May, 1928

The Dance Magazine

HARLEM'S PLACE

The Glare of Publicity
Conventionalize New York's
Rhythmic Art Is Fertile

By WALLACE THURMAN

in the SUN

Threatened to
Negroes—But Their
in New Expressions

Sketches by Richard Bruce

EN years ago, a dim,
noisy subterranean cellar
deep in dark Harlem;
raucous laughter; moans
and shouts; dancers—
grotesque shadows silhouetted
against a dark background by red
and blue electric bulbs; music, slow
stirring music—loud, discordant
music coming from a piano accom-
panied only by a drum. The pianist
is the dominating figure in the room.

He has no sheets of music before him,—he wouldn't know what to do with them if they were there. He plays by ear alone, improvising if he happens to forget the proper sequence of some melody he has heard another pianist play.

His music becomes more mad and more
intense as the evening progresses, and he

depends more
and more upon
his own creative
powers. The
dancers seem to
be in a frenzy.
Their movements

are frantic and in-
spired. There is rhy-
thm and masterful
coordination of limb
and body movement.
There are no conven-
tions considered.
Couples do as they
please, moving what-
ever portions of their
bodies they choose in
any way they choose,
inventing new steps

and introducing complicated rhythms into
their dance movements.

The evening wears on. There is much
noise and joy and drinking. Men who have
worked on the docks or in the ditch all day
perspire as freely during the night from a
different sort of exertion. Women who
have been cooking or washing or cleaning
in some white woman's kitchen or house
now lord it over their associates in their
midnight rendevous. Prostitutes and pimps
maintain a superior attitude. Here is low
Harlem at its best, unspied on, unfettered
and alive.

It was in such places, found not only in
Harlem, but in Chicago, St. Louis, Balti-
more, Philadelphia, Kansas City and
Omaha, that many of our new popular
dance steps and rhythm motifs were first

introduced. They were seldom
born in such places; rather, these
Negro cabarets in northern centers
were a sort of clearing house where
the Negroes from southern planta-
tions and Mississippi levee camps
merged their unsophisticated, semi-
primitive dance music and dance
tunes with the current northern
output.

Fresh from the south, fleeing to
the north to find the economic and
spiritual freedom promised them there, and
finding only new bonds, new barriers and
new problems, they sought relief in dance,
song, drink and night life just as they had
done in their former homes. Eager not to
be considered back numbers they would
attempt to contribute something new to the
evening's fun, some tricky foot shuffle or
rhythmic body movement which had long
been in vogue in their part of the country
but which was as yet unknown in their
new environment. This step would be
picked up and broadcast by other inmates
of the cabaret until finally it would reach
the theatres in the Negro districts. In a
short time some white performer would
master its intricacies and present it in big
time vaudeville or in a revue. And if it
proved fascinating enough there would
soon be ballroom adaptations.

It was in this way that we received our

salient contributions to the modern Ameri-
can dance. There are those who fear that
his continual Nordicisation will preclude
any such possibility, for so rapidly is black
America assimilating the manners and cus-
toms of white America that most of the
particularly Negroid characteristics, such
as an almost divine feel for rhythm and a
most enviable spirit of irresponsible spon-
taneity, are now found only among a fast
disappearing lower class. Northward migra-
tion has increased the store of sophisticated

Negros and aided
standardization.

One, however,
has a faint hope
that there are still
elements in black
American life
which retain some
of their native
vigor and traits,
and that there are
still some places in
northern cities
where this element
will continue to
gather and to
dance in their own

inimitable fashion. With this in mind one
begins a round of the cabarets which in
the olden days were festive mines for one
searching for material. There are over a
dozen of these places in Harlem, the great-
est Negro center in the world, of all sizes,
shapes and degrees of respectability. Yet
the visitor looking for new dance rhythms
or new anything will be disappointed, for
it seems that now the Negro cabaret, es-
pecially in Harlem,—and the same can be
said of other northern cities, is maintained
for whites rather than for blacks. Instead
of a mob of Negro dancers cutting new

steps and inventing
new dance rhythms as
was the case ten years
ago one now finds a
mob of ambitious
whites energetically
trying to do the old
Negro dances. For

every Negro dancer one
sees on the floor there will
be from ten to twelve white
ones, and those Negroes
one does see are what the
lower class of Harlemites
call "dicktys," which means

(Continued on page 54)

WALLACE THURMAN, author of
this article, is a Negro playwright
whose first play will be produced on
Broadway next Fall. He is a resident of
Harlem and is intimately acquainted with
the subject he treats here. Richard Bruce,
whose sketches appear on this page, is a
Negro artist of considerable repute. His
work has been used in an anthology of
writings by Negro authors.

Shimmy, Black Bottom, Charleston, Camel
Walk and many other popular dances
which are universally known as American,
but are really miscegenated progenies with
the Negro characteristics tending to domi-
nate. Vernon Castle admitted that all of
his innovations in the field of the dance had
been inspired and built upon Negro dances
he had watched and imitated, and he al-
ways used a Negro orchestra.

All of this, however, is well-known.
What one wishes to know now is whether
or not the Negro will continue to make