A New Black Aesthetic?
By ‘Funmi Adewole
Labels and definitions are like thorns in the side of the African Peoples’ Dance sector (APD). There is so little discussed and published about the work of black dance companies that it is difficult to follow artistic developments or trends or know what they mean. What is the ‘new black British aesthetic’? Was this phrase coined to create a distinction between the British and the American? It is also a fair to ask ‘what was the old British aesthetic? We could also ask ‘Why Black?’ and ‘Why not African or Caribbean?’ What visually is the difference between Black dance and some Contemporary African and most modern Caribbean dance? In Europe at least all these expressions base their definition on the fusion of non-western forms of African retention with western contemporary dance techniques.
The ‘New Black British Aesthetic’ might sound gimmicky but I feel the there is something going for it. For one the label indicates that some artists wish to be seen as working in a particular way and desire to draw attention to this by setting themselves aside from the pack. In time it will be clear what it refers to.
The dance theatre of Black people in Britain therefore reflects a variety of artistic lineages which umbrella terms such of African peoples’ dance do not acknowledge. Hence the work of choreographers can only be analyzed in the most general terms. The theatre dance of Black (here Black refers to African and Caribbean) people in Britain has developed differently from that of America as most Black People came to Britain though migration whilst African-Americans survived enslavement. As such, the way ‘heritage’ is reflected in movement vocabulary is different. You would be hard pressed to find the kind of contemporary African dance you find in Europe, or even the use of that term, in America. Contemporary African dance is obviously born of the kind of relationship that exists between Africa and Europe.
At least two things contribute to frustrating a closer engagement with the work of APD choreographers in Britain. The first is captured by a comment made by a journalist of a British broadsheet on the arrival of The Alvin Ailey American Dance theatre last year. The journalist hailed the return of a great American multicultural dance company. The use of the word ‘Multi-cultural’ is intriguing. The journalist had chosen this word because some members of the company are racially non-black. However even whilst Ailey’s was alive the company employed white dancers and the company now as then is still called a black dance company. For Ailey then the ‘Blackness’ of his dance was not solely about black bodies dancing. In making this comment the journalist overlooks the history and the on-going debates around the development of Black dance and the existence of a black tradition within American modern dance theatre. An artistic legacy is confused with an ethnic category on a monitoring form. Not much time is taken in Britain, to differentiate between the various uses of the word ‘Black’.
Secondly due to the struggle to develop infrastructure in the APD sector and keep dance companies afloat practitioners have given little time to analyzing their work artistically. We define ourselves by our heritage as this our common ground but in doing so we rarely talk about ‘how’ we use this past to meet present theatrical demands, such as how non-theatrical forms are used in a theatrical context; what informs the choices made in the fusion of dance forms; how ideological perspectives of ‘Africa’ manifest in movement vocabulary. This gives the erroneous impression that we are artistically stagnant.
Theatrical expressions such as African Contemporary dance, Modern Caribbean Modern dance, Post-modern African dance and now New Black British Aesthetic can serve as focal points. In understanding why and how they came into being we can achieve a fuller appreciation of dance theatre in the APD sector. To overcome the aforementioned obstacles to the appreciation of APD dance theatre we must acknowledge that within APD we are not only dealing a diversity of dance forms but a diversity of theatrical expressions that draw upon these forms. It is important to speak about how and why these theatrical expressions have developed. After all our present practice is the next generation’s heritage.
