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DANCES
To see an excerpt from the program, click on the Watch the Video link below.
"Awassa Astrige/Ostrich" (1932)
Choreography by Asadata Dafora
Music by Carl Riley
Performed by G. D. Harris, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company
The dancer is transformed into a powerful bird in this groundbreaking solo work by Sierra Leone-born choreographer Asadata Dafora. In "Ostrich," Dafora, who immigrated to the United States in 1929, blended his choreographic vision of a traditional African dance with Western staging.
"Barrelhouse Blues" excerpt (1938)
Choreography by Katherine Dunham
Music by Jess Stacy
Performed by Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble
Anthropologist and choreographer Katherine Dunham set this concertized jazz piece that incorporates vernacular movement to the slow drag -- a couples dance common to juke joints and honky-tonks. The dancers' pelvis-to-pelvis bumping and grinding provoked John Martin, a leading dance critic of the time, to call it an "incredible vulgarity."
"Strange Fruit" (1943)
Choreography by Pearl Primus
Poem by Lewis Allan
Performed by Dawn Marie Watson, Philadanco
Portraying a woman's reaction to a lynching, the piece is set to the words of a poem of the same title written by Abel Meeropol, under the pseudonym Lewis Allan. Among her "social protest" dances that lamented poverty, racism, and savagery, Pearl Primus drew from her own environment for movement motifs and from the American scene, especially in the South.
"Mourner's Bench" from "Southern Landscape" (1947)
Choreography by Talley Beatty
Music by William L. Dawson
Performed by Jerome Stigler, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company
"Mourner's Bench" is one of five dances that are part of "Southern Landscape," a work inspired by Howard Fast's book FREEDOM ROAD, which recounts a Southern black community's destruction during the Reconstruction era. The dancer performing on a "mourner's bench" recalls the pain of a life lost through racial violence.
"Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder" (1959)
Choreography by Donald McKayle
Music arranged by Robert Decormier and Milton Okun
Performed by Dayton Contemporary Dance Company
A commentary on the treatment of blacks in chain gangs in the South. Seven men, stripped to the waist, display the awful plight of men on the chain gang and how, in their desperation, they imagine and remember the solace of loved ones, represented by the solo woman in the dance.
"D-Man in the Waters" -- Section 1 (1989)
Choreography by Bill T. Jones
Music by Felix Mendelssohn
Performed by Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company
Created in response to the AIDS crisis and dedicated to Demian Acquavella, a member of his dance company who was struggling against the disease, the work was inspired by a dream Bill T. Jones had in which he saw a huge body of water filled with his friends.
Top banner photos: G.D. Harris performs "Awassa Astrige/Ostrich" and the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company in "Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder" (all photos by Andy Snow).
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Donald McKayle's "Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder." |
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Katherine Dunham's jazz-inspired "Barrelhouse Blues." |
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The DVD is available. |
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