This week's article written by Marcia E. Heard and Mansa K. Mussa was an indepth description of the various dancers and companies in New York City from the 1920's to the present. The article provided a lot of factual knowledge about the dance companies but not much analysis. Still I felt by reading the article I got a good general overview of what the dance companies were like through the various years.
One thing I noticed was that a few names kept on coming up. Other dance studios and dancers were mentioned and talked about but it seemed the authors always came back to Katherine Dunham and Asadata Dafora. Even though the reason they were probably mentioned so many times was because they were amazing dancers, coreographers and innovators, their repetition also shows how limited Black dancers options were. Because of this observation I would have liked the article to speak more of the social contexts. As we have learned in class, it was extremely difficult to gain notoriety or even training as a Black dancer. I would have liked to learn more about how these people were different, and how they were able to make such progress in such a backwards world.
I really enjoyed reading about how some of the dance schools like the "International African American Ballet" made the dancers dance with instruments and made the dancers learn how to play the drums. I thought back to several instances in our class room where a higher understanding of music and polyrhythms would have helped immensely with our dancing. If the dancers can play the rhythms then surely they can find and dance to several of them at the same time. Unfortunately for me I am terrible at the drums.
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