Dancing in Blackness A Memoir
HALIFU OSUMARE Foreword by Brenda Dixon Gottschild
“Finally someone who knows a dancer’s process and a choreographer’s vision that has tackled the mystery that is the magic of contemporary African American dance. In Dancing in Blackness, Halifu Osumare has extricated the fundamental influence of Dunham, the choreographic strategies of Rod Rodgers, Eleo Pomare, Chuck Davis, Donald McKayle, and Alvin Ailey, as well as illuminating the paths they created for Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Bill T. Jones, Garth Fagan, and Diane McIntyre. What a wealth of treasure and scholarly and aesthetic understanding Osumare brings to this often misunderstood and woefully neglected American art. Bravo!” —Ntozake Shange, author of for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf “Dancing in Blackness belongs on every dancer’s and artist’s shelf. It is a wonderful personal telling of the black experience in dance, in art, in life, and of the dance world in Boston, New York, and the whole Bay Area. It is beautifully written— an engaging and fact-filled narrative where you meet the choreographers of the period, their work and visions, trials, successes, and triumphs.”—Donald McKayle, choreographer of Rainbow Round My Shoulder
DANCE/BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY March 380 pp. | 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 | 20 b/w illus. ISBN 978-0-8130-5661-6 | Printed Case $34.95s
Credit: Elton King
Dancing in Blackness is a professional dancer’s personal journey over four decades, across three continents and twenty-three countries, and through defining moments in the story of black dance in America. In this memoir, Halifu Osumare reflects on what blackness and dance have meant to her life and international career. Osumare’s story begins in 1960s San Francisco amid the Black Arts Movement, black militancy, and hippie counterculture. It was there, she says, that she chose dance as her own revolutionary statement. Osumare describes her experiences as a young black dancer in Europe teaching “jazz ballet” and establishing her own dance company in Copenhagen. Moving to New York City, she danced with the Rod Rodgers Dance Company and took part in integrating the programs at the Lincoln Center. After doing dance fieldwork in Ghana, Osumare returned to California and helped develop Oakland’s black dance scene. Osumare introduces readers to some of the major artistic movers and shakers she collaborated with throughout her career, including Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Jean-Léon Destiné, and Donald McKayle. Now a black studies scholar, Osumare uses her extraordinary experiences to reveal the overlooked ways that dance has been a vital tool in the black struggle for recognition, justice, and self-empowerment. Her memoir is the inspiring story of an accomplished dance artist who has boldly developed and proclaimed her identity as a black woman.
HALIFU OSUMARE, professor emerita of African American and African Studies at the University of California, Davis, is the author of The Hiplife in Ghana: West African Indigenization of Hip-Hop.
OF REL ATED INTE RE ST Jazz Dance A History of the Roots and Branches Edited by Lindsay Guarino and Wendy Oliver 336 pp. | 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 | Illus. ISBN 978-0-8130-6129-0 | Paper $22.50s
Rebel on Pointe A Memoir of Ballet and Broadway Lee Wilson 224 pp. | 6 x 9 | Illus. ISBN 978-0-8130-6008-8 | Cloth $24.95
O RD E RS 800-226-3822 | U P RE S S.U FL.EDU
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