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Another way that labor contributes to dance is a much broader way. When a community moves from being an agricultural community to being one that is engaged in industrial labor, as we find happening with the African American moving from slavery into the industrial labor of the North after the Great Migration, dance is transformed in a less direct manner. Dance is now separated from the work routine. It is more distant from the work routine. There's something that interposes itself between the dancer and the work. So that the movement does not directly imitate those gestures in the work routine. The work frames the dance in a much broader way. For example, it sets the parameters of leisure versus the parameters of labor. But it also changes those gestures and it moves the dancer from labor that is bent over to labor that is more upright, and the dances consequently become more upright. The transformation of clothing styles, the relative ease and the relative amount of leisure that one has in the factory versus the cotton field influences the gestures and the postures, and it also influences the overall tone of the dance.
One of the things that black folks brought from the South to the North were the old plantation dances, as well as the music. And they also brought the context in which the dances occur, but they could not move the context to the North completely because the North is very different than the South. Your activities and the organization of dancers is not governed by the agricultural routine, it is governed by the industrial calendar. Now people are no longer having corn-husking dances and corn-shucking parties, and there are no dances that directly imitate the agricultural routine. There are dances that reference it. For example, the old dance, "Milking the Cow," uses the movement that goes on to become a dance known as the "Rock," which, of course, sweeps the nation in the late 1970s. But between "Milking the Cow" and the "Rock," there was an intermediary dance called the "Toilet Stool." People are encountering indoor plumbing for the first time! And that milking stool becomes the toilet stool. The dancer stays in the same crouched, seated position. The hand movements are very similar, but they're no longer pulling on the cow's udder. They are rolling the toilet paper, which people, of course, don't use in the rural environment in the same way that they use -- I mean we walk to the store and buy a roll of toilet paper and put it in our bathroom. People in the rural environment had to do something different.
The "Big Apple" is also one of those transitional intermediary forms between the rural dances [and] the urban dances. The "Big Apple," of course, is derived from the square dance, contra dance, form because it is done in a square as well as a circle. So it represents the merger of the ring shout, the counterclockwise circling of the old ring shout, the sacred ring shout, with the secular traditions of the contra dances. They come together in the urban environment. Africans bring both of those traditions to the North and they merge in the urban environment. The "Big Apple," like its predecessor, is called. So the "Big Apple" is really a transitional form in many ways. It's transitional not only for the African moving it to the North; it's transitional because it is really the first massive dance craze in America. We can discount the "Cakewalk" to some extent because the "Cakewalk" had much more of a rural profile than the "Big Apple." The "Big Apple" was seen almost exclusively as an urban dance. The "Cakewalk" was done on the plantation and then moved into the urban environment and is thought of as an urbanized rural form. The "Big Apple" originates in the urban environment.
Explain the significance of Congo Square in New Orleans.
What went on in Congo Square went on wherever there were Africans in America. I've seen accounts in which 10,000 African slaves come to dance in Albany, New York, or gathered together in dance contests in New York City, 6-7,000 for the Pinkster's Festival. Congo Square, I think, has been really misinterpreted in the historical literature. Congo Square has been interpreted as a fostering, a supportive gesture on the part of the city council of New Orleans to help African culture survive. Well, just the opposite was true. Congo Square represents a limiting because before the inauguration of Congo Square, Africans were allowed to dance all weekend in any vacant lot in the city. And of course, this caused problems, and so the city fathers started limiting the number of places as well as the hours that Africans could dance. And finally it is limited to one place on Sunday afternoon between four and six o'clock. And that place comes to be known as Congo Square.
What of the quadroon balls?
Wherever there was the concubinage of African women by white plantation owners and white men generally, there were vehicles for procuring concubines. These were dances that represent an aristocratic tradition, in the, quote, "mixed-race community" of New Orleans. Many of the attendees were slave women. Some of them were free women of color, and they came together, oftentimes chaperoned by their mothers, and at these dances they were chosen by protectors and many of these relationships lasted for life. They were not all exploitative. The quadroon ball was the vehicle through which the white male could procure this concubine. Of course, interracial marriage was illegal, but many of the men had Catholic ceremonies carried out nevertheless, by priests who were willing to violate the interracial marriage laws. And so these institutions, these dance institutions were places where women were taken as concubines.
These were institutions in which the women were expected to display good breeding. And so the dances were the high cultured dances of the European population -- waltzes, quadrilles. The more elegant dance form occurred there.
Dance is like other aspects of culture, it reflects the people that originate it. And if the people that originate the dance are members of an elite, then the dance somehow reflects that. And so the dances that were done reflect the class stratification in the African community.
The dances that were done at the quadroon balls would be rotation minuet, waltzes, European dances. They were far less African than the dances done by, quote, "the folks" on the plantation. Now, this is not to say that the quadroons at the quadroon balls didn't also do the African dances. Of course they did. The quadroon balls provided a particular context and inside of that context, there are certain rules that apply that govern the dancing as well as the social behavior, that govern the social interaction, and the dancing was part of that social interaction. The dancing represents the full spectrum of the courtship ritual.
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