Hallie Gammon - DANC 0163 - African Dance in New York City

Whereas many of the articles we have read so far have discussed the somewhat nebulous concept of "black" dance, this article at first appears to be fairly decisive in its criteria when it chooses to talk about African dance. The first examples it gives, including Asadata Dafora, give the impression that the authors are focusing exclusively on dances that are in some sense "transplanted" directly from Africa - they say that these artists "taught dances from Nigeria and Sierra Leone." However, as the article continues, it becomes fuzzier what exactly the authors mean by "African dance" - by the end, they refer to "the most celebrated African dance company permanently based in New York" as one that "combines martial arts, Horton- and Limón-based modern dance, and African dance techniques." This fusion seems to be characteristically what we have been talking about as "black dance." Perhaps I'm just arguing semantics, but it seems to me that talking about "African dance" implies a much stronger, more direct link to an African heritage than what Gottschild called "Africanist dance" - that is, saying that something is African implies to me that it has come out of Africa essentially unchanged and is being taught in its original form, whereas "Africanist" suggests African influences utilized in a more personal and innovative style. However, I can also think of arguments to contradict this: we talk about ballet as a "European" dance although we certainly don't mean that it hasn't changed since it left Europe to come to America. Perhaps one of the biggest barriers to understanding and talking about dance is spoken and written language itself, since it is so inherently different from the language of the body.

In any case, it is interesting to see the overlap among artists that this article classifies as specifically African and those whom we have talked about as examples of artists creating black dance - the article mentions several artists, including Ladji Camara and Charles Moore, who studied with Katherine Dunham. Others also studied and worked with Pearl Primus and Alvin Ailey. Although there is certainly crossover between the group of artists discussed in this article and those we have previously studied, I think they represent somewhat different philosophies: the one group seems to be very intentional about harkening back to explicitly African roots and using these very authentic steps, rhythms and music in their work, while the other group, while acknowledging the same sort of African influences, has as a primary goal to create their own original form of dance that necessarily and often intentionally recalls their heritage. While the result might often arguably be the same, I see two distinct approaches to creating dance in a black/African/Africanist paradigm.