Talking About Race at MSU

How often does a panel discussion actually stay on topic? At Montclair State University in April, following a year-end performance by a fiercely talented crop of dance majors, it didn’t take long for panelists to veer from the question at hand: “What is African American choreography?”

“You know, that was characteristic of the entire year,” observed moderator and MSU theater professor Neil Baldwin after the event, referring to the springboard effect of the question. Since September, that same query had served as a unifying theme for the MSU dance curriculum, propelling a rich, department-wide dialogue. In dance history classes and Baldwin’s “danceaturgy” seminar, African American contributions to modern dance were the focus of academic inquiry. In the studio, students tackled a range of works by black choreographers—or inspired by African American themes—from Helen Tamiris’ Negro Spirituals (1928–42) to Donald McKayle’s 1951 Games.

The diversity of the rep, in itself, spoke to the difficulty of defining “African American choreography.” “The original question was essentially unanswerable,” added Baldwin in a phone interview. “But it became a stimulus for other conversations and explorations.”

In college dance departments, the topic of “black dance” sometimes gets relegated to a weeklong unit on the dance history syllabus. Lori Katterhenry, chair of the MSU dance department, wanted to change that. In teaching dance history, she admits, she had always felt uncomfortable presenting a neatly packaged lecture on African American concert dance, a subject inextricably linked with America’s history of slavery and racial inequality. “In a way,” she says, “I was answering my own need to go further with this topic, to not pay it lip service or isolate it out of context.”

Katterhenry also hoped to open students’ eyes to the cultural relevance of dance. “We’ve got these very facile bodies, but we’re not always engaging them at a deeper level,” she says. “Could we use repertory to engage students with current and past events? Could we still bring them a broad range of rep, and yet house it under an idea that would make us examine ourselves and society?”

As it turned out, yes. During the panel discussion, professor Elizabeth McPherson, who staged Games, remarked that more than ever, she saw her students finding “cross-currents and connections” between dance, their own lives, and the world around them. “We’ve seen students grow enormously in artistic and emotional capacity,” she added. Recent graduate Tiana Taylor, who performed in Games and Robert Battle’s Arbitrary Intersection, enthused that “this year the dance program has been the strongest since I’ve been here.”

Katterhenry felt that a curriculum centered on race had divisive potential but that the most unsettling questions are the ones worth asking. “It was a liberating year,” she says. “By the end I felt like we had a real, full, three-dimensional picture of ourselves.”

Originally published in Dance Magazine, July 2010