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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2021
This article explores the work of choreographer Dianne McIntyre as an improvisational artist entangled in questions of intermedial relations among sounds and motions. It discusses the terms of performance in relation to emergent paradigms of Afro-pessimism, and argues for a black regard as a method of engaging with experimental performances by artists of African descent. The article explores theoretical terms of witness and encounter with black performance in relation to queer alterities, and non-normative modes of physical expression. The article suggests further need for research into the work of an outstanding black American female artist of theatre and dance.
1 Musicologist Ashon T. Crawley elaborates this concept in Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017).
2 Goler, Veta, ‘“Moves on Top of Blues”: Dianne McIntyre's Blues Aesthetic’, in DeFrantz, Thomas F., ed., Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (Madison, WI: Wisconsin University Press, 2002), pp. 205–29Google Scholar.
3 I construct this re-membering of McIntyre's dance by viewing several moving-image objects to remind me of her performances witnessed over the years. See ‘Jacob's Pillow’, https://danceinteractive.jacobspillow.org/dianne-mcintyre/willow-song, accessed 8 January 2021.
4 Sara Ahmed and Roderick Ferguson's work in queer aesthetics influence this thinking-through. See Ahmed, Sara, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Ferguson, Roderick A., Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004)Google Scholar.
5 McIntyre narrates her process in a clip created to celebrate her 2006 award for Lifetime Achievement in Dance from the Cleveland Arts Prize. See ‘Dianne McIntyre’, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozSOkjzW5Y8, accessed 7 January 2021.
6 See Goler, ‘Moves on Top of Blues’.
7 Ibid.
8 Danielle Goldman, I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), p. 146.
9 See Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Thomas F. DeFrantz, ‘Unchecked Popularity: Neoliberal Circulations of Black Social Dance’, in Lara Nielson and Patricia Ybarra, eds., Neoliberalism and Global Theatres: Performance Permutations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 128–40.
10 See Thomas F. DeFrantz, ‘Improvising Social Exchange: African American Social Dance’, in George Lewis and Benjamin Piekut, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Vol. I (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 330–8.
11 See Thomas F. DeFrantz, ‘Hip Hop Habitus v.2.0’, in Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez, eds., Black Performance Theory: An Anthology of Critical Readings (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), pp. 223–42.
12 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
13 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Frederick Douglass and W. L. Garrison, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1849).
14 Douglass and Garrison, Narrative, p. 5.
15 Ibid., p. 6.
16 Hortense J. Spillers, ‘Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book’, Diacritics, 17, 2 (Summer 1987), pp. 64–81.
17 Ibid., p. 80.
18 Frank Wilderson, Afropessimism (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020).
19 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp, 1968; first published Chicago, A. G. McClurg, 1903).
20 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
21 Any number of artists working in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries refer to black dance structures even as they create works unconcerned with the terms of everyday black life in opera-house settings. For an exploration of how the category continues to operate, and how artists move through its contents, see DeFrantz, Thomas F., ‘What Is Black Dance? What Can It Do?’, in Bleeker, Maaike, Kear, Adrian, Kelleher, Joe and Roms, Heike, eds., Thinking through Theatre and Performance (London, Methuen Drama, 2019), pp. 87–99Google Scholar.
22 Zondi, Mlondolozi, ‘Haunting Gathering: Black Dance and Afro-Pessimism’, ASAP/Journal, 5, 5 (May 2020), pp. 256–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 266.
23 Goler, Veta, ‘Love Poems to God: The Contemplative Artistry of Dianne McIntyre’, Dance, Movement & Spiritualities, 1, 1 (2014), pp. 73–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 85.
24 Collegium for African Diaspora Dance, at www.cadd-online.org/2020-conference.html, accessed 7 January 2021.
