Yesterday, at dinner, I was talking to a friend about a reading I had to do for my Anthropology course. More than talking to him I was inquiring him about something that has been in my mind and that this reading (for my Anthropology course) made it necessary to find a solution. The subject of the reading has nothing to do with the dance reading but I thought that the explanation my friend and I came up with shows the same phenomena in two aspects of American society. My initial question was why the United States, having been British territory, doesn’t follow what it seems to be an inevitable destiny of ex-colonies to be developing countries. My friend pointed out something very important about American history and it is that this territory was not as any other colony, meaning that the British came to this land to reestablish their model and not steal natural resources and impoverish natives. They pretty much killed all the natives and started over. Thus, the United States of America became a synonymous of a “New beginning” for people from all over the world. I am sure that if we ask the US citizens of our Middlebury community almost all of them will have a family member who is not a US citizen.
This environment made it possible and attractive for Black dancers to start performing the dances that demonstrated their African heritage. Whether they were former slaves or immigrants, they found it possible to show the recently born culture that “dances of Africa hold enormous potential for the modern concert stage.” The process that former slaves had to go through in order to be able to get to this point created new dances as the original forms had to be changed due to oppression. However, after the abolition of slavery and their slowly integration to the American society the dances became a representation of their race, that was seen as exoticism in white people’s eyes. It has been a common desire of Black people to make people change the way they saw Black dance as much more than pure exoticism and more like a way of life, a serious dance that was equivalent to ballet. This struggle responds to a much broader problem of defining what is part of American culture and what is not. The Black power movement was the Black’s community response to this process and their attempt to legitimize what they were doing as part of that American culture. Dance played an essential role in these historical changes as it was one of the things that best represented Black culture.
Personally, when I think about Black dance as always think about the music and how Black dance marries the music and the dance. The International African American Ballet hold the idea that the dancer has to know how to play the rhythm he or she is to dance and that the musician has to know how to move along with the music he or she is about to play. This is something that I, as a young classical guitarist who still has a long way to go, find revolutionary. The engagement of the whole body in the process of making music is something that I have taken for granted and thus, undermined its importance to the result of my work. It is physically impossible to dance and play the guitar at the same time (at least the way I do it) but in the process of finding bridges between these two I am hoping to gain a better understanding of the Black dance legacy and my musical aptitudes.
Gabriela Juncosa
DANC 0163
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