Humbly ReEducating
Dance has a complex and rich history involving every corner of the world. It’s what we love about it! However, too often the integral contributions of BIPOC and POC go unacknowledged within our classrooms and choreographic practices. This is a great disservice to an art form that we all love, and to the communities impacted by systemic racism within our dance community. We need to all do better to recognize we have been erasing important parts of our history and often unknowingly, though still harmfully, upholding systemic racism in our practices. The time for change was long ago and has already been called for. It is with this acknowledgment that we must humbly begin re-educating ourselves and re-structuring our systems. It is important that we recognize that the dance styles we know and love like jazz, tap and modern for example, would not exist or be the same without POC. Let’s start with educating ourselves on our collective history and on what we can change to right our wrongs. Here is a list of books to get you started.
1) Dance Pedagogy for a Diverse World: Culturally Relevant Teaching in Theory, Research and Practice by Nyama McCarthy-Brown.
2) Black Dance in America: A History Through It’s People by James Haskins
3) Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (Studies in Dance History) by Thomas F. DeFrantz.
4) Black Performance Theory by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez.
5) The Black Dancing Body: A Geography From Coon to Cool by B. Gottschild
6) Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture by Katrina Hazzard-Gordon.
7) Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race In Motion by Susan Manning.
8) Brotherhood In Rhythm: The Jazz Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers by Constance Valis Hill
9) Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches by Lindsay Guarino and Wendy Oliver.
10) Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History by Constance Valis Hill.
11) What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing by Brian Seibert.
12) Funk: The Music, The People, and The Rhythm of The One by Rickey Vincent
13) Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts by Brenda D. Gottschild
14) The People Have Never Stopped Dancing: Native American Modern Dance Histories by Jaqueline Shea Murphy.
15) Queer Dance by Clare Croft.
*This list is by no means comprehensive and should be used as a jumping off point to discovering the realities of each style and each community not represented in this list.
