Tag Archives: African diaspora

Katherine Dunham’s African diasporic dance aesthetics

African American dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist Katherine Dunham used ballet and African diasporic movement traditions to develop a dance methodology that subverted the white patriarchal gaze and forever changed the aesthetics of the Broadway stage. Early in her career as a dancer, Dunham cultivated techniques rooted in ballet but influenced by African dance aesthetics. Throughout her career, she attained a prominent status in the dance world, inspiring Black dance students to pursue their studies with courage and purpose. Her work also elevated Black dance forms out of the burlesque and made them more dignified.

Dunham’s technique combined Eurocentric ballet traditions with elements of the African diaspora, utilizing bodily aesthetics and movement to subversively engage the voyeuristic gaze–an approach that allowed her to manipulate socially inscribed and discursively produced identities. Through her work, including the dance piece L’ag’ya (1938) and the 1940s Broadway musicals Pins and needles and Cabin in the sky, Dunham maneuvered through dominant cultural narratives and cultivated a solid foundation for African American dancers, choreographers, and Black musical theater.

Theorizing Dunham’s work through the lenses of the voyeuristic gaze, race and culture, the sexuality of the Black body, and Black musical theater elucidates how she transgressively used dominant ideologies and spaces of racial and patriarchal oppression. By doing so, Dunham created opportunities to make African diasporic aesthetics of dance and the body legible to white audiences.

This according to “Développé: Katherine Dunham’s diasporic dance” by Amanda Jane Olmstead (Studies in musical theatre 11/3 [2017] 303–310; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2017-37090).

Below, Dunham performs accompanied by a West Indian creole music ensemble in a 1952 ballet at the Cambridge Theatre in London.

Read a related Bibliolore post:

https://bibliolore.org/2012/07/02/katharine-dunham-and-lagya/

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Filed under Africa, Black studies, Dance, North America

A Christmas ritual of Colombia’s Afro-Andean community

Every year from Christmas to Epiphany, the communities descended from the African slaves who mined gold for the Spaniards celebrate the Adoraciones al Niño-Diós in the Andean valleys of Cauca in southwestern Colombia.

The celebrants sing and dance until dawn in front of a creche set up in one of the village houses. A group of six musicians, unusual because it includes violins, accompanies the women who are the singers and the leaders of the ritual.

The tradition is documented on the CD Colombie: Adoration à l’enfant-Dieu (Département du Cauca) (VDE-Gallo 1349 [2011]).

Revisiting this classic Bibliolore post which originally appeared in December 2017. Happy Holidays from RILM!

Below is a brief documentary on Auroras al Amanecer, the group featured in the recordings.

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Filed under Religious music, South America

Black music reference series

African Diaspora Press, a scholarly imprint specializing in bibliographies about expressive culture of Africa and the African diaspora, launched its Black music reference series in June 2010 with From vodou to zouk: A bibliographic guide to music of the French-speaking Caribbean and its diaspora by John Gray, the director of the Black Arts Research Center in Nyack, New York. The book’s nearly 1300 entries cover all of the French-speaking islands—in particular Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana—as well as their overseas enclaves in France, the U.S., and Canada. Biographical and critical information on over 350 of the region’s leading musicians and producers is also provided.

Above, Perle Lama demonstrates the basic zouk steps.

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Filed under Ethnomusicology, New series, Popular music, Resources, West Indies, World music