Notwithstanding the efforts to welcome theatrical dancing by African Americans, epitomized by Alvin Ailey’s dance company and Arthur Mitchell’s Dance Theater of Harlem, that support is ignorant, because African Americans have developed other kinds of high dance performance.
Consider first the marching bands at Historic Black Colleges that for the last 100 years have regularly performed in the half-time intermissions at football games. While they play thumping music, a large number of spiffily dressed student musicians, often as many as 100, move in and out of complex formations with a grace and precision that make Busby Berkeley’s productions seem modest. (Disregard the HBC’s dancing girls sometimes accompanying them; their erotic choreography is embarrassingly familiar.)
If you can’t get to a live football game between Florida A&M and Jackson State, say, consider this extended feature:
They take a common American form of a marching band to a spectacularly higher level.
More recently, on YouTube I discovered footage of the Harlem Globetrotters then and now. Using only a basketball as a resistant prop, they dribble it low on the floor, they run a ball up their arms and behind their necks. They fake passing the ball in one direction while flipping it in another. They move the ball behind their backs and between their legs, and they jump high enough into the air to propel the ball downward through the hoop in a move called a dunk.
On this YouTube footage are Globetrotter routines from 1957:
Which I judge elegant and intricate, as well as awesome and witty, in the best tradition of abstract modern dance. Elizabeth Streb can hardly do as well.
This more recent clip shows that nearly seventy years later some of the Globetrotter routines have survived beside new ones added:
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