Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas DeFrantz
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Successful Operation ◽  
Performance Style ◽  
New Era ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Dance Theater ◽  
Social Dances ◽  
Alvin Ailey

Born on 5 January 1931 in Rogers, Texas, the only child of parents who separated when he was two, choreographer Alvin Ailey (b. 1931–d. 1989) moved to Los Angeles with his mother in 1942. Shy from an itinerant Texas life, Ailey turned to dance when a high-school classmate introduced him to Lester Horton’s studio in 1949. He immersed himself in study and developed a weighty, smoldering performance style that suited his athletic body. Ailey moved to New York in 1954 to dance with Carmen DeLavallade in the Broadway production of House of Flowers. Performing success led him to found Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1958. The company began as a repertory company devoted to both modern dance classics and new works created by Ailey and other young artists. The critically acclaimed first concerts in 1958 and 1960 marked the beginning of a new era of dance performance devoted to African American themes. His dance Blues Suite (1958), set in and around a barrelhouse, depicts the desperation and joys of life on the edge of poverty in the South. Highly theatrical and immediately accessible, the dance contains sections of early-20th-century social dances, Horton dance technique, Jack Cole–inspired jazz dance, and ballet partnering. Early performances of Revelations (1960) established Ailey’s company as the foremost dance interpreter of African American experience. The dance quickly became the company’s signature ballet, eclipsing previous concert attempts at dancing to sacred Black music. Set to a series of spirituals and gospel selections, Revelations depicts a spectrum of Black religious worship, including richly sculpted group prayer (“I’ve Been Buked”), a ceremony of ritual baptism (“Wade in the Water”), a moment of introverted, private communion (“I Wanna Be Ready”), a duet of trust and support for a minister and devotee (“Fix Me, Jesus”), and a final, celebratory gospel exclamation, “Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham.” Ailey’s ballet Feast of Ashes (1962), created for the Harkness Ballet, is acknowledged as the first successful pointe ballet choreographed by a modern dancer. Major distinctions and honors followed Ailey throughout his choreographic career, which spanned the creation of more than fifty dances for his own company and others. The Ailey company continues as a highly successful operation after Ailey’s death, and is affiliated with a large dance complex in New York City that offers comprehensive courses in dance study as well as venues for performance.

Harlem Nightclubs

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Templeton
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
York City ◽  
Black Identity ◽  
Big Band ◽  
Artistic Creation ◽  
Black Artists ◽  
Lindy Hop ◽  
Tap Dance ◽  
Social Dances

In the 1920s and 1930s, Harlem became a major hub of New York City nightlife and a prolific space for African American artistic creation. It was in Harlem’s nightclubs (also known as cabarets) that big band jazz became a sensation and where theatrical dance forms like tap dance, and social dances like the lindy hop and the Charleston, gained widespread popularity. These artistic developments contributed to an emerging modern black identity among the intellectuals and artists of the Harlem Renaissance. While the artists in these nightclubs tended to be African American, the more elaborate and expensive clubs catered almost exclusively to white patrons; black artists were often faced with the challenge of catering to white expectations while creatively developing their own art. The music and dance that emerged in these nightclubs also became the inspiration of many black modernist authors.

Horton, Lester (1906–1953)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Dinerman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
York City ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
Dance Theater ◽  
Theater Production ◽  
American Modern Dance ◽  
The U.S

Lester Horton, regarded as one of the founders of American modern dance, worked outside the established center of New York City, establishing a permanent dance theater in Los Angeles in 1946. The Lester Horton Dance Theater was a multidisciplinary arts school for children and adults, offering training in all aspects of theater production; both the school and company were multiracial, a rarity at that time. Horton’s broad choreographic range allowed him to work in films, nightclubs, and on the concert stage. His fascination with folklore, cultural history, and ethnic dance informed his diverse body of work, with themes ranging from the classics to melodrama, social commentary to satire. Working with his dancers, most notably Bella Lewitzky, he developed the Horton technique over two decades of classroom work, which is still taught today in the U.S. and abroad. In addition to Lewitzky, Horton’s influence continued through the careers of Alvin Ailey, Janet Collins, Carmen de Lavallade, James Mitchell, Joyce Trisler, and James Truitte.

Charles White

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (45) ◽  
pp. 140-149
Author(s):  
Jody B. Cutler-Bittner
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
African American Art ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
Current Events ◽  
Surface Patterns ◽  
African American Artists

The recent exhibition Charles White: A Retrospective (Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 7, 2018–January 13, 2019) offered a chance to consider the technical and iconographic breadth of an oeuvre that has been exhibited mainly in sporadic doses for the past few decades and has expanded in scope through recent attention from a subsequent generation of African American artists, including several students as well as art scholars. White (1918–79) was vocally committed from the mid-1960s through his final decade to African American art subjects in tandem with social issues, climactic in poignant, politically charged lithographs in a realist drawing style set in increasingly abstract environments. By then associated with the Black Arts Movement, he continued to recycle historical figures and references from his earliest work in the milieu of a Black Renaissance in Chicago and bolstered by the Works Progress Administration, which, with reciprocal viewing, takes on a collective modernist context in terms of current events related to African American experience and American life broadly, even where allegorical. White’s prolific graphic experimentation yielded varied surface patterns that often evoke content-laden textures, elided into several distinctive late paintings also featured.

Ailey, Alvin (1931–1989)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Ethnic Diversity ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Cultural Experience ◽  
Dance Theater ◽  
Broad Audience ◽  
American Modern Dance ◽  
Alvin Ailey

Alvin Ailey counts among the most significant American choreographers of the second half of the twentieth century, and his company the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT) as one of the most widely known companies both nationally and internationally. Initially established in 1958 as a small pick-up company of black dancers, AAADT quickly developed into a multiracial company that not only served as a platform for Ailey’s works but also became a repository for works by many different choreographers in a wide variety of styles. Communicating to a broad audience base, Ailey made the black dancing body integral to modern dance. In the tradition of the Lester Horton Dance Theater, Ailey stressed ethnic diversity and a broad artistic range. AAADT remains a primarily black yet multiracial company that continues the heritage of American modern dance while preserving the uniqueness of the African American cultural experience.

“New and Better Stories”

2019 ◽  
pp. 91-118
Author(s):  
Cameron Leader-Picone
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black American ◽  
New Era ◽  
Structural Role ◽  
American Experience ◽  
African American Authors ◽  
American Authors

This chapter analyzes Colson Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt (2006) and Paul Beatty’s Slumberland (2008) as attempts to craft the “new and better stories” of the African American experience that Charles Johnson’s 2008 essay “The End of the Black American Narrative” calls for. Johnson’s “The End of the Black American Narrative” posits Obama’s election as a turning point in African American literature, reflecting a new era of representation for African American authors. Through an analysis of Johnson’s essay in concert with Whitehead’s and Beatty’s novels, this chapter argues that these works illuminate a brief moment of optimism for the transcendence not of race itself but of the structural role that race has played and continues to play in American governance. With their shared representation of racial identity as a form of branding, Whitehead and Beatty point towards new conceptualizations of Blackness that embrace contingency and fluidity.

Los Angeles and Cinema

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Trafton
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Film History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
American Experience ◽  
New Hollywood ◽  
Wim Wenders ◽  
Starting Point

This article discusses the history of cinema in Los Angeles and the complex relationship that American film has had with its host city throughout film history. First, General Overviews considers the essential texts on Los Angeles and Southern California history. Although many of these works are not part of the literature on cinema and media studies, they nevertheless provide a critical starting point for scholars studying the role of Los Angeles on film. Mission Legend examines the mythical allure of the region that enticed film pioneers to leave the East Coast for the land of sunshine. Edendale features texts on the early studios of the 1910s. Weimar on the Pacific is on the contributions that Austrian and German émigrés made to the cultural landscape, including crucial theorists and German-Austrian filmmakers who fled to the United States. Los Angeles Modernist Architecture discusses another group of German-Austrian immigrants—modernist architects who constructed homes that would later become iconic film locations. Film noir has had an enduring relationship with the City of Angels, and Noir focuses on Los Angeles as a noir character in its own right. Los Angeles and New Hollywood reviews depictions of Los Angeles in films from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, including those by American filmmakers and European tourist filmmakers with their own take on Los Angeles: Michelangelo Antonioni, John Boorman, Jacques Deray, and Wim Wenders, to name a few. Los Angeles Disaster Cinema has remained consistent in Hollywood cinema over the last forty years, and as such, a scholarly focus on this aspect of Los Angeles Cinema is featured. Los Angeles and African American Cinema discusses texts on the L.A. Rebellion School, which invigorated a neorealist cinema about the Los Angeles African American experience, as well as studies on the L.A. “hood films” that emerged during the early 1990s. Los Angeles and Chicano Cinema offers a series of texts for scholars looking to engage with this field. The music industry has also played a crucial role in L.A. history, but the Los Angeles Punk movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s also energized a punk aesthetic in cinema that emerged from films like Repo Man. Toward the end of the 20th century, many auteur filmmakers, heavily influenced by New Hollywood cinema, created portraits of Los Angeles, and Los Angeles Auteur Filmmakers provides some key texts on these filmmakers. Lastly, this article features a section on Documentary Films, because there are so many nonfiction films that will serve scholars of Los Angeles Cinema well in their research.

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