‘Free to Dance’ Puts Its Own Spin on History

As a three-hour celebration of African American identity, “Free to Dance” has important stories to tell and lessons to teach Sunday on the PBS “Dance in America” series. However the high ambitions of this American Dance Festival project are often undercut by painfully limited notions of American diversity and peculiar distortions of dance history.

After linking the cultural legacy of Africa to related social dance traditions in America, the program focuses on the emergence of African American modern dance and, in particular, the careers of dancer-choreographers Edna Guy, Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus and Alvin Ailey. A number of others receive more cursory treatment, with rare archival films and pithy interview segments giving the biographies great immediacy.

As usual with PBS documentaries, the dance clips are oppressed by voice-overs. Despite that, the films of and by Dunham are spectacular, though they do raise an important question: Given their anthropological basis, should we really classify her works as modern dance or instead credit her, along with Uday Shankar of India and Igor Moiseyev of Russia, as one of the great pioneers of theatricalized folklore?

To restage historic works, “Free to Dance” enlists such major regional troupes as the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble and Dayton Contemporary Dance Company. But unfortunately, the script by Madison D. Lacy and Adam Zucker tends to make every work shown into something unique, first of its kind, unprecedented--even when it’s not.

Thus Primus’ “Strange Fruit,” a remarkable 1943 solo about a lynching, is described in these terms, though it came seven years after Charles Weidman’s equally disturbing “Lynchtown.”

The confused put-down of Martha Graham--with footage, music and commentary that don’t belong together--is especially deplorable. With three hours available, why these misleading shortcuts? Certainly Ken Burns’ “Jazz” series (on which Lacy served as a consulting producer) proved far more evenhanded in describing the parallel careers of black and white artists.

Worse, there’s only one kind of heritage acknowledged or respected here. When Dunham goes to the Caribbean and Primus to West Africa, for example, they’re praised for seeking their roots. But anyone who looks to Europe or Asia for inspiration is denigrated.

At one point, dance journalist Zita Allen praises a new generation of black artists by saying that “instead of going to Greece and using Greek myths, instead of going to India and using Indian dance, people went home and brought home into the theater.”

Sorry, but home and heritage come in many forms, and the Greek tragedies adapted by Graham and others represent an ancient, profound cultural legacy for many Americans--and not just Greek Americans. Moreover, the dances of India have not only found a home in contemporary America but possess many of the characteristics (percussive footwork, muscular isolations, a celebration of the dancer’s body and spirit) that “Free to Dance” credits solely to Africa.

Prominent in the final hour, choreographer Bill T. Jones has based a major work on Latino history and Donald McKayle has drawn intriguing pieces from the cultures of the Indian subcontinent and the Arctic Circle. But you’d never know it from the Afrocentric take on them in this telecast, and that gives a hollow ring to the statement by choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar that today black dance can be anything. Maybe in real life, but not here.

Early in “Free to Dance,” dance historian Katrina Hazzard Donald speaks persuasively about the “tremendous amount of exchange between blacks and whites; in fact they really provide us with the bedrock out of which American dance grows.” But, without extensive clips of nonblack dance, the exchange remains undocumented, her point unproven: a central failure of this telecast, whatever its other laudable achievements.

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“Free to Dance” airs at 8 p.m. Sunday on KCET-TV, Channel 28.