Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-18T09:16:34.517Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Myself, Dancing: Choreographies of Black Womanhood in US Dance and History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2021

Ariel Nereson
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay analyzes Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company's 2009 work Fondly Do We Hope…Fervently Do We Pray and its centering of Black women in US American history and contemporary choreographic practices. While the work's revisionist representation of national history could be understood as activist in terms of its desire to activate the spectator, this essay centers what performance might do for Black women performers and their personal practices of artistry and activism over what impulses toward social justice Black women's performances might galvanize in their audiences. Attributing FDWH's transformative potential to its aesthetic combination of postmodernism and sentimentalism and its erotic historiography, I theorize the work as a choreohistory, a mode of cultural production wherein the ordering of movement and the ordering of the past interanimate one another.

Keywords

choreographyracepostmodernismsentimentalismBill T. JonesAbraham Lincolnblack womenUS history
Type
Article
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 53 , Special Issue 2: Arms Akimbo: Black Women Choreographing Social Change , August 2021 , pp. 49 - 66
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Dance Studies Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Adams, Katherine. 2001. “Freedom and Ballgowns: Elizabeth Keckley and the Work of Domesticity.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 57 (4): 45–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Albright, Ann Cooper. 1997. Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
American Masters. 2011. “Bill T. Jones: A Good Man.” Directed by Bob Hercules and Gordon Quinn. Premiered November 10, 2011, on PBS. Accessed September 9, 2012. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/bill-t-jones-a-good-man-about-the-documentary-film/1863/.Google Scholar
Baker, Jean. 2009. “Mary and Abraham: A Marriage.” In The Best American History Essays on Lincoln, edited by Wilentz, Sean, 107–128. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berlant, Lauren. 1998. “Poor Eliza.” American Literature 70 (3): 635–668.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bernstein, Robin. 2011. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Carby, Hazel V. 1988. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Chaleff, Rebecca. 2018. “Activating Whiteness: Racializing the Ordinary in US American Postmodern Dance.” Dance Research Journal 50 (3): 71–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Christian, Barbara. (1987) 2007. “The Race for Theory.” In New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985–2000, edited by Bowles, Gloria, Giulia Fabi, M., and Keizer, Arlene R., 40–50. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Cohen, Margaret. 2002. “Sentimental Communities.” In The Literary Channel: The International Invention of the Novel, edited by Cohen, Margaret and Denver, Carolyn, 106–132. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Colbert, Soyica Diggs. 2017. Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cottom, Tressie McMillan. 2019. Thick and Other Essays. New York: The New Press.Google Scholar
Das, Joanna Dee. 2017. Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeFrantz, Thomas F. 2004. Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey's Embodiment of African American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock. 2018. “Ante-Oedipus: Race, Sex, Gender Systems of Colonial Modernity.” Paper presented at the Futures of American Studies Institute, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. June 18.Google Scholar
Dils, Ann. 2015. “Moving American History: An Examination of Works by Ken Burns and Bill T. Jones.” In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater, edited by George-Graves, Nadine, 380–397. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Douglass, Frederick. (1876) 1999. “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln.” In Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, edited by Foner, Philip S., 616–624. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books.Google Scholar
Edmondson, Belinda. 2007. “The Black Romance.” WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly 35 (1/2): 191–211.Google Scholar
Foster, Susan Leigh, ed. 1995. Choreographing History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Foster, Susan Leigh, ed. 2010. “Textual Evidances.” In Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography, edited by Canning, Charlotte M. and Postlewait, Thomas, 333–350. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Furtwangler, Albert. 1991. Assassin on Stage: Brutus, Hamlet, and the Death of Lincoln. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
George-Graves, Nadine. 2010. Urban Bush Women: Twenty Years of African American Dance Theater, Community Engagement, and Working It Out. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Gordon-Reed, Annette. 1998. Thomas Jefferson & Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.Google Scholar
Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. 1997. “Some Thoughts on Choreographing History.” In Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, edited by Desmond, Jane, 167–177. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. 2003. The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, Duchess, and Baum, Bruce. 2009. “Jefferson's Legacies: Racial Intimacies and American Identity.” In Racially Writing the Republic: Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity, edited by Baum, Bruce and Harris, Duchess, 44–63. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Hartman, Saidiya. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hogan, Patrick Colm. 2011. Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jenkins, Shayla-Vie. 2019. Interviewed by the author via telephone. January 10.Google Scholar
Jones, Bill T. 2015. Interviewed by the author via telephone, November 6.Google Scholar
Jones, Bill T., Wong, Janet, and Company. 2009. Fondly Do We Hope … Fervently Do We Pray. Text by Bill T. Jones and Janet Wong; music composed and arranged by Jerome Begin, Christopher Antonio William Lancaster, and George Lewis Jr.; decor by Bjorn Amelan; lighting design by Robert Wierzel; video by Janet Wong; costumes by Liz Prince; sound design by Lindsay Jones; guest artists Jamyl Dobson and Clarissa Sinceno. Ravinia Festival, Highland Park, IL, September 17.Google Scholar
Kendi, Ibram X. 2016. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. New York: Nation Books.Google Scholar
Kondo, Dorinne. 2018. Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Kraut, Anthea. 2016. Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Levine, Caroline. 2015. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Lorde, Audre. 2007. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 53–59. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press.Google Scholar
Manning, Susan. 2004. Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Martin, Randy. 1998. Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Matteson, Paul. 2017. Interviewed by the author at the author's office, Amherst, NY. January 18.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Koritha. 2020. From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Moyers, Bill. 2009. “Bill T. Jones Re-imagines Lincoln through Dance.” Bill Moyers Journal, WNET, December 16. New York: WNET. Accessed November 20, 2012. https://billmoyers.com/content/bill-t-jones-re-imagines-lincoln-through-dance/.Google Scholar
Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Murphy, Jacqueline Shea. 1995. “Unrest and Uncle Tom: Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company's Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land.” In Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance, edited by Goellner, Ellen W. and Murphy, Jacqueline Shea, 81–106. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Nereson, Ariel. 2015. “Counterfactual Moving in Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company's Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land.” Theatre Survey 56 (2): 166–186.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parks, Suzan-Lori. 1995. The America Play and Other Works. New York: Theatre Communications Group.Google Scholar
Perry, Imani. 2018. Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roach, Joseph. 1996. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Spencer, Suzette. 2006. “Historical Memory, Romantic Narrative, and Sally Hemings.” African American Review 40 (3): 507–531.Google Scholar
Spillers, Hortense. 1987. “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17 (2): 64–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spillers, Hortense. 2018. “To the Bone: Some Speculations on the Question of Touch.” Paper presented at the Futures of American Studies Institute, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. June 20.Google Scholar
Spillers, Hortense, with duCille, Ann. 2018. “Expostulations and Replies.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 29 (2): 6–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tillet, Salamishah. 2012. Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2015. Silencing the Past: Power and Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar