The memoir genre has long been important to dance studies. With fewer material remains than other art forms, dance often draws upon the memories of its practitioners to reconstruct dance worlds. Halifu Osumare's Dancing in Blackness: A Memoir, however, does more than make a contribution to this subgenre; it expands and redefines what a memoir can be. As not only a dancer, but also a scholar, Osumare connects her personal story to broader sociohistorical contexts. She examines how her experiences performing, teaching, choreographing, and administrating from the 1960s to the 1990s intersected with the development of black dance both in the United States and around the globe. Trained in postmodern anthropological methods, Osumare brings a self-reflexivity to the analysis of her own life that refreshingly distinguishes her book from the self-hagiographic tendencies of other memoirs.
Dancing in Blackness makes an important contribution to several discourses. First, it expands scholarly understanding of the development of dance on the West Coast. Despite the fact that many of twentieth century concert dance's most canonical figures either got their start or established their schools in California, dance scholarship remains stubbornly New York-centric. Osumare provides valuable insight into the dynamic and flourishing dance scene in San Francisco from the 1960s through the 1980s. She also expands our understanding of dance during the Black Arts Movement. Most scholars of the Black Arts Movement tend to ignore dance, although dance studies scholars such as Takiyah Nur Amin are working to change that. Osumare articulates the importance of dance to the political and cultural ideals of Black Power and how the Bay Area was central to that development. After all, the Black Panther Party was inaugurated in Oakland. Finally, Osumare contributes to a growing scholarly discourse of African diasporic dance, a global perspective on black dance that examines the successes and tensions of facilitating cultural unity across national borders.
The introduction to Dancing in Blackness addresses the title of the book—what blackness means in the context of dance. Osumare expertly summarizes the extant debates over the definition of “black dance” and how she will be utilizing the term in her book, namely, “to mean the individual and collective dances of any genre performed by black peoples anywhere in the world” (10). She calls her own sense of blackness a “fluid constant” (16), a term that acknowledges both her sense of self-determination in shaping her social identity and the fact that race is inevitably a part of how others view her. Chapter 1, “Coming of Age through (Black) Dance in the San Francisco Bay Area,” covers Osumare's earliest influences, including teacher Dolores Kirton (Nontsizi) Cayou at San Francisco State College, Zack Thompson, and Ruth Beckford. At this point in her life, Osumare went by her birth name, Janis Miller. Her dance experiences intimately intertwined with the “revolutionary culture” of the Bay Area in the late 1960s. From the beginning, therefore, Osumare approached dance as being “in service of social change” (27). In August 1968, Osumare left the Bay Area and spent an important month in New York, taking classes with Jean-Leon Destiné of Haiti and Nigerian drummer/teacher Babatunde Olantunji; the latter awakened Osumare to the “spiritual dimensions of dance” (36).
Chapter 2, “Dancing in Europe,” is an important challenge to the presumed male protagonist of the finding-oneself-abroad narrative, in black intellectual history often delineated as a lineage of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Osumare instead invokes Josephine Baker, exposing the important ways in which her intersecting identities as black, woman, and dancer shaped her experiences. Osumare is exoticized but also freer in Europe than in the United States. She finds agency (albeit limited) in her nightclub dancing gigs, resisting the notion that such experiences reduce her solely to commodified, eroticized black object. In Copenhagen, Osumare partners with Jewish New York dancer Diane Black to form a dance company, Magic Lotus Dance Theatre. The two women found common ground in an experimental, improvisatory approach to performance.
Chapter 3, “Dancing in New York,” provides wonderful new insight into the dance scene of the early 1970s, a tale often told through the lens of white postmodern choreographers like Trisha Brown or Lucinda Childs, or the “big names” in black dance like Alvin Ailey or Arthur Mitchell. First, Osumare recounts time spent in Boston, in which the personal, artistic, and political threads of her life fully intertwine. That city is the start of Osumare's choreographic career. One of the most striking moments in this chapter is when she responds to dance critic Kay Bourne's assessment of her first major choreographic work, Changes, Or How Do You Get to Heaven When You're Already in Hell? Instead of becoming defensive when Bourne reveals some of the limitations of the choreography, Osumare uses Bourne's critique to engage in thoughtful reflexivity and grow as an artist. Osumare next ventures to New York, where her year spent dancing with the Rod Rodgers Company is especially rich. Rodgers is not very well-known in the concert dance canon today, and yet his work, as described by Osumare, is wonderfully illustrative of the fluidity between notions “high” and “low” culture and a great example of dance as a form of social change. After reading, I immediately wanted to know more about him.
Chapter 4 has Osumare returning to the Bay Area to restart her dance career in her hometown. One of the most interesting parts of this chapter is the artistic and personal friendship Osumare develops with Ntozake Shange, who actually gives the young Janis Miller the name “Halifu Osumare.” The vibrant descriptions of their collaborative performance art reminds readers that black aesthetics, in particular, defy disciplinary boundaries, combining movement, poetry, theater, and music.
Chapter 5, “Dancing in Africa,” chronicles Osumare's year in Ghana. Though she states that “the feelings of a black American arriving in Africa for the first time cannot truly be explained in words” (175), her words convey beautifully the sense of coming home, including the complications that type of journey necessarily entails. Dancing connects Osumare to the Ghanaians she befriends and to her own blackness, despite occasionally facing jealousy and suspicion from locals who call her obruni, or “white woman” (214). Osumare speaks honestly about the means of access available to her as a young American woman traveling on her own abroad in the 1970s. In order to integrate into a small village to learn about Ewe culture more deeply, she accepts that she will engage in a romantic relationship with the man who can provide her that access, though she remains committed to her fiancé back in San Francisco. These are honest truths about the messy entanglements of ethnography that are often not broached in other scholarly texts. Also valuable is Osumare's attention to regional differences in performance practices within Ghana, details that often get overlooked in the efforts to create national dance companies and the broad genre of “West African Dance.”
The final chapter, “Dancing in Oakland and Beyond, 1977–1993,” is a hefty 104 pages, but it holds together well. There is growing interest in dance studies scholarship about the role of institutional structures in shaping dance, and Osumare provides a valuable account of the Every Body Dance Studio, which she takes over and transforms into the Everybody's Cultural Arts Center (ECAC) in 1977. ECAC then evolves into CitiCentre Dance Theatre and eventually becomes part of the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts. As a multidisciplinary, multiracial, community-oriented yet professional institution, ECAC highlighted what was unique about the Bay Area dance scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Osumare muses on the parallel between ECAC and the Clark Center for the Performing Arts in New York, the latter of which is more well-known today. After reading this account, I think ECAC should be considered in any study of twentieth-century US dance education or institutional structures. Osumare also spends 1977–1993 participating in major dance initiatives such as Dance Black America and American Dance Festival's Black Tradition in American Modern Dance, as well as founding her own initiative, Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century.
One of the biggest strengths of Dancing in Blackness, perhaps counter-intuitively, is that it is a memoir of someone who is not one of the big names in dance. As Osumare herself admits, her performing and choreographic career “never really made national waves” (326). What that opens up is a window into the living world of dance—how it happens on the ground in smaller pickup companies, dance studios, festivals, and administrative structures. The sense of the broadness of the dance world is fleshed out, as is its itinerant nature. Most dancers, like Osumare, are constantly on the move, constantly seeking new opportunities, often in new geographic locations. The breadth of black dance comes alive through Osumare's narration.
Furthermore, Osumare is the consummate model of the artist-scholar, and her life story offers an important lesson in what that designation means. Increasingly, people in the field are asked to be “artist-scholars” with the assumption that the person will play dual roles simultaneously and fully. Instead, Osumare transitioned through various phases, approaching her performing career with an intellect's curiosity and her academic career with a dancer's sensibility. Katherine Dunham, one of Osumare's major influences, was also a scholar-artist who recognized that this life must come in phases. It is no accident that Dunham's major books were written and published when she was on hiatus from performing or teaching, even as she maintained the mindset of the artist-scholar throughout. Allowing for shifts in foci, rather than expecting equal outputs in all arenas at the same time, leads to better creative and intellectual work.
That point is perhaps a minor sidebar to the larger contributions of Dancing in Blackness, namely, how it expands the memoir genre, makes a strong argument for the importance of the West Coast in the development of mid-twentieth-century dance, and greatly expands our understanding of dance's role in the Black Arts Movement. Furthermore, Osumare is an excellent writer who creates a smooth, jargon-free narrative flow while still making incisive and sophisticated theoretical points. Overall, the book is a tremendous resource for the field of dance studies’ big names.
