{"id":33439,"date":"2024-01-12T12:44:49","date_gmt":"2024-01-12T11:44:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/?p=33439"},"modified":"2024-01-12T12:48:00","modified_gmt":"2024-01-12T11:48:00","slug":"united-states-the-black-choreographers-dancing-toward-justice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/?p=33439","title":{"rendered":"United States: The Black Choreographers Dancing Toward Justice"},"content":{"rendered":"
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EDUCATION FOR PEACE . <\/p>\n

An article by Hannah J. Davies\u00a0from Hyperallergic <\/a> (produced in collaboration with the\u00a0Arts & Culture MA concentration\u00a0at Columbia University\u2019s Graduate School of Journalism)<\/p>\n

Since it began over a decade ago, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has celebrated the literal movements of its participants. People protesting killings of Black people have not only marched in the streets; they have krumped, twerked, vogued, and resurrected the electric slide of the \u201970s and \u201980s in often impromptu responses to the emotions underpinning their demonstrations. Black choreographers, in turn, have woven the grief, anger, and sadness of the BLM movement into formal concert dance. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nChoreographer Chanel DaSilva’s\u00a0Tabernacle\u00a0(2023) (photo by Amitava Sarkar, courtesy the Dallas Black Dance Theatre)<\/center><\/p>\n

Choreographer Kyle Abraham presented \u201cAbsent Matter\u201d in 2015, just two years after the acquittal of Trayvon Martin\u2019s killer, George Zimmerman, ignited BLM and one year after the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. A work of fluid and athletic gestures, Abraham\u2019s performance\u00a0took its cues from hip-hop, ballet, and politically minded anthems like Kendrick Lamar\u2019s \u201cAlright.\u201d In 2016, David Rouss\u00e8ve\u2019s \u201cEnough?\u201d \u2014 with an accelerating choreographic phrase danced to a soundtrack of Aretha Franklin \u2014 asked whether dance can be a sufficient medium for considering the brutality often inflicted on Black people.<\/p>\n

Now (January 2024), eight years later, that question is being answered in the affirmative on major dance stages around the United States. Choreographer Jamar Roberts\u2019s \u201cOde,\u201d a somber and sensuous dance first performed in 2019 as a response to gun violence, was\u00a0restaged\u00a0for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater\u2019s 65th anniversary in December. Last May, Chanel DaSilva\u2019s \u201cTabernacle\u201d premiered at the Dallas Black Dance Theatre, fusing Afrofuturism, hip hop, and African dance in a direct response to BLM. And last fall, as part of the French Institute Alliance Fran\u00e7aise\u2019s (FIAF) Crossing the Line festival, the French-Malian choreographer Sma\u00efl Kanout\u00e9\u2019s \u201cNever Twenty One\u201d made its New York debut, its title borrowed from a BLM slogan. A trio of dancers whose bare arms and torsos were emblazoned with words like \u201cdeath,\u201d \u201cnegro,\u201d and \u201cPTSD\u201d engage in movements akin to mortal combat onstage, punctuated by moments of kinship, in homage to people of color killed through gun violence in the US, South Africa, and Brazil before they had reached their 21st birthdays. After the performance at FIAF, one audience member noted that she had cried 63 times while watching.<\/p>\n

While there is a clear difference between dance erupting on sidewalks and performances choreographed for the stage, there is overlap between the two forms. In addition to a sense of urgency,\u00a0they share some of the same movements and gestures. In \u201cNever Twenty One,\u201d for example, the spasmodic krumping motions that originated in South Central Los Angeles in the \u201990s\u00a0were seen in protests in 2020\u00a0following the killing of George Floyd. One audience member animatedly joined in from her chair during the show at FIAF in perhaps an unusual move, but in another setting, it would be almost rude not to.<\/p>\n

Dr. Shamell Bell, a dancer, Harvard lecturer, and one of the founding members of the Black Lives Matter movement in Los Angeles, explained to\u00a0Hyperallergic\u00a0the importance of rooting such pieces in lived experience and \u201c[reaching] out to the people that you\u2019re supposedly wanting to bring attention to.\u201d Having begun her career dancing on the streets as a youth activist, Dr. Bell now works on performance pieces that, like \u201cNever Twenty One,\u201d play with the conventions and traditions of vernacular Black dance genres to shine a light on difficult topics. <\/p>\n

(continued in right column)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Question for this article:<\/strong><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\n

\n

Do the arts create a basis for a culture of peace?, What is, or should be, their role in our movement?<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

(continued from left column)<\/p>\n

Dr. Bell served as a co-social impact director for\u00a0Ritual of Breath Is The Rite to Resist\u00a0(2022), a transmedia opera at Dartmouth and Stanford that brought together dance, music, visual art, and text. Composed by Jonathan Berger and choreographed by Neema Bickersteth and Trebien Pollard, the piece was loosely based on the last moments in the life of Eric Garner, the 43-year-old African-American man who was killed by a New York City Police Department officer in 2014. His final words \u2014 \u201cI can\u2019t breathe\u201d \u2014 became a\u00a0major slogan\u00a0for the BLM movement.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe asked the community what they needed to heal,\u201d Dr. Bell said. \u201cOne of the most important aspects of doing performance as activism is making sure it has tangible resources for and connections with the community it matters the most to.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr. Bell reached out to Garner\u2019s mother, Gwen Carr, and others who had lost children to police brutality, not only entering into a dialogue with them but also creating rituals aimed at supporting them emotionally. In a similar vein, Kanout\u00e9 incorporated the testimonies of bereaved families into his piece at FIAF, including haunting monologues in multiple languages that comprise the show\u2019s soundtrack. Both works go beyond archiving the experiences of their subjects to also provide a space for grieving. \u201cDance is a healing modality,\u201d Dr. Bell added. \u201cAnd we need to heal ourselves in order to heal this world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, BLM and other movements for racial justice are just the latest chapters in a long history of Black cultural activism in the United States. Artist and academic Stafford C. Berry Jr., a scholar of what he describes as \u201cAfrican-rooted\u201d dance at Indiana University, told\u00a0Hyperallergic\u00a0that these choreographic works extend and are part of \u201cthe trajectory and existence of Black lives from enslavement up until now,\u201d adding that the BLM movement \u201cis really a contemporary recapitulation of our earlier movements.\u201d Mentored by the influential choreographers Chuck Davis and Kariamu Welsh, Berry noted that he has long drawn inspiration from the\u00a0Black Arts Movement\u00a0of the 1960s and \u201970s, which emerged in tandem with Black Power. Even so, Berry sees the BLM movement\u2019s resurgence in recent years as a step forward in understanding Blackness in America. Berry noted that the works that BLM has inspired have been \u201cbold and unapologetic, by people who are centering themselves and trying to figure out what BLM means for the United States, and the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

This certainly seems true of Kanout\u00e9, who is based in Paris and was inspired by what he described to\u00a0Hyperallergic\u00a0as the \u201cpowerful echo\u201d of events in the US to look at the loss of Black lives across the world. \u201cWe had a young man called Nahel [Merzouk] who was shot by the police,\u201d he said, catching his breath backstage after the FIAF performance as he recalled the case of the 17-year-old boy of North African descent who was killed by French police last June, sparking\u00a0protests\u00a0across France. \u201cThe racism and separation I grew up with was under the surface, but now it\u2019s come out.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the same way that popular dance can offer a sense of hope and resistance at protests, there is a cathartic quality to Kanout\u00e9\u2019s work. Despite the frequent choreographed clashes among the three men on stage, \u201cNever 21\u201d was infused with a sense of truly owning and embracing Blackness and Black joy in its many forms. Kanout\u00e9 explained that he draws particular inspiration from Black communities living in cities like Johannesburg and Rio de Janeiro, whose joy often exists side by side with danger and precarity.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey have to create their own identity, their own music, their own dance, because they don\u2019t know if tomorrow they will still be there,\u201d Kanout\u00e9 said. \u201cIn that kind of atmosphere, you create powerful things.\u201d<\/p>\n

– – – – – –<\/p>\n

If you wish to make a comment on this article, you may write to coordinator@cpnn-world.org with the title “Comment on (name of article)” and we will put your comment on line. Because of the flood of spam, we have discontinued the direct application of comments.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

EDUCATION FOR PEACE . An article by Hannah J. Davies\u00a0from Hyperallergic (produced in collaboration with the\u00a0Arts & Culture MA concentration\u00a0at Columbia University\u2019s Graduate School of Journalism) Since it began over a decade ago, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has celebrated the literal movements of its participants. People protesting killings of Black people have not … Continue reading United States: The Black Choreographers Dancing Toward Justice<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,91],"tags":[5],"class_list":["post-33439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-for-peace","category-north-america","tag-north-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33439\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}