عنوان

Bucking Anti-Blackness:

TLpq2323168307

انگلیسی

Bucking Anti-Blackness:

[Thesis]

Henderson, Lynnita Dawn

The Absence of the Black Female Body in Ballet Dance and the Rise of Black Dance Companies

Lindsey, Lydia

North Carolina Central University

2019

159

M.A.

North Carolina Central University

2019

There was an absence of the black body in ballet as it was emerging as an art form; however, there is not an absence of the black presence during the period in entertainment and daily life. The absence was due to the construct of race during this pivotal phrase at the dawn of the ballet dance form. In ballet's later years, when black people begin to appear in the ballet, there was an aversion associated with the black body that thrived on an anti-blackness prejudice. Black dancers resisted and formed their own companies and ballet productions. As an African American ballet dancer Arthur Mitchell famously said that he and others had "actually bucked society," and ballet "an art form that was three, four hundred years old "to bring "black people into it." Thus, dance has been used as a vehicle to break down anti-blackness barriers. This study seeks to explore the origin of the absence of the black body in the ballet genre. Primarily, it suggests that the absence of the black body was due to the construction of racial epistemology and thought formed in the Renaissance and Early Modern Europe society. Its later inclusion would be driven by black ballerinas' deconstruction of anti-blackness within the genre. Which eventually leads to black people performing and supporting black ballerinas, dance companies, and ballet productions. The first chapter will explore the general division of the black and white female body within dance and life, serving as a foundation of the result of the European ideals manifested in society from the Renaissance World. The second chapter will then examine more extensively the black presence in the Renaissance and Early Modern Europe and how the construction of racial epistemology began. The third chapter follows with a review of the creation of ballet from the Renaissance to Early Modern Europe with a particular focus on Italy, France, and Russia, as well as its race relations during the respective time period, and the absence of black dancers. The fourth chapter explores the reconstruction of race as it crosses the Atlantic into the Americas as it relates to the exclusion of blacks in ballet, while simultaneously focusing on how dance is ultimately used as a form of power and control that will later become a form of entertainment and pleasure. Finally, the fifth chapter dives into the emergence of black ballet dancers and the fostering of black ballet production and black dance companies as a form of resistance to the exclusion of blackness in ballet, (but not limited to incorporating the new waves of genres during the time period). The primary sources used are plastic and graphic artistic artifacts, statues, letters, and memoirs from the many monarchies such as Catherine de' Medici, King Louis XIV, and Peter the Great as well as people of letters works such as Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu and Alexander Pushkin. As well as interviews from major ballet choreographers and ballet companies such as ballet pioneer George Balanchine, and The Ballet Russes. Interview recordings of notable black dancers used as well as video recordings of black dancers' choreography in hopes to examine the idea of resistance explained in their dance productions that relate to anti-blackness and the reconstruction of race. The secondary sources that are used to support this work are monographs and articles from peer review journals on race relations and dance.

European history

Henderson, Lynnita Dawn

Lindsey, Lydia

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y