Hallie Gammon - DANC 0163 - Black Dance and Dancers and the White Public

Compared to last week's reading, I find Dixon's argument for attempting to define Black dance far more enlightening. She avoids the implication that such a definition's purpose would somehow be to show people the "right way" to do Black dance or to exclude those who consider themselves to be doing Black dance from the definition just because they don't match a certain set of criteria. Rather, she argues that "historically, Blacks have been shortchanged both financially and in the area of public recognition for their contributions to mainstream American culture." For her, studying history through the lens of trying to define, among other things, Black dance, is a way to restitute the credit for types of dance that fall into this category to the people who were originally responsible for their invention. She does not, however, demand that Black dance hold to a static definition; she recognizes that it should be studied "in the context of [its] Black origins as well as in the context of a White, Western frame of reference." She promotes a largely historical means of defining Black dance, which I find more useful, at least as a starting point, than some of the value-based suggestions given in last week's reading. Rather, she appears to trace common elements throughout historically Black dance forms and then draw conclusions about their cultural significance, an approach that seems to me more logical than taking cultural values and trying to imagine all the ways they might be expressed.

Although I find the majority of Dixon's argument well-reasoned and convincing, one statement puzzles me: she asserts that "America has learned that separate is, inherently, unequal. No dancer or choreographer wants a separate category created for his or her work." However, this is exactly what she is trying to do: create a separate category of "Black dance" (as distinguished from "White dance") for the work of some dancers and choreographers who reflect a certain history, set of cultural values, style, or - according to some - simply a certain ethnicity. Her arguments for this distinction make good sense, but if she is taking for granted that separate is unequal (and this statement carries all the negative connotations it held during the civil rights movement), I would think that this objection would overrule all possible benefits. I think that if Black dance is qualified as, not in opposition to, but simply as distinct from, certain forms of White dance, it might be able to remain separate without being viewed as unequal - perhaps in the same way that we regard Impressionism as very different from Baroque art without necessarily inducing a value judgment on one with reference to the other. Or Black dance could be considered to have as its primary goal the preservation and continuation of African heritage. I think it is when we start to think of Black dance as "fighting back" against White dance, or in some other relation of opposition, that categories move from separate into unequal. Additionally, and going back to the main quotation, I disagree with the generalization that "no dancer or choreographer wants a separate category created for his or her work." Many artists actively seek to "break out" of the mainstream, to blaze new territory, to do something nobody has done before. I think of the BBoys, for example, who were proud that they had created a whole new kind of dancing. Casting innovation in a negative light runs contrary to almost everything else Dixon talked about in this article, with her discussions of Black dance and American culture itself as "syncretistic." In sum, while I agree with the main points of Dixon's article, I don't think they are borne out in this puzzling statement.