So now we're talking about lynching...

Do you find it curious that the two most significant black female choreographers of the early 20th century began as anthropologists? Since it's just possible that you never thought about it at all, let's take a little minute to unpack that, shall we?

Katherine Dunham

I've written before about the magnificent Katherine Dunham, who achieved fame for her work on Broadway, infamy for her opus Southland, and adoration for her gifts of technique and teaching to future generations. But maybe I never mentioned that her early explorations were in the anthropology of dance. As a student at the University of Chicago, Dunham became interested in the African origins of black American culture and eventually received travel fellowships to do research in the Caribbean. In 1936, she submitted her master's thesis, The Dances of Haiti: A Study of Their Material Aspect, Organization, Form, and Function. Shortly afterwards, she left academia to pursue a career as a performer, but her studies throughout the Caribbean became the basis for dances such as Shango which bridged ritual and performance and introduced African diaspora dance to American audiences, both black and white.

Pearl Primus

Pearl Primus, born 10 years after Dunham, began as an informal scholar. She researched African art, dance, and culture with the explicit goal of making dances that expressed African aesthetic, the African-American experience, and the beauty of both. Her work was more consistently political than Dunham's, and within months of her debut concert 1943, she was performing at the Negro Freedom Rally at Madison Square Garden. Her success as a dancer did not dim her desire for scholarship. In 1948, she received a grant for travel and study to Africa, and eventually earned a PhD in anthropology in 1978.

So let's take a pause. I hope you are finding all this interesting, but I'd like to make it significant. In putting this blog together, I came across this extraordinary line... "In a lecture by Robert Redfield, a professor of anthropology, she learned that much of black culture in modern America had begun in Africa." Hold up. So - in the early 1930s, a young black American didn't already know this? I'm not sure whether to call bullshit or whether to just sit in stunned amazement. How could she not have known? Is it possible that black history was that erased?

As a young white American and anthropology major, I remember expressing dismay about the field to my advisor. If I recall correctly, I said that I had become uncertain whether anyone could ever really understand anything about a culture not their own. His reply? That's not the point; anthropology can only really teach you about YOU. At the time, I found this incredibly solipsistic. On the other hand, discovery of self though history and culture was exactly what Dunham and Primus needed. And what they learned about and wrote about and danced about made a huge difference. Black History month is problematic and limited and all that, but we have to keep pushing and growing and knowing. We just do.

Now back to our story. And back to my title. Dunham and Primus lived and worked at a time when merely asserting that black people could be artists of depth and brilliance was a political act. But they also both chose to tackle an issue that pressed on their community, country, and lives. In 1951, Dunham premiered her ballet Southland, a dramatic modern dance about a lynching. At the time, she was an artist of some renown, but because of the subject matter, she was unable to find a venue in the United States to stage her work. Southland premiered in Santiago, Chile, but was not seen in the US until Cleo Parker Robinson Dance recreated it in 2012. A clip is available here.

Primus took on lynching in her very first concert, in 1943. Her solo Strange Fruit was danced to the poem by Abel Meeropol. You can see it here - towards the middle of the clip, danced to voiceover rather than music. Strange Fruit - the dance - has a strange history, as well. If you search YouTube for the title, you will find many versions of the song Billie Holliday made famous, and many dances performed to her rendition and covers of it. It achieved a new notoriety in 2017, not for its explosive politics, but for charges of appropriation and insensitivity, when white choreographer Travis Wall made a new version for So You Think You Can Dance. Plenty of ink has already been spilled on that topic, so I will just direct you to Veronica Jiao's take for Dance Magazine.

I'm not sure that I want to go down that particular rabbit hole, but apparently A LOT of people really liked Wall's work. Though this might just be a matter of taste, I'd like to point folks back to Pearl Primus and Katherine Dunham who danced this when talking about lynching was career killing and not an opportunity to leverage your wokeness into an Emmy. Because, lynching may be a story from the past, but Faulkner's got some thoughts on that.

This week an editor in Alabama wrote an op-ed calling for a return of lynching, suggesting that the "very nice" KKK head to Washington with their nooses and get to work. The Senate JUST passed an anti-lynching bill last week, just about 100 years after it was first introduced. Plus, I ran across this little tidbit, which suggest that Strange Fruit recently got the "Blue Lives Matter" treatment when danced by a young black American.

So, I'm giving a shout out to Kendi Whitaker today - a young woman walking in the paths blazed by Dunham and Primus. May she speak loud and dance louder!