Screen-Stage Dialogues: Pedagogies for Witnessing and Black Performance

Abstract

During World War II, and despite Jim Crow, the U.S. witnessed an explosion of interest in Black dance and expressive culture. Black American, African, and Afro Caribbean dancers and choreographers engaged in anthropological research in the South of the U.S., the Caribbean, and Africa to explore music and dance of the Black diaspora, putting them in dialogue with Western dance forms—such as Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, and Asadata Dafora, among others. During this period, renowned dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham choreographed and toured L’Ag’Ya, a dance performance based on the expressive culture of Martinique. The only moving archival record that remains is a short clip titled Ballet Creole produced by British Pathé in 1952. Almost a decade earlier, in 1943, Trinidadian-born and New-York-raised choreographer, dancer, activist, and scholar Pearl Primus created one of her most commemorated and commended ‹protest› dances, the solo Strange Fruit—a response to the continuous violence against Black people in the U.S. In the same year, two musicals with an all-Black cast were released: director Vicente Minelli’s musical debut Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather, loosely based on the life of dancer ‹Bill Bojangles› Robinson. Both musicals were choreographed by Dunham. This video essay is an exercise in transformative and performative videographic/audiovisual methodology.1 As transformative criticism, it articulates rhythm, repetition, and connections across the films. As performative criticism, it creates new choreographies out of continuities and discontinuities in image and sound. In the context of these particular films, the video essay becomes a methodological tool that seeks to explore the political possibilities of reading these films and choreographies together.