Dancing in Oakland and Beyond, 1977–1993

As the longest section, chapter 6 covers sixteen years of the author’s career as dancer, choreographer, dance educator, and arts administrator. During this period, she solidified her reputation in the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area as a leader in the growing black dance and multicultural arts movements when she founds the non-profit dance institution Everybody’s Creative Arts Center (ECAC). She assess her development as a dancer-choreographer, discussing some of her key dance works as well as the creation of the center’s resident dance company, CitiCentre Dance Theatre, which was an important contemporary dance company that operated from 1983 to 1988. She also explores her simultaneous adjunct dance position at Stanford University and several of her choreographic and directorial commissions. The chapter articulates how, in 1989, her accumulated artistic and administrative experience culminated in her founding a major national initiative in black dance: Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century. She concludes with how she eventually transitioned from the arts to academia after going to graduate school, and how dance and “writing dancing” are similar.

Introduction

The Introduction explores the author’s major personality characteristic of rebelliousness that serves as the platform for the rest of the book. It defines “black dance” and the debate about whether there is even such a thing. The chapter also investigates the problem with American racism as it has been reflected in the world of dance.

Dancing in New York

This chapter describes the author’s return to the US after almost 3 years in Europe and continues to explore her blackness in the post-Civil Rights era of the early 70s (first in Boston and then in New York). Joining the Rod Rodgers Dance Company (RRDC) in NYC allows the author to become a part of developing concert dance among the major black dance companies who were second tier to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. The author explores the vitality of professional NY dance and the experiences that dancing with RRDC provided, such as the Dancemobile in the 5 boroughs, the cultural integration of the Lincoln Center, and the opening of the dance season on Broadway. Additionally, she explores NY’s African dance companies and the growing need to make black dance relevant to black people in these shifting political times.

Dancing in Europe

This chapter explores the unique positionality of being a black woman in Europe in the late 60s. This social position is further complicated with being a contemporary dancer trying to survive in Spain, France, and the Netherlands and finally Copenhagen, Denmark, and Stockholm, Sweden. The author forms a Danish modern dance company with another American dancer in Copenhagen and, together, they help create a dance “revolution” for the times. She ends up teaching jazz dance in a major ballet academy in Stockholm, where she is also able to continue her own training with former members of the Katherine Dunham and Martha Graham dance companies. The author also investigates the influence of Dunham’s Technique on the Nordic region of Europe.

Dancing in Africa

Chapter 5 records the author’s bold move to Ghana, West Africa for nine months to study and research the basis of black dance in the Americas. She studies the curriculum of the School of Music, Dance, and Drama (SMDD) at the University of Ghana, Legon, under the ethnomusicologist Dr. Kwabena Nketia and the dance ethnologist Professor Albert Opoku. She examines the development of the internationally touring Ghana Dance Ensemble. She also explores her personal relationships with other African Americans and Ghanaians to further interrogate race and blackness from the point of view of living in West Africa. She reminisces about how her dance fieldwork in five regions of Ghana and her excursion to Togo and Nigeria broadened her perspective on herself as African American in Africa.

Dancing Back into the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Area, 1973–1976

Chapter 4 chronicles the author’s return to her home area after five years, now as a professional dancer-choreographer. She establishes her professional reputation in the Bay Area, one that will serve as the foundation of her future work as a regional dance catalyst and cultural activist. As an artist, she develops the artistic theme central to her developing career in The Evolution of Black Dance. She creates and produces several evening-length productions during this three-year period, begins to learn arts administration, and forms Halifu Productions, a company that helped catalyse the mid-70s black dance scene in the Bay Area. She also meets the poet Ntozake Shange and artistically collaborates with her and her poems on a project that will become the famous production of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enough. Ntozake Shange gives her an African name, and the author becomes Halifu Osumare.

Coming of Age through (Black) Dance in the San Francisco Bay Area

This chapter tells the author’s beginnings in dance in high school and her developing dance training as an undergraduate at San Francisco State University. She also probes the unique qualities of the SF Bay Area in the latter 60s, specifically as it relates to the Black Arts Movement-West, the hippie counterculture movement, and black militancy leading to the formation of Oakland’s Black Panther Party and the SF State Strike for Ethnic Studies. She shows how she situated dance as her unique revolutionary statement and took this approach when leaving the US for Europe as a young woman.