find himself” is indicative of how this section of the semi- autobiographical solo was later transferred to Abdel Salaam, unfixing a particular gendered identity for the performer in “Miss Jane.” 11 Dyane Harvey. Conversation with the author. New York, NY. August 4, 2017. 12 Ibid. 13 W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk: Three Negro Classics (New York: Avon Books), 1965, 209. Literature chronicling the phenomenon of racial passing includes antebellum slave narratives like William Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860) and Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), as well as Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1893), James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929). 14 Cherise Smith Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper and Anna Deveare Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 2011, 11. 15 This definition of passing is rooted in a nineteenth-century understanding of race, and while it still has relevance, the meanings and instances of passing are considerably more diverse today. 16 “There are no proper names mentioned in this account of my family. This is because in the African- American community, we do not ‘out’ people who are passing as white in the European-American community. Publicly to expose the African ancestry of someone who claims to have none is not done.” Adrian Piper, “Passing for White, Passing for Black.” Transition, No. 58 (1992) 12, 14. 17 Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 2014. 18 Piper 14-15. 19 Karen Grigsby Bates, “A Chosen Exile: Black People Passing in White America.” All Things Considered. October 7, 2014. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/10/07/354310370/a-chosen- exile-black-people-passing-in-white-america# 20 Harvey 2017. Once, while performing, Harvey turned around and caught an image on the slide projected behind her, “a little boy sitting in a corner, a little boy all in white. A little black boy.” Miller’s mixed- media approach to choreography meant that multiple layers of references existed simultaneously, not necessarily with any overt explanation for the juxtaposition of images, sounds and kinesthetic information. 21 Cherise Smith observes that “Although passing intersects with many issues—identity formation, legal standings and definitions, and psychology among them—it remains, above all, a matter of representation, appearance, and visibility. To pass successfully, one must suppress one’s difference from, and perform the behaviors of, members of the dominant culture in order to appear like them.” Smith, 12. 1 Louise Bennett, “Pass Fe White,” in Jamaica Labrish. (J.W.: Sangster’s Bookstores, Jamaica, 1995, originally published 1966), 212-213. 186

2 When Joan began performing the solo, it would be her own recorded voice accompanying her dancing body, and later, when she passed the solo to other performers, she would read it live onstage.

3 Bennett, 211.

4 Miss Lou states, “For too long, it was considered not respectable to use the dialect. Because there was a social stigma attached to the kind of person who used dialect habitually” Mervyn Morris. Miss Lou: Louise Bennett and Jamaican Culture (Ian Randle Publishers: Kingston, 2014), 78. Her dialect poetry drew on the everyday rhythms and cadences in the appropriation of colonial English into Jamaican Patois. Carolyn Cooper: “Louise Bennett’s mission was essentially about black power … The lasting insult to Miss Lou is … our continuing refusal to acknowledge the power of our Jamaican language. At home and in school! The Ministry of Education must ensure that every child is able to learn in his or her home language. It’s a human right.” Cooper and Bennett’s comments emphasize an urgent need to decolonize the mind from a form of education that promotes a colonial status quo through the desire for ‘proper’ English as the possession of a ‘proper’ person, or human. Carolyn Cooper “I Have a Tablecloth Dress” http://louisebennett.com/carolyn-cooper-i-have-a-tablecloth-dress/

5 Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton University Press: Trenton, 1957. (quoted in Robert C. Elliot “Satire,” in Encyclopedia Brittanica 2004).

6 Abdel Salaam. Conversation with the author. New York, NY. July 22, 2017.

7 “Through her insightful humour she persuaded many colonially educated persons to value aspects of Jamaican heritage they had tended to ignore.” Morris, 111.

8 Joan Miller. Interview with Celia Ipiotis, Produced by ARC Videodance. Eye on Dance. WNYC-TV, New York. February 23, 1989. Producers: Celia Ipiotis and Jeff Bush.

9 Smith, 10.

10 Miller’s solo begins with a poem by Bennett called “Colour Bar,” which comes directly before “Pass Fe White” in Jamaica Labrish. This poem specifically discusses issues of colorism in Jamaica. Bennett’s introduction to the poem reads: “This is a comment on the sensitivity of Jamaicans to different shades of skin-colour and the stratification of society based partly on these differences—what the sociologists call the ‘white bias’ mentality.” Bennett, 211.

11 Renate Papke, Poems at the Edge of Differences: Mothering in New English Poetry by Women (University of Akron, 2012), 110-111.

12 The family’s situation dramatizes the terms of access to American university education in the wake of decolonization—the shifting geopolitical power relations of the historical era of the Immigration Act, which was passed in 1965 and enacted in 1968. The poems sits at the historical intersection of the father’s inability to move across national lines in the Jim Crow era and his daughter’s access to (power through) American universities, as a decolonized elite solicited by American universities in the wake of the Immigration Act. See Roderick A. Ferguson, “Immigration and the Drama of Affirmation,” in The Reorder of Things: the University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 147-179.

13 Papke, 110.

14Jim Crow segregation remained in place until the 1954 Brown v. The Board of Education Supreme Court case overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, legally ordering the integration of schools and all southern institutions. The order was met with violent hostility, and in 1957 President Eisenhower sent the national guard to forcibly integrate a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas.187 In 1963 President Kennedy forced the integration

of Alabama’s state university system. This was followed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which formally made discrimination and disenfranchisement based on race illegal. Anti-miscegenation laws were repealed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 but were declared unconstitutional by the 1967 Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia. https://www2.gwu.edu/~erpapers/teachinger/glossary/jim-crow-laws.cfm

15 F. James Davis, Who Is Black?: One Nation's Definition. (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005 (originally published 1991) my emphasis.

16 Historical law articulates these principles: (1662) “Negro women’s children to serve according to the condition of the mother.” (1705) “An act declaring the Negro, Mulatto, and Indian slaves within this dominion, to be real estate.” http://www.shsu.edu/~jll004/vabeachcourse_spring09/bacons_rebellion/slavelawincolonialvirginiatimeline. pdf

17 Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, 17, no. 2 (1987): 64-81.

18 Kobena Mercer, “Black Masculinity and the Sexual Politics of Race,” in Welcome to The Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), 131-171.

19 Christina Elizabeth Sharpe, In the Wake. On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press), 2017. Sharpe also references Saidiya Hartman’s considerable body of theoretical work on the “afterlife of slavery.”

20 “In Jamaica, my mother tells me, that everyone is of mixed ancestry is taken for granted … In this country, by contrast, the fact of African ancestry among whites ranks up there with family incest, murder, and suicide as one of the bitterest and most difficult pills for white Americans to swallow.” Piper, 17. “My mother being upper-middle class Jamaican, had no experience of this kind of thing. When she first got a job in this country in the 1930s, she chastised her white supervisor for failing to say, ‘Thank you,’ after she’d graciously brought him back a soda from her lunch hour. He was properly apologetic.” Piper, 24. 21 Piper, 18-19, original emphasis.

22 Text from videotape viewed during interview with Martial Roumain and Sheila Kaminsky. April 20, 2017.

23 This is in scare quotes, as the U.S. remains a de facto segregated society, evidenced especially by the public education system in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education. Ira Glass and Nikole Hannah-Jones, “The Problem We All Live With,” This American Life, WBEZ Chicago, IL, July 31, 2015.

24 Miller, Eye on Dance.

25 Sharpe, 15.

26 Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones. “Poem for Half White College Students,” in The Black Poets, ed. Dudley Randall (New York: Bantam, 1971), 225.

27 Neal, Larry. "The Black Arts Movement." In A Sourcebook of African-American Performance: Plays, People, Movements. Edited by Annemarie Bean London: Routledge, 1999 (originally published in TDR 1968), 55-67.

28 Some examples of hegemonic gender and sexual divisions of labor in Black Power and black nationalist discourse include: Stokely Carmichael’s position that, “The place for a woman in the revolution is on her back.” Mercer, 139. and “the call for black women to literally walk behind their men at three or ten paces.” Amin, 36. 188

29 Harvey 2017.

30 Johari Mayfield. Conversation with the author. New York, NY. April 18, 2017.

31 Miller quoted in Amin, 76.

32 Sheila Kaminsky and Martial Roumain. Conversation with the authors. New York, NY. April 20, 2017. 33 Lauren Berlant, “National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life,” in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 179.

34 Ibid, 200.

35 Ibid, 176.

36 Ibid, 177.

37 “[T]he American mulatta’s textual and juridical representation after 1865 always designates her as a national subject, the paradigm problem citizen (not only indeterminate in the racial/gender binarism that organizes American culture but) her will not to know, to misrecognize, and to flee her body by embracing the Liberty Tree suggests that she experiences herself precisely as not abstract, but as imprisoned in the surplus embodiment of a culture that values abstraction; and that her affinity for the bourgeois, the individual, the subjective, and the unconscious symptomatize her desire to shed her two racially marked gendered bodies in fantasies of disembodiment, abstraction, invisibility” Berlant, 177.

38 Berlant, 201.

39 Ibid, 196.

40 Ibid, 198.

41 Ibid, 202-3.

42 Berlant, 174-5.

43 Amin, 78.

44 Like the other sections of Pass Fe White, in some versions there is a live performer reading poetry, and in others it is a recording.

45 Vernacular poetry is both a theme of Black Arts aesthetics and a thread that connects all the sections of Pass Fe White: from Miss Lou’s patois to Baraka’s black colloquialisms to Earley’s funky speech, and into the following section with Nikki Giovanni’s poem.

46 Contrary to Miller’s claim that this section had ‘no dancing,’ her exploration of minimalism at this particular moment —framing pedestrian walking as choreographic by placing it in the context of the concert stage—brings forth her historical connections to, and divergences from, the historical development of postmodern dance, frequently associated with Judson Dance Theater and physical ideologies of “neutral bodies” performing “pedestrian movement.” Miss Mercy’s walk ‘points out’ the conditions of possibility for this embodiment of “democracy”: the conflation of the nation and whiteness enables the mobility of “neutral” pedestrians through public space, as well as on the concert stage.

47 “It’s a four-part suite that dealt with a woman that was trying to pass for white, and it ends with a woman that has self-confidence, self-pride and the person is eventually called Miss Me, so that she has transcended the trials and tribulations of that era.” Miller, Eye on189 Dance .

48 Harvey 2017.

49 Ibid.

50 Nadia Ellis, Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 3-4.

51 The title’s satirical reference to the “reason” for the poem’s grandiose “ego trippin’” indexes the critiques of the previous sections. Why is the narrator ego trippin’? She decolonizing her mind from the normative desires (for white femininity constructed on the terms) of (proximity to) the ‘human.

52 Patricia J. Saunders, “Fugitive Dreams of Diaspora: Conversations with Saidiya Hartman.” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 6, no. 1: 7, (2008).

53 Johari Mayfield. Conversation with the author. New York, NY. April 8, 2017.

54 “The most widely accepted account of modern and postmodern dance is one in which choreographers have progressively eliminated representation and ‘external reference’ in order to create an increasingly abstract ‘pure dance’.” Ramsay Burt “Undoing postmodern dance history,” (Lecture, Constructing contemporary dance colloquium, 2004). http://sarma.be/docs/767

55 See Banes “Sources of Postmodern Dance” in Terpsichore in Sneakers for this dominant historical account. Also see Gottschild “Barefoot and Hot, Sneakered and Cool: Africanist Subtexts in Modern and Postmodern Dance” for a contestation of this hegemonic account. The attribution of pedestrian walking on the concert stage to postmodern artists of the Judson Church is complicated by Pomare’s diddy bop walk and Miller’s performance in “Miss Mercy.”

56 Miller also used improvisational and composition techniques borrowed from jazz musicians in her choreographic approach. Abdel Salaam. Conversation with the author. New York, NY. July 22, 2017. 57 Ibid.

58 Amin, 127-128.

59 Marcia Siegel At the Vanishing Point: A Critic Looks at Dance. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972, 156.

60 Paris, 237.

61 To this day, Miller remains illegible in writing about black women postmodern concert dance choreographers. Melanie Greene, “Meet the Black Women Who Paved the Way for Postmodern Dance Today.” Dance Magazine, September 15, 2017. http://www.dancemagazine.com/meet-black-women- postmodern-dance-2485634454.html

62 Gershun Avilez, Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism (Chicago: University of Illinois, 2016), 12.

63 Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), xv.

64 Salaam 2017.

65 The figure of the international student in the poem conveys a historical, geopolitical shift from racist immigration law in Jim Crow segregation to the era of the Immigration Act, when U.S. universities would solicit decolonized elites. Ferguson “Immigration and190 the Drama of Affirma tion,” 2012.

66 Ferguson, 29.

67 Salaam 2017.

68 Ibid.

69 Amin, 73.

70 Thomas DeFrantz, “Theorizing Connectivities: African American Women in Concert Dance,” The Journal of Pan African Studies 4, no. 6 (September 2011): 56-74.

71 “African American women are too easily reduced to essentialized identities that stress their abilities to teach and nurture while operating outside of the forces of power that define modern life … [arriving] in the circulations of industry and intellect only in ancillary supportive positions … and without recourse to dynamic subjectivity, sustained group agency, or charismatic leadership abilities” DeFrantz, 57. “Black women in the United States create complex and sustainable gestures of culture, especially as a connectivity, even as they are routinely denied a centrality of presence in discourses of dance” DeFrantz, 57. This last statement emphatically describes Joan Miller’s career and contributions.

72 Ibid, 58.

73 DeFrantz, Thomas. “African American Dance: A Complex History” in Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance. University of Wisconsin Press, 2002.

74 Jennifer Dunning, “Eclipse: Visions of the Crescent and the Cross,” The New York Times (New York, NY) Dec. 23, 2005.

75 Salaam 2017.

76 Kaminsky and Roumain 2017.

77 “What I got from her, which happened through black studies and Africana studies, and the lessons within the Nation, all of these intellectual constructs that were shaping the way I thought, Joan was the predecessor of a lot of that for me, in the way that she forced me to look for the intelligence and the intellect. The balance between the intellect and the intelligence of the dance world. The intellect for me is academia. The intelligence is delivering visceral application of it.” Salaam 2017.

78 Kaminsky 2017.

79 Salaam 2017.

80 Ibid.

81 Martial Roumain describes how, “she gave parties … I mean lavish. I used to cook, and bring up, and hang out, and drink wine. She loved to entertain her dancers. Three or four times a year. And she would want everybody to dance.” Roumain 2017.

82 Dyane Harvey remembers the ways in which Miller encouraged her to move from “having just been the dancer, the tool. And now I have to make decisions about what to offer to students who are hungry, who need information … she would have us over for dinner. She would have these parties, and I said, ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to be creating here. And that’s when she said, ‘Well what do you like? What is inspiring to you?’” Harvey 2017. “Joan not only trained us, but gave us a voice—a venue for our own choreography. That type of support.” Roumain 2017. 191

83 Salaam 2017.

84 Ibid.

85 Ibid.

86 Ibid.

87 Ferguson, 5.

88 Salaam 2017.

89 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013), 116.

90 Harney, 148. “The student graduates. But not all of them. Some still stay, committed to black study in the university’s undercommon rooms. They study without end, plan without a pause, rebel without a policy, conserve without a patrimony.” Moten and Harney, 67. Salaam describes Miller in this way, “Joan was one of those teachers always in class.” She took Abdel along with her to take ballet classes at American Ballet Theater as well as Merce Cunningham’s classes downtown. They had phone conversations about his work until the day she died. Salaam 2017. Sheila Kaminsky said that Miller came to every show she ever did. Kaminsky 2017.

91 Amin, 119-120.

92 For example, the female protagonist sits on the throne with Allah, gives birth to (precedes) Noah, and turns herself into herself to become Jesus.

93 Moten and Harney, 110.

94 Moten and Harney, 75.

95 Roderick Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and its Pedagogies of Minority Difference. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

96 Ibid, 229.

97 Ibid, 29.

98 “At Rutgers, black students took over the main educational building, renaming it ‘Liberation Hall.’ At the University of Texas at Austin, a student organization called Afro Americans for Black Liberation “insisted on converting the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library to a black studies building and renaming it for Malcolm X.” Inspired by the black power movement, Chicano students would also form “the United Mexican American Students, the Mexican American Student Association, and MECha, Movimiento Estudantil Chicano de Aztlán, while others in San Antonio founded the Mexican American Youth Organization, MAYO. Those students would begin to demand Chicano studies courses and departments. Similarly in 1969 American Indian activists took over Alcatraz Island and claimed it as Indian territory, with hopes of building a cultural center and museum. And in 1970, the first women’s studies programs would be established at San Diego State University and at SUNY Buffalo” Ferguson, 5. Gesturing to international dimensions, Ferguson also connects the assault on Western metaphysics’ exclusion of difference as a mode of social formation to the student and labor uprising of May 1968 in France. Ferguson, 42.

99 The five demands were: (1) a separate school for Black and Puerto Rican studies (2) a separate orientation (3) consultation of minority students on faculty192 hiring, firing and promotion (4) admissions: the

student body should reflect the brown and black community of Harlem, where City College is located (5) curriculum: all students should take Black and Puerto Rican studies and education majors should take Spanish language classes. Ferguson, 90.

100 Ferguson, 77.

101June Jordan, “Black Studies: Bringing Back the Person” in Civil Wars (New York, NY: Touchstone, 1981), 50 (originally published Evergreen Review, October 1969).

102 Jordan’s trenchant critique of the university as an education in the normative ideology of possessive individualism: “As any college graduate can tell you, the extended family is ‘compensation for failure.’ According to these norms, success happens when the man and his immediate family may competently provide for greater and greater privacy, i.e., greater and greater isolation from others, independence from others, capability to delimit and egotistically control the compass of social experience” Jordan, 49. Private property in the person extends to the inheritance of the nuclear family, defined as the horizon of social responsibility in this system, in which protection is secured through isolating oneself and one’s family from (the risk of) others.

103 Ferguson, 90.

104 Salaam 2017.

105 Kaminsky 2017.

106 Abdel Salaam. Conversation with the author. July 22, 2017.

107 The student movements “reflect anti-colonial and liberal nationalist struggles to capture not only state offices, but the state form itself. In such a context, the takeover of administration buildings and the erection of schools and departments were modeled on the grand adventures of state capture by national liberation movements … As a phenomenon inspired by national liberation struggles, the open admissions movement—like its counterparts in other parts of the country—would inherit the contradictions of those struggles … an investment in administration as a horizon of dynamism and experimentation” Ferguson 103.

108 “We have been led to believe that essentialist discourses arise primarily as an effect of the student movements themselves, but Butler’s arguments compel us to interrogate the ways in which those discourses arise as part of bureaucratic protocols and metrics … The contradictory articulation of the student movements meant that those elements that arrested the dynamism of minority difference invoked institutional hegemony rather than repelling it, inviting academic institutions to fix otherwise dynamic notions of racial difference. Fixed and stable notions of race might thus be understood not simply as epistemological constructions but as administrative procedures as well” Ferguson, 105-6.

109 Ferguson, 104.

110 “One of the central claims of this book, then, is that the struggles taking place on college campuses because of the student protests were inspirations for power in that moment, inspiring it to substitute redistribution for representation, indeed encouraging us to forget how radical movements promoted the inseparability of the two” Ferguson, 8.

111 Moten and Harney, 136.

112 Abdel Salaam. Conversation with the author. July 22, 2017.

113 Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 193

140 (1989): 139-167. Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review, 43, no. 6 (Jul., 1991):1241-1299. Patricia Hill Collins. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Routledge, 2008).

114 “After turning his attention to that small and insignificant thing called the body, Foucault argued that one ‘advantage of conducting a critique of relations existing at a minute level would be to render impossible the reproduction of the form of the State apparatus within revolutionary movements.’” Ferguson, 232.

115 Salaam 2017, original emphasis.

116 Ellen Stodolsky, “Hannah Kahn, Joan Miller, Kathryn Posin, Janet Soares Dance Uptown, Minor Latham Playhouse, NYC, February 9, 10, 16, 17, 1973.” Dance Magazine. April 1973, 90. 117 Deborah Jowitt, “See Dick Run. See Dick Fly Jane.” The Village Voice. New York, NY. March 28, 1974, 46.

118 “To the chagrin of Stewardesses for Equal Rights, National planned to amp up its tag line by featuring its lovely ladies of the skies ‘looking seductively into the camera and breathing ‘I'm going to fly you like you've never been flown before.’” Cristen Conger, “Best of the Worst Vintage Airlines Ads: I’m Cheryl. Fly Me!” May 5, 2011. Accessed October 15, 2017. https://www.stuffmomnevertoldyou.com/blogs/best- of-the-worst-vintage-airline-ads-im-cheryl-fly-me.htm

119 bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994), 2.

120 See Berlant’s analysis of the 1933 novel and the 1934 film.

121 Piper observes that, “It may indeed be that we African-American women as a group have special difficulties in learning our place and observing the proprieties because of that particular side of white America to which, because of our traditional roles, we have had special access—a side of white America that hardly commands one's respect and could not possibly command one's deference.” Piper, 26.

122 Berlant, 200.

123 Salaam elaborated: “Like Joan had a husband. Um, and Joan lived a ‘heteronormative’ life, before she left out of that, and that marriage, and it not working, I don’t know if he was abusive or not, but Joan and I got to be so close that we, because she’s my dance mother, she would reveal to me certain things about the marriage that were not only pitfalls, but just completely turned her off from wanting to be in a marriage with a man, you know. She met Gwen and fell in love with Gwen. And that’s how we got in those conversations, you know about homosexuality opposed to heterosexuality, and the values of Judeo- Christian and Islamic normatives around relationships and what was ethical and what was moral—you know, constructs of morality.” Conversation with the author. July 22, 2017.

124 Abdel Salaam. Conversation with the author. August 4, 2017.

125 This movement description is an imaginative reconstruction based on Salaam’s memories of the piece. Abdel Salaam. Conversation with the author. August 4, 2017.

126 “Part of the reason for the strength is that while the taped voice reads a poem about ‘passing,’ the dancer in white racing outfit and goggles steams along her own track. She doesn’t attempt to illustrate the poem, and as a result she illumines it.” Jowitt quoted in Amin, 80.

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127 On methods of queer historiography: “The queer time and space of the afterhours club, in other words, is archived in the line of the poem, if not at the library at Yale” Shane Vogel, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 110.

128 Abdel Salaam. Conversation with the author. October 30, 2013.

129 “For queers of other colors, being ‘out’ already means something different, given that what is ‘out and about’ is orientated around whiteness” Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 175.

130 “Dance: Joan Miller’s Dance Players” The New Yorker. September 3, 2007. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/09/03/dance-21 “I spent 37 years earning a living improvising for American modern dance for cello and piano.” Severo Avila, “Brava: Gwendolyn Watson.” Rome Tribune. Rome, GA. April 12, 2011.

131 Amin, 83.

132 In another complication of public/private sphere distinctions, personal lives were legislated by the nation along same race, ‘opposite’ sex lines of desire. Although the 1964 Civil Rights Act repealed anti- miscegenation laws, it would not be until 1967, with the Loving vs. Virginia case, that the Supreme Court declared them to be unconstitutional.

133 Ahmed, 169.

134 Berlant, 179.

135 Simultaneously, structural power relations frame personal ones. “What is important to also know about Joan, is like many black people who are in an interracial relationship, is that there is this almost extra understanding, that you also have to make sure that people know that you ain’t forgot who the fuck you are.” Salaam 2017. Joan spoke from her lived experience and from her social location as a black, queer woman in the U.S. She choreographed from this position and perspective. She also followed her desire beyond the normative lines/logics of where, and to whom, it should lead. Crossing artistic, racial, gender, and sexual disciplinary boundaries, Miller remained invested in theorizing and living forms of connectivity through difference. I am suggesting that Joan’s desire for Gwen was distinct from the desire for whiteness (as normative subjectivity) that she deconstructed throughout her work, enacting a yearning beyond national, heteronormative racial logics of ‘proper’ placement.

136 Sharpe, 22.

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CHAPTER 5

THE DANCEMOBILE: SPATIAL BELONGING AS ENSEMBLE AND CONSTRUCTING QUEER ‘DANCE FAMILY’

The air is muggy. People leaning out of their windows shout down to those gathered on the street below. Children crowd around the stand with the sign that reads Hoffman Beverages. The crack of a soda can opening breaks through the damp air. A man is mopping the stage floor, drenched from the recent torrential downpour, with a mop borrowed from local residents. People are restless: “We want to see a show!” A lean, muscular man wearing loose white pants and a vest, bare brown chest exposed, piercings glimmering in the afternoon light, strides up to the stage: “Do you want to see us dance—or just make noise?” The crowd begins to settle down. “Get some soul, brother!” rings out from a dancer on the back of a flatbed truck on the corner of Lenox Avenue and 134th St. This interpellation marks the inaugural performance of the Harlem Cultural Council’s Dancemobile project on a sweltering July afternoon in 1967.

The Dancemobile’s physical structure was created from a flatbed truck, with a generator that powered basic lights and sound. The sides dropped open, converting the truck into a concert dance stage, allowing performances to happen in a parking lot or on a street corner, throughout New York City’s five boroughs and as far north as Albany and

Buffalo. The project’s choreographic movement strategies performed a complex structure of diasporic belonging initiated in the streets of Harlem.

Artists on the Dancemobile deployed diaspora citation to critique desires for normative subjectivity, particularly the extension of the terms for belonging to the

‘human’ into space through the exclusionary and homogenizing imperatives of a white spatial imaginary. This imaginary, premised on ideologies of settler colonialism and histories of people-as-property, underpins the spatial organization of the nation. These artists also used the practice of diaspora citation to affirm the capacity to desire differently, enacting alternative forms of personhood and spatial belonging. These emerged from a sense of entangled subjectivity in citations of the collective context from 196

which the individual emerges: I am because we are. In contrast to sovereignty as self- possession, secured through the legal/philosophical construct of property-in-the person, artists on the Dancemobile turned diasporic dynamics of displacement and dispossession into structures of be(long)ing (to each other) in the world in motion. The choreographic modes of citation practiced on the mobile honor the queer resources of black collective survival, affirming cultural and affective abundance in valuable forms of association, intimacy and kinship developed in contexts of black social life, imagining and performing alternative ways of being (human) (together) in the world.

In what follows, I lay out the conditions of possibility for the Dancemobile: ‘cool out’ funding to quell civil disobedience. This is followed by an analysis of the historical precedents that gave rise to these conditions: the formation of the modern black ghetto. I examine how a white spatial imaginary constructed a moral geography that used pathologizing discourses of juvenile delinquency to justify uneven distributions of resources across racialized sub/urban space. Eleo Pomare’s Beginsville, USA, created for the Dancemobile, deploys embodied citation to perform choreographic critiques of this white spatial imaginary and to affirm alternative modes of sociality galvanized in the mobile’s immediate context of performance—the streets. In this context, a black spatial imaginary repurposed segregated space for congregation, promoting affective practices of mutual care between Dancemobile artists and audiences as antidotes to structural violence. The affective intersection of live music and dance on the mobile illustrates the concept of ensemble (articulating soloist and group), enabling access to an experience of subjectivity as entangled (I am because we are) in contexts of black social life.

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From there I move to consider the Dancemobile artists’ use of embodied citation to construct forms of diasporic belonging by linking individual choreographic interpretations of collective diasporic movement practices in an collaborative curatorial structure. In a context of global decolonization, diasporic solidarities were articulated through the language and aesthetic sensibility of soul—soul sisters and brothers—as a signifier of racial kinship achieved through black struggles for survival. Soul, as a reference to shared experiences of moving through a white world in a black body, indexes black terms, a sense of belonging to each other in the wake of histories of diasporic displacement and dispossession. Finally, I turn to consider the mobile through the lens of coalition, as a heterogeneous collective operating on black terms, and the lens of Third World solidarities, investments in imagining a transnational commons.

The coalition of artists working on the mobile, forged through the survival technique of

“company hopping,” became “dance family,” a form of queer kinship. In this “dance family,” young artists became caretakers of unwritten histories of black (concert) dance in the transmission of movement.

Beginnings of the Dancemobile: Harlem and “Cool Out”

On May 5, 1967, following a performance of the newly formed Association for

Black Choreographers (ABC), Edward Taylor, the director/chair of the Harlem Cultural

Council (HCC), met with the Eleo Pomare Dance Company’s business manager, Michael

Levy, and assistant manager, Carole Johnson, to discuss the possibility of initiating a

Dancemobile. This project would build on the success of HCC’s Jazzmobile, a mobile musical touring unit begun in 1965.1 The council’s aims were to “provide the

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community of Harlem and its friends with ready access to the best in cultural events from the world community.”2 From the beginning, the Dancemobile linked a global cultural scope to local activities.

Carole Johnson, also a dancer in Pomare’s company, produced the first two years of the mobile. This chapter focuses on its tenure under her coordination in 1967-1968, in order to understand the conditions of possibility for the project.3 It relies heavily on her report to the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), as well as Pomare’s language, as they were, in some sense, the architects and theorists of the Dancemobile’s foundations.4 The project’s first year took place across the five boroughs of New York

City and was sponsored by the Harlem Cultural Council, the city’s Department of

Cultural Affairs, Hoffman Beverages, and NYSCA. The second year took place across the city, as well as upstate in Albany, Buffalo, and locations in Westchester County.5

The first two years also included a workshop series for professional dancers with choreographer Talley Beatty, in the winter of 1967, and an experimental performance series, during the spring of 1968, by choreographer Rod Rodgers that was designed to introduce pre-school children to modern dance.

Following Johnson, Thelma Hill took over as dance director, under the umbrella of HARYOU-ACT.6 She was succeeded by Jeannie Faulkner of the Harlem Opera

Company, who directed the Dancemobile for the remainder of its twenty-three year run.

In total, “The Dancemobile employed over 4,000 dancers with every major Black choreographer of the period including Arthur Mitchell and the Dance Theatre of Harlem,

Geoffrey Holder, Miguel Godreau, Talley Beatty, Louis Johnson, Walter Nicks, Rod

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Rodgers and John Parks. More importantly, over 1,000,000 citizens throughout the five boroughs experienced live, fully lighted dance concerts.”7

Faulkner’s comments about the conditions of possibility for the mobile reveal the relationship between property ownership, race, and establishing theatrical spaces:

“ironically there was no theater in Harlem except the Apollo. So when Langston Hughes,

Romare Bearden, Harry Belafonte, Jeanne-Blackwell Hudson, Katherine Dunham, and the other members of the Council sat down to wrestle with a Black theater concept, we found it would be pretty difficult to raise money for bricks and mortar. So somebody suggested we form a performance group and forget about the actual building.”8 Despite the immense cultural capital of the council’s members, the financial capital necessary for property ownership remained elusive for black folks in Harlem. The Apollo Theater was under white ownership most of its history, reflecting the dominant dynamic of property ownership in Harlem.9 The Dancemobile turned this dynamic of dispossession into a structure of belonging to each other in the world in motion. Rather than establishing territory on the terms of private property, the project cultivated interpersonal and spatial connections through its roving performances.

As tensions began to escalate in urban centers across the U.S. in the 1960s, collective acts of civil disobedience claimed public places, contesting the structural violence of status quo racist organizations of resources and space. Government desperation to avoid political unrest in the summertime provided a unique historical opportunity for artists. Under the troubling pretext of “cool out,” mobile street theater, including the Dancemobile, received a surge of funding through experimental government antipoverty programs.10 In 1968, Carole Johnson wrote a report to NYSCA

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reflecting on the first two years of the Dancemobile. She describes its conditions of possibility, especially the contested role that artistic production should play. Her use of quotation indicates her ‘reads,’ while she also indicates the potential for cultural equity beyond tokenism enabled by the historical moment:

Because of the pressures and tensions that exist in New York City during the summer months, the City, indeed the nation, is committed to finding and expanding recreational outlets for all its citizens. The fear of “riot” in the “long hot summer” has caused the City to experiment in many areas, notably the use of cultural and artistic groups that will attract the many people that “hang-out” in the streets. With “cool-out” as the motivation, the City was forced to look for or create groups relevant to the ghetto dweller. It’s not easy to create relevant art groups! This is especially true when that art form is coming from long established organizations that culturally are European oriented in concept and with all their visible personnel White. Because the addition of Black people to change the group appearance does not change the artistic conception, the City was forced to discover that groups which had grown out of Afro-American and Puerto Rican communities were culturally, artistically, and stylistically as rich as the “establishment” groups, and thus as deserving of support. At least they were given support for the summer “cool-out” purposes.11

Johnson ‘reads’ the rhetoric and motivation of “cool out,” citing and critiquing the city’s ideological wrangling of performance to distract disenfranchised folks through art as entertainment, while she also champions the value of artistic work emerging from these communities. Eleo Pomare echoes Johnson’s critique of the city’s forced support for artistic groups from the neighborhoods beyond established Eurocentric cultural centers in explicitly spatial terms: “In lieu of the establishment halls of the august Lincoln Center, the streets of New York in JazzMobiles and DanceMobiles will do.”12 In its second year, the Dancemobile performed in the housing projects located directly behind Lincoln

Center. The resonance of this spatial juxtaposition with Pomare’s statement amounts to a negation—refusing that which has been refused to you—in a performance of the capacity to desire differently. Rather than yearning to perform at the Metropolitan Opera House in 201

Lincoln Center’s elite plaza, these architects of the Dancemobile sought to repurpose public space in the service of congregation.

Instead of performatively deploying dance for distraction and entertainment purposes, to subdue those who “hang out” on the streets (a phrase that overlooks the systemic nature of black un(der)employment), choreography on the Dancemobile drew attention to the circumstances that had forced the government’s hand: the uneven distribution of material resources across segregated space, determined by the extension of property in the person into space, and concretized in the formation of the modern black ghetto. At stake in this history of racialized space are questions of movement— intentional migration, forced displacement, and spatial entrapment.

The Great Migration and Entrapment in the Modern Black Ghetto

Ghettos are not natural growths. They are legal constructs that are the fruit of long-held beliefs and the practices of segregation. —Mumia Abu-Jamal

During the Great Migration, between 1910 and 1970, six million African

Americans relocated from the rural South to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West.13

This large scale displacement was partially motivated by black people fleeing the white terrorism of lynching in the Jim Crow South, as well as by the enticements of employment opportunities in industrialized centers, like Detroit, New York, and Chicago.

However, in Northern and Western cities, the normative conditions of de facto rather than de jure segregation promoted and sustained “the existence of systemic inequalities in education, employment opportunities, and governance. School, housing and jobs were allocated based on strict racial hierarchies.”14 Motion instigated by flight from violence

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and promises of a better life, was met with constricted social and spatial mobility upon arrival.

In the years following World War II, policy-makers, planners, and politicians saw suburbanization as a solution to weak local and national economies and uncertain postwar social order. Government programs like the Federal Housing Authority and the

Veteran’s Affairs offices, engaged in racially discriminatory lending and mortgage policies that encouraged white families and manufacturing jobs to move to the rapidly expanding suburbs. This resulted in the phenomenon of ‘white flight’ (and white capital fleeing) from urban centers, contributing to the impoverishment of inner-city residents.15

These impoverished inner-city residents were primarily African American as the result of practices like redlining, residential segregation ordinances, racially specific restrictive covenants, and other (extra)legal means of promoting and sustaining residential segregation. For example, in 1962, when the antipoverty program HARYOU (Harlem

Youth Opportunities Unlimited) came into being, the neighborhood of Central Harlem was 94% black. This was government policy, not accidental, natural, or inevitable.16

Komozi Woodard describes this phenomenon of racial im/mobility: “as blacks migrated to the North, they were not absorbed into white America; instead they developed a distinct national culture and consciousness. The space of the African

American ghetto bore little resemblance to the spaces promised by the American Dream

… the ‘green pastures’ turned out to be concrete fields with forests of cramped project buildings … African Americans, in effect, were spatially trapped.”17 As Martin Luther

King Jr. succinctly put it at this historical moment: “the suburbs are white nooses around the Black necks of the cities.”18 In a moment marked by “increasing class formation,

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rapid urbanization, unprecedented ghetto formation and anticolonial unrest” forms of civil disobedience began erupting in the form of urban uprisings in black ghettos across the country.19 By 1967 over 120 major uprisings had been registered.20 This affective sense of discontent was the product of rising pressures and collective refusals of the ways in which the spatial extension of the philosophical paradigm of property-in-the-person— the transfiguration of whiteness into property ownership—prohibits, permits, and enforces the circulation of bodies through racialized space.

Discourses of Juvenile Delinquency & the Moral Geographies of a White Spatial Imaginary

In response to the urban rebellions of the 1960s, as David Wilson notes, the

(white) media began to represent cities as places controlled by delinquents and social undesirables, places where African Americans dominated the streets, scaring away whites and investment capital.21 “As urban areas were being destroyed by capitalist motivated government programs, African American youths and households were identified as contributing factors to ‘urban decay.’”22 Narratives of juvenile delinquency circulated by the white press ignored the structural dimension of “dismal youth employment numbers.”23 These discourses effectively blamed the material conditions of the ghetto on black behavior and nonconformity with liberal bourgeois gender and sexual norms, with the terms of ‘proper’ citizenship.24 Saidiya Hartman describes this dynamic as “ a way of thinking about black life as a particular kind of problem, and a problem of its deviation from bourgeois family norms and hetero-patriarchy. As if the restoration of the black patriarchy can remedy the ravages of slavery, dispossession, capitalism and white supremacy.”25 Blaming material conditions on collective pathological behavior deflected 204

attention away from policies that upheld white privilege through the capacity to acquire property (and pass it along in intergenerational wealth transfers) by creating a moral geography that “viewed the relative prosperity of the suburb as a reflection of the moral worth of white people. They fought to keep Black people out of their neighborhoods because they associated them with the ghettos that whites created and from which they profited. Concentrated residential segregation enacted in concrete spatial form the core ideology of white supremacy—that Black people ‘belonged’ somewhere else.”26 At stake in moral panics about juvenile delinquency are issues of belonging that reflect the spatial logics of property in the person.27

George Lipsitz extends his analysis of the perpetuation of whiteness through the construct of property in the person to a consideration of place, theorizing a white spatial imaginary: “The white spatial imaginary portrays the properly gendered prosperous suburban home as the privileged moral geography of the nation. Widespread, costly, and often counterproductive practices of surveillance, regulation, and incarceration become justified as forms of frontier defense against demonized people of color.”28 Lipsitz’s evocation of “frontier defense” indexes the historical precedents of the white spatial imaginary in philosophies of settler colonialism. “Rather than sharing North American space with Indians as common ground, the moral geography of the colonists required conquest, genocide, and Indian removal to produce the sacred ground that the Europeans felt would be pleasing to God as a City on a Hill.”29 Cheryl Harris locates the foundations of the property-like functions of whiteness in twin systems of oppression:

“the institution of chattel slavery, which exploited African American labor by rendering black people objects of property and the systematic seizure and appropriation of Native

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American land by whites.”30 In addition to rationalizing the literal genocide of indigenous peoples, this white spatial imaginary transformed the fantasy of sovereignty into concrete legal concepts of private property materializing as land ownership, in forums of violent dispossession and the brutal imposition of possessive individualism.31

In my interview with Carole Johnson about the Dancemobile, she discussed the need to heal from these twin systems of oppression, settler colonialism and chattel slavery, at the foundation of the nation. She proposed that before “you sing the national anthem, [at] every sporting event, especially, and the government [ceremonies]. You have to have that acknowledgment … we acknowledge that the Native American whatever the tribe is, whosever land we are—whether it’s the Susquehanna, or the

Cheyenne, or the Seminoles or whatever—who cared for this land before we arrived. We honor the work of the black African slaves, whose free labor helped make this country great.”32 Johnson calls for a recognition of the exploited labor and stolen land (the terms of property at the heart of a white spatial imaginary) at national events before the national anthem in order to heal the wounds at the foundation of the nation.

Choreographers working on the Dancemobile used embodied citation to critique the extension of the figure of the ‘human’ into the terms of a white spatial imaginary.

They quoted and rejected mechanisms of pathology, such as the white media’s hype of juvenile delinquency discourses, used to justify the ongoing exploitation of black people in the ghetto through de facto segregation. Artists like Eleo Pomare created choreographic ‘readings,’ which deconstructed naturalized hegemonic ideas about race and space, about who belongs where, while simultaneously mapping a poetics of

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solidarity among ghetto communities, affirming alternative forms of association and cultural abundance created in these conditions of survival.

Beginsville, USA: ‘Reading’ the White Spatial Imaginary

Eleo Pomare’s Beginsville, USA was created for the 1968 upstate touring unit of the Dancemobile and performed in Harlem the following year. The piece directly refuted the pathologizing discourses of juvenile delinquency circulating in the (white) media. It was performed by eight dancers who moved within the open weave of a structured improvisation, adding their personal flair and nuance to a diddy bop walk, pimp roll, or funky strut. In performance, they “glided, stalked, slouched, swaggered and bopped back and forth on the stage—their every move an angry challenge.”33 His choreographic theory of vitality is evident in the dancers’ improvisations of quotidian movement, such as the bop, drawn from repertoires of collective survival in Harlem’s streets. The speech in which he elaborates this theory prefaced the 1969 performance of Beginsville. The dancers were accompanied by Bob Cunningham’s jazz trio, the Black Spirits, and their movements were framed by a piece of poetry written by Pomare and delivered by actress

Jeanne Phillips. Thomas Johnson describes a dynamic interaction between performers and audience members in the Harlem 1969 performance:

[Pomare’s] head … bobbed and his lips moved to shape silently the words the dancers yelled and spat and shouted. “Nigger!” a lithe, pretty, Afro-ed dancer called out to the crowd. The dancer, Cynthia Ashby, stalked up and down the Dancemobile stage. With shrill anger and disgust, she shouted: “Nigger, Nigger, Nig-ger, NIGGAH!” The frenetic jazz of Bob Cunningham and his Black Spirits, coming from a raised bandstand, underscored the challenge—sometimes took it over, “Nigger,” came out now with an intense measured wrath, clearer than the jumbled cross talk from the other dancers, “NIG-GAH!” “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” a male voice in the audience called out, loud enough to be heard by the hundred who 207

watched on the street and from tenement windows, “I’m a nigger, I’m a ‘bad’ nigger!”34

The call and response between dancers and musicians is echoed by a call and response between performers and audience members. A racial epithet is cited and repeated. This ambivalent moment embodies a shared recognition of a degraded subjectivity, even as it announces the potential to Signify on the terms of that degradation—not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good—in a complex expressive reclaiming, an affirmation embodied in a moment of resonance. Fred Moten describes the social function in the repurposing of this slur in the black vernacular practice of the Dozens:

… within a certain social space it was the very differentiating glue that held together that social space. [It] completely galvanized that social space … it’s that kind of beautiful unencompassable sociality that actually manifests itself by way of what people would talk about as a kind of antagonism or slur … one of the ways that the difference between black people and white people manifests itself, is when Richard Pryor is saying, black people can just go, “Oh fuck you muthafucka,” like that’s what you say to your friends. That is the doublenness of the slur. That’s what I’m trying to talk about. But there’s another part of it too, which is maybe more abstract, which is that one way to think about the slur, and it bears as much pain and brutality as it does pleasure, is that the slur is generally an assault on the idea of the capacity to be a normative subject … I’m not trying to sanitize the slur, it always bears the trace of brutality, that shit can’t be eradicated from it, but by the same token, it constitutes, in our repurposing and refashioning of it, a new way of understanding … and it takes that denial of the capacity for normative subjectivity and says we don’t want that anyway. It is, in that instance, an announcement of a capacity to desire in a different way.35

The dynamic affective exchange described above in Beginsville—the citation of a racial slur in conjunction with the response from an audience member—points to the subversive potential of a system of alternative values developed in contexts of black social life. The call and response galvanizes that social context by articulating the resonances of lived experience between the bodies onstage and the bodies in the street, in a performance of the capacity to desire differently. Nobody here is trying to be a ‘proper’ subject. The 208

logic underpinning normative personhood is rejected in this context in an affirmation of the capacity to desire differently.

Suddenly, a fight breaks out onstage. One dancer thrusts his arm in a sharp stabbing motion as another’s ribcage violently contracts. The first performer runs offstage, leaving the body lifeless on the ground. Phillips’s voiceover provides commentary, “Violence has always been a part of him. That’s what the papers said.

‘JUVENILE GANG LEADER STABBED TO DEATH.’ Ain’t said nothing ’bout the urine-drenched hallways.”36 Pomare’s choreography juxtaposes the embodiment of quotidian brutality—the intimate relationship between death and life in black neighborhoods—with a quotation from the prevalent media discourse, attributing the violence of ghetto life to innate qualities of black youth. In response, he cites the structural conditions of institutional neglect—the “urine-drenched hallways” of housing projects—that never make the headlines. These forms of institutional neglect were conveniently overlooked, or attributed to failures of black people to maintain their environment, rather than to discriminatory policies that enabled structural forms of neglect and violence:

[W]hites viewed inner-city residents not as fellow citizens denied the subsidies freely offered to whites, but as people whose alleged failure to save, invest, and take care of their homes forced the government to intervene on their behalf, to build housing projects that were then ruined by alleged Black neglect. White suburbanites ignored how the artificially constricted housing market available to Blacks deflated home values, stripped homeowners of equity, reduced tax revenue for city services, created unhealthy conditions, led to overcrowding, and promoted crime. They did not acknowledge how federal funding formulas deprived housing projects of the capital reserves needed for maintenance and upkeep or how discrimination in the private sector made housing projects dwellings of last resort for the poor, rather than the mixed income communities they were initially designed to be.37

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Pomare ‘reads’ these state-sponsored forms of institutional neglect, created through exclusionary housing policies that create and sustain segregated space. His critique indexes the structural dimensions that led to empirical evidence, such as overcrowding and crime, which dominant media discourses pinned on alleged collective black behavioral deficiencies. Beginsville, USA ‘reads’ the commonsense of the (white) nation’s spatial imaginary, its moral geography, seeking resonance with audience members’ lived experiences and epistemologies.

Beginsville’s text also maps a poetics of solidarity, articulating a spatial network by citing local street corners and blocks in neglected black neighborhoods across the country. “Happens all the time on Drexel Boulevard, Chicago, Watts, Los Angeles or corners like 116th Street and Lenox Avenue, in ‘El Barrio,’ New York. Happens most the times in any old ’Spic or nigger-town U.S.A. Headlines don’t say nothing to Bedford-

Stuyvesant—they just ain’t got it together.”38 This network extends beyond exclusively black communities, linking Watts to Spanish Harlem (“El Barrio”), joining the exclusions of Latinx and black people from the national (white) body politic, in the material form of racialized spatial entrapments: “any old ’Spic or nigger town U.S.A.” In Beginsville,

Pomare ‘reads’ the spatial organization of the nation predicated on the exclusions of a white spatial imaginary. These citations also reference the neighborhoods that constituted the network of sites for the Dancemobile’s performances in its first year, including: Harlem, Spanish Harlem (“El Barrio”), Bed-Stuy, the South Bronx and the

Lower East Side (“Alphabet City”).39 Pomare’s gesture to the coalitional potential in connecting these aggrieved communities is absent from the privatized white spatial imaginary of possessive individualism: “they just ain’t got it together.”40

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Beginsville, USA: Appropriations and Affirmations of a Black Spatial Imaginary

In addition to revealing the spatial dimensions of structural racism, constructed through the possessive individualism of a white spatial imaginary, Lipsitz theorizes a black spatial imaginary—black performative re-imaginings of segregated spaces as sites for congregation and for conceiving a different future. Beginsville’s text nods to this dimension of Harlem’s summer streets, one marked by coolness, rather than a need for

‘cool out’: “Ain’t it nice baby, that things look so good? It’s summer again with some better, warmer days ahead. Ain’t that together? Ain’t that fine? Miniskirts for the chicks and time for boss cats to take better care of their ‘Do’s.’ Ever dug a cat smelling of fat- back, mustard green, basketball games and Dixie Peach?”41 The coolness of congregation in a black spatial imaginary is performed in Beginsville through movement quotations of the diddy bop stroll and citations of the historical vernacular nuances of black folks who moved North in the Great Migration—“Ain’t it?”—with their culinary traditions, “fat back and mustard greens.” It is referenced in the sensory memories of the sweaty cheers at a late afternoon basketball game and the smell of Dixie Peach hair pomade.

These references create affective resonance in performance, acknowledging valuable alternative forms of association and kinship, forms of sociality and cultural resources forged material conditions of survival. They are drawn from, and performed for, people ‘hanging out’ together in public space, folks who associate, who know each other, who take care of one another—who may not have the property rights to the places that they occupy, but who’ve got it “together.”

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“A Great Overexposure”: Performer and Audience Entanglements

In the Dancemobile’s repurposing of concert dance, and its proscenium format, for the streets, Pomare observed that it “creates a great overexposure for the performer.”42

The project was also designed to expose black audiences to the artists, seeking to return

“the artists to the community so that local people can experience the achievements of the individual artists who originated in similar neighborhoods.”43 This “overexposure” of performers and audiences to one another in free performances across the five boroughs of the city and upstate New York presented a dynamic of radical openness, a sense of living in common enabled by experiences of coming from similar neighborhoods. The mobile was also spatially exposed—a small platform, open on four sides, elevated just five feet off the ground. These dynamics stand in sharp contrast to the exclusive spatial constructs of the theater ‘proper’ with its strict divisions between artists and audiences (the fourth wall), its centralized location in Manhattan’s (mid/uptown) theater district, and its steep ticket prices. Beyond the state’s rhetoric of “cool out” and “bringing dance to” the community, another more fundamental concept of belonging-as-entanglement motivated the artists on the mobile—we come from you—from these same neighborhoods, communities and material conditions of black social life.

One way in which this dynamic of mutual overexposure occurred was that, during intermissions, the announcer would invite the children watching to perform. Sometimes only one child would be brave enough. At other times, so many children would crowd the mobile’s stage to show off their moves that they had to be divided into groups in order to fit. Johnson relates a story: “In one neighborhood there were no children who wanted to get on the stage, but a drunk of about fifty or sixty did an amazing solo performance. We

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never experienced any kind of discipline problem in allowing the children on the stage, and this participation added to the excitement and community involvement.”44

Lipsitz has noted that a white spatial imaginary demands the exclusion of those deemed nonnormative: “The creation of homogenous polities living in ‘free’ spaces required the exclusion of others deemed different, deficient, and nonnormative … The white spatial imaginary idealizes ‘pure’ and homogenous spaces, controlled environments and predictable patterns of design and behavior [e.g. private gated communities]. It seeks to hide social problems rather than solve them. The white spatial imaginary promotes the quest for individual escape rather than encouraging democratic deliberations about the social problems and contradictory social relations that affect us all.”45 The appropriations of public space for congregation in the black spatial imaginary enacted in Dancemobile performances involved improvised, heterogeneous, queer congregations, that were inclusive of the nonnormative figures pathologized in fears of the white spatial imaginary—the children as-juvenile-delinquents (who never had discipline issues), the drunk (who performed brilliantly), and the junkie present both onstage and off. In her discussion of discourses of black pathology surrounding the early social formation of “the black slum, or what we will later call the ghetto,” Saidiya Hartman observes that “Rather than deviance and pathology, what I saw was the way in which the particular formation of black social life yielded radically different forms of intimacy and kinship and association … subsistence as a radical process of collective survival and thinking about the wayward and queer resources of black survival.”46 In the context of the

Dancemobile—the children, the drunk, the junkie—were not viewed as deviants, to be controlled, excluded or eliminated, but as integral members of the community who

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enhanced the onstage performances by conveying the fullness of the Dancemobile’s social context. These queer, heterogenous congregations encouraged deliberation about social problems, rather than promoting the quest for individual escape in homogenous, controlled environments, like midtown Manhattan theaters.

The dynamic of mutual “overexposure” also meant that performers and audience members’ bodies were exposed to the same forms of structural and state violence.

Pomare’s company manager, Delos “Smitty” Smith remembers a performance of

Movements One and Two, a sensual duet in which Dyane Harvey and Strody Meekins were “really entangled … and all of a sudden there were all of these sirens, and you had policemen running around with their revolvers out. Whoa! Oh my God, all these guns and everything else.”47 Charles “Baba Chuck” Davis shares a story that registers the general volatility of the environment: “And then the rains came and they couldn’t cut the lights fast enough, so those hot lights and you heard pop! pop! pop! And people thought people were shooting, and we were diving under the mobile.”48 Overexposure also meant that the bodies of performers and audience members were exposed to each other in unpredictable and volatile ways. Abdel Salaam, a performer with four different companies on the Dancemobile recalls the atmosphere: “There would be the knuckleheads who would throw bottle caps or a piece of paper or a bottle. Sometimes you would go to a concert and it would be postponed because you would hear a gunshot.

The kids and people leaning on the stage, and you were trying to dance, and there was a hand trying to grab at your ankles and pull on your costumes. And you had to keep on performing, and eventually they would get the message that you were serious.”49

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While the radical openness of the stage meant that audience members could reach out and touch the dancers, the audience was also subject to infiltration. Pomare would set the dancers in the crowd twenty minutes before the show, in these “tough neighborhoods,” and ask them rhetorically, “Can you manage? Of course, that’s why you’re an artist.” He gives the example of the riot scene in the end of Blues for the

Jungle, “It becomes real because it’s right beside you.”50 In the riot, the performers on the street screaming obscenities in the faces of audience members blurred distinctions between audience and artists, as well as between riot as performance and condition of possibility for the mobile, implicating all of the bodies in their physical, historical and political present.

Hartman also proposes that “care is the antidote to violence.”51 Within the context of the structural violence that permeates segregated urban space, the black spatial imaginary enacted on the Dancemobile restructured theatrical and public space, performing belonging as a claim of affective interdependence facilitated through performance. These affective exchanges occurred in practices of mutual care in which the artists contributed their performances and offered forms of technical training, on running lights and sound, etc., while audience members opened their community centers and homes to the dancers in intimate forms of hospitality. Salaam frames this practice:

“As the expression goes ‘Each one teach one.’ It was an expression of the arts, to be informative and instructive to its own community. That this is what we have to offer.

This is what we can give and share. These are the issues that we can talk about. And these are the things that can stimulate discourse. And help one discover one’s sense of self, one’s value, one’s contributions.”52 In her report, Carole Johnson notes that both

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children and adults were so curious to learn about the technical setup of the mobile that it could add as much as a half hour to the setup time. A key component of the

Dancemobile’s mission was to offer training in dance, technical theatrical skills, and music for folks from the neighborhood.53 Part of this involvement included the

“overexposure” of the dancers’ process of warming up.54 Performers stretched and rehearsed and tested choreography on the tiny, rickety stage in full view of the audience members milling around in the streets in the hours before the performance.

Johnson describes the dynamic of selecting the neighborhood sites as a “mutual choosing,” noting that: “Ideally, Dancemobile is the result of being invited into a particular block, housing development, or community area. Dancemobile coming into the local neighborhood is thus similar to the individual artist being invited into someone’s home.”55 This sense of hospitality included invitations into community and private spaces that were repurposed for public use. Dancer Martial Roumain recalls that “the most beautiful part when we were performing, because a lot of the parks were closed, and we made a point where somebody in the neighborhood welcomed us and let us use the bathroom in their houses … we were able to communicate, and get really close with the neighborhood that we were performing in.”56 Pomare also remembers this intimate sense of belonging, dressing in people’s apartments, in the church, in the ladies club: “They would cook for us … We were of the people we were performing for.” He noted that the audience members, “might not be from your block, but could be from three blocks away.”57 Roumain echoes this sentiment, “It was very important, to impart to the people, that we are also them. That was the great thing about doing Dancemobile.”58 Both

Pomare and Roumain emphasize the significance of conceptualizing the artists as

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emerging from the community, rather than as outside cultural ambassadors bringing

‘Culture’ or ‘Art’ to the ghetto. This sense of entanglement between audience and artists offered a distinct paradigm for concert dance that blurred the divisions of the proscenium by articulating a sense of belonging to one another. This sense of mutual obligation, in conditions where folks are dependent on one another for survival, disturbs the foundations of sovereignty.

(Black) Music & Dance: Ensemble, Entanglement, and Citing Source

These affective practices of care between audiences and artists on the

Dancemobile perform a distinct priority, in relation to subjectivity, through the concept of ensemble elaborated by Fred Moten: “ensemble referring to the generative—divided, dividing, and abundant—totality out of which and against which … subjectivity appears.”59 Rather than a desire to belong on the terms of the ‘human,’ in which personhood, movement and space are conceived as forms of property, this priority points to alternative modes of belonging that reference the ensemble from which the self emerges. These modes of belonging were realized in the ways that the affective intersection of (black) music and dance disturbs notions of sovereignty, closed subjectivity, and separateness through enactments of feeling together.

In her report, Carole Johnson proposes that live music is integral to Dancemobile performances “since there is a special excitement that is generated by the combination of live music and dance.”60 In the speech that Pomare gave to audiences before Beginsville, he cites music as the source of his diasporic theorizing of “black oneness”: “I discovered black oneness through black music … Billie and Bessie, and loneliness in Europe taught

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me to listen to Mahalia Jackson to the point that I would turn that damned amplifier up and let it blast. I have to thank Mahalia Jackson and Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith and

Charlie Mingus and Ray Charles; they showed me who I am and where I’m going.”61

Listening to black music in the experience of loneliness was the catalyst for conceiving black oneness—thinking and imagining diasporic structures of belonging by way of black music, against the alienation he experienced in Europe.62

Moten’s elaboration of entanglement places pressure on the idea of relationality— working against the very idea of self/other embedded in relationality to think what comes before the emergence of the self/other—to think against the divisions of self/other in metaphysical constructs of whiteness, and instead through a blur of belonging in/to blackness. Forms of contact developed in conditions of black collective survival, in conditions of dispossession, blur the boundaries of self/other. “The generality of that precarity is our privilege, if we let it claim us. What whiteness seeks to separate, blackness blurs by cutting, in touch.”63 Artistic production in this sense of entangled subjectivity is less clearly categorized than under the sign of sovereignty. Movement is not property but a source of connection. Citing the sources that enable ‘my’ work to come into being (I am because we are) disrupts authorial economies that consolidate artistic production as property. The priority is not the movement creations of (the closed subjectivity of) an individual genius, but honoring the context that encompasses and includes the individual, the ensemble from which the self emerges, the we-ness that enables individual thought.

Moten suggests that the synesthetic intersection of (black) music and dance, seeing music and hearing dance in the ensemble of the senses, affords a kind of access to

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this prior state, through “the sociality of dance, from what it is to have been dancing to the music, and to have one’s thinking of and in and with the music emerge from that kinesthetic reality … dancing, that immersion in the black sociality of dancing, that living in and as … ‘the aesthetic sociality of blackness’ is a whole other (collective) head, one that is, in fact, antithetical to the detachment of listening from dancing and from thinking, and to the alienation that detachment enforces.”64 The alienation enforced by separating embodied motion from the act of listening, and both from the act of thinking, is blurred in the way dancing, listening and thinking coalesce, as if before their separation, in the aesthetic sociality of black dance/music.

Accessing this state points to a different kind of desiring than the brutality of self/other implied in relation.65 “[B]lack music in general, is trying all the time to get us not just to want something else but to want differently.”66 The affective sense of connection—feeling together in black music and dance through the sonorous intelligence of moving bodies—enables access to that thing that comes before (and the capacity to desire differently than) the closed subjectivity of possessive individualism. “At stake is the generality of fundamental, anoriginal dispossession.”67 This rhythmic intersection of music and dancing bodies—open to each other, sweating together, permeated by sound— offers a glimpse of what precedes the imposition of selfhood as sovereignty, the closed, private body as property. While it initially might appear that the dance Moten is discussing is limited to social dance, rather than concert dance, I am suggesting that through the Dancemobile concert dance was (re)contextualized in the streets, in a movement towards ensemble, through forms of affective contact that acknowledged interdependence.

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In discussing black popular music from the 1960s on, Moten notes the ways in which the clamor of voices and sounds that precede the opening lines of Marvin Gaye’s

“What’s Going On?” exemplifies a tendency: “it’s like everybody has to, say, comb that moment into their recording practices, just to remind themselves, and to let you know, that this is where it is that music comes from. It didn’t come from nowhere … this is where we live and here’s this sound.”68 Similarly he observes how, in the Staples Sisters’ song “I’ll Take You There,” Mavis Staples tells the band to start playing in the middle of the recording, “It’s her saying, ‘play’ and they’re already playing. And that’s not a call to order. It’s an acknowledgment and a celebration, of what was already happening.”69 This is how Carl Paris, a dancer on the mobile, describes his experience performing: “All of this came out … as an affirmation, an extension of the black experience and the black aesthetic. We were acknowledging it.”70 This affirmative space of the collective head is what Moten is trying to get at with the notion of ensemble in music and dance.

I am suggesting that the citational practices of choreographers on the

Dancemobile place their contributions within a larger framework of this collective mind from which they emerge, honoring and accessing this previous state in the intersection of live music and dance. Their singular choreographic contributions, or the nuances of a particular dancer’s execution of this or that movement, exist within the larger totality of collective diasporic movement practices in a way that does not oppose the individual and collective, but improvises through this opposition. “That space is the site of, ensemble: the improvisation of singularity and totality through their opposition.”71 Movement is not the property of one person (as it is under the terms of racial capitalism), but a form of connection that links the one and the many through ensemble as an affirmative form of

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black aesthetic belonging, “the improvisational and affirmative agency of ensemble and its etiolated calculation as the synthesis of one and many, individuality and collectivity, difference and universality.”72

Ensemble: Articulating Soloist and Group

Ensemble is why the group work of the Dancemobile artists, emerging from contexts of black social life and the cultural practices of diaspora, is a culmination (and the point) of this dissertation’s previous chapters on belonging. The first chapters focus not only on individual choreographers, but on their solos, which might initially appear to reinforce the notion of a sovereign subject: glorifying the individual genius choreographer whose unique story is articulated through his/her/their singular movement language, which belongs to him/her/them as intellectual property. However, the choreographic use of citation in the (semi) autobiographical solos aligns them with the significance described by Saidiya Hartman, in which the “autobiographical example is not a personal story that folds onto itself; it’s not about navel gazing, it’s really about trying to look at historical and social processes and one’s own formation as a window onto social and historical processes, as an example of them to tell a story capable of engaging and countering the violence of abstraction.”73 Against the violent abstraction of the figure of the ‘human,’ Pomare and Miller’s solos perform an indexing of the ensembles from which they emerge—the figure of the soloist appearing from, and pointing to, entangled subjectivity, to the humanity that lies beyond and before that abstraction.

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Carole Johnson takes up the role of the soloist in her discussion of the collaborative nature of musicians and dancers working on the Dancemobile, noting that:

Working with the dancers takes a special knowledge, ability, skill and interest … Usually the brilliant soloist is not the best accompaniment for the dance … Most pianists, of course, are usually writers and arrangers as well as accompanists. The drummer and the bassist are also accompanists in a group and thus are trained to be sensitive to the solo instruments in a musical group. Thus they are automatically sensitive to the dancers who occupy the place of the soloist in the dance and music ensemble. To date, Dancemobile’s most successful efforts in collaboration have been due to the talents of Bob Cunningham who created music for Eleo Pomare, Raymond Sawyer and arranged a piece for Louis Johnson.74

Dancemobile dancer and choreographer Chuck Davis echoes her assessment of

Cunningham, who was a bassist, composer and arranger, “’Tunji, Pomare, Rodgers, he worked with everybody. Some musicians were born to play with dancers.”75 While

Johnson positions the dancers as the soloists in the dance and music ensemble, understanding the role of the soloist in ensemble from Moten’s perspective reveals that this is not a hierarchical, but an integral relationship. “What the soloist says when he appears to have come to announce himself is that it’s not about me, it’s about us, the social field from which I and you emerge, and to which they recede, like vapor, as the illusory relation that stands for relationality’s illusory nature, as such.”76 The sensitivity of the musicians in becoming attuned to the needs and motion of the dancers is the foundation for this integral relationship—it’s about learning to play, and to be, together in difference, improvising through singularity and totality, attuning to décalage in (black) oneness.

The soloist as a glorified representation of the individual is negated by conceiving the soloist as messenger from the group in an overwhelming affirmation (of another way of being in the world together) achieved through the sensitivity of seeing music and 222

listening to dance in ensemble. In this sense, the soloist operates in/through the function of taking a solo, like an instrument in a jazz quartet or a dancer in a bantaba or cipher.

The soloist announces the capacity to desire differently than a solo way of being in the world: I am because we are. This capacity, articulating the soloist and the group, is key to Moten’s question, “Can art be, and show us how to be, something other than a society

‘structured in dominance’?”77

Citing Global Contexts: Decolonization, Anti-imperialism and Imagining Otherwise

In addition to the “small, close, beautifully microsensual practices of care” that occurred between artists and audiences on a local block or street corner, and to the entangled sense of belonging achieved in ensemble at the intersection of (black) music and dance, a global sense of belonging was constructed in the ways Dancemobile programming intertwined aesthetic and political concerns by making embodied references to broad international political developments.78 During a time when the

United States was in a contested war with Vietnam and African nations were claiming independence from European colonial powers, imperialism, Jim Crow segregation in the

U.S., and apartheid in South Africa were being forcefully challenged. People of darker hues throughout the world, especially in the Americas, Africa, and the Caribbean, were making their voices heard. “During the 1960s alone, almost thirty countries in Africa,

Asia, and Latin America declared formal independence after long, sometimes bloody struggles.”79

The choreographic strategies deployed on the Dancemobile—joining movement languages onstage to index and articulate global sites of black cultural production—

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occurred within, and constructed references in motion to, this historic context of worldwide decolonization: “We would do boot dances because there was the anti- apartheid movement.”80 The intentional inclusion of South African gumboot, as a dance associated with anticolonial struggle, or of Haitian folkloric dance, pointing to the Haitian

Revolution as a historical precedent of decolonization, placed the mobile’s construction of diasporic belonging in a context of global black liberation movements. This meant grappling with a sense of temporal entanglement, the ongoing purchase of the past on the present in the afterlife of slavery, as well as colonization. Artists on the mobile drew upon the resources of the past, choreographing history by constructing diasporic movement-music genealogies onstage, in order to imagine a radically different future from their present, asking: “What would it mean to not have a social political order that’s founded on settler colonialism and slavery, racism and anti-blackness?”81

Choreographing Black Historiography: Temporal Entanglement and Diasporic Genealogies

A photo from the Dancemobile’s first year shows a trio performing Eleo Pomare’s “Haitian Mazurka.” The stage, illuminated by two collapsible lighting poles and a street lamp, is surrounded by about a hundred spectators flooding the street. People can be seen leaning out of their windows above and behind the performers. Someone peeks down from a low rooftop. Others stand in doorways, or hang off the edges of fire escapes, but most are crowded around the edge of the stage. In the freeze-frame Pomare is caught in a jump, suspended four feet in midair. His arms extend above his head. His knees are bent, his body forming a joyous arc. His white vest is flung open from the force of the jump. Carole Johnson and Diana Ramos are on either side of him, wearing long white skirts with white midriff tops, and elaborate headpieces made of shiny fabric. Carole’s hands are on her hips, as her skirt follows their motion, spiraling off the ground. Diana is at the edge of the stage, one hand raised looking down into the audience. In another photo from this same performance, Diana smiles radiantly. Her foot peeks out from beneath the flouncing white ruffles of her skirt, as she hikes it up over one hip, eyes downcast flirtatiously. Eleo stands close behind her, in his white vest and striped straw hat. He wears an amused smile as he glances over her shoulder, hands on his waist, matching his extended leg with hers. Their sweaty skin gleams under the stage and street lights. They are engaged, relaxed, and celebratory.82

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The choreographic strategies deployed on the Dancemobile articulated diasporic solidarities as global structures of belonging (to one another) in motion. These structures of black internationalism were performed on the intimate scale of a neighborhood block and conceived through a black spatial imaginary, repurposing segregated space into opportunities for congregation. These forms of congregation extended from local affective exchanges to reference a transnational imagined community.

This global community was indexed, in part, through choreography that functioned as a form of black historiography by using the citational capacity of movement to articulate genealogies in, and of, motion. In a section entitled “Community and Educational Objectives,” Johnson lists as the first priority: “To present to the Black community by artistic methods something of their own Afro-American heritage.”83 The movement that invoked this heritage pointed to the diaspora as a collective head from which the work of these choreographers emerged in a “somewhat historical … survey of styles and countries that have had influence on the American choreographer.”84 The genealogies constructed through the mobile’s programming linked collective dance forms of the diaspora to individual choreographers’ interpretations of these practices, crafting movement as a form of cultural and historical connection in what would ultimately become a collaborative curatorial structure.

In its first year, 1967, the mobile presented four members of Eleo Pomare’s dance company performing his choreography, accompanied by the Clifford Jordan quartet, over a five-week period. The evening was bookended by musical interludes by the quartet.

The progression of choreography began with a trio performing a “Haitian Mazurka … a folk piece based on an old Haitian dance form” and proceeded with the chain gang solo

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“Take this Hammer” from Blues for the Jungle. Then came a quartet set to three spirituals, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Come Go With Me,” and “I’m on My Way.”

This was followed by High Times, described as “a suite of dances in the mood of early jazz and based on the insanity of the prohibition era,” which included Carole Johnson’s signature solo “Gin, Woman, Distress” set to the music of Bessie Smith. The choreography concluded with “Junkie,” with music by Charles Mingus, described as “a solo for now by Eleo Pomare.”85

The composition of the evening is conveyed in Johnson’s report as “historical in approach,” moving from “old” to “now,” from Haiti to the U.S. One reviewer described it as an “evolution of Negro history through music and interpreted by dance.”86 Rather than suggesting a teleological progression that culminates in America, I see this configuration beginning with a diasporic context removed from the streets of the mobile, in both time and space, and proceeding to place this movement in relationship to the junkie’s gestures drawn from Harlem’s streets, suggesting a narrative form of temporal entanglement instead of teleology. Saidiya Hartman describes, “a way of thinking about the afterlife of slavery in regard to how we inhabit historical time, [as] the sense of temporal entanglement, where the past, the present and the future, are not discrete and cut off from one another, but rather that we live the simultaneity of that entanglement. This is almost common sense for black folk. How does one narrate that?”87 The structure of the evening-length performance links the diasporic contexts of Haiti and the U.S., while also performing a narration of the (common) sense (for black folk) of temporal entanglement in the links between the chain gang and the quotidian gestures of Harlem’s junkies in the modern black ghetto, in forms of social death embedded in black social life in the

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afterlife of slavery. In the following year, the historical, diasporic structure initiated by

Pomare would be adopted and expanded into a more comprehensive, diasporic constellation through a collaborative framework.

In 1968, the Council expanded the Dancemobile to include two units (NYC and upstate), with three choreographers working on each (Louis Johnson worked on both).

“They felt that one choreographer only presented one artistic view, and the audience, which is so unfamiliar with Afro-American dance contributions, would get a better idea of what is being done if the program contained the works of several choreographers.”88

The mobile’s conceptual impetus was to showcase the internal diversity within blackness in/through concert dance, which included citations of collective black vernacular dance practices from across the globe. The curatorial imperative for this new structure was collaboration: “When there are several choreographers working on the same unit, they must decide together how they can make a balanced program.”89 The choreographers for the New York City mobile unit were Syvilla Fort, Walter Nicks and Louis Johnson.

They expanded Pomare’s approach to choreographing black historiography in a diasporic formation by placing American concert dance choreography in explicit relationship to collective diasporic practices and contexts.

Their evening-length program included: Nicks’ “Boot Dance,” based on movements of workers in the South African diamond mines; Fort’s “Danza,” grounded in a courtly style of Brazil; Johnson’s “Downtown,” an American dance theater piece;

Fort’s “Calypso,” drawn from a traditional West Indian dance; and Nicks’ “Hoe Down,” based on a North American square dance form.90 Linking these forms and their contexts of origin together provided a black transnational lens that enabled people watching and

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listening in the streets to discern aesthetic commonalities and disjunctures between rhythmic movement intertexts, like the complex cadenced stomping of South African gumboot and the pounding of cowboy boots in a North American hoe down, or between the hip articulations in Caribbean calypso and pelvic isolations of American musical theater jazz. The global network of movement languages cited on the mobile’s stage created a constellation of diasporic belonging by displaying connections, and distinctions, between bodies in motion.

This choreographic construction and exploration of diaspora, through curatorial choices that joined diverse movement vocabularies onstage in an evening-length program, would continue on the mobile. Initially, different choreographers set work on a fixed company of dancers, but as it continued, choreographers would bring their own companies, expanding the diversity of bodies onstage and the reach of the network of artists engaged by the mobile. By 1975, the Dancemobile roster included: Congolese choreographer Titos Sampa’s winding isolations, Garth Fagan’s signature Afro-

Caribbean modern dance style, George Faison’s Broadway jazz, Arthur Mitchell’s black ballet performed by the Dance Theater of Harlem, Michael “Babatunde” Olatunji’s

Nigerian influenced pan-African approach, Charles “Baba Chuck” Davis’s pan-Africanist approach, including his interpretation of South African gumboot, and “a neighborhood favorite” La Roque Bey, who still has a school in Harlem.91

The use of citation on the mobile constructed movement genealogies that linked concert dance to collective diasporic movement practices, while the mobile also became a site that articulated artistic genealogies of choreographers working in the diverse vocabularies that constituted (black) concert dance. Fort and Nicks both danced with

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Katherine Dunham, and Olatunji, originally from Nigeria, danced with Sierra Leone’s

Asadata Dafora, “the first to present African dances as concert art in the United States.”92

Chuck Davis studied with Olatundji, as well as Raymond Sawyer, Joan Miller and Eleo

Pomare, before beginning his own companies: the Chuck Davis Dance Company and the

African American Dance Ensemble. He later founded DanceAfrica, which continues to this day under the direction of Abdel Salaam, a performer on the mobile with Davis,

Miller, Fred Benjamin, and Ronald Pratt.93 Salaam emphasizes the diversity of movement languages cited in the Dancemobile’s diasporic programming: “whether it was

Fred’s balletic jazz, or George’s language, Chuck’s vernacular, Eleo’s modern, Joan’s postmodern … People got a chance to see the breadth of the dance world through the black dance experience and all of its choices.”94 The heterogeneous nature of the movement languages in the programming insisted on the diversity of genres which might define black concert dance, within the continuous unfolding of diasporic forms.

Soul as Racial Kinship: Narratives of Survival and Black Terms

I want to consider the statement that opened the premiere of the Dancemobile,

“Get some soul, brother!” as a particular kind of historical interpellation that reveals the ways in which a sense of entangled subjectivity extended to a sense of global diasporic belonging through a black aesthetic sensibility achieved in struggles for survival. Dancer on the mobile Carl Paris recalls, “[O]ur biggest cultural capital was music and dance and all of that. We’re talking about black pride at the time, the soul era. I mean, we were shaking the world.”95 This notion of cultural capital in the ‘soul era’ referenced an aesthetic discourse of belonging, expressed at this particular historical moment through

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“a Civil Rights-era model of racial kinship encoded in the terms ‘soul brother’ and ‘soul sister.’”96

In her analysis of soul in the 1960s, Emily Lordi proposes that “soul was a story about the hard-won yet culturally superior style one earned by moving through a white world in a black body,” arguing that soul is best understood not as an essential quality, musical genre, or commodity, “but rather as a term that encodes this narrative by which embodied racialized struggle leads to survivorship.”97 This notion of an aesthetic sensibility achieved by moving through a white world in a black body points to issues of

(im)mobility across racialized space, as well as to alternative terms, black terms, that emerge from such experiences.

Pomare shares a typical experience of immobility through racialized space that impacted what and how he wanted to choreograph for black audiences on the mobile’s stage: “I’m basically cheerful. My mood drops only when, for instance, waiting for a taxi, I stand on the corner for twenty-five minutes, and nobody stops for me. Negroes go through these little humiliations every day of their lives. This is the kind of experience which whites don’t understand and which I try to communicate to Negro audiences in their own terms.”98 These black terms emerge from the shared knowledge of the lived experience of (not) moving through a white world in a black body. The failed gesture of hailing in this choreography of everyday life points to the (in)ability of certain bodies to hail a cab on the same streets in which the mobile’s performances took place. This shared experience of (im)mobility also extended beyond the streets of Harlem to global contexts in Pomare’s experiences in Europe in a global framework of white supremacy.99

The interpellative claim of aesthetic belonging—“Get some soul brother!”—which

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marked the initiation of the Dancemobile, extended notions of racial kinship, and soul as a narrative of moving through a white world in a black body, to international contexts in a cry of solidarity to imagine a world not founded on the spatial premises of anti- blackness in a (settler) colonial imagination.

In the wake of experiences of diasporic dispossession and displacement across global contexts, in forced migration and spatial entrapments, ‘soul’ enacts an aesthetic claim of belonging to each other, a way of making a home in, and across, bodies. “The notion of having soul itself only signifies in relation to an imagined community of others who share it. To claim soul is thus to name belonging within a community of others who have achieved a hard-won wholeness.”100 Black terms, emerging from experiences of diasporic dispossession and displacement, entail a sense of affective interconnection, belonging to each other, rather than belonging as self-possession or property ownership.

In the context of the Dancemobile, operating on black terms, this sense of belonging to one another, included appropriating embodied white privilege in the service of the

(mobility of the) group. Smitty, Pomare’s white company manager, relates that “a lot of my work for them was to get through the hassles of being black in a white world … we called it the ‘salt and pepper gang.’ Downtown in white areas, blacks could not get taxis.

So I would get a taxi, and then I would sort of move by and all the blacks would run into it.”101 This move, on Smitty’s part, echoes the priorities of coalition politics theorized by black feminists, as alliances created for political action.

Black feminist theorizations of coalition sought to move beyond single issue identity politics. Bernice Johnson Reagon refers to identity politics as the safety of a nationalist sense of home: “Coalition work is not work done in your home. Coalition

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work has to be done in the streets. And it is some of the most dangerous work you can do. And you shouldn’t look for comfort.”102 Governed by divisive discourses of race, the difficult context of coalitional work engages racial and national differences— including the intern(nation)al décalage of diaspora—rather than suppressing heterogeneities of gender, class, race, and nation, while simultaneously imagining forms of unity that make common struggle possible. On the Dancemobile, the interpellative claim of soul sought affective resonance in shared embodied experiences of survivorship between artists and audiences, while the heterogeneous racial, national, and gender composition of folks working on the mobile meant creating coalitions that operated on black terms. Building coalitions on black terms involved recognizing the historical significance and priority of black liberation struggles, and acknowledging them as foundational.103

Soul Power: Creating Coalitions, Articulating Third World Solidarities

In Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left,

Cynthia Young identifies “how the discourses, ideologies, and aesthetic practices adapted from Third World anticolonialism helped leftists of color reconsider and rethink their own local context and their position within the U.S. nation-state.”104 She considers cultural forms that linked political analyses of state violence experienced by U.S. minorities to anticolonial and anti-imperial thought dedicated to the liberation of Third

World majorities.105 Following Brent Hayes Edwards’s theorization of diasporic décalage, Young suggests that “we might conceptualize the U.S. Third World Left as a

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cultural and political formation characterized by the simultaneous uncovering and suturing of multiple aporias that define the experience of diaspora.”106

The rhetorical goals of the Dancemobile’s architects reveal an investment in the coalitional articulation of oppressed groups through the perspective of a U.S. Third

World Left. In the speech delivered to Dancemobile audiences before Beginsville,

Pomare frames his lived experience as a person of color voluntarily traveling the globe at this historical moment in these terms, “What happened to me in Europe? I learned to love and dig a Third World people … the whole dark world is one.”107 In 1969, Carole

Johnson founded the non-profit organization called M.O.D.E. (Modern Organization for

Dance Evolvement). The second priority in its mission statement reads: “To become an effective mechanism and voice in events which affect the economic livelihood and cultural values of Black Artists and other Third World Artists.” Young notes that “Third

World” is a repurposed term, whose appropriation announces the capacity to desire differently: “Reclaiming the term meant inverting that political, economic, and social hierarchy; it meant challenging a global order in which the vast majority of nations pursued the ever shrinking horizon of First World status.”108 This announcement of

Third World coalitions—we don’t want that anyway—reoriented desire away from the normative struggles of sovereign nations competing in global hierarchies, toward a queer collective desiring to imagine a transnational commons predicated on the question: What would it mean to have a society not founded on imperialism, racial capitalism, (settler) colonialism and slavery?

The formation of a U.S. Third World Left within decolonization occurred as a result of a time-space compression that allowed for circulations of (radical) print culture

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and increased opportunities for people of color to voluntarily travel the globe.

“Migration from the South to North, immigration from colonies to metropoles, and circulation to international conferences transformed local and global landscapes … as the greater circulation of bodies and texts from the Third World to the First World made its indelible mark on local political cultures.”109 The circulation of bodies and texts through international travel to conferences offered opportunities to realize these transnational imagined communities through black global cultural exchanges in shared space and time.

1966 Negro Arts Festival: Diasporic Exchange and Representing the Nation

Writing in the spring of 1967, just before the mobile’s first season, Rod Rodgers comments on the thwarted potential for diasporic exchange in the monolithic representational politics of state-sponsored cultural diplomacy:

In 1966, at the first Negro Arts Festival in Dakar, Africa, another incident occurred which demonstrates the need for organization and self-definition by Negro dancers. The Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre appeared at the festival as the sole representative of American Negro dance. Another Negro company was formed for the occasion. It offered a repertory of established works by Negro choreographers. Its program in no way duplicated the material of the Ailey company. The new company could not obtain funds necessary to participate in this historically significant festival. Thirty foundations which had supported the performing arts rejected requests for assistance. Federal agencies were also approached without success. This is not meant at all to disparage the Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre, which unquestionably offered excellent examples of American Negro dance. What must be made clear, however, is that no one company can represent the considerable range of Negro dance.110

Rodgers’s argument, insisting on the heterogeneity of American black concert dance and choreography in international circuits of diasporic exchange, echoes the Dancemobile’s priorities in expanding from the work of one choreographer in 1967 to five

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choreographers in 1968, and in the following years to encompass a broad span of

(primarily) black dance companies working in New York City and beyond.

Clare Croft has analyzed the state’s strategic uses of aesthetic modernism in U.S. cultural diplomacy through promoting the Ailey company on international stages at this historical moment: “Modernist abstraction offered a universalizing veneer for the performances … the presence of black performers onstage simultaneously highlighted racial difference and absorbed that difference, through abstraction, into a color-blind

American vision.”111 At stake was the representation of the nation’s relationship to blackness on international stages within Cold War political jockeying. National representations of proper citizenship on international stages demanded the suppression of the second class citizenship status of African Americans. “The US authorities, conscious that the racism exposed by the civil rights struggle had tarnished America’s global reputation, ensured that no radicals would travel to Dakar to ‘make trouble.’”112

Choreographers crafting radical critiques of state violence—such as the 1968 protest program constructed by Pomare, Sawyer, and Johnson—could find neither public nor private support in the U.S. for transnational dissemination.113

In the two years following the exclusion of the ensemble that was created to compliment Ailey’s contribution to the 1966 festival, the structure of the Dancemobile brought black dance companies together in a coalitional framework seeking to convey the diversity in black(ness in) dance beyond the terms of monolithic state representational strategies. The Ailey company would be included in the Dancemobile’s network, but the choreographic voices, black dancing bodies, and collective practices onstage were not limited to a synecdochic focus, in which a single author stands in for all of ‘black dance.’

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As Joan Miller put it: “You have got to let them know that we do many, many things.”114

The ensemble of choreographers formed for the 1966 festival, which was unable to travel to Senegal as a representative of the nation, would instead perform the heterogeneity of black dance on local street corners under the auspices of the Dancemobile, articulating diverse forms of diasporic belonging in motion and performing radical critiques of state violence on black bodies.

Jobs and Survival: The Dancemobile’s Black Terms

I think the reason that you don’t want to be labeled a black artist is purely economic … because black arts got such a tiny little smidgen of a piece [of funding], that if you just were labeled modern dance, that slice of the pie is much larger than black dance. —Dyane Harvey

The sense of entangled subjectivity between artists and audiences was evident in shared struggles for survival. The general chronic un(der)employment of black people as a result of racial discrimination extended into the dance world. Black dancers faced enormous difficulties getting work in the established concert and commercial dance worlds. In the winter of 1967 a workshop series with choreographer Talley Beatty was administered by the Dancemobile. It was designed to reintroduce New York professional dancers to his work due to the fact that “Mr. Beatty, one of our noted modern dance choreographers (both Black and American), has been working in the European countries because he could not get enough work in New York City to support himself.”115

Dancemobile choreographer Rod Rodgers describes conversations he had with professional dancers at the time, “Most white dancers feel that there hasn’t been a serious racial problem for a very long time; most of the Negro dancers disagree with them. All agree that at every level of development, opportunities for Negroes are still unequal to 236

those available to white dancers of comparable ability.”116 The Dancemobile arrived as a potential solution to these issues. Carole Johnson’s report essentially amounts to an extended argument for the creation of Dance Caravan, which would expand the

Dancemobile summer programming into a year-round operation to create steady employment for black dancers and choreographers on black terms, creating a shift in priorities in the concert dance world.117

In these conditions of uncertain and inconsistent employment, black dancers often worked with several small companies, creating informal networks across the field of concert dance through the survival technique of “company hopping,” as well as formal coalitions, such as the Association of Black Choreographers (ABC), the group that was approached by the Harlem Cultural Council with the idea of the Dancemobile.118 The racial composition of these small black dance companies was heterogeneous. We might think of them as operating on black terms, like the premises for employment laid out by

Carole Johnson, which prioritizes the employment of black dancers, choreographers, musicians and technicians, but not to the exclusion of other artists: “To date, the policy has been that the choreographers on the mobile be Black and that the majority of dancers be Black. In practice the entire artistic and technical staff has been Black. This includes choreographers, dancers, musicians, costume designer, lighting designer, stagehands, drivers, community relations people, and most of the business people. In the future, it would be possible to put the works of a non-black choreographer on a predominately

Afro-American company—that is, under the artistic direction of a Black artist. However, this possibility is still to be investigated.”119 While the structure of the Dancemobile was theoretically open to choreographic contributions from non-black artists, the practices

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engaged in the mobile’s first years gave precedence to creating work for the survival of black artists. The first purpose of the mobile listed in the report is: “Creating more work for black choreographers, dancers, musicians and technicians.”120

Dancer Carl Paris shares his sense of belonging (on black terms) in watching his first performance of Eleo Pomare’s dance company, which he would later join and dance with on the mobile: “One of the things that first attracted me when I saw that first performance, well Roberta [Pikser] was performing. So, there was a white person. That first performance I saw, for a person like me, from the neighborhood I came from, blew me away, a majority black company but different people onstage. It was the first modern dance performance I saw, the first time I saw black and white people dancing on the stage together … first time I saw what I had been learning politically put on bodies and in choreography, so it just blew my mind, and that made me feel like I belonged.”121 His sense of belonging within a majority black company with diverse bodies participating on black terms (prioritizing the employment of black dancers and issues of black lived experience) engendered a new sense of possibility for belonging that was previously unknown to a young person who had been raised in segregated neighborhoods.

“Company Hopping”: Coalition as Survival Technique/Techniques as Survival Strategy

Reflecting on her time on the Dancemobile, dancer Dyane Harvey muses, “We were all company hopping, so often it was more than a week. Each company had a week, and they would go to each borough. We would be in the projects. Staten Island, it took forever to get there, and ooh Manhattan! We would perform uptown or on the Lower

East Side, or Alphabet City as they called it—only, we never did midtown or the Upper 238

West Side.”122 The dynamic of physical decentralization from Manhattan’s midtown theater district or posh Upper West Side was reflected in the decentralized network of dancers across multiple companies created through the survival technique of “company hopping.”123 Roumain underscores the material dimension of this network: “That’s the way we paid the rent. That’s the way we ate. Because I danced with three or four companies at the same time.”124

He emphasizes the ways in which this survival strategy demanded that dancers be fluent in the dominant concert dance techniques of modern dance and ballet, as well as the uses of diasporic vocabularies in Black Arts Movement concert dance: “We had to know Graham, Limon, Wigman, Dunham, Horton. In order to survive, we had to know these techniques, period. And strong ballet. Strong ballet technique behind it … Started with African, started with Chuck and doing that, but you had to learn the other. That’s the only way you gonna eat. For survival, the most important thing was to be a blank canvas, not with mannerisms.” Dancers working across different companies were required to know the codified, established vocabularies of concert dance like ballet and classical modern dance techniques, while they also became repositories of the idiosyncratic voices of each choreographer with whom they worked, as well as keepers of collective diasporic movement languages. Dancer with the Alpha Omega company Donna Clark observes,

“Yeah, and Eleo had his own sources from which he created his own style or voice, and that’s the same for Abdel. He has his Eleo’s and Joan, but he still has his own voice.

Same thing with Enrique [current director of Alpha Omega], his style—you’re like, that’s an Enrique move—but he will tell you where his influences came from, what he was inspired by. And there are some people who are no longer with us, Talley, you know

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Enrique was with Talley Beatty … Fred Benjamin.”125 Alpha Omega Dance was created by Ronald (Ronnie) Pratt and Deloris Vanison, who were both dancers with multiple companies on the mobile, including Pomare’s and their own. The dancers in this network were/are able cite signature movements, such as Joan Miller’s “Millerisms” and Talley

Beatty’s “Talley drag.” They became (an) ensemble (of) dancers, citing each other’s work as form of connection, of belonging to one another, and eventually, as people passed away, as an embodied form of dance histor(iograph)y. Their bodies became transfigured into archives of diverse movement material from this network of small black concert dance companies referencing collective diasporic movement practices. In this citational logic, they became caretakers, rather than owners of movement legacies and the unfolding articulations of diasporic choreographies.

“Dance Family” as Queer Kinship

The practice of ‘company hopping,’ in this crucible of survival produced a structure of belonging that participants refer to as ‘dance family,’ and which I position as a form of queer kinship. Dance family was created through the transmission of movement languages in the process of cultivating young artists and intimate forms of hospitality, like those exchanged between performers and audiences. Their construction of dance family was a queer one, an appropriation of the (nuclear) family form. This network of queer kinship in ‘black dance’ offered a radical alternative to the relations defined by the insulated nuclear family unit (of private property and patrimonial inheritance) constructed by the state. In contrast to being charged with the reproduction

(and representation) of the (homogeneous, idealized) nation in the (white suburban)

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nuclear family, or with the recuperation of this idealized national form in hegemonic forms of black nationalist thought, dance family was actively chosen, rather than biologically given.

This sense of belonging in loose networks of coalitions across small black dance companies was consolidated into a sense of family through the intimacy achieved in long hours of rehearsal, the blurring of life and rehearsal, and nurturing young artists. These experiences became long term investments in one another. Roumain reminisces, “It becomes family, beginning with Eleo. I was just coming out of high school. Eleo had his studio on 32nd St. and 6th Avenue, and we would go there and eat. He would cook a big pot of food. We would go there from school, do our homework, eat dinner, go to rehearsal, as was needed, and we did not leave until midnight or one o’clock … with Joan too.”126 “Baba Chuck” Davis recalls, “With the Dancemobile and all those around, if you came in and you were a young person there, then you were treated as a member of the family.”127 Dancer Sheila Kaminsky adds, “[I]t is definitely making a family. It is.

Because a lot of these people didn’t stay in touch with their families.”128 While lack of connection from one’s biological family can result from many different causes, the construction of ‘chosen family’ has historically been a queer strategy of community building—appropriating the term family to construct alternative networks of queer kinship, such as the houses of vogueing in ball culture for those rejected from their homes of origin because of gender and sexual nonconformity.129

In discussing this phenomenon of ‘dance family’ with Donna Clark, she expressed this sense of mutual choosing in the process of selecting dancers, “We chose you, we want you … And Alpha Omega is like, we rarely audition … People find their way here.

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If you want to be here, you have a platform to do what you love to do, and if you find it’s not for you, no love lost, you know what I mean. We want you to want to be here.”130

This queer dance family was created and sustained by active choosing, by showing up— for rehearsals, for performances, for the work, and for one another.

Dyane Harvey and Delos “Smitty” Smith, Pomare’s company manager, also commented on the kinds of intimacy that were achieved due to improvisations within material conditions of survival, such as the fact that Pomare’s living quarters, which doubled as an office and a dressing room, were directly above the studio.131 Smitty relates his introduction to the dance world: “No male/female dressing rooms. Everybody was always together.”132 Smitty’s training as a federal economist did not prepare him for the nontraditional forms of intimacy, especially distinct norms surrounding bodies, gender and sexuality, that he would encounter in this dance world.

Queer Worldmaking: Nurturing Artists, Distinct Norms, and Radical Discourses

This chosen family, created through “company hopping,” late night rehearsals, communal meals, and shared intimate spaces, like dressing rooms and bedrooms that doubled as offices, enacted a queer worldmaking in the context of Black Arts Movement concert dance. Smitty describes his encounter with the distinct norms of this world, “I quickly realized that this is a different world, the dance world. Two I never knew … the black world. And three, I never knew the homosexual world … And for the first time in my life, I was considered a pervert, well with Eleo, because I happened to like females …

And you would have all these fans with flowers and candy and they all ran to the male dancers. And to say Dy was thoroughly pissed because she had no admirers.”133 In this

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intersecting world of dance, blackness, and diverse sexualities, adoring male fans ran to the male dancers. The heterosexual desires of the white, male company manager were considered perverse. Here, the norms that ruled the nation, and dominant discourses of black nationalism regarding the recuperation of the black family, were displaced in favor of other desires, promoting alternative forms of belonging. Abdel Salaam discusses the way in which his sense of being a minority, as a straight person in this context, meant that he absorbed alternative discourses of this queer worldmaking:

Not one of my mentors was straight … it was Joan, Chuck, [and Fred Benjamin] and then my next level of mentors, Ronnie Pratt, Eleo … The companies I would go see, Andy Torres, Glen Brooks, George Faison Universal Dance Experience, DTH Arthur Mitchell … They were all part of the same community. We were their dance children. When they got together we were around them a lot of times. … Interestingly enough what happened in the dance world was that the tension values between the heterosexual community and the gay community, it wasn’t the same as the tensions in the outer community. Because one, if you were heterosexual in the dance world, you were a minority. Right? And because you were around such a heavily defined discourse with all of the intelligence that accompanies it you either remained outside or in the bubble around the discourse, or eventually you heard it … Their position was … This is the world we are.134

According to Salaam, in this queer lifeworld of Black Arts Movement concert dance, tensions between gay and straight communities existed differently, on distinct terms. The discourses created by these artists didn’t reproduce demands for homogeneity, the demands of sameness in identity, such as those (re)produced in white or (hegemonic) black nationalisms. They worked across lines of difference, building queer coalitions premised on a fundamental recognition of the priority of the struggles for black liberation, departing from the fundamental priority of black terms, while crafting alternative discourses that insisted on sexuality as an integral part of black liberatory politics. 243

It is significant that the Dancemobile was always produced and directed by women. This kind of production labor was frequently invisibilized, as Ruth Feldstein writes: “Assertions of black male pride and a celebration of aggressive masculinity remained at the rhetorical and visual center of many expressions of black power, regardless of all that women activists were doing.”135 However, in this queer dance world, the politics of citation operated differently than in hegemonic accounts of the period. Pomare makes sure to “credit Carole Johnson with the idea of putting dance on a truck.”136 Baba Chuck gives citation to Jeannie Faulkner’ labor as coordinator, which extended over twenty years: “You give credit to Mama Jeannie and HCC and her vision because it was all encompassing, and the history keeps on going, and I build on what I learned … it’s that sea of knowledge, and I’m happy to have been there.”137 In these citations, the choreographers place their own work within the larger matrix that enabled the mobile to exist, practicing a form of historiography that acknowledges women’s labor, while Davis situates his individual choreographic contributions as building on a collective (diasporic) sea of knowledge.

Coda for “Dance Family”

In 1997 a group of companies formed Coalition of Dance Artists/New York

(CODA/NY) to address “collective organizational, aesthetic, and political concerns.”138

In a Village Voice article, Thomas DeFrantz notes that these groups worked together in the heyday of the Harlem Cultural Council’s Dancemobile project: Eleo Pomare’s was the first company to perform; Rod Rodgers ran a Headstart program; Joan Miller danced with Rodgers; and Delores Vanison, director of Alpha Omega Theatrical Dance

244

Company, danced with Pomare. “For 30 years they’ve shared composers, and audiences; now they claim kinship as warriors against shriveling funding and flickering visibility.”139

Formed on the brink of the millennium, CODA/NY gestures backwards to a longing for the historical articulation of ensemble realized in the Dancemobile’s coalitional strategies and to the forms of queer kinship it enabled. This new/old collective is haunted by a sense of mourning that is Pomare’s primary concern in the article—the ravages of HIV/AIDS on the (queer) community of (black) concert dance.

“‘AIDS has devastated an entire generation of dancers. These were our collaborators, dance educators who are just not here anymore. Dancers I trained, who could read my mind artistically, are missing.’”140 Mourning the loss of these artists is also grieving for dance family, for queer kinship cultivated in practices of care through the transmission of movement languages. Rodgers’ desires extend this sense of loss to a longing for the sense of entangled subjectivity, for the affective connections with neighborhood folks that materialized in the mobile’s roving performances: “We’re going for a community-based linkage between artists and audiences, to reflect our truths in dance.”141

The Dancemobile’s immersion in conditions of survival in black social life yielded alternative forms of association, intimacy and kinship: through the alchemy of transforming segregation into congregation in a black spatial imaginary; in affective exchanges and practices of mutual care between artists and audiences; in performances of ensemble, feeling together at the intersection of (black) music and dance; through soul as a signifier of racial kinship and diasporic solidarities; in transnational articulations of

Third World coalitions; and in “dance family” as a form of queer kinship in black concert

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dance. Troubling the figure of the ‘human,’ and its extension into space through property

(in the person as self) ownership, this queer dance family crafted and shared choreographic critiques of the violent national status quo racialization of space.

Simultaneously, their choreographic imaginations extended beyond national boundaries, linking the local to the global, imagining diasporic forms of belonging performed through the diverse references of bodies in motion. These forms were realized through ensemble, in the service of desiring differently, transforming diasporic dispossession and displacement into structures of belonging (to each other) in the world in motion.

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NOTES

1 ABC included Eleo Pomare, Rod Rodgers, and Raymond Sawyer. It was created in September 1966 to “resolve problems facing the Black American in modern dance.” Carole Johnson, “Progress and Development of Dancemobile 1967-1968: A Progress Report on Dancemobile and Other Funded Projects,” personal archive, 1969, 5. It was created, according to Johnson, as a “black structure that developed as a contrast especially to Dance Theatre Workshop,” a predominantly white downtown dance institution. Amin, 97.

2 Johnson, 1969, 2.

3 The mobile began in 1967 and continued for twenty-three years, eventually incorporating a winter program at Symphony Space, a performance venue on New York’s Upper West Side. This chapter focuses on the first two years, as it would take at least a book-length project to fully investigate the implications of the project in its entirety.

4 The weighting of this chapter towards considerations of Pomare’s choreography, and interviews with his dancers, is due to the fact that his was the only company in the mobile’s first year and heavily featured in its second year. It also includes interview material from the perspective of performers who came later. This allows for an understanding of the experiential dynamics of performing on the mobile, while gesturing toward the broad matrix of artists ultimately encompassed in its scope.

5 The 1968 programming was sponsored by Summer on Wheels, under Governor Nelson Rockerfeller’s Ghetto Arts Program and Mayor John Lindsay’s Urban Action Task Force, both of which were targeted at “riot prevention and social disturbances in ghetto areas.” Historian Vincent Cannato bluntly states that the UATF's main purpose "was riot prevention." Vincent Cannato, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 131.

6 HARYOU-ACT (Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited-Associated Community Teams) was a Great Society program located in Central Harlem, which conveys the political/funding dynamics of historical moment HARYOU was started by a neighborhood group after it was discovered that the city had created juvenile delinquency programs without consulting residents in response to the 1964 Harlem riot. It was chaired by sociologist Kenneth Clark, before politician Adam Clayton Powell usurped control, receiving the largest grant of Johnson’s “community action” programs from the Office of Economic Opportunity. In the summer of 1965, HARYOU-ACT’s Project Uplift (controversially) funded LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School (BARTS), where Eleo Pomare premiered his first choreography for the streets “Missa Luba.”

7 The Harlem Cultural Council, directed by Patricia DeArcy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzjkBqCCjlk

8 Jeannie Faulkner quoted in Zita Allen, “Dancemobile Kicks Off Free Concert Series,” New York Amsterdam News, Aug 13, 1975, p. D9, col. 2.

9 “The paradigm of the Apollo has been, in a sense, like the story of African people themselves, stolen from their homeland as captives and then made chattel slaves, seen and used as ‘raw materials’ for the conscienceless jaws of American development…”9 Amiri Baraka, “The Apollo Past, Present, and Future,” in Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment, eds. Richard Carlin and Kinshasha Holman Conwill (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2010), 180.

247

10 This occurred at federal state and city levels through Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, Rockefeller’s Ghetto Arts Program, and Lindsay’s Urban Action Taskforce.

11 Johnson, 1969, 3-4.

12 Eleo Pomare, “Where are black artists going?!!!” Dance Herald, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1975, 3.

13 Nicholas Lemann, “The Unfinished War” (Part 1), The Atlantic Monthly, December 1988.

14 James Tyner, “Urban Revolutions and the Spaces of Black Radicalism,” in Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, eds. Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2007), 223.

15 Tyner, 224-5.

16 Mary W. Day, “Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited,” in Advocacy in America: Case Studies in Social Change, eds. Gladys W. Hall, Grace C. Clark, and Michael A. Creedon. Lanham (Md: University Press of America, 1987), 11. Although frequently black people were economically unable to purchase housing in the suburbs, those who were able were prevented by racist zoning laws, as well as by violence and intimidation, such as white neighbors burning crosses, throwing bottles, rocks, and bricks. “This shameful history of white violence in northern cities in defense of white neighborhoods remains a protected secret in our society.” George Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 20.

17 Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 6, 23. In the 1930s black people were restricted from public housing, but with the turn toward suburbanization, both the face and the institutional neglect of public housing shifted. Richard Rothstein, “Race and Public Housing: Revisiting the Federal Role,” Poverty and Race 21, no. 6 (November/ December 2012): 1-21.

18 Lipsitz, 17.

19 Woodard, 23.

20 “[I]n 1964, 1965, and 1966 violent outbreaks took place throughout the United States: in Watts, New York City, Cleveland, Chicago, Philadelphia, Rochester, Jersey City.” Tyner, 221.

21 Tyner, 226. This narrative conveniently overlooked “the unidirectional economic integration of the ghetto,” a dynamic of racial capitalism which meant that, “Whites were permitted to buy land, set up shops, and profit from the spatial entrapment of African Americans.” Tyner 227.

22 Ibid, 225-226.

23 Miller, 90.

24 “Whites attributed urban decay and poverty to the behavior of Black people, not to discrimination and ill- conceived public policy.” Lipsitz, 27-28. The potency of these discourses is evident in contemporaneous institutions such as Kennedy’s President’s Council on Juvenile Delinquency and the Moynihan Report’s pathologizing narrative of ‘the black family’ in disarray.

25 Saidiya Hartman, “On Working with Archives: An Interview with Writer Saidiya Hartman,” interview by Thora Siemsen, The Creative Independent, April 18, 2018. https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/saidiya-hartman-on-working-with-archives/

26 Lipsitz, 27-28.

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27 Lipsitz incisively characterizes the performative nature of these discourses of pathology: “Moral panics about alleged Black misbehavior … are designed to obscure the special privileges that whites receive from collective, cumulative and continuing forms of discrimination. It is not so much that Blacks are disadvantaged, but rather that they are taken advantage of by discrimination in employment, education, and housing, by the ways in which the health care system, the criminal justice system, and the banking system skew opportunities and life chances along racial lines.” Lipsitz, 2.

28 Lipsitz, 2011, 28.

29 Ibid, 29.

30 Anthea Kraut, “On Authenticity, Appropriation, and Property in the Body” (keynote, Annual CORD+SDHS Conference, Pomona College, CA, November 3, 2016).

31 Fred Moten discusses this historical dynamic: “there’s this amazing brutally clear, evil moment in one of Teddy Roosevelt’s books about the West in which … he’s basically saying that the true genocidal vanishing of the Indian will occur by what he calls the imposition of severalty, the imposition of land ownership, that’s how we’ll make the Indian disappear, that’s the mechanism … the point is the democratization of sovereignty, it’s an act of war, right? It’s a brutal imposition of violence. And it’s an imposition not of an actual state, but of a fantasy.” Fred Moten, “The Breathe and Blur Books” (Jose Muñoz Memorial Lecture, New York University, New York, February 24, 2016).

32 Carole Johnson. Conversation with the author. June 22, 2014, my emphasis. Implicit in her statement is the distinct philosophical orientation proposed by caring for land, as a form of stewardship, versus viewing land as private property, aligned with principles of ownership.

33 Thomas A. Johnson “‘I Must Be Black and Do Black Things,” The New York Times, September 7, 1969, p. D31.

34 T. Johnson 1969.

35 Moten, “The Breathe and Blur Books,” February, 2016.

36 T. Johnson, 1969.

37 Lipsitz 2011, 27-28.

38 Eleo Pomare quoted in Thomas Johnson, p. D31.

39 Artist invested in radical political mobilization created connections across these sites in the Great Society’s “community action” programs. Dancemobile choreographer Rod Rodgers worked for Mobilization for Youth organization (M.F.Y.) on the Lower East Side, while the Harlem-based HARYOU (ACT) coordinated the Dancemobile after Carole Johnson: “[Woodie] King [director of M.F.Y.] considered other antipoverty programs, Harlem Youth Opportunity Unlimited (HARYOU) and the Bedford Stuyvesant Redevelopment Corporation, his sister organizations. Under a bureaucratically thick program, theaters managed to form intermediaries between the state’s definition of citizen participation and more radical dimensions of political mobilization” Miller, 86.

40 The repurposing of ‘cool out’ funds to critique the establishment did not always go smoothly. Beginsville was created and performed on the 1968 unit of the Dancemobile, which toured upstate New York on a program with a premiere by Raymond Sawyer, “Untitled/Protest,” and a restaging of Louis Johnson’s “Uptown or Downtown,” which included text by civil rights leader John Lewis. In Buffalo the final performance was cancelled. “The excuse given was rain—and the complaint was against the profanity used in the production. However, the performers were aware that it was not because of the rain or even the profanity that the performance was cancelled, but because249 the entire content of the work was a protest. This

was a tribute to the choreographer, Eleo Pomare, who created the work for inner-city residents, and not to please the power structure.” Johnson, 1969, 11.

41 Eleo Pomare quoted in T. Johnson, 1969.

42 Pomare interview footage, The Harlem Cultural Council, directed by Patricia DeArcy, documentary. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzjkBqCCjlk

43 C. Johnson, 1969, 7.

44 Ibid, 7.

45 Lipsitz, 2011, 29.

46 Hartman, “On Working with Archives.”

47 Delos Smith. Conversation with the author. New York, NY. November 7, 2013.

48 Davis interview footage, The Harlem Cultural Council, directed by Patricia DeArcy, documentary. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzjkBqCCjlk DeArcy shared her raw footage with me, as the documentary is still in process.

49 Salaam 2013. Performances were also subject to immediate evaluation. Carole Johnson attributes this to a high standard on the part of Dancemobile audiences and the terms of mobile theater, “And black audiences are very discerning. You have to be good [laughs]. You lose the audience, I mean they’re not going to sit polite like they will in a concert hall.” Johnson 2014.

50 Pomare interview, The Harlem Cultural Council.

51 Hartman, “On Working with Archives.”

52 Salaam 2013.

53 Among the listed objectives were: “To bring art (quality, professional performance) to people who would not otherwise see it; To show the community the intense dedication and training necessary in the presentation of dance and music; To involve the community in dance theater on as many levels as possible.” C. Johnson, 1969, 7.

54 C. Johnson, 1969, 9.

55 Ibid, 7.

56 Roumain 2017.

57 Pomare interview footage, The Harlem Cultural Council. This happened during the “first stage” of the mobile, before they created a cabinet dressing room on the side of the truck in the second year.

58 Roumain 2017.

59 Fred Moten, In the Break the Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 2003), 112.

60 “Although limited by lack of adequate financing, Dancemobile has made it a policy to include a group of musicians in the total planning of the project.” C. Johnson 1969, 11. 250

61 Eleo Pomare, Beginsville Speech. Circa 1970. Glenn Conner, Eleo Pomare Dance Company Archive. 62 Not only did Pomare use Charles Mingus’s music for “Junkie” and Bessie Smith’s for “Gin, Woman, Distress,” both of which were performed in the Dancemobile’s premiere, but his citations point to the integral role of black music in developing his choreographic theory of vitality, citing the cultural resources for survival, ways of being (together) developed in black social life.

63 Fred Moten, Black and Blur (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 281.

64 Moten 2017, 272. In the talk: “And I want to make sure you know that I’m not saying that dancing is antithetical to listening or to thinking, or to thinking about thinking.”

65 “What it is we think we are trying to rehabilitate by a humanization of relation is maybe better understood by the language of a quantum physics of entanglement … The theory of relation, if you think about it in the most brutal form it takes, the good old fashioned Hegelian form [the master-slave dialectic], or the updated even more brutal version that it takes in slavery as social death, okay? That relation is the impediment to entanglement, to being more sensitive ...” Moten, “The Breathe and Blur Books” February, 2016.

66 Moten 2017, 273.

67 Ibid, 255. “What’s at stake here is neither a bringing forth in itself nor a bringing forth of an Other but a bringing forth out of or against self and Other, a bringing forth in defiance of the metaphysical foundations of relation. To bring forth in the blur, out of the blue, in and out of entanglement …” Ibid, 254.

68 Stefano Harney, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Minor Compositions, 2013, 129.

69 Moten 2013, 129.

70 Carl Paris. Conversation with the author. New York, NY. June 19, 2014.

71 Moten 2003, 89.

72 Ibid, 72, original emphasis.

73 Saidya Hartman, “Fugitive Dreams of Diaspora: Conversations with Saidiya Hartman,” interview by Patricia J. Saunders. Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 6, no. 1: 7, (2008).

74 Johnson 1969, 11, my emphasis.

75 Davis interview footage, The Harlem Cultural Council.

76 Moten 2017, 274

77 Ibid, 256.

78 Moten 2017, 278.

79 Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 169.

80 Salaam 2013.

81 Hartman 2018. 251

82 Joe Nash Collection, Archive and Resource Library: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library (New York, NY., 1967), n.p.

83 C. Johnson 1969, 7.

84 Ibid, Appendix B.

85 C. Johnson, 1969, Appendix B, 48.

86 Richard F. Shepard, “Dance Mobile’s First Stop: 134th Off Lenox,” New York Times, July 27, 1967.

87 Hartman 2018.

88 C. Johnson 1969, 9-10.

89 Ibid. The choreographers for the upstate unit cooperated on the previously mentioned “protest” program that was cancelled in Buffalo because of Beginsville. See footnote 493.

90 Ibid. Walter Nicks and Syvilla Fort danced with Dunham’s company and became the assistant director and director, respectively, of the Dunham school. The curatorial choices made by Fort and Nicks reflect Dunham’s approach to constructing diaspora on the concert stage. Like Dunham, their work did not engage in ethnographic re-presentations of folkloric or vernacular collective practices. Instead, they combined movement quotations from these forms, with their modern dance and ballet training, making adjustments for the proscenium stage in choreographic statements that linked collective practices of the diaspora to individual choreographic interpretations.

91 Zita Allen, “Dancemobile Kicks Off Free Concert Series,” New York Amsterdam News, Aug 13, 1975, p. D9. George Faison was the original choreographer for the Broadway production of The Wiz, and Louis Johnson was the choreographer for the film version of The Wiz.

92 Marcia E. Heard and Mansa Mussa, “African Dance in New York City,” in Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance, edited by Thomas DeFrantz (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 143.

93 Ibid, 151. “Davis and other African American artists who embraced their African heritage opened the way for the larger mainstream United States concert stage and performance arena to receive African traditional dancers and musicians as performers and arts educators—both as new immigrants from Africa and as artists of African descent born outside of the African continent. Moreover, they created a new category with financial promise within the arts industry for years to come.” Angela Gittens, “Black Dance and the Fight for Flight: Sabar and the Transformation and Cultural Significance of Dance from West Africa to Black America (1960-2010),” Journal of Black Studies (43, no. 1, January 2012), 58-59.

94 Salaam 2013.

95 Paris 2014.

96 Emily J. Lordi, “Souls intact: The soul performances of Audre Lorde, Aretha Franklin, and Nina Simone,” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 26:1, 56.

97 Lordi, 55.

98 Pomare quoted in Ric Estrada, "3 Leading Negro Artists and How They Feel about Dance in the Community: Eleo Pomare, Arthur Mitchell, Pearl Primus." Dance Magazine, November 1968, 48. 252

99 “In Europe, I often couldn’t find a place to live. I had one particularly eye-opening experience. I kept urging this Amsterdam landlady who owned several buildings to rent me a place. Finally she leveled with me: ‘Look, Mr. Pomare. Even if I had a dozen rooms, I couldn’t rent you one.’ She opened a neat file. ‘In this area of the city … I can’t rent to Negroes …’” Estrada, 48.

100 Lordi, 62.

101 Smith 2013.

102 Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century,” in Homegirls: a black feminist anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (Rutgers University Press, 1983), 359.

103 Bernice Johnson Reagon and Audre Lorde both note the importance of recognizing that the black liberation struggles coming out of the civil rights movement provided a template for anti-war demonstrations, student movements, feminist movements and gay liberation struggles. B. Johnson 1983. Audre Lorde in the documentary Before Stonewall, see K. Mercer 1994, 132.

104 Cynthia A. Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 12.

105 This articulated sentiment is clear in the acerbic closing lines of James Baldwin’s essay “A Report from Occupied Territory” joining the Vietnam War and police brutality in Harlem: “The meek shall inherit the earth, it is said. This presents a very bleak image to those who live in occupied territory. The meek Southeast Asians, those who remain, shall have their free elections, and the meek American Negroes— those who survive—shall enter the Great Society.” James Baldwin, “A Report from Occupied Territory,” The Nation, July 11, 1966. https://www.thenation.com/article/report-occupied-territory/

106 Young, 10-11.

107 Pomare Beginsville speech In W.E.B. DuBois’s words at the first Pan African conference in 1900, the problem of the twentieth century, the color line, was also an international problem: “the ‘Negro problem’ in the United States is only a ‘local phase’ or a much greater problem: ‘the color line belts the world.’” Edwards, Practice, 2 This early moment, in which intellectuals of African descent gathered to discuss a larger population of colonized and oppressed peoples, “the darker races of the world,” presaged the coalitional conception of the 1955 Bandung Conference described by DuBois as a gathering of “yellow, brown and black folk of the world” dedicated to “the elimination of colonialism and the ‘color line.’” Young, Soul Power, 1.

108 Ibid, 2.

109 Ibid, 9-10.

110 Rod Rodgers, “For the Celebration of Our Blackness,” Dance Scope, Spring 1967, 9, my emphasis. Arthur Mitchell also briefly discusses his thwarted participation in this festival in Estrada 1968. 111 Clare Croft, Dancers as Diplomats: American Choreography in Cultural Exchange (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 67.

112 David Murphy, “The first black arts festival was shaped by Cold War politics,” The Conversation, April 1, 2016. https://theconversation.com/the-first-black-arts-festival-was-shaped-by-cold-war-politics-54926. 113 Eleo Pomare directly addresses these monolithic politics in the representation of the nation: “Did the state department ever even consider sending me overseas?” T. Johnson 1969.

114 Amin, 131.

115 C. Johnson, 1969, Appendix D. 253

116 Rodgers 1967, 7.

117 C. Johnson 1969, 36. Funding support for the project grew from $15,000 in the first year to $100,000 in the second year of existence; still, the project had no committed funding in 1969 and was still functioning primarily as a summer project as opposed to being a year-round operation. The Dancemobile had 15 performances in 1967 and 50 performances in 1968 across New York.

118 The ABC was created for purposes of cultural and economic advocacy and collective self-determination, as an organization operating on black terms. “When the question ‘who are you?’ is asked, we feel the answer should not come from the inquisitor. This would indeed be a ‘minstrels’ imposition. ABC hopes to make it possible for the question to be answered, and from the variety of styles and techniques, we know there will be many different answers. They will all be right because we are all of these many things.” Amin, 97. The internal diversity, in terms of styles and techniques, in the emergent field of ‘black dance’ was a key component in processes of collective definition. The essentialism, of which ‘black dance’ has been accused, was not evident in the material heterogeneity of the practices or the language of theorist- practitioners like Carole Johnson. This essentialism is more productively attributed to the reductive discourses of white critics (see Siegel 1972).

119 C. Johnson 1969, 10. Zita Allen echoes this sense of priority a decade later, “Although whites have taken some part in Dancemobile, it is essentially a Black administered program for Black choreographers and their dancers to perform in what usually turns out to be predominantly Black neighborhoods.” Allen 1975.

120 C. Johnson 1969, 1.

121 Paris 2014.

122 Harvey 2013.

123 Spatial, bureacractic and cultural decentralization was a theme of jobs and cultural programs at this historical moment extending from Johnson’s Great Society programs in theories of “community action” to Rockefeller’s Ghetto Arts Program, both of which funded Dancemobile in its first two years. Lemann 1988. Miller 2016.

124 Roumain 2017. Abdel Salaam also danced with four different companies on the mobile: “I worked with Chuck’s company, I worked with Ronnie Pratt’s company, Alpha Omega 1-7 Theatrical Dance … Joan Miller’s Chamber [Players] … and Fred Benjamin.” Salaam 2013.

125 Donna Clark. Conversation with the author. New York, NY. December 7, 2016.

126 Roumain 2017.

127 Davis interview. Patricia DeArcy, dir. The Harlem Cultural Council, documentary.

128 Kaminsky 2017.

129 See Kath Weston’s seminal ethnographic study Families We Choose: Gays, Lesbians Kinship and E. Patrick Johnson’s examination of the appropriation of family in the ballroom scene “Mother Knows Best: Blackness and Transgressive Domestic Space” in Appropriating Blackness.

130 Interview with Donna Clark.

254

131 Harvey relates: “[A]s you left the studio you walked right up into his studio apartment so if there was a ten o’clock in the morning or twelve noon rehearsal, sometimes you would knock on the door and Eleo would still be with somebody and he would just shut his door and come out for rehearsal.” Harvey 2013. 132 “So there I am, and Eleo shows me where the office is, and there is an old broken down desk, and he opens up the drawer to show me the papers and roaches run out all over the place. So I sit down at this old rickety desk, get rid of the roaches, then I noticed that it happens to be a bedroom, so that’s where Eleo lives, then I notice there’s a shower in one corner on the right, and I see all kinds of photos of the dancers lined up all over the room, and I realize this is a dressing room. And I like to think of myself as not an uptight person, of course the facts of the story is that I was. And I was getting very nervous. I had never been in a locker room with both sexes, and then I was like, ‘Oh my god. What happens if a dancer comes in, and here I am, a stranger?’ And then one did and—have you ever met Roberta Pikser? So she runs in, and in two seconds the leotards are completely off, and she is naked, and she turns around and I am red-faced, completely speechless at all of this, and she runs over, and she says, ‘I’m Roberta. You must be the new accountant.’ My introduction into the dance world.” Smith 2013.

133 Smith 2013.

134 Salaam 2013, my emphases.

135 Ruth Feldstein, How It Feels to Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 100.

136 Pomare interview footage, The Harlem Cultural Council, directed by Patricia DeArcy.

137 Davis interview footage, The Harlem Cultural Council, directed by Patricia DeArcy.

138 Thomas DeFrantz, “We Shall Not Be Overcome: African American Ensembles Join Forces,” Village Voice, April 1, 1997; 42, 13.

139 DeFrantz 1997.

140 DeFrantz 1997.

141 Ibid.

255

CHAPTER 6

CITING ANCESTRAL SOURCE: ABDEL R. SALAAM’S BLACK AESTHETIC HEALING

The music begins first, a low rhythmic humming that rises and falls, lulling the audience as the spotlight reveals the figure of a man in a loose purple shirt, baggy flowing overalls, and a purple fedora. He glides within the circle of light as his body creates fluid spirals accented by quick little flicks of his wrists. Suddenly, the entire stage is moving as the light opens up on the figures of sixteen women snaking up from a low squat in black silk pants that meld into the slick black floor. This movement references the sinuous motions of popular entertainer Earl “Snake Hips” Tucker, as well as Aida

Ouedo and Damballah, feminine and masculine aspects of the snake lwa in the cosmology of Haitian Vodoun. The dancers move together breathing like a single undulating organism, torso and arms fluid, hips twisting easily, building and then releasing subtle tensions with every rise and fall of the music. There is a sensation of ease, a subtle energetic and meditative flow within the spiraling movement language that synthesizes various styles from the poppin’ and lockin’ isolations of hip-hop, to the deep lunging kicks of house dancing, to variations on West African and Caribbean vocabularies. It is at once a visual metaphor for the elliptical movement of the universe and an embodiment of the Africanist aesthetic of the cool. It is Smoove.1

Abdel R. Salaam does black aesthetics on the concert stage by affirming the beauty of diasporic forms (bodies and cultural practices) and honoring the theoretical intelligence embedded in Africanist practices. His choreography constructs affirmative

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black spaces of belonging through diaspora citation. Rhythm and movement vocabularies function as articulating principles in his work within a lexicon that joins embodied citations of ancestral sources with contemporary movement. Salaam engages the affective “visceral” capacities at the intersection of rhythm and movement as diasporic healing technologies for his (core black) audiences and dancers in the present.

His use of embodied citation in his black aesthetic interventions, particularly in the cultural nationalist context of Kwanzaa, also critiques the way Western philosophical theories of linear historical time have rationalized brutality and exploitation in modernity through the abstracted figure of the ‘human,’ particularly the role of Eurocentric aesthetic hierarchies in maintaining a color coded hierarchy of human kinds.

In what follows, I lay out a brief sketch of Salaam’s biography, illustrating how this personal history informs his choreographic philosophy. Salaam’s Rhythm Legacy:

The Living Books (2000) uses embodied citation to construct a complex structure of diasporic belonging and a critique of racial capitalism. The first section, “Continental

Drifts,” links diasporic contexts by juxtaposing movement quotations that honor theoretical dimensions of diasporic movement/music practices, dimensions Salaam refers to as “intelligence.” The following section, “A Gray Flannel Matter,” critiques the possessive individualism embodied in the rhythms and values of Wall Street. In the final section, “Club Legacy,” Salaam offers a remix and repurposing of ancestral/contemporary beats and movement, constructing a space which affirms the genius of these collective practices as historical resources for survival and cultural resources for thriving and healing in the present.

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In Kulture Seed (2007), Salaam questions the terms for African Americans to perform belonging to the nation, interrogating aesthetic performances of normative subjectivity, in a Kwanzaa performance at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Beyond a binary of assimilation versus nationalism, he repurposes both Europeanist and Africanist movement vocabularies on black terms through a diasporic lens, proposing a black aesthetic that can encompass not only ‘white’ aesthetic movements and principles, but also white dancing bodies.

In The Healing Sevens (2017) Salaam centers (the need for) healing from the violent effects of the abstraction of the ‘human’ in Western modernity through a grounded black aesthetic philosophy in which ethics, aesthetics and politics are integral.

A brief examination of a New York Times review of the piece reveals the persistence of temporal double binds derived from primitivism, in the ongoing uneven (racialized) terms of dance criticism inherited from Western philosophy. Turning from these terms toward the central theme of healing in the work is crucial to understand the stakes of choreographing diasporic belonging in the twenty-first century for an artist whose work emerges from the Black Arts Movement. Salaam’s Afrocentric spiritual philosophy, constructed in the piece through embodied references to diasporic healing technologies, engages the affective healing potential of dance and rhythm in the arrival of ‘spirit.’

Spirit signals transformative possibility in Salaam’s choreographic exaltation of black beauty, which transfigures the abstraction of the ‘human’ into a gesture of connection between/among black humanity, affirming alternative modes of be(long)ing human

(together) in the world.

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Background: From Aesthetic Hierarchy to an Africanist Perspective

Salaam’s formal and thematic choices are inseparable from his background and his political, spiritual, and philosophical development. He was born and raised in

Harlem, New York City in 1950. Salaam’s musical training was key to the development of his choreographic voice. He composes all of the live orchestration in his repertoire and choreographs from a musical perspective. At an early age he took piano lessons in

Harlem with Selma White, a black teacher whose “perspective was exposure and empowerment through Western, symphonic culture,” a perspective that promotes black empowerment through the mastery of dominant Europeanist cultural forms.2

Following the landmark 1954 Brown vs. the Board of Education decision to desegregate schools, two students were pulled from each of the Harlem schools to attend predominantly white public schools downtown. At the age of ten, Salaam was sent to school on 86th Street and Madison Avenue. Forty blocks from his home might as well have been another world: “Kids pulling up in limousines, having charge accounts at restaurants and signing checks. You know, stuff I had never seen.”3 The distribution of resources in schools, determined by property taxes, meant that the extensions of property in the person into space produced radically distinct educational environments. “These were my first cultural experiences and exposure to the differences between where I had grown up and the white Western world of people who had money.”4 For high school he auditioned for the High School of Music and Art and was accepted, but they had their quota of saxophone players, which Salaam had taken up in junior high. In order to attend, he was forced to play the viola, which he had learned at the white school downtown: “I had to play a ‘legitimate’ instrument—which at the time was in a symphonic orchestra,

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the superior genre—just the racism, you know what I’m saying? … So I was exposed to those norms, that you were supposed to submit to and emulate.”5 This normative framework was underpinned by European aesthetic hierarchies that determined which instruments were “legitimate.”

Salaam’s mother raised him with a Baptist and Presbyterian religious background.

He also spent extended periods of time with his father, who lived in the L.A. neighborhood of Watts and exposed him to jazz, as well as Malcolm X’s Nation of Islam teachings. Salaam’s exposure to Malcolm X and the Prophet Elijah Muhammed made an indelible impression against the inescapable backdrop of Christianity in America.

Ultimately, he joined the Nation of Islam (N.O.I.) at the age of nineteen:

I had white folks I really loved, even though in the Nation they said, “White folks are the devil.” But I loved the devil. For a time I felt guilty about the hypocrisy of continuing those friendships, so I let them go. I went full- fledged into anything and everything about blackness. This was the transition from Milton [Mickey] Pryor Bowser IV to Abdel Rut Salaam. Blackness became not just the antithesis of white, but the all existing reality of the universe. I was embracing the understanding of a divine blackness. I began to challenge, analyze, and deconstruct the white world that hid our contributions from us, from the nation and from the world.6

This was also the moment when he began attending Lehman College, met Joan Miller and began his dance training, including ballet, modern dance, and their vigorous intellectual debates regarding social and aesthetic norms. He left the Nation shortly after a meeting with Louis Farrakhan in 1973 when he was told: “Muslims don’t dance.”7 This really meant male Muslims don’t dance.8 His desire to pursue dance was in conflict with the N.O.I.’s heteronormative gender proscriptions.

Salaam describes what followed as a transformation from his Black Power self to his Africanist self. This was a moment in which he began to explicitly identify as a

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cultural nationalist, particularly through Maulana Karenga’s theory of Kawaida, elaborated in the seven principles of the Nguzo Saba and celebrated in the annual holiday of Kwanzaa. The Africanist perspective is rooted in an acknowledgement of the value and presence of African derived contributions to American, Western, and global culture.

This is the impetus for his company, Forces of Nature Dance Theatre (Forces): “That’s why I have co-founded a vehicle and an institution that is demonstrative of the genius that has been often times purposely overlooked, vilified, relegated to a lesser position in a

Western context.”9 The celebration of diasporic aesthetic intelligence is the motivating principle behind the company. It was created in 1981 in a Kwanzaa celebration, and co- founded with Olabamidele (’Dele) Husbands and his wife and former principal dancer

Dyane Harvey.10

The construct of Forces has two units: contemporary/modern and traditional/African diaspora. Although this appears to operate within the paradigm of a linear timeline, placing the unit with European derived movement ‘ahead’ of the African- derived movement, the choreography in both units moves across this provisional division in multiple ways, and Salaam’s use of diaspora citation operates in a temporal orientation that is nonlinear. He is clear about his diasporic choreography, “This is contemporary

African dance.”11 This fusion of Western dance forms (e.g. ballet and modern dance) with diasporic forms (e.g. yonvalou, capoeira, and sabar) is a result of Salaam’s apprenticeship with Chuck Davis, whom he met at Lehman College. Eventually he became the Associate Artistic Director of the Chuck Davis Dance Company. “Marrying the movement of the West to movement of the African diaspora was from Chuck Davis

… The Yoruba came into play because of my exposure in Chuck’s company.”12

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References to Yoruba imagery and cosmology are deployed throughout the Forces repertoire. Salaam’s time with Davis also enabled him to travel on tours throughout

Africa and its diaspora, spending significant time in West African countries in the late

1970s.

Doing Black Aesthetics (in Modernity): Interventions of Black Beauty on the Concert Stage

In his genealogical overview of a black aesthetic philosophical tradition in the

West, Paul C. Taylor offers a performative definition of doing black aesthetics, which is encompasses a broad scope of critical, theoretical and artistic activity: “to do black aesthetics is to use art, analysis or criticism to explore the role that expressive objects and practices play in creating and maintaining black life-worlds … artists do this when they draw on the resources of black expressive culture in their work or when they examine the challenges and pleasures of blackness in their work.”13 In particular, he notes the ways in which bodily judgments of beauty, although excluded from formalist boundaries of supposedly autonomous Art, are a central concern in black aesthetic theorizing. “[O]ne can do the work of black aesthetics … by exploring the metaphysical, phenomenological or ethical implications of the search, or by stepping outside the artworld altogether, to consider, for example, the way that judgments of bodily beauty have shaped and been shaped by racialized practices of colonial domination.”14

Salaam’s imperative to convey black ‘beauty’ onstage comes from his history, from the ways that white supremacist aesthetics, as judgments of bodily beauty ‘beyond’

Art, or the designated realm of the aesthetic, in the Kantian sense, impact his black aesthetic interventions in that realm. His early experiences were filled with 262

contradictions surrounding desire for the normative aesthetics of beauty defined through whiteness. Salaam remembers, at nine years old, asking his mother, who had a very light complexion (as he does) and dyed her hair blonde, “Mommy how come I don’t have straight hair like you?”15 This desire to embody whiteness as bodily beauty is an effect of white supremacy in black communities, resulting in the ideology of colorism that Joan

Miller deconstructs in her solo Pass Fe White, explored in Chapter Four. He also marvels at the fact that his father, who introduced him to Malcolm X’s searing critiques of this ideology, offered a contrary view: “I remember him saying to me, in a similar timeframe … that if I intermarry, it’s gonna improve the looks of the race. The same guy that introduced me to Malcolm! Talk about a conundrum.”16 Here Salaam indicates the depths of the informal white supremacist education imparted through racialized hegemonic aesthetic hierarchies in everyday life. These experiences form the impetus for black aesthetic imperatives that promote “‘decolonizing’ African minds: rooting out the white supremacist assumptions that led black people to think of themselves as ugly and black practices as unworthy of attention.”17

This mental colonization extended to Salaam’s formal education by the state, through the erasure of the significance and existence of black history and cultural practices in forms of white nationalist historiography: “You taught that to me for four hundred years—that I was a mongrelized African, that I was black, that I was without culture … that I was dark, and all of the negative things.”18 The aesthetic exploration of black lifeworlds occurs within the political economy of modernity, which produced racial blackness: “Modernity has been built in part on the myth that black people have no culture or civilization and on the related myth … that whatever practices black people

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have are primitive, timeless and homogenous.”19 This primitivist myth is derived from

Western philosophies of history, which are inextricable from the colonial project and the rise of racial capitalism within modernity.20

Lindon Barrett argues that the conceit of racial blackness is foundational to modernity, which is defined not by technological innovations, but by the fundamental and ongoing event of the imperial partitioning of the Western hemisphere by Europe. This imperialism is driven by the economic, social and political need for state legitimation

(sovereignty) and the historical rise of capitalism coterminous with the Transatlantic

Slave Trade. In this historical context, dehumanizing epistemologies of ethnic superiority were created in order to consolidate Europe. “[G]eopolitical and economic coincidence yields the modern declensions of humanity and subhumanity.”21 In this way,

“racial blackness, the primary enabling point of exclusion for the development of

Western modernity complicates the legibility of modern subjectivity.”22 Despite

Enlightenment claims to rationality, Barrett argues that this interdependence of the economic and the epistemological in the racialized thought of the European imagination, and the modern exclusive paradigm of personhood they give rise to, are far from reasonable: “‘individual presence’ … is an arbitrary and profitable rather than inevitable paradigm.”23

Bringing Barrett and Taylor’s insights together reveals the interdependence of economic, epistemological, and aesthetic realms—the way European dominance in modernity was established, in part, through the figuration of the ‘human,’ with its exclusive claims to superior Culture and Art within the ‘civilizing’ progress of a linear temporal schema, which was used to rationalize the brutality of exploited labor. As

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Jacques Rancière puts it, “Matters would be easy if we could merely say—naïvely—that the beauties of art must be subtracted from any politicization, or—knowingly—that the alleged autonomy of art disguises its dependence upon domination.”24 Taylor reflects that one of the preoccupations and themes of black aesthetic interventions centers on the question of black beauty:

In light of the ineliminable connections between human consciousness and embodiment … the question of black beauty, becomes pressing because of the tight connection between race-thinking and the body. Race-thinking works by assigning social meanings to human bodies, by using the body as a metonym for broader social conflicts and dynamics. In this spirit, classical racialists treated black bodies as standing signifiers of disease, depravity and barbarism, and encapsulated this view in general judgments about black ugliness. Insisting on black beauty, and on the ideological and political dimensions of the stigmatization of black bodies, has been and remains a vital part of the work of black aesthetics.”25

Thomas DeFrantz has further observed that, despite this tight connection between race- thinking and the body, philosophical discussions in aesthetics continue to ignore the field of dance (this includes Taylor’s). DeFrantz has positioned Salaam’s choreography as contributing to an aesthetic genealogy of black ‘beauty’ in African American concert dance.26 He notes the uneasy fit between the universalist impulses of much aesthetic philosophy—derived from the Kantian conception of a (male) viewer considering a static object and generally excluding black contributions from consideration—and the significance of ‘beauty’ in African American concert dance as a potential conduit of social change for black audiences:

Still philosophy becomes an inevitable partner in a project to ground aesthetic theory in performance research, if only because it contains what [Kwame Anthony] Appiah terms “the highest-status label of western humanism” … ‘beauty’ is of course, among the highest-status labels of gesture as thought, action, and spiritual wholeness. In a context that considers America’s continuously fraught racial asymmetries, any maneuver to align African American corporeal practices and aesthetics with 265

narratives of beauty’ proposes a strategic recuperation of some political import … African American dance can choreograph gestures of ‘beauty’ recognizable to African American audiences, a possibility denied in almost any other modern American location. Here, concert dance may predict social change through the staging of ‘beauty’ as an action.27

Salaam’s philosophy is centered in doing black aesthetics, seeking to viscerally impact

(black) audiences and dancers by performing his inextricable aesthetic and political choices through movement.28 This relationship with his audience signals the interventions of dancing black beauty as a means to decolonize the aesthetic philosophical discourses of Western ‘human’ism. His history with the Nation of Islam helped him to gain confidence to articulate the contributions of black people, using dance as a medium of empowerment that articulates a vision of black beauty to (black) audiences.29 The Forces’ mission statement expresses this principle of empowerment:

“To develop a choreographic ‘language’ that educates as well as empowers the viewer with a synthesis of images of the African Diaspora and American culture.”30 Angela

‘Fatou’ Gittens corroborates the performative impact of the affirmative spaces of black beauty that Salaam creates in performance: “One of the reasons that I, as a Black female dancer, aspired to become a member of Forces of Nature is that first, as a viewer, I always left a Forces performance feeling proud to be Black, proud to be of African descent, and proud of my body.”31 Salaam’s aesthetic exaltation of the African diaspora affirms alternative modes of belonging—in excess of the in/formal education of the white supremacist nation state, in excess of Eurocentric aesthetic hierarchies in the dehumanizing discourses of modernity—through promoting performances of black beauty on the concert stage.

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Africanist Intelligence in Motion, Rhythm Legacy: The Living Books

The premise of Rhythm Legacy: The Living Books (2000) is Salaam’s understanding of choreography, music, song, dance, and ritual practices as “living languages”: “[T]he legacy of rhythm, whether it is housed in the dance, housed in the song, or housed in the living language of the people, and/or the music, as well as sometimes, sacred or secular ritual and practices … those are things which are living languages. They are if you will, a book of knowledge, a book of form, a book of movement.”32

In Rhythm Legacy, Salaam uses movement/rhythmic quotations to connect related cultural practices from distinct diasporic contexts, demonstrating (dis)continuities in these forms of transmitted knowledge, to create a diasporic structure of belonging on the concert stage. In the rehearsal process he has commented that if the audience doesn’t see the connections between the movement quotations, “the piece doesn’t make sense.”33

His choreographic method reveals observable cultural transmissions in these living languages: “If it was knowable, it became knowable through the practice … it wasn’t written down like a part in a symphony or notated in dance. The transference, whether sacred or secular, happened through the practice itself, from body to body, sound to sound, rhythm to rhythm.”34 As “books of knowledge,” however, Rhythm Legacy goes one step further, moving beyond empirical observations of cultural continuities and retentions, by making explicit and honoring the theorizing activity in embodied black repertoires.35 These collective repertoires were forged in historical circumstances of black exclusion from the technology of the written word as a qualification for full

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citizenship and full humanity. Barrett describes this as “the extraordinary feint proposing the technologies of script to be equivalent conventionally to human presence.”36 The living books of Rhythm Legacy refute this equivalence in performances of Africanist intelligence.

Salaam refers to the theorizing activity within practices as intelligence: “The intellect, for me, is academia. The intelligence is delivering the visceral application of it.

The practice, right? So that the execution of the form, the manifestation of choreography, the creating of the work, which has visceral impact, the ability to take what you think you know, and then to actually do it.” 37 Rhythm Legacy offers a performative Africanist education, charting the embodied wisdom and critical insights embedded in the practices of this “counterculture of modernity” as a radical alternative to (his own) white nationalist state education.38

DeFrantz describes the exploration of the theoretical imperatives embedded within dance practices as an approach to African American dance scholarship within a genealogy that extends from 1960s articulations of a ‘black aesthetic’ to its reformulation as ‘Africanist retentions’ or ‘Africanisms’ by literary and cultural theorists in the 1990s.39

This historical period spans the development of Salaam’s choreographic voice, and his identification as an “Africanist” implicates his choreographic philosophy in this historical turn toward honoring theoretical dimensions of dance practices.40 The aesthetic- theoretical elements explored in Africanist dance scholarship include: a percussive concept of performance, polyrhythms, individualism within a group dynamic, call-and- response, access to a dynamic ‘flash of the spirit,’ and songs and dances of derision.

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Rhythm Legacy constructs diasporic belonging on the concert stage by articulating these aesthetic characteristics and their theoretical significance across diasporic contexts.

“Continental Drifts”: Movement Citations in Rhythm Legacy

The first section of Rhythm Legacy entitled “Continental Drifts … is the drifting of the physical language through dance and music.”41 Salaam notes that these drifting transmissions occur as a result of the histories of the Transatlantic slave trade, as well as in intercultural exchanges in excess of that framework.42 The ancestral figure of the

Egun (a Yoruba term) is the thread which links the vignettes of music-movement citations that compose this first section. The piece opens with a spotlight on the Egun costumed in dry, rustling straw-colored raffia. She reaches into a briefcase, pulling forth props that connect one vignette to the next. As the piece moves through various diasporic contexts, she echoes the movement citations of each group of dancers, joining the structure of belonging. The historical arc of the piece moves from the past to the present; this, however, is not a teleological or evolutionary premise. Instead, it is an excavation of the performative uses of the past in response to the urgencies of the present for the black dancers and audiences that comprise Salaam’s core constituency.

Yoruba—Pentacostal: Flash of the Spirit

Two pools of light illuminate the stage. A preacher in a black robe stands over a

‘sanctified woman,’ or ‘Holy Roller,’ speaking in tongues, indexing embodied practices in the Pentecostal Christian church. Her body shudders, trembling, seizing in ecstasy. As he places one hand on her head, the other firmly grips a bible. Across the stage, a Yoruba

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priest, places his hand on the head of a devotee. Dressed in flowing white robes, her convulsing body manifests spirit. The theoretical principle embodied by the dancers connects human and divine worlds through the body, in forms of “embodied wisdom” and “a dynamic ‘flash of the spirit’ that simultaneously confirms temporal presence and ubiquitous spirituality.”43 The link between the moving bodies downstage left and right traces cultural connections between Yoruba religious practices in Nigeria and Christianity in the U.S. The relationship of continuity is made legible through the motions of bodies manifesting spirit, while the distinct historical and spatial contexts—referenced by the

Christian Bible and the Yoruba chanting—bring distinct meanings to the movement, revealing the décalage inherent in diasporic structures of belonging.

Patakato—Cakewalk: Dances of Derision, Signifyin’ in Motion

As the sharp rhythm cracks briskly through the air, two dancers wearing white masks and holding fans perform a vignette of exaggerated manners. Bowing back and forth, noses in the air, full of pomp and circumstance, they imitate European colonizers.

Wagging their bottoms haughtily and flourishing their fans, they accentuate their absurd sense of cultural superiority as they scoot offstage. Two couples emerge from the wings in suits and floor-length white lace dresses with high collars. The dancers twirl their parasols, adjust their top hat and tails, prance primly in a circle, and kick their bent legs high. They are dancing the cakewalk, a nineteenth-century form in which enslaved

Africans imitated the Europeanist mannerisms of plantation owners.

The cakewalk dancers cite the European forms, with a difference. They shift the form by introducing Africanist aesthetics such as angularity and asymmetry, while

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theorizing in motion about the ‘superior’ nature of European ‘civilization’ from the perspective of people-treated-as-property. Salaam’s choreography links continental and diasporic strategies embodied in dances of derision. The theoretical principles in songs and dances of derision embodies the subversive potential of satire—Signifyin’ on those in power. The cakewalk-patakato intertext performs embodied commentary on global white supremacy, citing Europeanist movement, while repurposing its significance in embodied counternarratives of modernity.

Salaam clarifies that the first section, entitled “Patakato” after the Nigerian rhythm it uses, is an appropriation from its initial context for theatrical purposes: “I exercised creative license to utilize a Nigerian rhythm patakato to talk about the mocking and making fun of Europeans through dance, making fun of their culture, making fun of their colonial masters … And I did hear a rhythm in the videotapes, but the rhythms they were using did not grab me, so I used patakato in order to deal with that particular concept. But patakato is not that, as a dance.”44 The meanings of dances and rhythms shift as they move across diasporic contexts, including their repurposing in concert dance, but even in the appropriations of “creative license” within concert dance, Salaam cites the source of his inspiration.

The inclusion of the cakewalk in Rhythm Legacy is also a movement intertext within Salaam’s personal history. He remembers working with a costume designer who disparaged the enslaved Africans for their supposed inability to correctly perform the cakewalk: “[W]hat becomes racist is for some of the people in the colonial mindset to think that the Africans themselves were not sophisticated enough to deal with language and music and rhythms that were satire. The reality is that they [plantation owners]

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weren’t supposed to know that it was satirical because that was the Masonic language … happening amongst the enslaved Africans.”45 They were ‘reading’ the ‘masters.’ Salaam pulled choreography from that production for Rhythm Legacy. In this way, the cakewalk citation also references the ongoing temporal entanglements of the afterlife of slavery through the perpetuation of ideologies of cultural superiority. These embodied satirical forms of ‘reading’ are also an announcement of the capacity to desire differently—we don’t want to belong to that kind of personhood, that culture, premised on those terms.

Elegba—Guede: Sexuality, Spirituality and Healing at the Crossroads

A figure dressed in red and black emerges from the wings, his chest pulsating atop his rocking legs, his fists clenched around a red and black cane. His elbows are sharply bent following the rhythmic motion of his ribcage in the signature step that announces the arrival of the Yoruba orisha Elegba (also called Elegua, Elegbara). As he places his cane on the ground, his steps are unstable. His legs wobble as he moves stage right. Papa Guede (also called Gede) enters stage left dressed in a purple and black top hat, with a suit jacket, dark sunglasses, and a cane. They drink from the ritual bottle offered to them by the Egun, spraying the liquid in a fine mist. It shimmers in the stage lights above their heads. As Elegba exits, Guede takes center stage, dancing to the driving banda rhythm and performing his signature gouyad—"a focused circling of the pelvis and accented articulation of the hips … to recognize the close link between death and life, sex and play, survival and movement.”46 Salaam describes the articulated diasporic cultural intertext:

[O]ne is purple and black, another is red and black. They both sit at the crossroads of the light and darkness of an experience. If you take a look at 272

the movement: they manipulate people; sometimes the energy is sensual, sexual; sometimes it’s about life and death ... One is definitively from the culture of Nigeria, Yoruba people, Elegba, and then you come over here and Guede is clearly Haitian. But the construct of the Vodoun in Haiti is not any one particular culture in Africa, some of it is Congolese … some of it is Yoruba, but you see those correlations in what is definitively a form of music and dance, or a living book, if you will, of the Haitian people, which is a composite of stuff which is taking place within Africa.47

Vodoun originated in the kingdom of Dahomey (now Benin) and developed in the French colonial empire during the eighteenth century. It also incorporates Ewe and Fon cultural practices, along with Catholicism in syncretic forms of subterfuge. Elegba and Guede, from Yoruba and Vodoun traditions respectively are raunchy bawdy trickster figures that embody the double voiced techniques of Signifyin’.48 They sit at the crossroads of life and death, human and divine worlds, fertility, sexuality and healing.

Sabar—Hip Hop: Feminist Reclamations of the Hips

Three dancers take flight. Their feet barely touch the ground. Their arms slice through the air, palms up, in the distinct movement signature of Senegalese sabar. The fabric of their gran boubas swirls around their arms in bright orange, deep purple and vivid blue. One dancer moves to the center. Placing one hand on her stomach and the other on her lower back, she winds her hips, with a pelvic thrust back on the accentuated pop! of the drumbeat. Another dancer moves to the middle. She positions herself on the floor, propped on one elbow, exuding cool. Her face is calm as her backside vibrates rapidly in a virtuosic isolation. As the drums playing the sabar rhythm fade, the distinct beats of a 1990s hip hop song blare through the speakers. Young women dressed in jeans, cut off T-shirts and fishnet stockings dance onstage. They hit a series of strong, accented poses, before stepping forward one at a time to show off their skills. One 273

dancer hikes her leg up, as she rotates her back to face the audience—hands on knees dropping into her lower back, her buttocks bounce rapidly up and down. She falls into the splits, all the while continuing the up/down motion.

These dancing bodies enact a feminine articulation of power joined by performative uses of the hips across time and space. Through virtuosic deployments of their backsides, black women reclaim their bodies and sexualities in historical circumstances where these body parts have been used to denigrate and disempower them.49 In discussing black aesthetic preoccupations with bodily judgments of beauty shaped by racialized practices of colonial domination, Taylor notes that the “aesthetics of female buttocks … [function as an] overdetermined marker of racial difference” in a genealogy that extends at least from the tragic decline and death of the so-called

Hottentot Venus/Sarah/Sartjie Baartman at the beginning of the nineteenth century to celebration in hip hop songs like “Baby Got Back.”50 The hip hop portion of this vignette was initially entitled “Doo Doo Brown,” after a similar hip hop song, and then updated to

“Twerking”—a dance developed in the late 1980s New Orleans bounce music scene, involving isolations of the buttocks in a low squat. Regarding this legacy, Salaam states:

“[The kids] don’t even realize that twerking is something that’s been happening for what, two hundred years? Whether it was statements of power, statements of sexuality, of gender, of identification—it’s … utilizing the butt.”51

Hip hop developed in the U.S., a nation whose racialized sexual mores are burdened with the inheritances of Puritanical Christianity, “especially when pelvic movement was involved … bodily movement … was considered anything but exalted by white Christians, who associated it with sexual activity and barbarism at a time when

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sacred dance was no longer a force in Western religious communities.”52 This historical baggage around pelvic motion continues to exert influences on contemporary forms like hip hop in the aesthetic genealogy described by Taylor, where it takes on complex gendered dimensions in U.S. patriarchy through the objectification of black women’s buttocks as simultaneous objects of repulsion, fascination, and desire.

Sabar emerged in the Islamic context of Senegal where, as Gittens argues, it carves out a unique space for women’s embodied voices: “The women who belong to this community actually control sabar events which become underlying politicized responses to a variety of surrounding events controlled by Moslem men of the region … they dance the lëmbël in front of the male drummer, isolating their thigh and buttocks muscles while showing off their ability to control their bodies along with symbolic control of their men.”53 In Rhythm Legacy, these distinct contemporary contexts are placed in embodied conversation across the stage and across geopolitical space.54 The citations evidence décalage in the distinct clothing, aesthetic nuances, and configurations of patriarchal power, even as they are joined through virtuosic performances of danced sexuality by black women (re)claiming their bodies.

The theoretical principle in this embodied intertext linking sabar and hip hop engages the agency of autocritical, autopositioning, an “absence of sovereignty where sovereignty implies a kind of auto-positioning, a positioning of oneself in relation to oneself, an autocritical autopositioning that moves against what it is to be positioned, to be posed by another, to be rendered and, as such, to be rendered inhuman.”55 Countering the sovereignty of the abstracted figure of the ‘human,’ the materiality of these dancing bodies gives concrete form to empowered articulations of black feminine humanity.

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Scholar, and former company member, Angela Fatou Gittens indicates the phenomenological agency in her discussion of this articulated citation: “… connections that show women from two different continents doing street dances that highlight a woman's ability to be a braggart with her body, thus shifting the focus from how the viewer chooses to see the dancer to how the dancer wants the viewer to see her… while also forcing viewers to see the Black female dancing body exercise agency over physical features that have been shunned according to the standards of the mainstream dance world.”56 In this way, the vignette offers an implicit critique of the Eurocentric standards of the contemporary concert dance world by placing this movement on these bodies in the center of the Western proscenium stage. Salaam choreographs a black aesthetic historical intervention by crafting and claiming an affirmative space of belonging for these bodies and movement techniques in Western concert dance.57

In the first section of Rhythm Legacy, “Continental Drifts,” the dancing bodies articulate a transnational map of historical and contemporary movement citations.

Linking diasporic contexts through embodied intertexts, they perform Africanist intelligence in motion, evidencing simultaneous continuity and difference in a complex structure of belonging.58

“A Gray Flannel Matter” and Dispossession in Racial Capitalism

The second section of Rhythm Legacy follows the hip hop vignette. A boombox is left onstage playing Eric B. and Rakim’s classic hip hop song “I Know You Got Soul”:

“It's been a long time I shouldn't have left you/Without a strong rhyme to step to.” A lone dancer in a suit steps onstage and cuts off the music. She pulls out a laptop and sits

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down to type, as an even controlled voice begins to read a poem over the clicking computer keys detailing the encroachment of corporate technocratic society into every domain of life: “It’s really a gray flannel matter.”59 The poem/section’s title, “A Gray

Flannel Matter,” is an intertext referencing the 1956 movie “The Man in the Gray Flannel

Suit,” a commentary on conformity in a world dominated by the logics of business and capitalism.

The dancers enter wearing suits and ties. Their hair is slicked back. Their faces project blank, neutral expressions. Everyone faces different directions, performing a walking pattern on a grid, as they look past each other. The walking pattern begins as a staggered canon, with everyone moving at various speeds, before developing into perfect unison, seamlessly incorporating everyone into the same time signature. One dancer checks his watch.60 The movement, primarily ballet and modern dance vocabulary, is sharp, linear, crisp, efficient and disaffected—‘business-like.’ The lines of dancers’ legs and arms slice through the air, as they briskly brush past one another without regard or acknowledgement.

The music is a loop of a repeated beeping rhythm, interspersed with car horns, screeching brakes, and zooming cars—the relentless rhythms of urban capitalism: “Wall

Street has its own rhythm, but it’s not that rhythm that we were empowered by … it’s a form of class abuse because it’s the exaltation of one group of people, because of their class, over another group of people, and it’s all about access—access to resources, access to education, access to power, and access to control and dominion.”61

The question of access and dominance in the afterlife of slavery refers to the perpetuation of unequal distributions of power and material resources along racial lines.

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Saidiya Hartman clarifies, “If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black

America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.”62 This section is a commentary on the ways in which the terms for success under racial capitalism serve to further detach African

Americans from their histories, cultural resources and one another—the ways in which the racial calculus of personhood (legally) conceived through possessive individualism is a driving motor of societies structured in dominance.

The section ends in a subway car. As people check their watches, someone stumbles onstage: “’Scuse me, ladies and gentlemen, ’scuse me!” Everyone in the car shifts to ignore the homeless person’s plea. This intertext to a moral impasse in everyday urban life under capitalism demonstrates the illegibility of this (black) figure of abjection and dispossession as human, on the terms of the ‘human.’ Success on the terms of racial capitalism is attained through the alienation of ‘proper’ personhood—private property, private schools, private investments, private jet. The homeless person’s mouth opens wide in a loud scream. Everyone collapses, crumbling to the ground, then quickly collects themselves and briskly exit the stage, avoiding him.

Initially, this section was entitled “Expressways,” referencing the subway, demands for efficiency in capitalism, and the drive of upward mobility.63 Recently,

Salaam updated this section by inserting a newer piece called “Wall Street.” This piece was created in the wake of the 2008 global economic crash, in which the greed and self-

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interest of individuals manipulating the market for personal gain compromised the well- being of the general public, especially vulnerable populations who faced defaulted loans, foreclosed homes (because of predatory lending), and unemployment.64 One person remains behind onstage and takes the collapsed figure by the hand. This gesture embodies the urgent need for healing from these forms of dispossession by understanding one’s fate as mutually intertwined with the fates of others, a recognition of being human in common. This is realized at the club.

“Club Legacy”: Diasporic Remixing in the Service of Healing

The final chapter in the living books of Rhythm Legacy is “Club Legacy.” This section is set to the driving beats of Afro-house, remixing continental and diasporic vocals and rhythms—from chants for the orisha Changó to Celia Cruz—over the thumping bass of house music. Four dancers dressed in black crop tops, halters, tight leggings, loose balloon pants, and fishnet stockings strut confidently onstage. Their weight drops suddenly, one leg kicks out, snapping back with a quick rebound, beneath the serving arms of sabar. A bouncing house step prepares them for a turning jeté leap into a double pirouette, accompanied by a jazz-influenced ‘mess around’ port de bras, and finishing with Salaam’s signature Africanist ‘flick of the wrist’ on the turn’s landing.

This section incorporates movement from the previous sections, both Africanist and

Europeanist in aesthetic and origin, in a repurposing of the diverse vocabularies that constitute Salaam’s diasporic lexicon. Direct movement quotes from earlier sections, like sounu, twerking, sabar, and yonvalou, are seamlessly incorporated into Salaam’s

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movement language alongside ballet arabesques, a modern dance pitch, house lunges, and hip hop breaking.65

“Club Legacy” is Salaam’s statement on cultural healing. He proposes rhythm as language of recuperation, agency, and healing from the damage of historical violence to black bodies in modernity. It offers a means for

… reclaiming, or being able to have the option of choice, to put on cultural, not only physical garments, but to put on one’s visceral cultural experience, to wear that again, to be imbued with that experience, to allow it to sit within you again, to ride within you, to regenerate the dynamic power of it, so that it becomes an expression of a new dynamism, of a regenerated dynamism within you. Are you further healed by that, by having this connected sense of legacy? … Is that link reestablished again by you being able to identify with it and re-experience it? And the answer is yes, for me.66

The link Salaam refers to is both visual, as in the intertextual articulations of “Continental

Drifts,” and experiential. This ‘re-experiencing’ speaks to the phenomenological dimension of citing historical movement practices in the body—the “visceral” affective impact of the movement and music on performers and audience members. Deborah

Kapchan articulates two conceptual bodies to think with. The “juridical body … is equated with property—and specifically with property-in-the-person. It is a sovereign … body … a laboring body with a presumed agency: its boundaries are the edges of the skin.”67 The “sound body,” on the other hand, offers an alternative modality for embodied engagement in the world through affective listening practices: “The sound body, however, resists the property principle … Sound affects: we feel it and it creates feeling. Indeed, it is the affective dimension of the sound body that transforms.”68 The sound body moves away from juridical conceptions of a closed self, private-property-in- the-person, toward enactments of feeling (together) that hold the potential for

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transformation. DeFrantz has noted that “an Africanist aesthetic enactment of ‘beauty’

… move[s] beyond ‘beauty’ as something visually apprehended, toward ‘beauty’ as a performed gesture felt by a witnessing audience.”69 While the stakes for representing black bodies and cultural practices on the Western concert stage remain urgent, this phenomenological sense of regeneration speaks to an affective sense of feeling together that goes beyond visual representations, beyond the closed juridical body, and beyond the autonomous, sovereign viewer of the work of Art. In “Club Legacy,” historical movement citations unite with the affective vibrations of rhythm to offer a felt sense of connection between bodies on and offstage, as well as a sense of connection to legacy in the present, facilitating collective access to sources of ancestral regeneration.

Lamban in Kwanzaa

In 2013, Rhythm Legacy was performed in a Kwanzaa celebration. Kwanzaa is a holiday of African American culture based on the seven principles of the Nguzo Saba and created by Maulana Karenga in the context of the Black Arts Movement. Karenga describes Kwanzaa as a “Pan African holiday” with origins in “ancient African festivals of harvest and shared good” as well as “the Black Power period of the Black Freedom

Movement … It is an act of freedom in its recovery and reconstruction of African culture, our return to its best values and practices and our resistance to the imposition of

Eurocentric ways of understanding and engaging the world.”70 This form of cultural nationalism sought the empowerment of African Americans through connections to their ancestral past in order to cultivate aesthetic-political resources in the historical present.

According to Salaam, “Kwanzaa is the vehicle for that, first and foremost for African

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American people because we were disenfranchised—ignorant of the knowledge that could empower us.”71 Kwanzaa carves out a space of belonging in the general estrangements of African Americans in the U.S., from realizations of full citizenship and national belonging, and as a corrective to dominant (white nationalist) historiography, which positions black people as either ‘primitive’ or without History. It is less about a recovery of origins and more about constructing cultural connections to an imagined ancestral homeland and, in Salaam’s case, realizing their performative dynamic actualization in dance.

The presenters in charge of programming the 2013 Kwanzaa celebration requested that the last two sections of Rhythm Legacy be replaced by Salaam’s choreographic staging of “Lamban,” a dance from the Malian empire. This request was based on lamban’s legibility as a movement vocabulary that cites an ancestral, cultural link to Africa in the context of Kwanzaa.72 At stake in the request is the representation of

‘Africa’ in Kwanzaa to the exclusion of diasporic developments. In Rhythm Legacy,

Salaam cites ballet and modern dance vocabularies to index the cultural hegemony of whiteness in “A Gray Flannel Matter”’s critique of racial capitalism. He also cites and appropriates these Euro-American movement vocabularies on black terms in “Club

Legacy,” repurposing these movements from their role in Eurocentric cultural hierarchies as a potential source of healing and empowerment for African Americans in particular, and black people in general. In this way, Salaam’s work both deploys and complicates a black/white aesthetic binary of belonging in motion. In Kulture Seed (2007) Salaam quotes ballet, as a legible reference to Euro-American aesthetics and cultural hierarchies, juxtaposed to a citation of lamban, as a legible reference to blackness and Africanness, in

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a Kwanzaa performance at the Apollo Theater. This choreographic statement examines the role of desire in relation to questions of which bodies ‘properly’ belong in which movement vocabularies. It does so by citing performances of everyday life onstage.

Kulture Seed simultaneously interrogates the aesthetic terms of belonging to the white nation and black nationalism, offering diasporic repurposing of dominant cultural forms as an alternative.

Kulture Seed: Racial Vindication and Self-Determination

Kulture Seed (2007) is a theatrical exploration of an internal tension in African

American communities regarding the aesthetic politics of national/ist belonging. It is “a fusion dance/music/theatre work which explores the philosophical and cultural discourse between the Africanist and the Black Americanist in the new global Harlem of the 21st century.”73 The piece opens with a voiceover and a corresponding danced conversation between two black couples on various hotly debated issues ranging from the aesthetics of black women’s hair to ancestral heritage and cultural assimilation. The man and woman in each duo highlights the gendered dimensions of the discourse. They are costumed according to their roles with the Africanist couple in mud cloth pants and shirts and the

Black Americanist couple in suits, with the woman wearing a blond wig.74 The conversation devolves into an argument where epithets are hurled back and forth so quickly that they begin to overlap, building to a frenzied pitch, “Uncle Tom and

Thomasina wannabees!” “Fake king and queen of Africa without a throne!” “Jigaboo!”

“Negro!”

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In this first section of Kulture Seed Salaam sets up a binary of terms for belonging: Americanist versus Africanist. This can also be framed in terms of assimilation versus nationalism, or white versus black nationalism. The dancers’ citations of degrading terms (terminology) derived from white supremacy, index the terms (rules of engagement) of white supremacy that create this internal tension. On these terms, the choices for black people in the U.S. (and a white supremacist world) are either to conform to dominant white aesthetic norms or to discard them completely in a separatist, black nationalist move. This tension can also be understood as racial vindication versus self-determination. Paul Taylor describes the performative implications of belonging in racial vindication: “African descended people used performances and aesthetic objects in European styles and settings not just to make meaning, but also to demonstrate to a sceptical world their capacity for culture and, hence, for civilization.”75 At stake in this desire to belong in the white (Man’s) world through demonstrating mastery in Western cultural forms is a desire to be recognized as fully, levelly human: ‘civilization’ is the terrain of the ‘human’ in the articulation of

Western philosophical discourses of cultural superiority and history as racialized human progress.

One way in which the dehumanizing philosophical discourses of modernity were carried beyond Hegel, Kant and the Enlightenment was in the form of Eurocentric standards for artistic criticism. In this criticism the philosophical underpinnings of

‘universal’ standards for criticism relied on ethnocentric frameworks, which deployed temporal and aesthetic rhetoric as a means of dehumanizing black people by devaluing their cultural productions. These terms are evident in Susan Manning’s analysis,

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discussed in this dissertation’s introduction, in which dance critics in the first half of the twentieth century created racialized double binds for artists along a white/black binary: modernist/primitive, avant-garde/folk, innovative/derivative, universal/particular, abstract/culturally specific, un/marked.76 On these unevenly scripted terms, performances of racial vindication will always fail as they will be measured against an

(often) implicit and unattainable standard of whiteness. On these critical premises black people will never really belong to the nation or the ‘human.’ In response to this, black aesthetic theorists in the Black Arts Movement, like Addison Gayle and Larry Neal, demanded separate (non-white and non-European) terms for critiquing black cultural production, emphasizing the need for collective self-determination.77

The Terms of Criticism: Assimilation versus Nationalism

In an article that presaged his publication of the foundational anthology The Black

Aesthetic in 1971, Gayle articulates the internal tension in black communities, embodied in the first section of Kulture Seed, as the “cultural dichotomy” between assimilation and nationalism.78 Positioning the Harlem Renaissance as the artistic-theoretical predecessor of the Black Arts Movement, Gayle celebrates artists like Langston Hughes for their efforts to create new terms in practice, “standards based on the artifacts of Black life,”79 while castigating Harlem Renaissance critics for their continued use of “bankrupt critical standards” that inhibit the artists’ ability to be understood on their own (black) terms.80

At stake in Gayle’s intervention are not only the terms (rules of engagement/cultural values) in the allocation of cultural capital, but also, and more importantly, the ability to be recognized through one’s cultural productions as fully, levelly human. This was an

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impossibility on the extant critical terms underpinning the abstract figure of the ‘human’ with its superior cultural production in the vanguard of linear history, or in Gayle’s words: “the belief that civilization and Whiteness were synonymous terms and that he who would be civilized must first shed his Black skin.”81

Gayle’s desire for distinct critical terms is precisely what motivated Carole

Johnson to establish The Feet magazine for black concert dance. It is also the move against which dance critic Marcia Siegel chafes in “Black Dance: A New Separatism,” discussed in Chapter 3, when she dismisses the possibility of separatist terms for criticism: “The black dance movement and its militant publication The Feet boosts all black dance and puts down nearly all white dance. What kind of standards lie beneath this bravado? … Until blacks themselves are able to make basic distinctions about quality and originality, I don’t see how the distinctions made by whites can be declared invalid.”82 Critics like Gayle and Johnson, as well as the artists whose work they chronicled, sought to establish terms for criticism that emerged from the aesthetic practices of black lifeworlds, in Gayle’s words “standards based on the artifacts of Black life.”

DeFrantz notes that “the work Siegel referred to did feel different … the

‘hysterically cheering’ crowds she witnessed—confirmed an undocumented dimension of dance performance. That dimension, linking proscenium forms of concert dance to New

World religious practices and contemporary experiences of African American people, developed outside the concert hall and the dance studio.”83 In this way, concert dance artists in the Black Arts Movement, like the artists of the Harlem Renaissance discussed

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by Gayle, were successful in establishing criteria derived from contexts of black social life that became legible (to audiences) in/as performance on the concert stage.

In Kulture Seed, the Black Americanist couple embodies assimilationist values associated with economic success in demands for aesthetic/political conformity on the terms of whiteness. Historically, this is associated with the growth of the black middle class in the late 1970s and 1980s, ironically coterminous with the intensification and deepening of ghetto poverty explored in the previous chapter on the Dancemobile.84 “So the opposition is between the Africanist couple and, what in the Black Power movement we would call the Negro, who is in love with Americana, like Republican black folks, or a conservative Negro who thinks black stuff is unnecessary.”85 The Americanists’ embodiment of dominant cultural values is referenced by the suits, also an intertext to “A

Gray Flannel Matter,” while the blonde wig references Salaam’s childhood—his mother dying her hair blonde and his desire for her straight hair. This section embodies the tensions of national/ist belonging in the “cultural dichotomy” between assimilationism and nationalism.

“Hell No!” & “A Fair Exchange”: Dancing Black/White Aesthetics

As Kulture Seed continues, Salaam deconstructs this binary. Beyond the bipolar opposites of assimilation versus nationalism, or a black versus white aesthetic, his articulation of diaspora uses embodied citation to create a third option: repurposing

Europeanist aesthetic vocabularies, choreographic structures, and theatrical principles on black terms. Salaam’s allegorical characters in the piece arose from the lived experiences of dancers in the company. Courtney Lewis, a black female dancer, who plays the role of

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the Black Americanist has had ongoing disagreements with Salaam over her desire to perform his ‘contemporary’ work exclusively and his pressure for her to join the

‘traditional’ unit of the company.86

Salaam choreographed a vignette within Kulture Seed entitled “Hell No!” that references Lewis’ choice to pursue Western dance forms, specifically classical ballet.

She executes a petit allegro, a ballet combination involving quick jumps and virtuosic footwork, accompanied by a black flautist. This vignette is followed by another, entitled

“A Fair Exchange?,” in which I perform a brief lamban solo, consisting of about five repeated steps, accompanied by a white djembe player named Michael Markus. This vignette references my own history, as a white female dancer who had been taking

Salaam’s weekly West African/ diasporic dance class at the Harlem Children’s Zone on

125th street for several years. Courtney and I joined the company within a week of one another in the spring of 2006.

My body feels electrified. My hand is acutely sensitive to the velvet texture of the wings, as I push aside the heavy black fabric and tuck myself into a backstage corner. My shoulder muscles are taut; I roll them back, swiveling my head from side to side. I keep snapping open the slit in my lapa (wrap skirt), double-checking to make sure it won’t catch as my knee pulls up in my entrance step. If it catches, it could pull my feet out from underneath me, an alarming prospect. My thoughts are racing with reminders: “Don’t forget to make the bouba dance.” “If your head wrap flies off, just pick it up and, no matter what, keep dancing.” I pull the African fabric wrapped around my slippery brown hair tight, until my forehead is pulsing. The last thing I need is for my gele, or head wrap, to fly off my slippery white girl hair. That would be as bad as being off the rhythm—no, actually, nothing could be worse than that. That happened at last night’s dress rehearsal. I found myself onstage alone, off the rhythm, in my one shot at rehearsing before the show. The memory exerts tangible pressure on this moment. Tonight Abdel has placed an older drummer backstage with me so I can hear the rhythm clearly; I waver between feelings of embarrassment and comfort. I smile tightly at Osei through waves of anxiety. I continue marking my steps.

Onstage the light bounces off a gleaming silver flute playing the first notes of the William Tell Overture. Courtney steps lightly in a circle before assuming a balletic “B+” preparation stance—standing on one turned out leg, the other tucked behind with a pointed foot. I hear laughter from the audience, along with encouragement: “Alright girl!” “Go 288

ahead!” is audible amongst cheers, clapping and whistling. She launches into a petit allegro combination, performing the signature swift beating of the legs and small, powerful jumps with buoyancy and flair.

It’s my turn! Brrrrrrrrrr … a drum roll breaks through the dying applause, eliciting cheers from the audience. Michael Markus grins as he turns around onstage mid-drumming and steps into the light, his white palms dancing across the drumhead. As his playing gains speed and complexity, his eyes close, and he squats a little deeper. Teasingly, he pauses for a fraction of a second, as one hand leaves the drum di-ga-de dah! gesturing to the audience. They cheer. I envy his familiarity with the instrument, the rhythm, and his performance. I search his face for an indication of the coming break in the rhythm that signals my entrance. He slows and quiets the final drum roll; as he plays the break, he turns his head offstage to catch my eye—a signal. Ba-ga-de-da-da-da-da-da-dah!

The steps are taking me forward, my feet scooting me onstage, my arms thrown in concentric circles from behind my head, as if driven by a force beyond my control. I turn the corner to see vague outlines of forms in the darkness below the blinding glare of the lights. The break comes: Ba-ga-de-da-da-da-da-da-dah! I switch the step. My head rebounds up and down in triple time with the rhythm, but the sensation is like moving in slow motion as I watch the dimly lit sea of faces through my whipping hair. I see my hand describing a figure eight in front of my face. Everything beyond that is a blur.

I am smiling uncontrollably, filled with joy, releasing my anxiety in the fullness of the movement I have practiced over and over again—stretching my limbs to their fullest, flicking my wrists, feeling the familiar pinch between my shoulder blades as my arms swing back, fingertips almost touching, jumping as high as my legs will take me in the frame of the rhythm, giving it up, giving my all to this moment. The break comes. I entrust this split second timing to my body. Ba-ga-de-da-da-da-da-da-dah! As I leap to the floor on the pop! of the final drumbeat, there is a fraction of a second of silence, an interminable inhale. I hold my final position, down on one knee, my heart racing … I hear cheers and a short applause. I stand up, relief floods my awareness. I have correctly executed the movement on the rhythm. I exhale. Later, when I watch the tape, I will notice the tightness in my performance, the physicalized anxiety of trying to get it right. I catch Michael’s eye as we walk over to where Courtney stands on the opposite side of the stage. Dyane Harvey, elegant and poised, wears a deep purple velvet dress with her silver locks coiled like a crown atop her head. She plays the role of “The Root,” an ancestral presence. She places her hands on our heads. As we kneel and rise beneath the weight of her hands, our eyes are open wide, locked, communicating wordlessly. We exit into the darkness of the wings.

In this pairing of vignettes Salaam uses ballet and lamban as citations of racialized movement vocabularies. Ballet references the pinnacle of European aesthetic hierarchies in concert dance. Lamban is such a legible index of blackness and

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Africanness that producers have specifically requested it for that purpose in Kwanzaa celebrations. While these citational references appear to reinforce a white/black aesthetic binary, a closer look at the choreography reveals the imbrication of Europeanist and

Africanist movement vocabularies and aesthetic approaches through his diasporic choreographic lens. Courtney’s petit allegro involves angular broken wrists, jazzy forward thrusts of the pelvis, and off-center passés, none of which are part of the classical ballet lexicon, and all of which evince Africanist aesthetics. My brief lamban vignette is choreographed rather than improvised. It emerges from the wings of a proscenium stage, turns to face the audience, addressing itself to the fourth wall, and functions within a tightly compressed time frame characteristic of Western concert dance conventions of spectacle. Salaam cites and reconfigures the movement on diasporic terms: an Africanist petit allegro, a choreographed Western concert dance lamban.

His choreography moves beyond a clear black/white aesthetic binary by repurposing both European and African derived movement in concert dance to exalt the diasporic experience of being African American. His movement lexicon constructs new forms of belonging in motion, driven by the deeply rooted sense of diasporic yearning for new forms of belonging. Stuart Hall discusses the desire for origins, the affective dimension of longing within diasporic belonging, stating that “it can neither be fulfilled nor requited, and hence is the beginning of the symbolic, of representation, the infinitely renewable source of desire, memory, myth, search, discovery.”87 Salaam reflects this creative cultural prerogative: “It’s concert dance … It’s neo-mythology. We are going to take these things and reinvent them.”88

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Our bodies in motion cite performances of everyday life—Courtney’s history of practice in ballet classes growing up at Dance Theater of Harlem and mine in Abdel’s weekly class at the Harlem Children’s Zone. “It’s a perfect matrix of life experiences— contradictions, paradox, dialectics.”89 These citations of lived experience complicate a clean separation of white/black aesthetics in lived experiences in the U.S. and in diaspora more broadly. The petit allegro references Salaam’s own artistic training, and the ways in which European-derived music and dance forms impact his choreographic voice:

“Why would I make that less valid, when that was a part of my development, a part of who I was, a part of who I am?”90 The Africanist petit allegro is an affirmation that

“exalts my experience of what it is to be an African American.”91

Courtney’s performance also implicitly references the longstanding exclusion of black dancers from ballet, the pinnacle of Eurocentric aesthetic hierarchies in concert dance.92 The terms of property-in-the-person extend to movement vocabularies in the

U.S. through the historical formation of ballet as a racialized form of movement property secured through the right of whiteness to exclude. In this history, movement becomes naturalized as belonging to certain bodies and not others. The abstract figure of the ballerina embodies whiteness.93 The Apollo audience applauded Courtney’s proficiency in a ‘high art’ form in which the absence of black dancers has often been implicitly attributed to black inferiority rather than to structural forms of exclusion.

The title of my vignette, “A Fair Exchange?” is a rhetorical question. The terms of exchange cannot be equal on the uneven terrain of the afterlives of slavery and colonization. Salaam elaborates, “There’s this thing where my reactionary shit is equal to your institutionalized shit, and it’s like no … It’s not the same thing … it’s not an equal

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playing field.”94 There is no equivalence in the two solos. Ballet and lamban arrive on the concert stage with distinct histories and performative implications. Ballet’s position in Eurocentric hierarchies contains the trace of sovereignty in its emergence from the royal court of Louis XIV.95 Lamban arrives as a result of the legacy of black concert dance artists’ search for other terms, by promoting West African forms in theatrical dance and through continental/diasporic exchanges beginning in the Black Arts Movement.96

The dancing bodies are also incommensurable. Courtney and I occupy distinct forms of subjectivity on the uneven terrain determined by histories of property, legal personhood, and its impact on cultural hierarchies. Our “juridical bodies,” in Deborah Kapchan’s terms, register in distinct ways in the biopolitical matrix constructed through property-in- the-person.

While his rhetorical-question title acknowledges the asymmetrical terms of exchange, in this vignette Salaam also seeks to interrogate the ideological limits of

Kwanzaa: “Devotees of Kwanzaa were steadfast, and could become almost rigid … New practices require extreme discipline, extreme devotion, and extreme application in order to adhere to and master them. Because of the codification it can become dogmatic …

You were included because you were important as a study for analysis and internal debate. If I’m critical of white people for denying or only partially embracing black people who want to participate in their culture, then what about a white person in ours?”97

In his provocation of the limits of belonging in the affirmative black spaces he constructs in performance, Salaam questions the scope of what can be embraced or encompassed in the context of Kwanzaa. In this pairing of vignettes Salaam poses the question—which bodies ‘properly’ belong in which movement vocabularies? At stake in his

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intervention/provocation is the idea of a cultural dichotomy between African derived practices and ballet, the notion of movement as racialized property, and the risk of reproducing the terms of normative subjectivity in nationalist forms of belonging.

“Beyond a Cultural Norm”: Salaam’s Diasporic Disidentifications and Disruptive Inhabiting

The audience response to “A Fair Exchange?” in Kulture Seed was split. “Some people were fine and some weren’t … But my position is that I have the right to explore what I need to … like Coltrane, when people said he should stay in bebop and not explore the avant-garde. That’s the part of me that’s an artist. There are questions I need to ask beyond a cultural norm.”98 Salaam’s personal history in his desire to explore dance beyond the heteronormative gender proscriptions of the Nation of Islam reveals the ways in which his queer artistic prerogatives chafe against the norms of a regulatory, binary framework based on fixed identity constructs, norms which pre/proscribe what a body can do and what form desire should take.

Salaam’s articulation of diasporic belonging moves beyond the centrality of identity inherent in the concept of the nation towards thinking identities-in-difference through the conceptual lens of diaspora. Gayle states that, “Central to both philosophies

[assimilationism and nationalism] is the question of identity.”99 In pursuing the central question of identity within the frame of the white/black nation, Gayle’s black aesthetic theorizing reproduces normative subjectivity, with a difference: “the Black Man” is the central figure in his discussion of black male artists’ contributions.100 This reproduction reveals an internal tension in critiques of belonging based on normative subjectivity: radicalism can lead to the desire for norms and a general critique of the proper may lead 293

to desires for propriety.101 The articulation of identity and nation is at risk of reproducing the terms for proper personhood, with a difference.

Salaam’s artistic relationship to the cultural norms of national/ist conceptions of identity along a strict white/black binary resonates with disidentification, a queer of color strategy in which dominant forms are repurposed to create alternative terms. Jose Muñoz theorizes disidentification as practice of racial and sexual minorities who negotiate majority culture—not by aligning themselves with or against exclusionary works (e.g. ballet) but rather by transforming these works for their own cultural purposes.102 I argue that Salaam takes such a queer perspective on European aesthetics and movement vocabularies, neither simply accepting them (assimilation) nor outright rejecting them

(black nationalism), but repurposing them to function on black terms through a diasporic lens. This strategy is also evident in the repurposing of diasporic historical practices, evidenced in the ‘rhythm legacies’ of the cakewalk, strategies of Signifyin’, Vodoun’s syncretic layering, etc.

Simultaneously, by putting a white woman performing lamban on the stage of the

Apollo Theater in Harlem for Kwanzaa, Salaam situates himself at queer angle in relationship to his core black nationalist audience. In this sense, he choreographs what

Gershun Avilez has theorized as a disruptive inhabiting of black nationalist rhetoric,

““Disruptive inhabiting moves beyond binaristic models of engagement or rejection to conceptualize strategic incorporation that is linked to reimagining. It is a version of engaged critique that results in formal experimentation.”103 The formal experimentation in this case includes a Western concert dance lamban performed by my white dancing body.

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When I pointed out to him that my dedication to the practice could have remained in the classroom, rather than being placed onstage at the Apollo, he replied, “I put it onstage as a … synthesis of ideas to be looked at, challenged and debated … To do that in Kwanzaa challenges our ability to be who we are, our black selves … The [seven] principles [of Kwanzaa] should and will free you from social taboos … In the height of thievery of black shit and gentrification, I still stand on the principle because all humans demand the right to study something that is truly a reflection of our desire and that right exists for all people, even if we disagree.”104 Salaam’s conception of a black aesthetic through a diasporic lens encompasses not only European-derived aesthetic principles and practices, but even white dancing bodies, on black terms. “White dancers become empowered in the Forces construct through valuing the Africanist mindset. It doesn’t lose the strength of the black mind. It rather does what any powerful society does. It absorbs—all becomes a part of it. That’s why it’s a seed—a Kulture Seed. It brings forth fruit from the source, but it can morph, mutate, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Fruit that is organic or genetically modified—African American culture.”105

While Courtney and I cannot exchange our juridical bodies, my experience dancing in Forces has been one of transformation through the cultivation of my (kinetic)

“sound body.” In learning to listen for the break (initially in Salaam’s classes and later in rehearsals and onstage in ensemble with my dance family), I have become attuned to the world through the affective capacities of rhythm. In this experience, I have also learned to hear the ways in which our (dancing) bodies are framed by histories of property. I have come to understand the ways in which these histories, like the break in the rhythm, continually cut into the present moment. Learning to hear these proprietary histories, and

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sensory attunement to the vibrations of the drum, are distinct ways of knowing and learning. They are also linked through embodiment, through the affective capacity of listening to cultivate a responsive body. I have been learning to listen to/through forms of Africanist intelligence and to hear the yearning for other forms of belonging in excess of the property principle, beyond the terms of belonging to the nation, beyond the terms of white supremacy that create a national/ist binary, to listen for new ways of being

(human) together.

Tradition and Beyond: The Healing Sevens

In addition to inheriting Chuck Davis’s use of Yoruba iconography and fusion of

European-derived and diasporic vocabularies, in 2016 Salaam inherited Davis’s position as artistic director of the annual DanceAfrica program at the Brooklyn Academy of

Music.106 Davis transitioned into the ancestral realm two weeks before the 2017

DanceAfrica program, The Healing Light of Rhythm: Tradition and Beyond, which featured Salaam’s piece The Healing Sevens.107 Dancemobile inheritances are evident in the piece’s collaborative structure of ensemble, which brings together Forces of Nature with the Brooklyn-based company Asase Yaa (whose musical director Osei was backstage with me at the Apollo), and the Philadelphia-based hip hop company Illstyle &

Peace Productions (whose director Brandon Albright is married to a Forces dancer). The inheritances through, and constructions of, dance family continue through Salaam’s work in DanceAfrica.

In The Healing Sevens, Salaam uses diaspora citation to critique the material conditions of disproportionate violence that persist in black social life in the U.S.,

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resulting from the terms of property that created and entrenched ghetto formations in the

U.S. The piece, a Western concert dance spectacle on the stage of an opera house, uses diaspora citation to create a structure of belonging through references to ancestral knowledge. Additionally, the entirety of The Healing Sevens occurs in a meter of seven, a divine number of transformation in an Africanist cosmology, including Yoruba, Akan,

Kemetic, and Vodoun systems. This formal construct frames Salaam’s artistic

(re)citation and appropriation of movement vocabularies, such as his adaptation of

Guinean Sorsonet, usually performed in a meter of six.108 The piece culminates in a theatricalized Africanist ritual of healing for black communities, affirming a utopian desire that transfigures the ‘human’ in a celebration of black humanity.

The Healing Sevens opens with the hip hop stylings of Illstyle & Peace

Productions, choreographed by Albright in conjunction with Salaam. Six male dancers wearing red and blue, occupy opposite sides of the stage in two crews, indexing the oppositional gang colors of the Bloods and Crips. Over the beats of the classic hip hop anthem “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash (“It’s like a jungle sometimes/It makes me wonder how I keep from going under”) each of the dancers steps forward to show off his skills. The music and the movement—the wind milling legs of flares, the complex footwork of top rocking, a single arm balance breaking freeze, and a series of backflips— cite the contexts of hip hop’s emergence in black and Puerto Rican social life in New

York City’s streets. The party environment within each crew also points to hip hop’s emergence as social dance, in excess of its associations with violence and narratives of black pathology. Quotations of current popular dances like dabbing and whipping index contemporary developments.

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A fight breaks out with the male dancers tumbling, flipping, over each other, as the wailing of police sirens, screeching cars and breaking glass swells in the background.

The dancers scatter offstage. One in red and one in blue stagger back onstage. Holding guns to one another’s temples, they shoot simultaneously, crumpling to the floor center stage, as a light reveals the red and black figure of Elegba standing behind them.

Salaam’s citation of this trickster figure, who sits at the crossroads of life and death, embodies the piece’s concern with healing the relationship between black social life and death.

In the final section, two pairs of dancers, place long thin sticks on either side of the stage, symbolizing the graves of the two boys. The figure of Guede emerges from the wings wearing a purple and black tuxedo jacket, a purple headscarf, and his signature black glasses. Slinging his cane over his shoulders, he gyrates his pelvis in his signature gouyad movement over each grave while the drummers play his signature Banda rhythm.

Salaam articulates Elegba and Guede (both played by Fritzlyn Hector) in the trickster character that forms a throughline of the piece. Citing their iconography, movement and rhythmic signatures, he creates a diasporic structure of belonging onstage by linking these two figures who sit at the crossroads of life and death.

Inheritances of Western ‘Human’ism: Modes of White Spectatorship in Dance Criticism

The Healing Sevens, situated within the larger evening The Healing Light of

Rhythm: Tradition and Beyond, reflects the temporal nature of Salaam’s use of diaspora citation—repurposing movements from the past for the urgencies of the present in a utopian longing for a future, a beyond. A critical response to the piece in the New York

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Times by Gia Kourlas entitled “DanceAfrica Excels at Tradition: Why Go Beyond?” reveals the persistence of uneven discursive/temporal terms for allocating value in white supremacist aesthetic frameworks of modernity. The review demonstrates the ongoing relevance of interventions by black aesthetic theorists like Gayle, Neal, and Carole

Johnson who sought to establish distinct criteria for understanding black cultural production.109 Kourlas’s lack of cultural literacy means that she is unable to comprehend the formal innovations in the piece, like Sorsenet’s reformulation into a meter of seven, the significance of the number seven in an Africanist cosmology, or the articulated citations of Elegba and Guede, which construct diaspora on the concert stage.

At stake in the title of her review is the temporal framework she uses to dismiss

Salaam’s work, a framework which inherits the philosophical discourses of Western humanism in the form of primitivism. For example, her language in the review pairs

“tradition and abandon,” positioning dance techniques from Africa and the diaspora as natural in a rhetoric of ‘wildness,’ or “abandon,” revealing the spectator’s inability to read the technical dimensions of the movement/rhythm.110 At issue is an understanding of formal structures and innovations in cultural practices beyond Eurocentric aesthetic frameworks. Although this type of primitivist framework was debunked in anthropology in the 1980s, it persists in dance criticism in 2017.111 The binary premise of the review—

"tradition” versus beyond—reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the temporal nature of diaspora, a phenomenon defined by Stuart Hall as a constant unfolding of new forms from diverse traditions.112 If anything defines the African diaspora, it is a tradition of transformation.

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Troubling the ‘Human’ in Western Philosophy: Grounding Ethics, Aesthetics, and Politics

Paul Gilroy notes that, although it is seldom acknowledged, practical philosophy, as a tradition in which ethics and politics were integral, “lost its exclusive claim to rationality partly through the way that slavery became internal to western civilization and through the obvious complicity which both plantation slavery and colonial regimes revealed between rationality and the practice of racial terror.”113 This contradiction between liberal humanist discourses of freedom and the practices of slavery and colonization led to discrediting the Western philosophical tradition of ethical politics. In his discussion of diaspora as a counterculture of/in modernity, Gilroy suggests that we view “this expressive counterculture … as a philosophical discourse which refuses the modern, occidental separation of ethics and aesthetics, culture and politics.”114 This black aesthetic tradition operates as a grounded philosophy, refusing the modern Western separation of ethics, aesthetics and politics (e.g. Kantian aesthetics) in expressive cultures that offer social critiques of the decidedly unethical, yet integral, operations of aesthetics and politics in modernity: “Their grounded ethics offers, among other things, a continuous commentary on the systematic and pervasive relations of domination that supply its conditions of existence. Their grounded aesthetics is never separated off into an autonomous realm where familiar political rules cannot be applied.”115

Paul Taylor argues that the greatest contributions of this grounded, ethical- political black aesthetic philosophical tradition lie in its commitment to a two-pronged approach to social criticism: Cultural criticism reveals public meanings of aesthetic objects through the interpretive techniques of the art critic. Ethico-political criticism demonstrates and contests the insidious effects of dominant cultural meanings on the 300

individual psyche. He maintains that this “double-barrelled criticism” is of urgent importance because of the close links between expressive culture and the perceptual bases of social stratification: “Large swaths of the contemporary world are saturated with cultural images, many of them drawn from archives of old racial symbols. These symbols shape our perceptions of the real world, leading global policy-makers to treat dark people displaced by civil war or natural disaster as savages from the opening scenes of ‘King Kong’, and encouraging police officers to see unarmed black men as dangerous thugs from ‘Dirty Harry.’”116 Beyond the unmistakable relevance of Taylor’s examples to the contemporary political situation in the U.S.—in which the Trump administration criminalizes refugees through racialized rhetoric and the Movement for Black Lives protests the perceptual conditioning that leads police officers to shoot unarmed black people—Kourlas’s review reveals the extension of this perceptual shaping into concert dance criticism.

Her reductive characterization of the piece as “a tale of gun violence” willfully

(dis)misses the celebratory and healing dimension of the work explicit in the titles of the piece and the evening, while her description of the two gang members as “a public service announcement” effectively dismisses the material conditions of violence in black social life within white supremacy. She conveys her distaste for Salaam’s articulation of aesthetics and politics in a jab that sets up Davis as a foil to Salaam on problematic terms.

After her disparaging review, she wistfully describes Davis, “Always generous, that man.

He made us laugh.”117 This comment reveals the demands of white modes of spectatorship: Don’t be political. Entertain me.118 Part of the issue in Kourlas’s review is that she feels left out in Salaam’s construction of diaspora, which centers black people

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and their needs. As Anthea Kraut has explained, “the notion of diaspora not only troubles stereotypes of black people as unthinking, uncivilized exotics. It also replaces the hierarchies and dichotomies on which primitivism depends with a model of black influences and exchange not wholly dependent on any white arbiter. That is, whereas primitivism views blackness only vis-à-vis whiteness, diaspora foregrounds the relations within blackness.”119 This is, of course, threatening to a dance critical establishment in which your authority is premised on being a white arbiter. DanceAfrica was founded by

African Americans for the purpose of addressing the issues that plague this community— as a turn to rhythm and movement as a source of healing and connection to the diaspora for disenfranchised people. Eleo Pomare was a mentor to both Davis and Salaam. His words ring true half a century later: “In my opinion artists don’t need critics or reviews.

A reviewer can easily hurt an artist through bias, or worse, through ignorance.”120

Kourlas’ review reveals the persistence of uneven temporal and cultural terms in a history of white dance critics policing black choreography by perpetuating racist double standards derived from primitivism: treating black performance as though it exists in the past, outside of Western concert dance and modernity.121

Manifesting Spirit, Transfiguring the ‘Human’

In the expressive cultures of the diaspora situated in modernity, spirituality has offered a means to insist on the integral nature of ethics, aesthetics, and politics. Gilroy clarifies how black people in the West “had to fight—often through their spirituality—to hold on to the unity of ethics and politics sundered from each other by modernity’s insistence that the true, the good, and the beautiful had distinct origins and belong to

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different domains of knowledge.”122 In the wake of the moral impasse of these separations, spirituality has historically provided ethical-political remedies for people of

African descent in modernity. The role of ‘spirit’ in Africanist performance, a corporeal manifestation of incorporeal forces, confirms rhythm/movement as a source of ancestral connection in the present moment. This diasporic healing technology heralds unexpected possibility in the utopian strivings of these expressive cultures. In The Healing Sevens, the meter of seven indexes and performs transformation, deploying the affective capacity of rhythm to perform gestures of healing that are felt by dancers and audience members, deploying the affective capacity for transformation through sounding bodies.

Salaam’s choreographic praxis is a result of his autodidactic approach as an artist.

Rather than finishing his degree at Lehman, he sought out diverse cultural, historical and spiritual literature to construct a unique Afrocentric philosophical spiritual paradigm with movement at its center. This is aligned with the role of spirit in Africanist performance,

“Clearly ‘spirit’ needn’t be tied to a particular religious doctrine. It emerges in the fullness of gesture performed with vitality and clarity for the purpose of group cognition—at times, for the performance of ‘beauty.’”123

Gilroy describes two internal, complementary strands of the philosophical discourse embedded in diasporic expressive practices as a counterculture of modernity.

The first strand Gilroy describes as having a “normative” character in the politics of fulfillment, which operates in a discursive mode, aiming to make bourgeois civil society live up it its own rhetoric, and mostly operates on the terms of occidental rationality. The second strand, described as this counterculture’s “utopian aspirations,” exists on a different register, in the politics of transfiguration: “This emphasizes the emergence of

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qualitatively new desires, social relations, and modes of association within the racial community of interpretation and resistance and between that group and its erstwhile oppressors … Its basic desire is to conjure up and enact the new modes of friendship, happiness, and solidarity that are consequent on the overcoming of the racial oppression on which modernity and its antinomy of rational, western progress as excessive barbarity relied.” 124 As a utopian complement to the normative politics of fulfillment, the politics of transfiguration highlights a yearning beyond the normative mechanisms of (legal, economic) justice in civil society. This longing is a queer desiring—for new ways of being human together beyond the extant, dominant, normative modes of association, both within and beyond black communities.

To transfigure means to make more beautiful, to elevate and exalt. It has been used in spiritual terms to reference the human body made more luminous by the arrival of spirit. Salaam’s work transfigures the abstract ‘human’ into concrete embodied exaltations of black humanity. In the final section of The Healing Sevens, the rhythm intensifies as the two boys rise from their graves and two dancers pour white powder over their heads. The white powder is a theatrical reference to Efun, crushed powdered white eggshells, from the Nigerian Yoruba tradition and its diasporic derivations in Santeria,

Candomble, Lucumi, Vodoun, etc. Efun signifies ancestral protection and communication, rebirth, regeneration, and purification. The entire cast, over thirty dancers, emerges from the wings, surrounding the two dancers and enveloping them in the ensemble. The piece ends with the juxtaposition of this exuberant dancing multitude against a slow motion gesture. Highlighted by a laser focused beam of light centerstage, the two boys reach out to clasp hands. The dancing multitude embodies a joy that is

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unspeakable: “the utopian desires which fuel the complementary politics of transfiguration … exists on a lower frequency where it is played, danced, and acted, as well as sung and sung about because words … will never be enough to communicate its unsayable claims to truth.”125 The two boys are regenerated in in a ritual for collective healing. Their bodies are transfigured, illuminated in a gesture of connection, an affirmation of another way of being, a utopian desiring for a life yet to come, a beyond.

For Salaam movement is a form of connection, between past and present, between ancestral and human worlds, and between audiences, musicians and dancers. His black aesthetic philosophy begins with healing in black communities in order to transfigure the

‘human’ from abstraction into a sense of being human (together) in common: “That oneness that we’re searching for in humanity, without the healing, it cannot take place.”126

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NOTES

1 Robert Farris Thompson, "Dance and Culture, an Aesthetic of the Cool," African Forum (Fall 1966): 85- 102. On the aesthetic of the cool in dance see, Brenda Dixon Gottschild, “Crossroads, Continuities and Contradictions: The Afro-Euro-Caribbean Triangle” ed. Sloat, Susanna. Caribbean Dance from Abakuá to Zouk: How Movement Shapes Identity (Gainseville: Universtiy of Florida Press, 2002): 3-10.

2 Abdel Salaam. Conversation with the author. New York, NY. February 22, 2012.

3 Abdel Salaam. Conversation with the author. New York, NY. July 22, 2017.

4 Salaam 2012.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7 Abdel R. Salaam. Conversation with the author. New York, NY. October 23 2011. Salaam has since clarified that he never went through the formal initiation process that would have given him an X rather than a last name.

8 Thanks to Dr. Kariamu Welsh for bringing this significant distinction to my attention with her observation that she danced for Nation of Islam events.

9 Salaam 2012.

10 Salaam met ’Dele Husbands at Clark Center for the Performing Arts. She performed with the company for many years and continues her work as its Executive Director.

11 Abdel R. Salaam. Conversation with the author. New York, NY. September 25, 2018.

12 Abdel Salaam. Conversation with the author. New York, NY. November 28, 2011.

13 Taylor’s genealogical scope extends beyond the historical moment of the Black Arts Movement, when the longer philosophical tradition he explores becomes “fully self-conscious” and adopts the name “black aesthetics.” Paul Taylor, “Black Aesthetics,” Philosophy Compass 5, no. 1 (2010), 2.

14 Taylor, 1.

15 Salaam 2017.

16 Ibid.

17 Taylor, 7.

18 Abdel Salaam. Conversation with the author. November 24, 2013.

19 Taylor, 4. “The black people whose lives black aesthetic means to study are members of a population that has been brought into being by the political, economic and social dynamics of modernity … Black lifeworlds are creative responses to the burdens of self-creation under the pressures of modern politics, with its constitutive commitments to anti-black racism and white supremacy” Taylor, 2.

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20 G. W. F. Hegel, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, (The Philosophy of History) 5th, rev. ed. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1955): 216-18.

21 Lindon Barrett, Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity (Chicago, Urbana and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 12.

22 Barrett, 44.

23 Ibid, 66.

24 Jacques Ranciere. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc., 2010), 116.

25 Taylor 11.

26 DeFrantz places ‘beauty’ in scare quotes, as a contested term, noting that contemporary dance studies has all but ignored beauty, for somewhat obvious reasons: “the concept seems at once extremely unstable— what are the terms for recognizing ‘beauty’? and monolithic, without significant nuance. More than this, ‘beauty’s’ philosophic lineage has ignored dance, all the while positing universal values from which African American identity and subjectivity have also been excluded.” Thomas DeFrantz, “African American Dance- Philosophy, Aesthetics, and ‘Beauty,’” Topoi, no. 24 (2005): 94.

27 DeFrantz, 96-97.

28 Salaam describes his choreographic process: “I want a blank slate. … I just want to start moving. And what is viscerally happening from this construct of movement that I’m experiencing. How is the language borne out of that? Then afterwards sometimes I can take the language and attach the thought to that.” Salaam 2017.

29 “{T]he Nation, and Malcom and Farrkhan … They shifted my life. They made me believe in myself as a black man. Know that there was nothing wrong with being a black man … what Farrakhan did for young black men, is just unbelievable. You know, you found a sense of purpose, saw God in yourself, related to your history… I could never diss that.” Salaam 2017.

30 Lynne F. Bachleda, “Eclipse Visions of the Crescent and the Cross: Teacher Guidebook” Tennessee Performing Arts Education Humanities Outreach in Tennessee, 2006.

31 Angela D. Gittens, "Hands, Eyes, Butts, and Thighs: Women's Labor Sexuality and Movement Technique from Senegal through the Diaspora," Diss. New York University, 2008, 185.

32 Salaam 2013.

33 Abdel R. Salaam. “Conversation in Rehearsal.” Nov. 8, 2013.

34 Salaam, November 24, 2013.

35 “Participants in this tradition have obviously been concerned with questions about the nature and limits of racial identity, relationship between art and politics, the prospects for black beauty and self-hood in an anti-black world and much else besides. Unlike the empirical questions of cultural continuities and retentions across the phases and migrations of the African diaspora, questions like these make room for contributions by philosophers qua philosophers.” Taylor, 10.

36 Barrett builds on “the Talking Book”: “as theorized by [Henry Louis] Gates, [which] underscores that, following the cultural reorganizations of Europe proceeding from the sixteenth century, one consistency 307

‘was that black people could become [human and sometimes civic] speaking subjects only by inscribing their voices in the written word.’” Barrett, 59-60.

37 Salaam 2017. Original emphasis. 38 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Boston: Harvard University Press), 1993.

39 In addition to biographical and historiographic approaches to African American dance scholarship, this third approach emerged following Robert Farris Thompson’s 1966 essay “Dance and Culture: An Aesthetic of the Cool.” DeFrantz, Thomas. Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002, 11-15. Thompson 1966.

40 This historical period also saw the rise of the term ‘diaspora’ as a lens for understanding black global cultural production, impacting Salaam’s explicit framing of his work through this lens. Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Uses of Diaspora.” Social Text, 66 vol. 19, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 45-73.

41 Salaam 2013.

42 Salaam specifically references the theories of African migration to the Americas before the Transatlantic Slave Trade by Ivan van Sertima in They Came Before Columbus, which is the basis for another piece called Ancestral Earths about Native American and African intercultural exchange. Ibid. Ivan van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus (New York: Random House, 1976).

43 DeFrantz, 2002. 15. “The spirit ‘flashes’ in Africanist performance to momentarily confirm incorporeal action enabled by the performance, and not bounded by the performer’s body. In the ‘flash of the spirit’ we find what African art historian Robert Farris Thompson has described as the motivation of successful Africanist performance” DeFrantz, 2005, 98. Yvonne Daniel, Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005).

44 Salaam, Nov 24, 2013. Dr. Kariamu Welsh has pointed out that patakato, as a heel and toe dance, may very well have been used to riff on the heel and toe dances of British colonizers in Nigeria. It is also relevant that this rhythm/dance was brought to the U.S. by Michael Babatunde Olatundji, Chuck Davis’ mentor, Salaam’s dance grandfather, and a participant in the Dancemobile.

45 Salaam 2013.

46 Chapman, Dasha. “The Diasporic Re-membering Space of Jean Appolon’s Afro-Haitian Dance Classes.” The Black Scholar. Special Issue “Black Moves: New Research in Black Dance Studies,” (2016): 60.

47 Salaam 2013.

48 Gates’ theorization of Signifyin’ is premised in large part on the diasporic figure of Esu Elegba as he circulates throughout the diaspora. Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (London: Oxford University Press, 1988).

49 Gittens 2008.

50 Taylor, 11.

51 Salaam 2013.

52 P. Sterling. Stuckey, “Christian Conversion and the Challenge of Dance.” In DeFrantz 2002, 47.

53 Gittens, 215. 308

54 Gittens 2008.

55 Fred Moten, “Taste, Dissonance, Flavor, Escape: Preface for a solo by Miles Davis” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 17, no. 2, (July 2007): 217-246.

56 Angela D. Gittens. "Hands, Eyes, Butts, and Thighs: Women's Labor Sexuality and Movement Technique from Senegal through the Diaspora." Diss. New York University, 2008. 193-194.

57 The choreographic structure of these two vignettes also honors the theoretical principle of individualism within a group dynamic. Each woman steps forward from the circle or line of dancers to take a solo, demonstrating her unique variations within the aesthetic and rhythmic structure of the form—citing the aesthetic principles of collective source as the group encourages individual innovation, clapping and calling out to the soloist.

58 Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to examine all of the intertextual vignettes that Salaam constructs in “Continental Drifts,” I will indicate them here: One series of intertexts links the sinuous undulations of Haitian yonvalou to the rippling motions of black popular dances inspired by the entertainer Earl Snake Hips Tucker, to Lindy Hopping at the Savoy Ballroom, and the sensuous partnering of U.S./Caribbean salsa. Another section juxtaposes the broken wrists, angular elbows, flapping arms of linjin (a dance from Senegal and Casamance based on the mating dances of the horn-billed crane) with the Buzzard Lope (dance from the U.S. South, originally performed in slavery and later in minstrelsy). An earlier section joins Malian sounu with the Ringshout, a form of subterfuge which disguised African derived, dance-based religious practices. In environments of persecution and forced conversion, in which African religion and drums were outlawed, bodies carried the legacy of rhythm into the so-called New World. See Stuckey for more on the Ringshout.

59 Jasiri Kofele is the author/reader of the poem entitled “A Gray Flannel Matter.”

60 Eric Hayot argues that modernity is a theory of the world—of a particular world … that it most commonly calls the “universal.” He examines the effects of the application and spread of “modern” thinking across the globe, including the “geometrization” of space and time through the spread of capitalism. “The homogenization of labor-time produced by capitalism (via money, and the clock) led to ‘a generalized social imposition of a single standard of time,’ … capitalism has ‘universalized’ history, in the sense that it has established systematic relations of social interdependence on a planetary scale … in terms of a single standard of measurement: world standard-time.” Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 5.

61 Salaam 2013. “Yet dialectically, sacred rhythm was the strongest conceivable force, in African terms, against the mechanical movements of an emergent capitalist world. Even before slaves and their descendants heard the machines, the forced labor extracted from them that made slavery a profitable part of the economy led them, after work, to draw on dance as a main form of recreation and relief.” Stuckey, 43. 62 Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: MacMillan, 2006), 6.

63 It can also be understood as a citational reference to Joan Miller’s solo choreographed for Salaam (Bower) entitled “Modern Black Businessman,” within the piece B.U.M.P.S. (Black Upwardly Mobile Professionals), which was her commentary on alienation in black middle class aspirations toward upward mobility under the terms of racial capitalism.

64 “So within Wall St., yeah the economy is rebounding, Wall St. is doing great, but the jobs. People still can’t get a job, money’s not flowing the way it’s supposed to flow, and culturally it’s another kind of devastation.” Salaam 2013.

65 In another sense “Club Legacy” also cites Salaam’s309 own personal history at clubs like the legendary

Paradise Garage (colloquially known as the Gay-rage), where he would go to see legendary gender nonconforming performer Sylvester. Clubs like these were the birthplace of house music as it emerged from disco. The queer spaces of these clubs have historically offered forms of cultural survival and healing for those living on the margins, in terms of race, gender, and sexuality. On this history see Sally Sommer “C’mon to My House: Underground House Dancing” Dance Research Journal, 33, no. 2, Social and Popular Dance (Winter, 2001): 72-86.

66 Salaam 2013, original emphasis.

67 Deborah Kapchan, “Body,” in Keywords in Sound. Eds. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015): 33-44.

68 Ibid.

69 DeFrantz, 2005, 96.

70 Maulana Karenga, “Kwanzaa, the Nguzo Saaba and Our Constant Striving, Repairing, Renewing and Remaking the World.” 50th Anniversary Founder’s Kwanzaa Statement. Los Angeles Sentinel, December 22, 2016, p. A6. http://www.us- organization.org/position/documents/KwanzaatheNguzoSabaandOurConstantStriving12-22-16.pdf

71 Salaam. 22 February 2012.

72After an internal debate, the presenters decided to split the shows, so that the lecture demonstrations during the week closed with “Lamban” and the family shows on the weekend closed with “A Gray Flannel Matter” and “Club Legacy.” Salaam: “ Initially, they didn’t want me to do anything contemporary. They wanted something that was ‘all African’ … But then the other people, and these were black people, and then another group of black people came in, you know African Americans, and they said it’s starting to feel too African. Is it African? Kwanzaa’s not that African is it? In other words, there are just a whole bunch of, I’m dealing with a whole bunch of misnomers and misinformation with regard to Kwanzaa, it’s origin, what it was, why it was created, who it was initially developed for, who it is supposed to empower and how that living language, if you will, that cultural practice was, why it was even developed.” Salaam. 22 February 2012.

73 Abdel R. Salaam “Kulture Seed.” Program notes. Kwanzaa Celebration-Regeneration Night. The Apollo Theater, New York. 26 Dec. 2007.

74 See Brenda Dixon Gottschild on the complexities surrounding black women and blond hair and the politics of aesthetics. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts. (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 1996, 1998). 205-207.

75 Taylor, 6

76 Manning 2004. I discuss this series of racialized double binds in the introduction of this document.

77 Taylor, 8.

78 Addision Gayle, “the harlem renaissance: towards a black aesthetic,” Midcontinent American Studies Journal, 11, no. 2, Perceptions of Black America (Fall 1970), pp. 78-87.

79 Gayle, 85. He mentions Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson. Also relevant, although he does not mention her, is Zora Neale Hurston’s “Characteristics of Negro Expression.”

80 Ibid, 85. 310

81 Ibid, 79.

82 Siegel, 138.

83 DeFrantz 2002, 6.

84 Nicholas Lemann attributes this growth of the black middle class during this historical period to an irony of the Great Society programs, in which the creation of social service jobs enabled individuals and families to escape the ghetto without impacting the majority of black people who remained. Lemann, 1988. This is the historical period when the War to End Racism and Poverty became the War on Drugs, which was essentially a war on people of color, which led to the current situation of mass incarceration. See Ruth Wilson Gilmore Golden Gulag and Michelle Alexander The New Jim Crow.

85 Salaam 2012.

86 Salaam has also noted in our conversations that this contemporary/traditional language is an “in-house” shorthand used within the company, derived from the early days of Forces of Nature, observing that he does not use it in any writing about the company or promotional materials.

87 Hall 1986, 403.

88 Salaam 2013.

89 Salaam 2012.

90 Ibid.

91 Salaam 2018.

92Despite the success of a few black ballerinas in majority white companies, from Janet Collins to Misty Copeland, the structural dimensions of racial exclusion remain firmly in place in the hierarchies of the ballet world.

93 Working in myriad ways to normalize white entitlement and black disempowerment, essential whiteness, as Richard Dyer suggests, is embodied in figures like the ballerina … which are assigned attributes that characterize them as pure, talented and ephemeral.” Cherise Smith Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 10. The desire to create an institutional space that would disprove assumptions about black inferiority in ballet was the motivation behind Arthur Mitchell’s creation of the Dance Theater of Harlem (DTH) in 1969. Both a professional company and a school, DTH was conceived as a space where black ballet dancers could perform belonging in American classical ballet. It is an institution that embodies the tension between racial vindication and self-determination.

94 Salaam 2012.

95 Mark Franko, “Figural Inversions of Louis XIV’s Dancing Body,” in Acting on the Past: historical performance across the disciplines, eds. Mark Franko and Annette Richards (London: Wesleyan University Press, 2000): 35-51.

96 Gittens 2010.

97 Salaam 2012.

98 Salaam 2012. 311

99 Gayle, 82.

100 Gayle, 81, 82, 86.

101 Ferguson 2004. Jared Sexton, “Ante-Anti-Blackness: Afterthoughts,” Lateral 1 (2012).

102 Jose Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

103 Gershun Avilez, Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism (Chicago: University of Illinois, 2016), 12.

104 Salaam 2012.

105 Salaam 2012.

106 In his 2005 discussion of Salaam’s work, DeFrantz positions DanceAfrica as an inheritance of 1960s concert dance: “[I]n the wake of the 1960s civil rights movement African Americans have embraced neo- African choreographies … ‘Ancestral beauty’ is protected by these dances, in their recovery by African Americans, and in their frequent staging in touring concert dance festivals such as the annual DanceAfrica series.” DeFrantz, 99.

107 Davis died May 14, 2017 at the age of 80.

108 This adaptation is affectionately called Sorso-no-no by the company referencing Salaam’s formal innovation of the traditional step in his choreographic reformulation.

109 Gia Kourlas, “DanceAfrica Excels at Tradition: Why Go Beyond?” The New York Times, May 30, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/30/arts/dance/danceafrica-review-bam.html My full response to the review can be found here: https://movementresearch.org/publications/critical-correspondence/strong- and-wrong-on-ignorance-and-modes-of-white-spectatorship-in-dance-criticism

110 Rachel Carrico makes this connection clear: “In 1837, Friedrich Hegel articulated a common European view of the “ African character” as the absolute alterity to the enlightened white man: ‘The Negro represents the Natural Man in all his wildness and indocility’… The ways Africans danced were occasionally offered up as evidence of their primitivity … narratives about black dance served as unmediated proof for Hegel’ s colonialist formulations of the Negro as Natural Man in all its guises: savage, criminal, primitive, and rhythmically gifted.” Rachel Carrico, “Un/Natural Disaster and Dancing: Hurricane Katrina and Second Lining in New Orleans,” The Black Scholar, Special Issue “Black Moves: New Research in Black Dance Studies,” eds. Thomas F. DeFrantz and Tara Aisha Willis, 2016): 29-30.

111 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia UP, 1983).

112 Hall, 1986.

113 Gilroy, 39.

114 Ibid, 38-39.

115 Ibid. Gilroy specifically mentions this strategic separation in relation to natural rights theorists who conceived of property-in-the-person (e.g. John Locke), German idealists (e.g. Hegel), and political economists (i.e. Barrett’s critique linking economic and epistemological foundations in the European imagination). Black aesthetics questions “the foundational moves of modern philosophy and social thought, whether they came from the natural rights theorists312 who sought to distingui sh between the spheres

of morality and legality, the idealists who wanted to emancipate politics from morals so that it could become a sphere of strategic action, or the political economists of the bourgeoisie who first formulated the separation of economic activity from both ethics and politics.” Gilroy, 40.

116 Taylor 12-13.

117 The way she positions Davis and Salaam on opposing sides of a binary, completely ignores Salaam’s professional history as the Associate Artistic Director of the Chuck Davis Dance Company and his participation in DanceAfrica beginning forty years ago. Perhaps if she had understood this legacy, she would realize that Salaam inherited his fluency in concert dance, across ballet, modern, West African and diasporic forms from Baba Chuck himself.

118 On the other hand, when entertainment is invoked in the review through a demeaning reference to Broadway, it is degraded as void of intellectual or artistic content, labeled “flashy.” Her dig—“Was this DanceAfrica or a Broadway tryout?”—polices Salaam’s use of concert dance conventions like canon, counterpoint, and retrograde, which are deployed throughout the ensemble sections of Sevens. Her comments fall into tired tropes that demean Broadway and popular entertainment, while ignoring the historicity of the Africanist presence on Broadway. This comment sets up a false binary between African derived dances and Broadway productions, revealing her ignorance of the long history of African dance on Broadway. This history extends from Asadata Dafora’s Kykunkor in the 1930s, a smash hit that was similarly subject to racist and ignorant reviews in the white press (Manning 2004) to Fela! in 2008. It also elides the fact that Broadway is premised on African diasporic movement practices (i.e. Broadway jazz and Bob Fosse’s vocabulary are derived from African American vernacular practices).

119 Anthea Kraut, Choreographing the Folk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 146.

120 Pomare quoted in Estrada, 45.

121 Gottschild 1997, Perpener 2001, DeFrantz 2002, Manning 2004, Kraut 2008.

122 Gilroy, 40.

123 DeFrantz 2005, 98.

124 Gilroy, 37-38.

125 Gilroy, 37.

126 Abdel Salaam. Conversation with the author. New York, NY. September 8, 2018.

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CHAPTER 7

CONCLUSIONS: THE ARCHIVAL POLITICS OF CITATION AND ‘DIVINING MOVEMENT’

Each of this dissertation’s previous chapters has examined the use of diaspora citation by choreographers working in Black Arts Movement concert dance. This practice constructs critiques of the terms for belonging to the abstract figure of the

‘human,’ conceived through property-in-the-person as white, Western, heteropatriarchal, propertied Man, as well as affirming and imagining alternative modes of being human together in the world. Viewing movement as a form of connection, rather than property, their choreographic critiques, affirmations and imaginaries gesture toward other terms that might create a more livable world for those excluded from this figure.

Eleo Pomare understood diaspora through his lived experience of be(com)ing black in the world, traveling across four continents. This experience was channeled into his choreographic theory of black oneness and vitality, evidenced through a micrological attention to gestural nuance in diddy bop walk performances, which conveyed a queer

1970s Harlem lifeworld. His solo Narcissus Rising registers a ‘militant’ structure of feeling, which, along with his “Junkie” solo, enabled his choreographic critiques of the normative terms for national(ist) belonging.

Joan Miller constructed diaspora through choreographic references to her personal background as the daughter of Caribbean immigrants. Through black nationalist, feminist poetic constellations of diaspora as a speculative queer ‘outside,’ Miller imagined a world beyond the terms of white heteropatriarchy, which dictate ‘proper’

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placements for women in racialized economies of female objecthood dictated by the nation state.

Despite their exclusion from participating in international conferences (e.g. representing the state at the 1966 Negro Arts Festival in Dakar), artists on the

Dancemobile constructed choreographic forms of diasporic belonging on local street corners: imagining a transnational, Third World commons; enacting affective forms of mutual care in ensemble between artists and audiences; and constructing queer forms of belonging in/as ‘dance family.’ These artists didn’t refer to their choreographic practices using the terminology of diaspora, as it was just arriving in discourse as a way to reference black global cultural production during the historical moment of the 1960s.

Abdel Salaam, as the inheritor of this two-pronged choreographic strategy around belonging is the most intentional of these choreographers in the ways that his choreography creates a structure of diaspora through a constellation of references, primarily through articulations of movement vocabulary and rhythm. In some ways, his choreography synthesizes various aspects of this genealogy: Joan and Chuck’s fluency across vocabularies; Chuck’s inheritance of staging continental and diasporic vocabularies from Olatunji and Asadata Dafora; and Eleo’s unapologetic linking of aesthetics and radical politics, along with his use of African American vernacular gestural vocabularies in performing black aesthetics on the concert stage. In other ways, like

Joan’s “Millerisms,” Salaam’s dynamic combinations of movement languages and musical understanding, are unique to his particular idiosyncratic movement sensibility.

They come through his ‘visceral’ understanding of the movement—an intuitive process whereby the embodied knowledge absorbed throughout his course of study emerges in

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his creative process, but not as a direct replication. Thus the paradox of diaspora citation:

It’s all an “original variation.”

This history lives in his body and in his choreography. It is how I even know about the practice and these artists in the first place, how I began to listen for their queer longing for other terms beyond property, and the normative subjectivity to which it gives rise, as well as their enactments of those other terms in performances, onstage and in everyday life. He has become a living archive of these movement materials and histories.

Implications of the Research

The practice of diaspora citation in Black Arts Movement concert dance has meaningful implications for African American/black studies, gender and sexuality studies, performance studies, dance studies, and the humanities in general. At first glance, black studies and dance studies do not appear to be central to the humanities, but these choreographic critiques of the humanities’ general ‘object’ of knowledge, the

‘human,’ propose that the intersection of these interdisciplines offers a great deal of insight on the general operations of that system of knowledge—especially about the historical, embodied formation of privileged personhood from the perspective of its ‘limit cases.’ Most importantly, their work provides an opportunity to think beyond the terms of belonging to the ‘human’ within the extant and pervasive terms of property, beyond the reproductive logic of the status quo, which reinforces that the ways things are is the only way they can be, based on some kind of ‘natural’ order. This dissertation proposes that the intersection of black studies’ analysis of (general) modern racialized subjectivity and dance studies’ analysis of embodiment, where this subjectivity is performed and

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contested, offers a generative site for rethinking the central category of analysis in the

‘human’ities.

The choreographic case studies examined in the previous chapters also complicate historiographies within black studies, which foreground the heteronormative, masculinist character of cultural work in the Black Arts Movement, and its concomitant emphasis on textual and verbal forms of artistic expression, by conveying a decidedly queer embodied perspective derived from epistemologies of lived experience. This is evident in the performance of gender and sexual diversity in the Harlem diddy bop walks, and the ways in which they communicate an epistemology of the lived experience of the U.S. political economy from the perspective of 1970s Harlemites: “Harlem Knows.” It is also danced in the unapologetic erotic posturing of the motorcyclist’s sinewy, rippling muscles in

Narcissus Rising, as s/he performs a queer militant refusal to desire normative subjectivity. In excavating these choreographers’ imperatives, I have attempted to listen to the alternative terms, to the queer worldmaking toward which their work gestures.

My examination of the choreographers in this ‘dance family’ simultaneously complicates dance historical narratives conceived through the ‘family tree’ model, which reproduce whiteness as the terms for belonging to the dominant narrative of concert dance. This family tree begins to become a “tangled bush,” in Michelle Wright’s terms, by drawing a line of connection, for example, between Eleo Pomare and German

Austrucktanz choreographer Kurt Jooss. This line signals both a transnational inheritance in Pomare’s choreographic use of tension, which he observed and admired in Jooss’s work, and his rejection of the ideology of primitivism as he encountered it in Jooss’s studio and Europe more broadly.

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The intended audience of this dissertation includes dance studies scholars, especially those tasked with teaching dance history, because it addresses how we conceive and transmit knowledge about concert dance history, particularly in relation to its internal exclusions. At stake is not only the inclusion of these choreographers in the

American (post)modern canon in dance history courses, but the ways in which their critiques of the terms of belonging to the nation create friction, jamming a smooth narrative of national progress with considerations of the afterlives of slavery and colonization in the(ir) historical present—the ongoing internal exclusions of black people not only from dominant dance historical narratives, but also from realizations of full citizenship, and by extension full, level humanity.1

Their work also opens American concert dance to considerations of: diasporic transnational choreographic perspectives; the performative implications of citing quotidian movement beyond the rhetoric of a ‘neutral pedestrian body’; and a model of choreographic authorship that acknowledges the collective authorship of social dance forms. This dimension complicates even the ostensible scope of this dissertation’s focus on ‘concert dance,’ by revealing the ways in which, in black concert dance at least, the

‘autonomous’ realm of Art is always already in conversation with vernacular forms of movement—from the diddy bop walk to sabar, from the cakewalk to Miss Mercy’s minimalist black walk, from Pomare’s quotations of the junkie’s twitch and lean to

Miller’s citations of disco dancing. This practice points to the generative intersection of dance studies with performance studies’ interest in the performance of everyday life, especially the rich potential for choreographic analyses of the embodied performative constitution of social formations like gender, race, class, and sexuality.

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Historical considerations of the diversity of choreographers working on the

Dancemobile, coterminously with Alvin Ailey, might prompt those of us disseminating dance history in the academy to reconsider a common pedagogical practice of allowing

Ailey to stand in for all of ‘black dance,’ along with the practice of lumping Ailey,

Dunham and Primus together in one week of the syllabus in order to tick the ‘black dance’ box. I have witnessed this approach on a syllabus as recently as this semester.

We might also consider teaching dance history in more interdisciplinary ways by examining choreographers’ horizontal relationships to their artistic contemporaries—such as the relationship between Eleo Pomare and writer James Baldwin, Pomare and filmmaker Kenneth Anger, or between Joan Miller and poet Louise “Miss Lou” Bennett.

One of the ideas that this research has sparked for me, as a scholar and a professor, is the creation of an online platform for teaching dance history as black/American/transnational/queer/feminist historical studies. This conceptual technology would be able to account for a rhizomatic, rather than a family tree paradigm.

Such a model could be built on dynamic network mapping, enabling students to move horizontally among the kinds of peer relationships indicated above, as well as vertically through the established authority of relationships that have been well documented in concert dance history.2 Students would also be able to add information to this dynamic, living archive, creating new lines to connect dance historical contexts in order to reveal new understandings of interdisciplinary, transnational connections in and through dance.

They could begin constructing queer genealogies in dance through the intertextual contributions of their own research projects and interests.

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Areas for further research include a sustained scholarly examination of the significance of the Dancemobile project beyond its first two years. This important project deserves further investigation, both as a mobile platform in its early years and later as a winter institution at Symphony Space serving a wide variety of black dancers and choreographers. Another generative direction for future studies would be an examination of other artists working on the Dancemobile through a queer of color lens, such as Baba Chuck Davis, George Faison and Arthur Mitchell. Additionally, interviewing white women dancers performing on the mobile, such as Elizabeth Dalman,

Roberta Pikser, and Jennifer Barry, would lend an alternative perspective to monolithic notions of what moving bodies constituted the history of ‘black dance’ and the historical contours of being a white dancing body performing on black terms.

Much of Pomare’s and Miller’s repertoires also deserves further inquiry and analysis. Of particular interest in extending the theoretical lens of diaspora citation are

Pomare’s pieces: Radiance of the Dark, a satirical piece about a storefront preacher in

Harlem, and Missa Luba, an anticolonial choreography performed in the streets as a part of Amiri Baraka’s 1965 Black Arts Repertory Theater and School. Additionally,

Pomare’s most explicit “Black Power” piece, Hushed Voices (which has a blaxploitation style ending) could be read with Kara Keeling’s queer of color analyses of Foxy Brown in blaxploitation films, or his piece on the Vietnam War, Burnt Ash, could also be placed in conversation with Baldwin’s essay, “A Report From Occupied Territory.”3 Miller’s critiques of conformity to normative subjectivity could be further explored through close readings of her pieces Robot Game and Gender Hues. Salaam’s work has also received little scholarly attention. His use of diaspora citation could be productively explored

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through works like Terrestrial Wombs, an exploration of the divine feminine through diverse diasporic references including Yemaya and Mami Wata, and Smoove, an embodiment of fluid movement generally construed as feminine in Western contexts but with multiple valences across the diaspora, especially in Congolese and Caribbean contexts.

In/Formal Archives, “Dance Family” Knowledge, and the Politics of Citation

The effort to reconstruct the history of the dominated is not discontinuous with dominant accounts or official history but, rather, is a struggle within and against the constraints and silence imposed by the nature of the archive. —Saidiya Hartman

Throughout this dissertation I have tried to avoid a reductive characterization of the politics of citation in terms of giving credit to a single, locatable point of origin, focusing on the ways that giving embodied citation enables an understanding of connections, in contrast to viewing movement as property. However, in my research process, I encountered the traces and the effects of the lack of citation given to African

American cultural labor in the field of concert dance as a significant dimension of my inquiry. The politics of citation is an integral part of understanding what was at stake for these choreographers and dancers—their (awareness of their) omission in dominant dance historical narratives and their ambivalent relationship to the institutions of concert dance in the U.S. I conclude with a meditation on my experiences in various kinds of archives, and the ways in which I attempted to listen to the priorities of my research subjects, in order to leave the reader with a sense of the theoretical, historical, and political significance of diaspora citation as a historiographic practice.

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The preeminent site for concert dance archival research in New York City is the

Jerome Robbins Dance Division in the New York Library for the Performing Arts at

Lincoln Center. A significant portion of Eleo Pomare’s archive is housed there.

However, it was in a document that I found at the Schomburg Center for Research in

Black Culture in Harlem where I first encountered a story that points to the dimensions of power that cohere around the institutional structure of the Dance Division. This story functions as an intertext that points to the silences of that archive. In the document from the Schomburg, Eleo Pomare tells the interviewer of a time when Jerome Robbins came to visit a Harlem recreational center, “A definite rip-off from Raymond Sawyer. I can pull out the material and show you where a particular dance was taken from. When I saw

‘Westside Story,’ I just went blank! I just had to exclaim, ‘How can ANYONE do that?!’”4 This story surfaced in my interviews as well, as a kind of alternative historical knowledge that exists in the ‘black dance’ community. In my separate interviews with

Abdel Salaam and Martial Roumain, they both brought up this story. In their versions, instead of Raymond Sawyer, it was Talley Beatty whose movement material Robbins had appropriated for Westside Story without giving credit.

Chuck Davis also reflects this kind of vernacular knowledge about practices of not giving citation in dynamics of misappropriation when discussing the early years of the Dancemobile: “Those were formative years, and there was so much going on up in

Harlem. I mean a lot going on, and it would filter down, just as in the old days when the people from downtown used to come up to the Savoy Ballroom and learn all the movements and steps and take it downtown, and all of a sudden it became theirs. But we were fiercely watchful over what was being created at that time, and we made sure that

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we shared it amongst ourselves.”5 Rather than a form of possessive attachment to cultural production, this attitude reflects a concern with, and knowledge of, the ongoing erasure of black artistic contributions in dominant historical accounts.

This concern with preserving black historical legacies in concert dance also existed for these dance artists in relationship to their elders, to the folks that paved the way for them, and their potential invisibilization in dynamics of misappropriation. In the

Dancemobile report, Carole Johnson is clear that, while one dimension of the project seeks to convey the influences of collective diasporic authorship on American choreographers, a significant aspect of the stakes in the mobile’s performances is a recognition of the contributions of black American choreographers to concert dance.

This is why one of The Feet’s goals was to establish an archive for black dancers and choreographers.6 In particular, the potential erasure of Katherine Dunham’s legacy is of concern to Johnson. She notes how black dancers and companies that are supported by white patrons, boards, managers, and agents:

give out their knowledge and talent to Europeans and White Americans who can support them. This becomes an American contribution to the modern dance world and the American contribution is always White. For instance, today only a few Black people study Dunham technique. Almost all dancers study jazz dance. How many Broadway dancers (other than Black ones) know that jazz technique is basically Dunham technique. She codified African, Caribbean, European and Negro social dance movements into a theatrical style and classroom technique. Her contribution is comparable to that of Martha Graham. The entire Broadway theatrical style of dance was derived from her technique and style—Matt Mattox, Pere Gennaro, Jerome Robbins. Yet, most American White dancers probably think that “Matt Mattox” originated the technique of what is called Jazz dance.7

The invisibilization of the Africanist presence in jazz established by Brenda Dixon

Gottschild in the 1990s was of paramount concern to artists on the Dancemobile. They

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practiced citation of collective and individual authors as a form of historiography to counter the erasure of black dance history in U.S. concert dance institutions.

I heard the Jerome Robbins appropriation story from Martial while I was sitting on his living room couch, as he poured me a glass of ginger ale while cueing up a DVD to watch clips of Joan Miller in Pass Fe White. Since the recent death of Eleo’s longtime romantic and business partner Glenn Conner, Martial has become the keeper of the remainder of both Eleo’s and Joan’s archives. Their documents, videotapes, and photographs are piled so high in boxes in the corners of his bedroom that they threaten to topple over at any given moment. He is in the long process of preparing the materials and advocating for their submission to the Jerome Robbins Dance Division archive at the

Performing Arts Library. Photos of Eleo and Joan hang across from each other on the wall above the couch. He muses, “They loved each other.”

When I went to interview Carole Johnson, her Dancemobile archives were kept in the basement and various closets of Bess Pruitt’s (Chuck Davis’s former company manager) house in the Bronx. Bess insisted on making me breakfast, eggs with hot sauce and toast. Because I am tall, they asked for my help. Standing on a rickety stool, I reached up into the back of the closet, trying to find the slide projector that Bess was almost certain she had left up there. Carole and Bess spent almost half of our interview trying to think where other archival materials might be and commenting on how they had almost been thrown out of a church where they had an office.

This dance family opened their homes, their archives, and their historical lived experiences to me, treating me like one of the family. Their faces would light up with a new kind of recognition when I told them I danced with Forces, and that Abdel is my

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dance father. This group of black concert dance artists has maintained their relationships as ‘dance family’ over the years. At each interview, they offered me other people’s phone numbers and email addresses, names and tips to follow up on for my research.

However, the institutional support to preserve this legacy in formal archives remains elusive. The lived experiences of this dance family are disappearing. Eleo, Joan, and

Baba Chuck are all ancestors. Smitty passed while I was writing the chapter on the

Dancemobile.

It is important to note that all of the choreographers discussed in this dissertation positioned themselves as authors of their work within the terms of capitalism that underpin authorship in concert dance. They were not naïve. However, I submit that their philosophical orientation was directed toward a critique of the very terms (property-in- the-person, racial capitalism, white supremacy) that made this type of authorial claim necessary, and that their orientation toward movement was not one of possession, but of connection.

The way Abdel practices citation as historiography in his choreography performs a transmission of knowledge of these omitted ‘black dance’ contributions, which remain only partially legible in the formal archives of concert dance institutions and, more often, are held in the informal archives of people’s bedrooms, basements, and closets. The alternative discourses kept (alive) in ‘black dance’ communities both keep the open secret of forms of historical erasure and enact practices of citing source, maintaining this history in those practices. Salaam clarifies the nature of this alternative discourse, “Our only beef is that the dominant culture don’t give it up. The internal conversation is the dominant culture steals from us, and doesn’t acknowledge the source. I acknowledge the

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source because that empowers me, the ancestors, my elders. As a black man I am part of a line of greatness, genius, energy and light all connected to the source.”8

“Divining Movement” and Giving Citation: Salaam’s Choreographic Praxis

Salaam’s “visceral” black aesthetic theorizing in his choreography cites ancestral knowledge, embodying rhythmic movement’s capacity for affective forms of connection between past and present —citation as regeneration for healing in the present and as a practice of doing history. These capacities for connection are grounded in the movement’s embodiment of divine principles, a “commonality” in African and African diasporic dance practices that Kariamu Welsh has theorized as a form of embodied memory: “The African dancer remembers all the others who danced the dance and why.”9

This danced remembering is a form of embodying legacy. The embodiment of legacy has been a tool for those historically excluded from the written word as a technology of exclusion from the figure of the ‘human.’

The name of his company refers to the way in which Salaam conceives of his choreographic process as a spiritual connection to ancestral sources: “Well, I originally called it Forces of Nature Dance Theatre because I felt that I couldn’t take credit for something that was coming through me—the inspiration—I was divining movement.

That I am a product of my ancestors, of the Neteru, of the spirit, of Jesus, God, Supreme

Being, not a supreme being but Being in itself … we are all connected to supreme being, and ultimately, we can tap into that source.”10 This perspective is at odds with the economies of authorship in capitalism, where movement operates as a form of property in concert dance. Abdel has quipped in rehearsal, “I should have named it the Abdel

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Salaam Dance Company,” reflecting the dominant practice of modern dance companies, which foregrounds a single author in the construct of the individual genius. “So, I was simply a conduit of the energy of the creative thought. But living in the West, people I respect very much said, ‘That’s very altruistic of you and very humble of you, but if you do that shit, you’ll get absolutely nowhere.’ In this particular society, people need to identify a source. Because if they don’t, then somebody else comes along and they take a look at your idea and they put their name on something that came through you. And they’re the ones that can get paid. They’re the ones that can get acknowledged.”11 His comments surface the tensions of proprietary histories, the terms of racial capitalism and histories of cultural misappropriation in U.S. concert dance and beyond.

His choreographic praxis operates in a distinct way: “You know me, I give citation all the time … that’s Talley [Beatty], that’s George [Faison], that’s Louie [Falco], that’s Jennifer [Muller], that’s Paul Sanasardo. That’s where I got the inspiration to do that. Now, this is not the same step, I’m not going to do that exactly the same way, but the feeling of what you’re doing comes from—yeah, always give credit where credit is due … I don’t know what totally original means … It’s all an original variation.” This choreographic philosophy of giving citation to the sources of one’s “original variation,” understanding the choreographer as a channel, divining movement from ancestral sources, is a philosophical orientation distinct from viewing movement as property.

The practice of diaspora citation that I have elaborated throughout this dissertation offers an ethical way to approach choreography and historiography, by understanding movement as a form of connection. Beyond the notion of movement as property, giving citation to source material has become an ethical imperative that I have

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learned as a white dancer participating in the legacy of the artists this dissertation explores. It is an imperative that I perform in my dance classes, in my own choreography, and in my history and theory classes. It is the way in which I hope to enable my students to understand the inextricable ethical and political work of black aesthetics as a practice that seeks to implement new terms, in excess of possessive individualism. It can help students, as it has helped me, to understand the ways that the existing terms of property overdetermine the relationality of black and white (and other forms of) modern racialized subjectivity in the U.S. (and beyond). Those terms affect all of us, and we should heed the urgency with which these artists call for new terms for belonging, the insistence with which they announce the capacity to desire differently, the ways that bodies in motion articulate a desire for a more livable world, for new forms of being human together in the world.

This is what is what the practice of diaspora citation has given me … a sense of belonging and connection through movement to a legacy of dance that has enabled me to see the world, and my body and my place in it, differently and perhaps even more importantly, to see the potential of another world not yet here …

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NOTES

1 See Richard C. Green on efforts to canonize Pearl Primus in this regard. Richard C. Green “(Up)Staging the Primitive: Pearl Primus and ‘the Negro Problem’ in American Dance,” in Dancing Many Drums, ed. Thomas DeFrantz (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002): 105-142.

2 For an example of the conceptual mapping enabled by dynamic networks see this video mapping the tweets in the Arab Spring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2guKJfvq4uI

3 Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, The Black Femme, and the Image of Commonsense. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

4 Arthur T. Wilson, "Eleo Pomare: "Pomare Power!"-Dance Theater Passion." African American Genius in Modern Dance (Durham, NC: American Dance Festival, 1993), 23.

5 Chuck Davis Interview. Patricia DeArcy “Harlem Cultural Council” film.

6 DeFrantz 1999, 89.

7 Carole Johnson, “Progress and Development of Dancemobile 1967-1968: A Progress Report on Dancemobile and Other Funded Projects.” Personal archive, 1969, 35.

8 Abdel Salaam. Conversation with the author. New York, NY. February 22, 2012.

9 Kariamu Welsh-Asante, “The Zimbabwean Dance Aesthetic: Senses, Canons, Characteristics,” in African Dance, edited by Kariamu Welsh-Asante (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1998), 213.

10 Abdel Salaam. Conversation with the author. New York, NY. November 24, 2013.

11 Salaam 2013.

329

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Chapter Four

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press, 2007.

Amin, Takiyah. “Dancing Black Power? Joan Miller, Carole Johnson and the Black Aesthetic, 1960-1975.” Dissertation, Temple University, 2011.

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Chapter Five

Allen, Zita. “Dancemobile Kicks Off Free Concert Series.” New York Amsterdam News (New York, NY) Aug. 13, 1975.

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346

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Baraka, Amiri. “The Apollo Past, Present, and Future.” In Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment, edited by Richard Carlin and Kinshasha Holman Conwill, 174-181. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2010.

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DeArcy, Patricia, dir. The Harlem Cultural Council, documentary. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzjkBqCCjlk

DeFrantz, Thomas. “We Shall Not Be Overcome: African American Ensembles Join Forces.” Village Voice (New York, NY), April 1, 1997.

Estrada, Ric. "3 Leading Negro Artists and How They Feel about Dance in the Community: Eleo Pomare, Arthur Mitchell, Pearl Primus." Dance Magazine (New York, NY), November 1968.

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Ferguson, Roderick A. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. 2004.

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347

Goldman, Danielle. I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom. University of Michigan Press, 2010.

Harney, Stefano and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Minor Compositions, 2013.

Hartman, Saidiya. “On Working with Archives: An Interview with Writer Saidiya Hartman.” The Creative Independent. By Thora Siemsen, April 18, 2018. https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/saidiya-hartman-on-working-with- archives/

------. “Fugitive Dreams of Diaspora: Conversations with Saidiya Hartman.” By Patricia J. Saunders. Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 6, no. 1(2008): 7.

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Heard, Marcia E. and Mansa Mussa, “African Dance in New York City.” In Dancing Many Drums:Excavations in African American Dance, edited by Thomas DeFrantz, 143-153. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002.

Johnson, Carole. “Progress and Development of Dancemobile 1967-1968: A Progress Report on Dancemobile and Other Funded Projects.” Personal archive, 1969.

------. Conversation with the author. New York, NY. June 22, 2014.

Johnson, E. Patrick. Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

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Kaminsky, Sheila. Conversation with the author. New York, NY. April 20, 2017.

Kraut, Anthea. “On Authenticity, Appropriation, and Property in the Body.” Keynote Annual CORD+SDHS Conference, Pomona College, CA, November 2016.

------. Choreographing the Folk: the Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Lemann, Nicholas. “The Unfinished War (Part 1)” The Atlantic Monthly, December 1988. https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/politics/poverty/lemunf1.htm

Lemann, Nicholas. “The Unfinished War” (Part 2)” The Atlantic Monthly, January 1989. https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/politics/poverty/lemunf2.htm

348

Lordi, Emily J. “Souls intact: The soul performances of Audre Lorde, Aretha Franklin, and Nina Simone.” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 26, no. 1 (July 2016): 55-71.

Miller, Hillary. Drop Dead: Performance in Crisis, 1970s New York, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016.

Moten, Fred. In the Break the Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

------. “The Breathe and Blur Books.” Jose Muñoz Memorial Lecture, New York University, New York, February 24, 2016.

------. Black and Blur (consent not to be a single being). Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.

Murphy, David. “The first black arts festival was shaped by Cold War politics.” The Conversation, April 1, 2016. https://theconversation.com/the-first-black-arts- festival-was-shaped-by-cold-war-politics-54926

Nash, Joe. (Archive and Resource Library: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library: New York, NY., 1967), n.p.

Paris, Carl. Conversation with the author. New York, NY. June 19, 2014.

Pomare, Eleo. Beginsville Speech. Circa 1970. Eleo Pomare Dance Company Archive (via Glenn Conner).

------. “Where are black artists going?!!!” Dance Herald, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1975, 3. Rothstein, Richard, “Race and Public Housing: Revisiting the Federal Role,” Poverty and Race 21, no. 6 (November/December 2012): 1-21.

Reagon, Bernice Johnson. “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century.” In Homegirls: a black feminist anthology, edited by Barbara Smith 356-368. Rutgers University Press, 1983.

Rodgers, Rod. “For the Celebration of Our Blackness.” Dance Scope. Spring 1967, 6-10. Roumain, Martial. Conversation with the author. April 20, 2017.

Salaam, Abdel. Conversation with the author. October 30, 2013.

Shepard, Richard F. “Dance Mobile’s First Stop: 134th Off Lenox,” The New York 349

Times, July 27, 1967.

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Smith, Delos. Conversation with the author. November 7, 2013.

Tyner, James. “Urban Revolutions and the Spaces of Black Radicalism.” In Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, edited by Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods, 218-232. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2007.

Von Eschen, Penny. Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937 1957. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Weston, Kath. Families We Choose: Gays, Lesbians Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Woodard, Komozi. A Nation wthin a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Young, Cynthia A. Soul Power Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

Chapter Six

Adams, Michael Henry. “The End of Black Harlem.” New York Times, May 27, 2016. Allen, Zita. "What is Black Dance?" The Black Tradition in American Dance, American Dance Festival, 1988, 22-23.

Bachleda, F. Lynne. “Eclipse Visions of the Crescent and the Cross: Teacher Guidebook” Tennessee Performing Arts Education Humanities Outreach in Tennessee, 2006.

Baraka, Amiri. "Harlem, Black Creativity, and Black Consciousness." Ain't Nothing like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment. Ed. Kinshasha Conwill and Richard Carlin, 174-181. Washington, DC: National Museum of African American History and Culture through Smithsonian, 2010.

Barrett, Lindon. Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity. Chicago, Urbana and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2014.

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Bunch III, Lonnie G. "The Apollo: A Place of Possibility.” Ain't Nothing like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment. Ed. Kinshasha Conwill and Richard Carlin. 14-18. Washington, DC: National Museum of African American History and Culture through Smithsonian, 2010.

Carrico, Rachel. “Un/Natural Disaster and Dancing: Hurricane Katrina and Second Lining in New Orleans,” The Black Scholar, Special Issue “Black Moves: New Research in Black Dance Studies,” eds. Thomas F. DeFrantz and Tara Aisha Willis (2016): 27-36.

Chapman, Dasha. “The Diasporic Re-membering Space of Jean Appolon’s Afro-Haitian Dance Classes,” The Black Scholar, Special Issue “Black Moves: New Research in Black Dance Studies,” eds. Thomas F. DeFrantz and Tara Aisha Willis (2016): 54-65.

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DeFrantz, Thomas. “African American Dance- Philosophy, Aesthetics, and ‘Beauty.’” Topoi, no. 24 (2005): 93-102.

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Estrada, Ric. "3 Leading Negro Artists and How They Feel About Dance in the Community: Eleo Pomare, Pearl Primus and Arthur Mitchell" Dance Magazine (November 1968): 45-60.

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351

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Lemann, Nicholas. “The Unfinished War (Part 1)” The Atlantic Monthly, December 1988. https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/politics/poverty/lemunf1.htm 352

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Moten, Fred “Taste, Dissonance, Flavor, Escape: Preface for a solo by Miles Davis” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 17, no. 2, (July 2007): 217- 246.

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------. Kulture Seed. Program notes. Kwanzaa Celebration-Regeneration Night. The Apollo Theater, New York. 26 Dec. 2007.

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Welsh-Asante, Kariamu. “The Zimbabwean Dance Aesthetic: Senses, Canons, Characteristics.” In African Dance. Edited by Kariamu Welsh-Asante. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1998.

Chapter Seven

Davis, Chuck. Interview. “Harlem Cultural Council.” Directed by Patricia DeArcy, Patricia, documentary.

Green, Richard C. “(Up)Staging the Primitive: Pearl Primus and ‘the Negro Problem’ in American Dance,” in Dancing Many Drums. Edited by Thomas DeFrantz. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002: 105-142.

Johnson, Carole. “Progress and Development of Dancemobile 1967-1968: A Progress Report on Dancemobile and Other Funded Projects.” Personal archive, 1969, 35. Keeling, Kara. The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, The Black Femme, and the Image of Commonsense. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

Salaam, Abdel. Conversation with the author. New York, NY. February 22, 2012.

------. Conversation with the author. New York, NY. November 24, 2013.

The Egyptian Revolution on Twitter: Through the Eyes of a Dynamic Networks Analyst. Accessed September 15, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2guKJfvq4uI Welsh-Asante, Kariamu. “The Zimbabwean Dance Aesthetic: Senses, Canons, Characteristics.” In African Dance, edited by Kariamu Welsh-Asante. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1998.

Wilson, Arthur T. "Eleo Pomare: "Pomare Power!"-Dance Theater Passion." African American Genius in Modern Dance (Durham, NC: American Dance Festival, 1993), 22-25. 354

APPENDIX

Fig. 1 My Sketch of The Dance Family Tree

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Fig. 2 Eleo Pomare in Narcissus Rising Eleo Pomare Dance Company Archive (courtesy Glenn Conner)

Fig. 3 Eleo Pomare teaching Martial Roumain Narcissus Rising Eleo Pomare Dance Company Archive (courtesy Glenn Conner)

356

Fig. 4 Donna Clark in Narcissus Rising Eleo Pomare Dance Company Archive (courtesy Glenn Conner)

357

Fig. 5 Joan Miller’s Facial Contortion “Millerism” Martial Roumain Personal Archive

Fig. 6 Joan Miller watching herself performing “Miss Liz” in Pass Fe White Martial Roumain personal archive

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Fig. 7 Musicians on Dancemobile Carole Johnson Personal Archive

Fig. 8 Kids on Dancemobile Carole Johnson Personal Archive 359

Fig. 9 South African Gumboot Dance on the Dancemobile Carole Johnson Personal Archive

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Fig. 10 Audience members hanging on the Dancemobile stage Carole Johnson Personal Archive

Fig. 11 Audience members at Dancemobile Performance Carole Johnson Personal Archive 361

Research Integrity & Compliance Institutional Review Board Student Faculty Center Phone: (215) 707-3390 3340 N. Broad Street, Suite 304 Fax: (215) 707-9100 Philadelphia PA 19140 e-mail: [email protected]

Date: 01-Mar-2016 PI: WELSH, KARIAMU Committee: A1 Protocol Number: 23604 Project Title: Diaspora Citation: Choreographing Belonging in the Black Arts Movement

The above new study was administratively closed because the IRB determined that the proposed activity is not human subjects research as defined by DHHS or FDA regulations. Consequently, Temple IRB approval is not applicable and the study was given the status of “closed/never opened.” You are welcome to pursue the activity, obtaining any applicable administrative or departmental (non-IRB) approvals.

Please contact the IRB at (215) 707-3390 if you have any questions.

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