Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey's Embodiment of African American Culture

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Overview

In the early 1960s, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater was a small, multiracial company of dancers that performed the works of its founding choreographer and other emerging artists. By the late 1960s, the company had become a well-known African American artistic group closely tied to the civil rights struggle. In Dancing Revelations, Thomas DeFrantz chronicles the troupe's journey from a small modern dance company to one of the premier institutions of African American culture. He not only charts this rise to national and international renown, but also contextualizes this progress within the civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights struggles of the late twentieth century. DeFrantz examines the most celebrated Ailey dances, including Revelations, drawing on video recordings of Ailey's dances, published interviews, oral histories, and his own interviews with former Ailey company dancers. Through vivid descriptions and beautiful illustrations, DeFrantz reveals the relationship between Ailey's works and African American culture as a whole. He illuminates the dual achievement of Ailey as an artist and as an arts activist committed to developing an African American presence in dance. He also addresses concerns about how dance performance is documented, including issues around spectatorship and the display of sexuality, the relationship of Ailey's dances to civil rights activism, and the establishment and maintenance of a successful, large-scale Black Arts institution. Throughout Dancing Revelations, DeFrantz illustrates how Ailey combined elements of African dance with motifs adapted from blues, jazz, and Broadway to choreograph his dances. By re-interpreting these tropes of black culture in his original and well-received dances, DeFrantz argues that Ailey played a significant role in defining the African American cultural canon in the twentieth century. As the first book to examine the cultural sources and cultural impact of Ailey's work, Dancing Revelations

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780195301717
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date: 1/13/2006
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 320
Product dimensions: 9.10 (w) x 5.90 (h) x 0.90 (d)

Meet the Author

Thomas DeFrantz earned degrees from Yale, the City University of New York, and the Performance Studies Department of New York University. He organized the dance history program at the Ailey School, and is editor of Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance. His writings have appeared in the Encyclopedia of African American Culture and History, and the Village Voice. Also a performer and choreographer, DeFrantz has taught at NYU and Stanford University. He is currently Associate Professor of Theater Arts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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	Introduction	xi
1	Revelations 1962	3
	Why Revelations Worked	14
	Break: Black Modernism	19
	Situating Revelations in African American Cultural Life	23
2	Early Dances	26
	Ailey's Childhood: Race Matters	27
	Break: Unquenchable Racial Desire	35
	Blues Suite	38
	Ailey's Early Dances	44
	Hermit Songs	46
3	Early Company	51
	Early Years in New York	54
	Early Residencies	57
	Southeast Asia Tour	60
	Break: "Official" African American Culture	69
	Riedaiglia	73
4	Revelations II: 1969	75
	Break: Versioning	82
	Multiracial Concert Dance	85
	Revelations 1975	89
5	Touring, Touring, Touring	93
	Quintet	94
	Swelling Popularity	99
	Break: Jazz Dance	101
	Flowers	104
	The Popular Audience	108
	Break: No Exit from Racism	112
6	Reflecting a Spectrum of Experience	115
	Masekela Language	117
	The Lark Ascending	127
	Hidden Rites	130
7	Other Dances	136
	Feast of Ashes	137
	Break: Black Dancer, White Dance	145
	The River	148
8	Ailey Celebrates Ellington	160
	The Ellington Connection	161
	Break: Heroes	167
	Ailey Celebrates Ellington	171
	Pas de "Duke"	174
	Ellingtonia	177
9	Gender and Spectatorship	180
	Cry	182
	Love Songs	185
	Masked Spectatorship: Ailey's Representation of Sexuality	188
	Break: Sex	189
	Streams	192
	Break: Black Atlantic Dance	197
10	Later Dances	200
	Memoria	205
	Au Bord du Precipice	213
	Survivors	223
	Break: Alvin Ailey, Public and Private	229
11	Concluding Moves	232
	The Ailey after Ailey	235
	Revelations 2003	236
Appendix	Choreography	241
	Notes	257
	Bibliography	275
	Index	289