Keeping the Spirit of Harlem Dance Alive

Every image here of the dancers Ayodele Casel, LaTasha Barnes and Camille Brown is strikingly contemporary. All artists at the cutting edge of dance today, they regularly perform for rapt audiences. But if you were to cast their angled bodies, brilliant smiles and euphoric turns in black and white, these dancers could almost fit in stills from a night club during the Harlem Renaissance.

In motion, these modern women bring to mind historical figures like the Whitman Sisters, who in 1931 took to the stage of the Lafayette Theater in Harlem to put on a raucous, mesmerizing show featuring brilliantly garbed chorus lines, jazz bands, comedians and child performers. According to The Pittsburgh Courier, one of the preeminent African American newspapers of the day, it was the “greatest stage attraction Harlem has ever seen.”

With the Great Migration from the rural South to the North, West and Midwest in the 20th century, Black dance traditions were remixed and funneled into newly energetic and virtuosic forms like the Charleston, the Lindy Hop and the Jitterbug, and older styles like the Cakewalk and tap evolved. Dance halls, ballrooms and music venues in Black urban centers were filled with hopeful migrants who found freedom in movement despite persistent adversity.

As part of what was called the New Negro movement, the four Whitman sisters — Mabel, Essie, Alberta and Alice — stood at the forefront of Black popular culture. Mabel led the company, while Essie was known for her deep and resounding voice, Alberta was an acrobatic “flash” dancer who performed in male drag under the name Bert and the lithe, blonde Alice was lauded as one of the greatest tap dancers of her time. In their four-decade run, they introduced the Cakewalk (a high-stepping dance originated by enslaved people on plantations) to the mainstream and gave big breaks to many other Black artists, including tap dancers like Jeni LeGon and Bunny Briggs.

In an article in Continuum: The Journal of African Diaspora Drama, Theatre and Performance, Nadine George-Graves, a biographer of the Whitman sisters, wrote that the siblings, once the highest paid act on the Black theater circuit, “pushed buttons and broke barriers left and right.” The fact that they aren’t better known in the broader dance world demonstrates how many groundbreaking Black female artists have faded into obscurity.

At the forefront of the movement to keep dance forms from the era alive stand women like Barnes, Casel and Brown — carrying countless long-forgotten artists of the Harlem Renaissance with them into the present with grace and conviction.

This experience is best with audio.
Listen

LaTasha Barnes grew up dancing with generations of her family at their weekly Sunday gatherings. She fondly remembers her great-grandmother holding her hand as she leapt into the air. “It was the spot. That’s where you went after church,” she said. “My love for sharing really came out of that.”

After a youth spent as an athlete, a career in the military and years devoted to social dance, including hip-hop and house, Barnes found her way into the world of swing. As she studied its origins in African American communities, she became a revivalist for the Black tradition of the Lindy Hop, and is now a choreographer and a tenured professor of dance at Arizona State University.

unmute

Though Barnes holds a self-designed degree in ethnochoreology, the study of dance and culture through other disciplines, Black studies and performance studies, she is foremost a practitioner; she doesn’t ever want to be “known for only the scholastic.”

Barnes describes Black dance as a freedom practice, no less salient than the civil rights movement. “It is liberation,” she said. “It is freedom.” She also makes a distinction between choreographed dance and social dance, which is made up on the spot and therefore imbued with that sense of freedom. “It’s hope embodied,” she said. “Sometimes the truth that needs to be spoken doesn’t need to be verbal.”

unmute

Through the study of social dance — with all of its electrifying turns, leaps and flips — one can witness the history of the Harlem and Chicago Black renaissances and the broader hemispheric Black expressive cultures, Barnes argues. Throughout that history, people were consistently reaching for freedom and movement — across geographies as well as dance floors — in response to being excluded and abused, she says. Barnes follows in the footsteps of well-known Lindy Hop pioneers such as Norma Miller, with whom she trained, and Frankie Manning. (Barnes is a board member of the Frankie Manning Foundation.) “My archivism is here,” she said, gesturing to her extended arm — indicating that the dancing is at once a visual chronicle and a collective song of hope.

Barnes’s performance piece “The Jazz Continuum,” which received a 2023 Bessie Award honoring exceptional performance in the arts, is a journey through the history of Black American social dance forms, including jazz, the Lindy Hop, hip-hop, house and more. For Barnes, each period’s different styles and sensibilities emerge from a common root. “Dance was, and is, a space for Black people to find freedom in the midst of turmoil and strife,” she said.

Ayodele Casel is a tap dancer and a master of improvisation. Though constantly aware of her predecessors, including her teacher Gregory Hines, she is remixing and extending the classic form. “I am a conglomerate of every tap dancer and musician that has ever entered my psyche,” she said. Music, she said, as well as “the specific dance vocabulary of tap, makes it possible for me to approach the floor at any given time with reverence for the past and the thrill and potential of the present moment.”

unmute

Casel brings her whole self – queer, Black and Puerto Rican — into that vast body of work. As a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University, she has explicitly taken on the “history of black women hoofers whose stories have been lost to history,” like Edith Hunt, Ludie Jones, Cora LaRedd and LeGon. In 2021, she was featured on a U.S. Postal Service stamp, a sign of the growing recognition of women in tap.

While many will remember Salt-N-Pepa as groundbreaking hip hop artists, an earlier duo of Black female artists actually paved the way for that moniker: Two tap dancers — Edwina Evelyn, known as Salt, and Jewel Welch, known as Pepper, both queer women who dressed in suits — headlined at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in the 1940s alongside Fats Waller and Count Basie.

unmute

It’s these hidden figures of dance that propel Ayodele both onstage and off. “I think about Jewel and Edwina, they were closeted,” Casel said. “The fact that I’ve been able to live in a fully realized way, my own life is an honor and testament to their lives — the women who wore suits, flats and ties and wanted to swing.”

She continued: “We tap dancers are a very studied group of artists, so signature steps and approaches are always in my back pocket to shout out, but, most importantly, they have made way for my rhythmic innovation.”

There’s a moment in Camille A. Brown’s 2015 dance piece “Black Girl: Linguistic Play” when you see the everyday beauty of Black expressive culture come to life. Two dancers move through space from what feels like a double Dutch routine into a block party dance into a version of the Lindy Hop and then into a finger-snapping carousel of a tap routine. With a background in concert dance, Brown has brought social dance into that space and expanded her reach to Broadway and film.

unmute

A four-time Tony nominee, Brown has become one of the most visible figures in contemporary dance, most recently recognized for her work on “Hell’s Kitchen,” Alicia Keys’s Tony Award-winning coming-of-age musical. When she worked on Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf” in 2022, she became the first Black woman to direct and choreograph a Broadway production in six decades, and in so doing, also drew attention to Shange’s legacy as a dancer as well as a playwright and novelist. In 2021, she became the first Black artist to direct a mainstage production at the Metropolitan Opera (alongside James Robinson) with “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which she also choreographed. She will next choreograph the upcoming revival of “Gypsy” starring Audra McDonald, opening in December.

unmute

On Broadway and at the Metropolitan Opera, she follows in the footsteps of the great scholar, dancer, choreographer and director Katherine Dunham. In 1962, Dunham choreographed, produced and directed “Bamboche!” on Broadway, and in 1963 she became one of the first African Americans to choreograph for the Met, with “Aida.” As an anthropologist and choreographer, Dunham used traditional dances of the African diaspora as a foundation for her work. Her success in the theater opened doors for artists of color on the American stage. And yet it took over half a century for Brown to become the second Black woman to choreograph a Broadway show. Like Barnes and Casel, Brown is conscious of the dance tradition from which she emerges, and she cites numerous influences, including Dunham. “I’ve always loved history,” she said. She described how, with theatrical work, she would research the social dances of the period and weave a story with sound and music.

unmute

When she is dancing, she said, she is “listening and channeling.” And Brown believes that dancers are musicians, of a sort. “I have always looked to Ella Fitzgerald,” she said. “I studied her clarity and range. I wanted to do that with my body.” When performing, she added, “I am actively singing and humming.”

Though this is a renaissance moment for Black female dancers, Brown cautioned against getting too comfortable: “I continue to see the erasure of our history,” she said. To that end, she, like Barnes and Casel, is working hard to preserve the traditions of Black dance. “I believe it is always part of me,” Brown said. “It is important to understand it, to bring it into the present and move it into the future.”