Dancing in Blackness
Subtitle: a memoir
By: Halifu Osumare
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 378
ISBN-13: 9780813056616
Subjects: Dance; African American dance; African American women dancers; Biography; History
Description: This book explores a black female dancer's personal journey over four decades across three continents and numerous countries, including different parts of the U.S. It is personal musings about the place of dance and race in Halifu Osumare's life across time and space that defined her life choices and career path.

"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 that she chose dance as her own revolutionary statement. She moved to Europe, where she taught "jazz ballet" and established her own dance company in Copenhagen. Returning to the United States, she danced with the Rod Rodgers Dance Company in New York City and played key roles in integrating black dance programs into mainstream programming at the Lincoln Center. After dance fieldwork in Ghana, Osumare returned to California and helped develop Oakland's black dance scene. Along the way, she collaborated with major artistic movers and shakers: among them, 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. This is the inspiring story of an accomplished dance artist and a world-renowned dance scholar who has boldly developed and proclaimed her identity as a black woman." -- Publisher's description
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Foreword / Brenda Dixon Gottschild; title: Introduction: dancing in blackness; title: Coming of age through (black) dance in the San Francisco Bay area; title: Dancing in Europe; title: Dancing in New York; title: Dancing back into the S.F.-Oakland Bay area, 1973-1976; title: Dancing in Africa; title: Dancing in the Oakland and beyond, 1977-1993.