Author: Thomas DeFrantz
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195301717
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 324
Book Description
He also addresses concerns about how dance performance is documented, including issues around spectatorship and the display of sexuality, the relationship of Ailey's dances to civil rights activism, and the establishment and maintenance of a successful, large-scale Black Arts institution."--Jacket.
Dancing Revelations
Author: Thomas DeFrantz
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195301717
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 324
Book Description
He also addresses concerns about how dance performance is documented, including issues around spectatorship and the display of sexuality, the relationship of Ailey's dances to civil rights activism, and the establishment and maintenance of a successful, large-scale Black Arts institution."--Jacket.
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195301717
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 324
Book Description
He also addresses concerns about how dance performance is documented, including issues around spectatorship and the display of sexuality, the relationship of Ailey's dances to civil rights activism, and the establishment and maintenance of a successful, large-scale Black Arts institution."--Jacket.
Dancing Revelations : Alvin Ailey's Embodiment of African American Culture
Author: Thomas F. DeFrantz Associate Professor of Theater Arts MIT
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195348354
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Book Description
In the early 1960s, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater was a small, multi-racial company of dancers that performed the works of its founding choreographer and other emerging artists. By the late 1960s, the company had become a well-known African American artistic group closely tied to the Civil Rights struggle. In Dancing Revelations, Thomas DeFrantz chronicles the troupe's journey from a small modern dance company to one of the premier institutions of African American culture. He not only charts this rise to national and international renown, but also contextualizes this progress within the civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights struggles of the late 20th century. DeFrantz examines the most celebrated Ailey dances, including Revelations, drawing on video recordings of Ailey's dances, published interviews, oral histories, and his own interviews with former Ailey company dancers. Through vivid descriptions and beautiful illustrations, DeFrantz reveals the relationship between Ailey's works and African American culture as a whole. He illuminates the dual achievement of Ailey as an artist and as an arts activist committed to developing an African American presence in dance. He also addresses concerns about how dance performance is documented, including issues around spectatorship and the display of sexuality, the relationship of Ailey's dances to civil rights activism, and the establishment and maintenance of a successful, large-scale Black Arts institution. Throughout Dancing Revelations, DeFrantz illustrates how Ailey combined elements of African dance with motifs adapted from blues, jazz, and Broadway to choreograph his dances. By re-interpreting these tropes of black culture in his original and well-received dances, DeFrantz argues that Ailey played a significant role in defining the African American cultural canon in the twentieth century. As the first book to examine the cultural sources and cultural impact of Ailey's work, Dancing Revelations is an important contribution to modern dance history and criticism as well as African-American studies.
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195348354
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Book Description
In the early 1960s, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater was a small, multi-racial company of dancers that performed the works of its founding choreographer and other emerging artists. By the late 1960s, the company had become a well-known African American artistic group closely tied to the Civil Rights struggle. In Dancing Revelations, Thomas DeFrantz chronicles the troupe's journey from a small modern dance company to one of the premier institutions of African American culture. He not only charts this rise to national and international renown, but also contextualizes this progress within the civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights struggles of the late 20th century. DeFrantz examines the most celebrated Ailey dances, including Revelations, drawing on video recordings of Ailey's dances, published interviews, oral histories, and his own interviews with former Ailey company dancers. Through vivid descriptions and beautiful illustrations, DeFrantz reveals the relationship between Ailey's works and African American culture as a whole. He illuminates the dual achievement of Ailey as an artist and as an arts activist committed to developing an African American presence in dance. He also addresses concerns about how dance performance is documented, including issues around spectatorship and the display of sexuality, the relationship of Ailey's dances to civil rights activism, and the establishment and maintenance of a successful, large-scale Black Arts institution. Throughout Dancing Revelations, DeFrantz illustrates how Ailey combined elements of African dance with motifs adapted from blues, jazz, and Broadway to choreograph his dances. By re-interpreting these tropes of black culture in his original and well-received dances, DeFrantz argues that Ailey played a significant role in defining the African American cultural canon in the twentieth century. As the first book to examine the cultural sources and cultural impact of Ailey's work, Dancing Revelations is an important contribution to modern dance history and criticism as well as African-American studies.
Modern Dance, Negro Dance
Author: Susan Manning
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816637362
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 332
Book Description
Two traditionally divided strains of American dance, Modern Dance and Negro Dance, are linked through photographs, reviews, film, and oral history, resulting in a unique view of the history of American dance.
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816637362
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 332
Book Description
Two traditionally divided strains of American dance, Modern Dance and Negro Dance, are linked through photographs, reviews, film, and oral history, resulting in a unique view of the history of American dance.
Dancing Many Drums
Author: Thomas F. Defrantz
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299173135
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 382
Book Description
Few will dispute the profound influence that African American music and movement has had in American and world culture. Dancing Many Drums explores that influence through a groundbreaking collection of essays on African American dance history, theory, and practice. In so doing, it reevaluates "black" and "African American " as both racial and dance categories. Abundantly illustrated, the volume includes images of a wide variety of dance forms and performers, from ring shouts, vaudeville, and social dances to professional dance companies and Hollywood movie dancing. Bringing together issues of race, gender, politics, history, and dance, Dancing Many Drums ranges widely, including discussions of dance instruction songs, the blues aesthetic, and Katherine Dunham’s controversial ballet about lynching, Southland. In addition, there are two photo essays: the first on African dance in New York by noted dance photographer Mansa Mussa, and another on the 1934 "African opera," Kykunkor, or the Witch Woman.
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299173135
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 382
Book Description
Few will dispute the profound influence that African American music and movement has had in American and world culture. Dancing Many Drums explores that influence through a groundbreaking collection of essays on African American dance history, theory, and practice. In so doing, it reevaluates "black" and "African American " as both racial and dance categories. Abundantly illustrated, the volume includes images of a wide variety of dance forms and performers, from ring shouts, vaudeville, and social dances to professional dance companies and Hollywood movie dancing. Bringing together issues of race, gender, politics, history, and dance, Dancing Many Drums ranges widely, including discussions of dance instruction songs, the blues aesthetic, and Katherine Dunham’s controversial ballet about lynching, Southland. In addition, there are two photo essays: the first on African dance in New York by noted dance photographer Mansa Mussa, and another on the 1934 "African opera," Kykunkor, or the Witch Woman.
African-American Concert Dance
Author: John O. Perpener
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252026751
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 354
Book Description
Provides biographical and historical information on a group of African-American artists who worked during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s to legitimize dance of the African diaspora as a serious art form.
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252026751
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 354
Book Description
Provides biographical and historical information on a group of African-American artists who worked during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s to legitimize dance of the African diaspora as a serious art form.
Dancing in Blackness
Author: Halifu Osumare
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813065070
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 390
Book Description
American Society for Aesthetics Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award Dancing in Blackness is a professional dancer's personal journey over four decades, across three continents and 23 countries, and through defining moments in the story of black dance in America. In this memoir, Halifu Osumare reflects on what blackness and dance have meant to her life and international career. Osumare's story begins in 1960s San Francisco amid the Black Arts Movement, black militancy, and hippie counterculture. It was there, she says, that she chose dance as her own revolutionary statement. Osumare describes her experiences as a young black dancer in Europe teaching "jazz ballet" and establishing her own dance company in Copenhagen. Moving to New York City, she danced with the Rod Rodgers Dance Company and took part in integrating the programs at the Lincoln Center. After doing dance fieldwork in Ghana, Osumare returned to California and helped develop Oakland’s black dance scene. Osumare introduces readers to some of the major artistic movers and shakers she collaborated with throughout her career, including Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Jean-Leon Destine, Alvin Ailey, and Donald McKayle. Now a black studies scholar, Osumare uses her extraordinary experiences to reveal the overlooked ways that dance has been a vital tool in the black struggle for recognition, justice, and self-empowerment. Her memoir is the inspiring story of an accomplished dance artist who has boldly developed and proclaimed her identity as a black woman.
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813065070
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 390
Book Description
American Society for Aesthetics Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award Dancing in Blackness is a professional dancer's personal journey over four decades, across three continents and 23 countries, and through defining moments in the story of black dance in America. In this memoir, Halifu Osumare reflects on what blackness and dance have meant to her life and international career. Osumare's story begins in 1960s San Francisco amid the Black Arts Movement, black militancy, and hippie counterculture. It was there, she says, that she chose dance as her own revolutionary statement. Osumare describes her experiences as a young black dancer in Europe teaching "jazz ballet" and establishing her own dance company in Copenhagen. Moving to New York City, she danced with the Rod Rodgers Dance Company and took part in integrating the programs at the Lincoln Center. After doing dance fieldwork in Ghana, Osumare returned to California and helped develop Oakland’s black dance scene. Osumare introduces readers to some of the major artistic movers and shakers she collaborated with throughout her career, including Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Jean-Leon Destine, Alvin Ailey, and Donald McKayle. Now a black studies scholar, Osumare uses her extraordinary experiences to reveal the overlooked ways that dance has been a vital tool in the black struggle for recognition, justice, and self-empowerment. Her memoir is the inspiring story of an accomplished dance artist who has boldly developed and proclaimed her identity as a black woman.
Revelations
Author: Alvin Ailey
Publisher: Carol Publishing Corporation
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 216
Book Description
World-class choreographer Alvin Ailey was a pioneer in the world of dance. Now, the intensely private man opens up to tell his own story in his own words. It is a revelation that will astound even those who think they knew Alvin Ailey--the man who forever changed the face and the rhythm of the world of dance. photographs.
Publisher: Carol Publishing Corporation
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 216
Book Description
World-class choreographer Alvin Ailey was a pioneer in the world of dance. Now, the intensely private man opens up to tell his own story in his own words. It is a revelation that will astound even those who think they knew Alvin Ailey--the man who forever changed the face and the rhythm of the world of dance. photographs.
Black Performance Theory
Author: Thomas F. DeFrantz
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822377012
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Book Description
Black performance theory is a rich interdisciplinary area of study and critical method. This collection of new essays by some of its pioneering thinkers—many of whom are performers—demonstrates the breadth, depth, innovation, and critical value of black performance theory. Considering how blackness is imagined in and through performance, the contributors address topics including flight as a persistent theme in African American aesthetics, the circulation of minstrel tropes in Liverpool and in Afro-Mexican settlements in Oaxaca, and the reach of hip-hop politics as people around the world embrace the music and dance. They examine the work of contemporary choreographers Ronald K. Brown and Reggie Wilson, the ways that African American playwrights translated the theatricality of lynching to the stage, the ecstatic music of Little Richard, and Michael Jackson's performance in the documentary This Is It. The collection includes several essays that exemplify the performative capacity of writing, as well as discussion of a project that re-creates seminal hip-hop album covers through tableaux vivants. Whether deliberating on the tragic mulatta, the trickster figure Anansi, or the sonic futurism of Nina Simone and Adrienne Kennedy, the essays in this collection signal the vast untapped critical and creative resources of black performance theory. Contributors. Melissa Blanco Borelli, Daphne A. Brooks, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Nadine George-Graves, Anita Gonzalez, Rickerby Hinds, Jason King, D. Soyini Madison, Koritha Mitchell, Tavia Nyong'o, Carl Paris, Anna B. Scott, Wendy S. Walters, Hershini Bhana Young
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822377012
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Book Description
Black performance theory is a rich interdisciplinary area of study and critical method. This collection of new essays by some of its pioneering thinkers—many of whom are performers—demonstrates the breadth, depth, innovation, and critical value of black performance theory. Considering how blackness is imagined in and through performance, the contributors address topics including flight as a persistent theme in African American aesthetics, the circulation of minstrel tropes in Liverpool and in Afro-Mexican settlements in Oaxaca, and the reach of hip-hop politics as people around the world embrace the music and dance. They examine the work of contemporary choreographers Ronald K. Brown and Reggie Wilson, the ways that African American playwrights translated the theatricality of lynching to the stage, the ecstatic music of Little Richard, and Michael Jackson's performance in the documentary This Is It. The collection includes several essays that exemplify the performative capacity of writing, as well as discussion of a project that re-creates seminal hip-hop album covers through tableaux vivants. Whether deliberating on the tragic mulatta, the trickster figure Anansi, or the sonic futurism of Nina Simone and Adrienne Kennedy, the essays in this collection signal the vast untapped critical and creative resources of black performance theory. Contributors. Melissa Blanco Borelli, Daphne A. Brooks, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Nadine George-Graves, Anita Gonzalez, Rickerby Hinds, Jason King, D. Soyini Madison, Koritha Mitchell, Tavia Nyong'o, Carl Paris, Anna B. Scott, Wendy S. Walters, Hershini Bhana Young
Joan Myers Brown and the Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina
Author: Brenda Dixon Gottschild
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137512350
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 341
Book Description
Founder of the Philadelphia Dance Company (PHILADANCO) and the Philadelphia School of Dance Arts, Joan Myers Brown's personal and professional histories reflect the hardships as well as the advances of African-Americans in the artistic and social developments of the second half of the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries.
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137512350
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 341
Book Description
Founder of the Philadelphia Dance Company (PHILADANCO) and the Philadelphia School of Dance Arts, Joan Myers Brown's personal and professional histories reflect the hardships as well as the advances of African-Americans in the artistic and social developments of the second half of the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries.
Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race
Author: Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 080717341X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244
Book Description
Winner of the SAMLA Studies Award Honorable Mention for the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize From the 1880s to the early 1900s, a particularly turbulent period of U.S. race relations, the African American novel provided a powerful counternarrative to dominant and pejorative ideas about blackness. In Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race, Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus uncovers how black and white writers experimented with innovative narrative strategies to revise static and stereotypical views of black identity and experience. In this provocative and challenging book, Daniels-Rauterkus contests the long-standing idea that African Americans did not write literary realism, along with the inverse misconception that white writers did not make important contributions to African American literature. Taking up key works by Charles W. Chesnutt, Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain, Daniels-Rauterkus argues that authors blended realism with romance, often merging mimetic and melodramatic conventions to advocate on behalf of African Americans, challenge popular theories of racial identity, disrupt the expectations of the literary marketplace, and widen the possibilities for black representation in fiction. Combining literary history with close textual analysis, Daniels-Rauterkus reads black and white writers alongside each other to demonstrate the reciprocal nature of literary production. Moving beyond discourses of racial authenticity and cultural property, Daniels-Rauterkus stresses the need to organize African American literature around black writers and their meditations on blackness, but she also proposes leaving space for nonblack writers whose use of comparable narrative strategies can facilitate reconsiderations of the complex social order that constitutes race in America. With Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race, Daniels-Rauterkus expands critical understandings of American literary realism and African American literature by destabilizing the rigid binaries that too often define discussions of race, genre, and periodization.
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 080717341X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244
Book Description
Winner of the SAMLA Studies Award Honorable Mention for the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize From the 1880s to the early 1900s, a particularly turbulent period of U.S. race relations, the African American novel provided a powerful counternarrative to dominant and pejorative ideas about blackness. In Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race, Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus uncovers how black and white writers experimented with innovative narrative strategies to revise static and stereotypical views of black identity and experience. In this provocative and challenging book, Daniels-Rauterkus contests the long-standing idea that African Americans did not write literary realism, along with the inverse misconception that white writers did not make important contributions to African American literature. Taking up key works by Charles W. Chesnutt, Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain, Daniels-Rauterkus argues that authors blended realism with romance, often merging mimetic and melodramatic conventions to advocate on behalf of African Americans, challenge popular theories of racial identity, disrupt the expectations of the literary marketplace, and widen the possibilities for black representation in fiction. Combining literary history with close textual analysis, Daniels-Rauterkus reads black and white writers alongside each other to demonstrate the reciprocal nature of literary production. Moving beyond discourses of racial authenticity and cultural property, Daniels-Rauterkus stresses the need to organize African American literature around black writers and their meditations on blackness, but she also proposes leaving space for nonblack writers whose use of comparable narrative strategies can facilitate reconsiderations of the complex social order that constitutes race in America. With Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race, Daniels-Rauterkus expands critical understandings of American literary realism and African American literature by destabilizing the rigid binaries that too often define discussions of race, genre, and periodization.