This article exemplifies an idea we have seen elsewhere in this class: dance fosters a culture-within-a-culture whose values simultaneously challenge and reflect those of society at that time. The Whitman Sisters' race- and gender-bending performances did not conform in many respects to the accepted values of the time, for example, in representing whites and blacks on the same stage, having Alberta cross-dress as a male, and suggesting cross-racial relationships, but the stage served as a barrier between the real world and the world of artistic representation that allowed audiences to view these situations without feeling threatened by them. For me, this brings to mind the videos we watched on crumping and break dancing - throughout the interviews, dancers reiterated that dance, for them, was a medium through which they could express complex emotions, like anger, fear, or violence, while keeping them separate from reality and therefore not actually having them harm anyone. In that case, dance was creating a screen between the dancer and his own emotions; in somewhat the same way, in this article, dance creates a screen between the dancer and the audience, allowing the dancer to convey a potentially unpleasant message while keeping any negative reactions from overflowing into the real world. In a way, what was happening onstage was challenging cultural ideology of the time, whereas the actual stage itself was situated in and conforming to those cultural expectations - i.e. the expectation that what was happening onstage wasn't actually real.
This same idea is seen in the way dancers and choreographers adopted and at the same time subverted tropes of the white dance and entertainment world to engage in social commentary in a somewhat veiled form. For example, "the familiar scene of a Southern cottage at eventide" tended, in the white dance world, to evoke a heavily idealized version of black life in the South that imputed a degree of blithe happiness to their life that might seem to render them almost without feeling; the Whitman Sisters' version, on the other hand, brought in the spiritual to evoke a religious inner life, giving the characters "humanity and depth" that "expanded the images beyond stereotypes." The Whitman Sisters' entire show can be seen as a highly skillful way of introducing their audience to new ideas by presenting them in a form that at first seems familiar but eventually reveals itself to be something else entirely.
The one point about this article that I found somewhat strange is the author's neglect to mention the Whitman Sisters' occasional passing for white until after he had already discussed much of their history. Though I don't think their light skin in any way takes away from their accomplishments in the black dance world, I do think it causes us to read the story of their success in a slightly different light, especially the assertion that "the Whitman Sisters performed as a white act in their early days." Given that the article is using them as the primary example of black female performers of the era, it makes me wonder if all successful black female troupes were similarly light skinned, or if the Whitmans' success was largely (or to any degree) due to their ability to pass for white, or to what extent this passing affected their experience as African Americans and how that experience was then portrayed on the stage. I think that all of these would have been interesting and relevant things for the author to address in order to back up her use of the Whitman Sisters as an example of black female performers.
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