DANCE : A World of Change : The debate in black dance continues over the enduring conflict between cultural traditions and colorblind innovation

“I don’t think that there’s ever really been such a thing as black dance per se,” says Cristyne Lawson, dean of the dance school at CalArts.

Buy into that statement and you can accept the notion of attending a festival exclusively featuring the work of black choreographers, but not seeing any black dance.

No wonder organizers have carefully avoided the problematic term in “Black Choreographers Moving Towards the 21st Century,” an eight-day festival of panels and performances beginning today with a 2 p.m. panel on Alvin Ailey and Donald McKayle at the California Afro American Museum and an 8 p.m. performance by the David Rousseve Project at the Bradbury Building. The bulk of the activities will take place at the Wadsworth Theater.

“What we call black culture is already multicultural,” says festival founder Halifu Osumare. “If we in dance now could show that we have all borrowed and lent from one another, if we could get beyond stratification and embrace all of our hybrid forms as uniquely American, I think that could really take us farther. Because I don’t feel that we’re ever going to have a political democracy until we have a cultural one. And a cultural one is an acceptance of all the aesthetic principles and philosophies that make up America.”

Coincidences can be instructive. At about the same time as the “Black Choreographers” brochure hit the mail, Princeton Book Publishers shipped to video stores an 87-minute Dance Horizons documentary on the four-day “Dance Black America” festival held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1983.

The two festivals are linked by more than just the goal of celebrating blackness. Both, for instance, avoid using “black dance” in their titles. Both probe the links between cultural traditions of the black community and the creative innovations of a generation breaking free from all stereotypes.

It’s no coincidence that Osumare danced in the first festival and founded the second in 1989. To Lenwood Sloan, co-director of “Dance Black America,” Osumare’s festival represents “an extended dialogue--continuing the dialogue that Katherine Dunham had, that Pearl Primus had--because the choreographers working in the last decade of the 20th Century have the luxury of knowing about those early choreographers.”

Sloan explains that his work for “Dance Black America” focused on “street and social dance and its impact on the concert stage” from 1690 to 1900, while co-director Harold Pierson presented “concert work of the 1900s to the 1980s,” when the pioneers of the form established the standards for what has been called “black dance.”

He describes Osumare’s role in this continuum as presenting “people with fully articulated identities that go beyond all that--the black artist in a fusion society. We have the luxury of being abstract, of having abstractionist musicians, writers and visual artists create a body of information to help us articulate the work. And that is as it should be in an assimilated society, a society that talks about multiculturalism--which is not a synonym for the color of your skin but a fusion of multiple aesthetics and multiple consciousnesses.”

The deaths of so many of the participating artists in “Dance Black America” (Alvin Ailey, Charles Moore, Al Perryman, Mama Lu Parks) have made the videotape “a time capsule,” Sloan says, and intensified Osumare’s determination to “not let the momentum slip backwards.”

To Osumare, the festival comes at a time when many young artists have begun what she calls “a strong looking back at traditions and a reinterpretation of them. You have a need by many black choreographers, as they chart new courses, to examine their roots.

“They feel we must uphold our traditions, glory in them,” Osumare says, “because they are massive and in fact make up a great deal of what is uniquely American. However, we also need to relish our own individualism as creators--unique artists separate from any tradition whether it is black or white.”

Artists can become caught between these extremes--and Osumare cites the uncompromisingly postmodern Donald Byrd as an example of someone who changed his outlook as a result of participating in the 1989 “Black Choreographers” festival in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

“In some of the early panels, he was reluctant to be labeled ‘a black choreographer,’ ” Osumare recalls. “But by the end he stated that he’d been rethinking this whole issue--thinking about the culture that he’s a part of.”

Byrd confirms this account, adding that where he used to have only one black dancer in his company, now half the members are black. “I had always said that I couldn’t afford the quality of black dancers that I was looking for,” he explains, “like the ones in the Ailey company or Dance Theatre of Harlem. During the festival, it occurred to me that maybe I hadn’t made the effort.”

The result paid surprising dividends. “We were just in Austin, Tex.,” he says, “brought there by the Black Dance Alliance. And on opening night the audience was predominantly black. The kind of work that I do was not what they expected--black audiences to a large extent think that everything black choreographers do will be in the Ailey tradition. So the work was somewhat uncomfortable for them.

“I think the thing that made it--I don’t want to say palatable but something like it--was that there were black dancers in it. There was a certain identification with those dancers and so the audience could take it in.”

Neil Barclay, co-producer of the “Black Choreographers” festival, agrees that many black audiences have had limited exposure to Byrd’s generation. “Beyond Alvin Ailey and Dance Theatre of Harlem, a lot of major black American dance artists are unknown to the black community,” he says. “They’ve largely been developed by presenters who have white constituencies, so part of what we’re doing is making sure the black audience becomes aware of them.”

“These are artists who are in the forefront of American dance,” he says, “the people who have given voice to what many international communities think about as ‘American dance.’ ”

Barclay also accepts Byrd’s point that some members of the black community don’t relate to a work if it’s danced by non-blacks--or if it doesn’t depict black culture. “Part of that (attitude) is the assumption that the work doesn’t have anything to do with them,” he explains. “I think that’s true of anything. People tend to look for their own images in order to connect with a work, whether it’s an ideological or thematic connection or simply the fact that the performers and audience belong to the same race.”

This issue continues to be controversial, with some choreographers of color rejected by their colleagues as not black enough--and many of them adopting the statement of position articulated by choreographer Bill T. Jones on a “Dance Black America” panel: “I am a choreographer who happens to be black.”

During that festival, choreographer Gus Solomons Jr. wrote an open letter to the directors protesting his exclusion, saying “my work is apparently being ignored by my black colleagues because it refuses ethno-cultural categorizing.” He hasn’t exactly mellowed on the subject since then.

“Black dance is a very exclusive club,” Solomons says bitterly. “It includes whatever’s convenient at the moment and seems to me an excuse for inclusion or exclusion.”

He describes his work as “nonobjective, nonpolitical, nonoppressed” and declares, “I am a reflection of my heritage, which is Irish-Catholic on the verge of Italian and Portugese.” He grew up in Cambridge, Mass., “and my whole upbringing was about assimilating into the community at large. . . . It would be hypocritical to put on a mask and suddenly get angry, as some black choreographers have done. I suppose I could make political dances if I wanted to, but I don’t want to and shouldn’t be made to.”

Because he considers himself “a holdout for the idea that we should all be gray,” Solomons says he’s not “a cheerleader for (the idea of) a black dance festival. However, until the ‘white’ festivals begin including more work from other cultures on an equal basis with Eurocentric work, there’s going to be a need for ghettoized festivals.”

“I think categories sell us all short,” says CalArts’ Lawson. “It’s obvious I’m black, what can I do about that? I certainly wouldn’t choose to be anyone else than who I am. But the human experience is more important to me than what all this (debate) is talking about. I don’t understand why we’re isolating ourselves again at a time when we have a rebirth of diversity.”

Lawson expressed discomfort with both the concept of the “Black Choreographers” festival and its performance format. “I don’t see that you have to be black first to get in a festival,” she comments, noting that she’d prefer seeing the same artists on full programs rather than on sampler bills that are “not really an introduction to anything because you never see enough to know. It can be very misleading.”

However, she acknowledges the bottom line: “If this is a way to get money to survive, if that’s what it takes for them to get a concert together, then I have to accept it. We’re talking of finances really.”

But the key issue for her, for Solomons and for many others remains the definition of “black dance.”

“I think there are black people dancing, which is not necessarily anything you have to put in a category,” she says. “All the things we relate to in Alvin Ailey as ‘black dance’ aren’t. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all modern dance.”

Choreographer John Pickett (presented in the ’89 “Black Choreographers” festival) summarizes the factors that theoretically constitute black dance: “The choreographer’s black and the subject matter has to do with the black experience and some of the movement relates to the ethnic black African vocabulary, etc. You pile up those factors and you might say that you have ‘black dance.’ Whether that’s valid or not I may not be astute enough to say. I guess I’m avoiding saying so.”

In any case, Pickett confesses that this model doesn’t fit the young generation showcased in the “Black Choreographers” festival. “Although the choreographers are black, they are working in diverse modes,” he says, “some of which may relate specifically to their white counterparts and others which may be very ethnic in their pursuit. I think the vocabulary used is so wide that I wouldn’t necessarily consider it black, in and of itself.

“There is a lot in ‘white culture’ that has been lifted from blacks,” Pickett says, “so we have a culture of diverse elements that at some point intertwine.”

This may be the heart of the matter. Certainly it has prompted Brenda Dixon, professor of dance at Temple University, to define those values in contemporary dance that originated in black cultures.

“I would look to those aesthetic principles that have to do with vitality, energy, force, angularity, rhythms/cross-rhythms/polyrhythms,” Dixon says. “Take radical asymmetry, which presupposes that you’ve already thrown out certain modes of theme-and-variations and that you’re looking at another model.

“There’s also the sense of double entendre, with the movement vocabulary used the way words are. Twyla Tharp didn’t only use the music of Jelly Roll Morton, but the dry, deadpan humor in her stuff was also a quality that’s part of this African aesthetic.”

Choreographer Garth Fagan had work presented at both the “Dance Black America” festival and the first “Black Choreographers” event two years ago. Like Dixon, he finds it important to acknowledge the “cultural trademarks that sometimes identify work by an artist who happens to be black.” His list would include “a sense of volume and texture that comes genetically and culturally from Africa or West Indies America. A way of using music--of getting away from the beat, improvising around it, over it, under it. A sense of love for the emotional that you find rooted in the black church here. These things I can see and identify as coming from a black perspective.”

That said, Fagan warily approaches the the prospect of any “Black Choreographers” festival, starting with the title. “I’d like the word choreographer to come before black or Korean or Mexican or Jewish,” he says. “The danger also is, like any other festival, it might become an inbreeding of negative stereotypes, or negative ways of approaching choreography, and dichotomize the already narrow, small, under-funded dance world.

“I just want us to get to the point where we can judge the work first,” he says. “It’s not being proud of who you are and where you came from. It’s being aware of the value and grandeur of art.”

A GUIDE TO THE FESTIVAL

Today, 2 p.m.: California Afro American Museum, 600 State Drive, L.A. Panel: “Legacy of the Masters--A Historical Tribute to the Works of Alvin Ailey and Donald McKayle.” Moderator: Richard Long. Panelists: Paula Kelly, Rita Moreno, Michelle Simmons, Cristyne Lawson, Lula Washington.

8 p.m.: Bradbury Building, 304 S. Broadway, L.A. Performance: The David Rousseve Project in “Had Somebody but I Lost Her Very Young.” Also Monday and Tuesday.

Wednesday, 7 p.m.: Wadsworth Theatre, Wilshire and San Vincente Blvds., Westwood. Panel: “Black Choreographers, Many Voices.” Moderator: Cynthia Sitembele West. Panelists: Nia Love-Pointer, Bebe Miller, David Rousseve, Keith Young.

Thursday-Friday, 8 p.m.: Wadsworth Theatre. Performance: Dayton Contemporary Dance Theatre in Ulysses Dove’s “Urban Folk Dance,” Nia Love-Pointer in her “Lesson Number One,” Los Angeles Contemporary Dance Theatre in Donald McKayle’s “Songs of the Disinherited,” Bebe Miller and Company in her “The Jimi Hendrix Project” and David Rousseve in “Colored Children Flyin’ By.”

Friday, 7 p.m.: Wadsworth Theatre. Panel: “Visions of Black Artists, An Interdisciplinary Dialogue.” Moderator: Beverly Robinson. Panelists: Ulysses Dove, Synthia Saint James and others.

Saturday and April 21, 8 p.m.: Wadsworth Theatre, Performance: Same program as April 18, 19, except Keith Young Dance Company replaces Nia Love-Pointer.

April 21, 3 p.m.: Los Angeles Contemporary Dance Theatre, 5179 1/2 W. Adams Blvd., L.A. Panel: “The Black Choreographer and the Community, Partnerships for the Arts.” Moderator: Gertrude Rivers-Robinson. Panelists: Neil Barclay, James Burks, Denise Nelson Nash, Darlene Neel, Lula Washington.