Hallie Gammon - DANC 0163 - Stripping the Emperor

This article takes a very clear and reasonable approach to broadening our understanding of "black dance" by defining and exploring "five Africanist characteristics that occur in many forms of American concert dance." She does not attempt to exclude certain forms of dance or imply that a form of dance absolutely must possess these characteristics to be considered part of the black dance movement; in fact, she takes almost the completely opposite approach, arguing that all dance in America has in some way been part of the evolution of black dance. To illustrate that point, she leaps immediately to the form of dance most people would consider to be so far removed from Africanist influences as to be completely untouched: ballet. In fact, most of the articles we've read so far have talked about black dance in strict opposition to ballet. However, Gottschild exposes, in a clear, logical way, how ballet and Africanist dance techniques have come into contact and how, most importantly, ballet has been permanently changed by that contact. I appreciate the connection this makes for us between the kind of dance we explore in class and ballet, since some moves in our warmup routine (like the pliés and rond de jambes, for example) are evidently connected to ballet, and up until this point all the discussion of how ballet is the antithesis of black modern dance has seemed somewhat confusing. It seems much more reasonable to assert that people are simply in denial about the very real connections that exist among all forms of American dance; it would be almost absurd to claim that an art can survive completely untouched in an ever-changing culture.

Gottschild's characterization of the five Africanist characteristics she used in her analysis clarified and codified many of the things we've seen again and again through other readings, videos and our own movement in this class. Some, like polyrhythm and "the aesthetic of the cool," already seemed obvious, something we had a name for, but the others - high affect juxtaposition, embracing the conflict, and ephebism - give welcome labels to trends I had only hazily put together before. Embracing the conflict, for example, harks back most explicitly to the article we read about Yoruba body attitudes, but also recalls the simultaneous violence and camaraderie we saw in the teenagers who were crumping or break dancing, and explains "music or vocal work that sounds cacophonous or grating to the untrained ear" - it gives a name to, and therefore reminds me of the value of, an aesthetic completely foreign to the one I've always been surrounded by. Of all the characterizations of black dance we've read so far, I find Gottschild's the most helpful in getting closer to understanding the essential parts of a complex, widespread and evolving form.