{"id":1573,"date":"2018-09-12T18:05:56","date_gmt":"2018-09-12T22:05:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/?p=1573"},"modified":"2019-09-13T17:06:29","modified_gmt":"2019-09-13T21:06:29","slug":"week-2-shange-music-movement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/?p=1573","title":{"rendered":"Week 2: &#8220;Physicality is the basis of my art&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_1575\" style=\"width: 216px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"http:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/Why-I-had-to-dance-essay-cover.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1575\" class=\" wp-image-1575\" src=\"http:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/Why-I-had-to-dance-essay-cover-245x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"206\" height=\"252\" srcset=\"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/Why-I-had-to-dance-essay-cover-245x300.jpg 245w, https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/Why-I-had-to-dance-essay-cover-768x941.jpg 768w, https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/Why-I-had-to-dance-essay-cover-836x1024.jpg 836w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 206px) 100vw, 206px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-1575\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Archive Object: The original first page for &#8220;Why I Had to Dance&#8221; from Black Renaissance. Note how the letters seem to move. What is the effect of having the first line in boldface?<\/p><\/div>\n<p>ASSIGNMENTS<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Ntozake Shange, selections from <em>A Daughter\u2019s Geography<\/em> (handout)<\/li>\n<li>&#8212;&#8211; \u201cgetting to where I haveta be \/ the nature of collaboration in recent works\u201d \u201cwhy I had to dance,\u201d\u00a0 \u201cmovement\/ melody\/ muscle\/ meaning\/ mcintyre,\u201d \u201ca celebration of black survival\/ black dance america\/ Brooklyn academy of music\/ April 21-24, 1983\u201d\u00a0 in <em>Lost in Language and Sound<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Selections from Jessica Hagedorn, <em>Beauty and Danger.<\/em>\u00a0Pay particular attention to the introduction, either of the two \u201cAutobiography\u201d poems, &#8220;Canto De Nada\u201d (16), &#8220;Pearl\u201d (28) and &#8220;Something About You&#8221; (73).<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/132248175\">Her Pen is a Machete: The Art of Ntozake Shange<\/a>&#8220;(11 mins) and &#8220;A Conversation with Ntozake Shange and Dianne McIntyre&#8221; (1 hour) from \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/bit.ly\/S-FZake\">The Worlds of Ntozake Shange<\/a>.\u201d http:\/\/bit.ly\/S-FZake<\/li>\n<li>Clips from \u00a0Busby Berkeley\u2018s <em>Wonderbar\u00a0<\/em>(in class)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Today is the beginning of a twofold journey of (1) learning to read Ntozake Shange\u2019s work\u00a0and (2) \u00a0learning more about the artistic and political friendships that shape her work. We will start with talking about movement.\u00a0In a 2010 interview with Shange, critic Alexis Pate points to the many levels of Shange&#8217;s work: &#8220;It approaches you on multiple levels. Idea, language, music, movement, memory, action.&#8221; (<em>Black Renaissance<\/em> 10.2\/3 (Summer 2010). \u00a0Shange herself told previous classes that &#8220;physicality&#8221; is at the basis of her art, so we need to have some conversation about what that means.<\/p>\n<div>For 1, I\u00a0assigned for today some videos that hopefully give you some tips on how to read the printed page as performance along with the choreoessays from\u00a0<em>Lost in Language and Sound; or how I found my way to the arts: essays<\/em> (LLS)\u00a0that to me seemed most clearly to speak to the role of dance in her life and art )most particularly \u00a0&#8220;Why I Had to Dance\u201d)\u00a0\u00a0<strong><strong>What does it mean to think capaciously about &#8220;movement&#8221;? <\/strong><\/strong>Towards the end of &#8220;Why I Had to Dance,&#8221; Shange says, \u201cIt is possible to start a phrase with a word and end with a gesture.\u201d\u00a0 <strong>How do gesture\/movement and the spoken text work together?<\/strong><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>For 2, I gave you selections from Filipina writer and performance artist <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jessicahagedorn.net\/about-2\">Jessica Hagedorn<\/a>\u00a0who was an early friend <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1977\/12\/20\/archives\/3-satin-sisters-spin-a-poetry-of-nostalgia-at-stage-cabaret.html\">and collaborator<\/a>. <strong>What do you learn about San Francisco in the 1970s from her introduction? How does it gibe with Shange&#8217;s description of that era in the video?\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0Pay particular attention to the two \u201cAutobiography\u201d poems, &#8220;Canto De Nada\u201d (16), &#8220;Pearl\u201d (28) and &#8220;Something About You&#8221; (73).\u00a0 You&#8217;ll find both Hagedorn&#8217;s and Shange&#8217;s work rich with musical, literary and real world <a href=\"https:\/\/literarydevices.net\/allusion\/\">allusion<\/a>. <strong>How would you characterize their use of description and music?\u00a0 How do they use <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Paratext\">paratext<\/a>?<\/strong><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>It would interrupt your reading experience to look up all of the allusions, but you should get into the habit of investigating some of them.\u00a0 In an earlier reading, I decided to look up Busby Berkeley, because I had a vague childhood memory of the trailers from his musicals.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"wonder bar 1934\" width=\"1140\" height=\"641\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/vQubRUCsp_s?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>The Busby Berkeley dance numbers I remember were entrancing and overwhelming. I don&#8217;t know if as a kid (by then his time had passed&#8211;just how old do you think I am?) I noticed how really <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wisegeek.com\/what-does-heteronormative-mean.htm\">heteronormative<\/a> (a key element of musicals themselves) the musicals were. So too, I probably didn&#8217;t notice how much of the glamour was linked to classic notions of femininity and to the angelic glow that Richard Dyer sees as constitutive of cinematic whiteness. Now that impression is so overwhelming, I just can&#8217;t shake it.\u00a0\u00a0<strong>The first question for me then became: how did Shange incorporate into a diasporic consciousness something that seems to exclude the possibility of color: in her own words, &#8220;how did i jump over the fact of their whiteness and my very brown-ness&#8221; (LLS 51)?<\/strong>\u00a0How does she move from Hollywood spectacle\/Euro-&#8220;American&#8221; tradition to something that is more diasporic?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>In Dianne McIntyre&#8217;s choreography of the essay (which I&#8217;m sorry I couldn&#8217;t acquire for you), the dancers move about using white cloth&#8211;the motion mimicking the flowing costumes of a Berkeley number (and perhaps that <a href=\"http:\/\/blackgirlstalking.tumblr.com\/post\/60755485750\/i-grew-up-watching-a-lot-of-comedy-with-my-dad-it\">black girls&#8217; childhood<\/a> game of using sheets and towels to pretend to have flowing white hair.) McIntyre&#8217;s dancers move through Berkeley-inspired movements to the more intimate movements of home and family, Shange&#8217;s parents dancing, the dances of home and community. If Berkeley plays on a <a href=\"http:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=TBBbydc0jdoC&amp;lpg=PA14&amp;ots=hJN0bXna08&amp;dq=manichean%20black%20and%20white&amp;pg=PA14#v=onepage&amp;q=manichean%20black%20and%20white&amp;f=false\">Manichean\u00a0<\/a>contrast of white\/black, Shange shows the diaspora as a space whose dynamism merges things that superficially seem contradictory or oppositional:<\/div>\n<div style=\"padding-left: 240px;\"><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div style=\"padding-left: 240px;\">my mother was not only blonde at that time\/ but she could dance\/ and carried herself with aplomb and a flirtatiousness that was at the core of the berkeley chorus girl.<\/div>\n<div style=\"padding-left: 240px;\"><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>The beauty, poise and femininity the Berkeley chorus claims as an attribute of whiteness becomes something Shange can claim through a vision of her mother who is both &#8220;black&#8221; and blonde and through parents who travel throughout the diaspora to supply the sounds and movement that become the grounds for a black\/diasporic aesthetic.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Looking at the Busby Berkeley routines though Shange&#8217;s essays, I see power and virtuosity, which his dancers convey through order and precision. The individual dancer&#8217;s prowess is amplified&#8211;but also subsumed by&#8211;monumental scale, architectural sets and technical innovation. In McIntyre&#8217;s choreography, we see the same values of power and virtuosity, but this time rendered through a diversity of movement and bodies.\u00a0 (As you know from the video, the dancers and the choreographers meticulously research allusions in the choreoessays.) The Dancers take you through a dizzying array of black\/African dance movements, from colloquial dances like the shimmy &amp; the Charleston to the signature moves of Tina Turner and the Ikettes, to the more formal, technical artistry of Katherine Dunham, Dianne McIntyre and Alvin Ailey.\u00a0\u00a0Blackness and black movement is multi-racial, its dynamism coming, not from perfectly choreographed order, but from a capacious and chaotic sense of history, space and time which gives everyone a place through which to enter.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Perhaps this is what the movement does\/means: it collapses the distance between the reader and the text. When watching a Berkeley routine, I sit there in awe; &#8220;Why I had to Dance,&#8221; invites you dance yourself.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>ANNOUNCEMENTS:<\/div>\n<div>Don&#8217;t forget about the <a href=\"http:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/event\/if-we-forget-ourselves-who-will-be-left-to-remember-us-a-conversation-with-cherrie-moraga\/\">Cherr\u00ede Moraga reading\/conversation on Thursday<\/a>.\u00a0 If you can, go, even if you haven&#8217;t registered.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>ASSIGNMENTS Ntozake Shange, selections from A Daughter\u2019s Geography (handout) &#8212;&#8211; \u201cgetting to where I haveta be \/ the nature of collaboration in recent works\u201d \u201cwhy I had to dance,\u201d\u00a0 \u201cmovement\/ melody\/ muscle\/ meaning\/ mcintyre,\u201d \u201ca celebration of black survival\/ black dance america\/ Brooklyn academy of music\/ April 21-24, 1983\u201d\u00a0 in Lost in Language and Sound [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[14,350,424,423,13,61,493],"class_list":["post-1573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-classes","tag-dance","tag-dianne-mcintyre","tag-jessica-hagedorn","tag-lls","tag-movement","tag-music","tag-third-world-feminism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1573"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1573\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2191,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1573\/revisions\/2191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}