African-American Dance - African American Modern Dance

African American Modern Dance

See also: Modern dance in the United States

African American modern dance drew on modern dance and African American folk and social dance along with African dance and Caribbean dance influences. Katherine Dunham founded Ballet Negre in 1936 and later the Katherine Dunham Dance Company based in Chicago, Illinois. She also opened a school in New York (1945). Pearl Primus drew on African and Caribbean dances to create strong dramatic works characterized by large leaps in the air. Primus often based her dances on the work of black writers and on racial and African-American issues, such as Langston Hughes The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1944), and Lewis Allan's Strange Fruit (1945). Alvin Ailey, a student of Lester Horton and Martha Graham, with a troupe of young African American dancers performed as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York in 1930. Ailey drew on his blood memories of Texas, the blues, spirituals and gospel.

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