Dance Scholar Mora-Amina Parker illuminates the historical and cultural context of Mr. Talley Beatty's choreography as well as the significant impact on in her course as a professional dancer after discovering his ballets.
[Music begins, composed by J.S. Bach, performed by Jess Meeker]
Norton Owen: Welcome to PillowVoices, a production of Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival with content from the Pillow archives. I'm Norton Owen, the Pillow’s Director of Preservation, and it's my pleasure to introduce Mora-Amina Parker, who is a dancer, founding member and rehearsal director of Camille A. Brown and Dancers. She is also a dance scholar who writes on African American modern concert dance aesthetics, whose dissertation at Temple University is titled The Expressive Black Life-Worlds of Talley Beatty’s Choreographies: Embodiments of Afropessimism and Afrofuturism.
Mora-Amina Parker: I was researching Mr. Talley Beatty at Jacob’s Pillow in August of 2024 and discovered Norton Owen’s 1992 interview with Mr. Talley Beatty. This interview was illuminating and is unique because it is only accessible in-person at the archive and as such has a repository of information not often cited about Mr. Talley Beatty. In this exchange, I was moved and further informed by what Beatty said, but more so by what he did not say. His body language in this video speaks louder than the subdue of his voice, particularly when asked to recount the anti-Black racism he encountered throughout his life. For me as a researcher this interview confirmed the oral histories I learned of Beatty throughout my dance career and aided me in strengthening my academic assertions. But as a dancer who danced Beatty’s work, listening and watching him discuss his choreographies gave voice to what my body felt performing his ballets.
Norton Owen: Southern Landscape, I understand it hadn't been done from 1949 up until it was revived this year. Do you want to tell me a little bit about the genesis of it? I understand that some of it came out of your own experiences with, with your family and who was it your father It was, uh, almost done in by a lynch mob or…?
Talley Beatty: That's so, but I didn't...that wasn't the reason for the ballet. I had read Howard Fast’s Freedom Road, and I had graduated from high school (unintelligible word)…and it moved me so. It dealt with the, with the communities in the South where the Whites and the Blacks had taken these… plantations made out of communal living… and very successful. And after three or four years the white businessman financed the Ku Klux Klan and they came in and killed about thousands and thousands, destroyed these communities made the Blacks and the Whites sharecroppers. So that was pretty hateful. I never read that. We were not taught that in our school system. That's the reason for it, but, as a family, we did have some problems down in Louisiana and in, and in Chicago too, [long pause]. But the, the genesis of it, you know it came out of having read Howard Fast.
[Music Interlude: “Reg’lar Reg’lar Rollin’ Under” by Bessie Jones, Ed Young, and Hobart Smith (n.d.)]
Mora-Amina Parker: Talley Beatty’s career spanned a half century, during which he adamantly created narratives that were expressively representative of Black American lived experiences. Beatty was born December 22nd, 1918 in Cedar Grove, Louisiana. His birth was socio-politically situated after World War I and during the discriminatory practice of Jim Crow laws in the United States. In the multimedia essay available on Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive, John O. Perpener explains how and why Beatty’s family departed the Southern United States. They took their leave when the injustice and lawlessness of Jim Crow arrived at the Beatty’s family’s farm when he was a nine-month-old baby. White men demanded ownership of the family’s property without offer of payment and threats of violence. In protection of the family, Beatty’s father relinquished control of the farm and the family fled the South joining the mass exodus of Black Americans in The Great Migration to Northern and Western geographies throughout the United States. The Beatty family settled in Chicago’s Blackbelt neighborhood on the Southside of the city and although in the North, where the omnipresence of Jim Crow was lessened, the discriminations, a consequence of anti-Black racialism were in part maintained.
As a young teenager, Beatty encountered dancer, choreographer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham and began to train in ballet and early modern dance techniques. In 1932, Dunham was awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship and departed to the Caribbean to research dances created by the descendants of Black bondspeople dispersed throughout the archipelago. Upon her departure she arranged for Beatty to continue his dance training at predominantly white dance studios. Once Dunham departed, Beatty was allowed in the buildings, where the dance classes were being held, although he was not permitted in the dance studios with the other students, all of whom were white. This overt segregation led to Beatty taking his dance classes in small nearby closets or office spaces so as not to sully the white children with his Blackness. Undoubtedly, this prejudice left an indelible impression on young Beatty. This is one example of the discriminations Mr. Talley Beatty encountered in his pursuit of codified dance training. These anti-Black affronts would continue throughout his career, functioning as a locus to his works.
[Brief musical interlude]
Talley Beatty: I can make up steps, I can choreograph and dance very simply. But to really create a dance from an idea and to hold the idea and show my Blackness--that interest me most.
Mora-Amina Parker: In this excerpt from the 2001 PBS documentary Free to Dance, Mr. Talley Beatty described the inspiration and intended outcomes for his works. Beatty’s assertion to “show my Blackness” I interpret as his determination not to be beaten or silenced because of the anti-Black oppressions he encountered, witnessed or was aware of throughout United States history. How Beatty conceptualized his Blackness was through a unique movement amalgamation. From the primary era of modern dance techniques in Dunham and Graham, to mid-20th century Black American social dance movements and comportment and lastly, ballet. Describing this amalgamated aesthetic Beatty referred to his works as, “….ballet… with a little Louisiana hot sauce on it.” In demonstrating his Blackness, he was standing in and owning of a constructed racial ascription that in racialist hierarchy is the fundamental cause for inequitable treatment of Black/African diasporic peoples.
[Music Interlude: “Malletoba Spank” (1959) by Duke Ellington]
Mora-Amina Parker: Beatty addressed “his Blackness” throughout his career first as a dancer with the Katherine Dunham Dance Company and then as a freelance choreographer. In each decade of his career, Beatty narratively situated his ballets in the Black American experience. Beginning with his inaugural ballet, Southern Landscape choreographed in 1947, Beatty addressed the failures of the Reconstruction era, post the American Civil War. He dramaturgically revealed the dangers of this governmental neglect that was unleashed on the newly emancipated Black American citizenry and their white American allies. In Beatty’s 1959 The Road of the Phoebe Snow, a thorough exploration of the unequal alienating conditions of Jim Crow and how these outside injustices permeated a subaltern community, inciting betrayal, rape, and murder was communicated. By the late 1960s, Beatty was a vanguard representing The Black Power Movement on the American concert stage in The Black Belt. This ballet premiered in 1968 and was a demonstration of the riotous violence that erupted in predominantly Black American urban centers. Beatty represented these riots as more than mere lawlessness from peoples predisposed to violent acts, situating these outbreaks as spontaneous revolts against the structural failures of the United States doctrine of “separate but equal” that espoused segregation a century prior. Throughout the 1970s Beatty choreographed ballets for the concert stage and Broadway, garnering a Tony nomination for best choreography for Your Arms Too Short to Box With God, in 1976. By the early 1980s, Beatty was in his mid-sixties, but this did not prevent him from creating a ballet filled with the zeitgeist of the post-Vietnam, late 1970s, early 80s era that exhaustively and unheedingly celebrated the ephemeral. The youthful and hubristic joie de vivre Beatty expressed in The Stack Up reads as the last big party preceding the biopolitical terrors that would be unleashed in the HIV/AIDS and the crack-cocaine epidemics of the 1980s. These diseases would overshadow this decade with excessive and unnecessary losses of lives and while the gilded, lithe beauty of the dancers in The Stack Up bewitched me, Beatty’s subject matters in this ballet were far more than mere statistics. As a child in San Francisco during the 1980s with ties to both the LGBTQ+ community and as a Black American I witnessed firsthand what Beatty’s The Stack Up was adumbrating. I witnessed and experienced the very real, loved ones in my life perish and because of my lived experiences was able to connect with the narrative that Beatty presented.
[Music Interlude: “Faces” (1980) by Earth Wind & Fire]
Mora-Amina Parker: My encounter with The Stack Up was as a seventeen-year-old in the 1990s. I had just decided to commit my life to concert dance and was particularly interested in dancing for Black American dance companies. In an effort to research potential genres and companies, I phoned the San Francisco Performing Arts Library and requested to view videos from the Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre and Dance Theatre of Harlem. These were the only two predominantly Black American dance companies in which I was aware. While appreciative of the Dance Theatre of Harlem video recording of Creole Giselle (1984), it wasn’t expressively my ministry, calling or future dance outlet. In that Saturday afternoon viewing session, I saw the Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre performing The Stack Up (1982) and this is where the course of my dance life changed. I thought, WOW!!!!! This is amazing, It;s SOOOO Black. I have to dance like this. I wanted to know where people learn to move like that. I investigated further, pre-internet, and discovered a fair number of the dancers, many of my favorites with the Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre , had either previously trained or danced with another dance company, Philadanco and this is where I set off. Once in the training program at Philadanco, I discovered Joan Myers Brown had amassed a repository of Beatty’s ballets in the company’s repertoire. This discovery caused me to become ever more resolute to ascend in my training to gain promotion into Philadanco’s main company in hopes of dancing one of Beatty’s ballets. I yearned to embody Beatty’s narratives and to feel the movement aesthetic in and through my body. What I wanted to embody in his work was the corporealization of my first reaction to Beatty’s The Stack Up, a ballet “that is SOOO Black.” When I say this, I mean it was emphatic in Black American expressivity, and aesthetics. This was evident through four characteristics: his movement amalgamation, the musical selections he employed, the costuming and how they were styled on the dancers, and in the backdrop or scenery in the work. In The Stack Up, each of these attributes are demonstrated in Beatty’s Black life-world to the utmost. When this ballet premiered in the early 1980s, Beatty was in his fourth decade as a choreographer and at this stage his movement syncretism had maturated, seamlessly alternating between all four techniques to service his dramaturgy. Also essential Beatty’s aesthetic was the music he selected. Throughout The Stack Up, the soul, funk and disco sonics of Earth Wind & Fire, The Weather Girls and Alphonse Mouzon inundate the atmosphere of The Stack Up with interspersals of Grover Washington Jr.’s soul/funk jazz saxophone and the early hip hop musings of The Fearless Four. The dancers wore gender-specific disco style clothing, with sequin and spandex aplenty, popping and sparkling in adornment of the lithe dancing bodies. The women wore a variety of mini dresses or skirts accompanied and the men in a variety of brightly colored jazz pants, satin button up shirts or baseball jackets. The men’s footwear were leather jazz shoes, while the women courageously wore two-inch heeled character shoes to perform Beatty’s arduous choreography. Of note is one faction of dancers, three male and one female. Each of these dancers are costumed in more athletic gear, Black jazz pants, leotards or fitted half tops. The female dancer who was a part of this faction too wears jazz shoes instead of the heels the other women are wearing. This was due to the acrobatic choreography this foursome would perform, and was Beatty making a narrative statement. This quartet was representative of a street gang and as such was Beatty’s acknowledging of the disintegration of civic structures in urban centers that compelled youth to form familial affinities through these coteries. The final component to the world of this ballet was the scenery created by notable Afro-modernist artist Romare Bearden. His cityscape, Under the Bridge, positioned in the backdrop of the stage was representative of the collage and abstraction signature to Bearden’s creations. For my seventeen-year-old Black female urban dwelling Generation X eyes and ears the music, costumes and artwork were elements of Black American cultural production. But chief to The Stack Up and to my reaction was the movement. How Beatty unified the aforementioned four techniques and pulled them into his world building was what both my body and my mind sought. In The Stack Up, the dancers would visit the ballet canon performing high-flying jumps: coupe jetes, double tour, pas de chat en tournant, multiple pirouettes and a la seconde’s, instantaneously transitioning into polyrhythmic foot movements and undulating spines present in Dunham movement that then morphed into the pulling into and off of the leg and spirals of Graham technique with interspersals of Black American social dances like The Snake from the 1980s. Embedded in these choreographic movements was an overall feeling that was a coolness, a reassured way of being that was smooth, stylish beyond, and decidedly unmovable. It was an assertive Black self-expressivity that was notwithstanding any external white supremacists ideology with the expressed agenda of divorcing the Black body and beingness from any access to self. This embodied expression was seemingly unaffected or existed in spite of the external pressures of anti-Blackness and continued to be a performative modes of creative resistance. While I did not have the opportunity to work directly with Beatty, I was fortunate to train with dancers and teachers who did. I did learn and perform his choreographies, A Rag A Bone and A Hank of Hair, choreographed in 1985, while I was a member of Dallas Black Dance Theater. During my tenure as a dancer with Philadanco, I performed Southern Landscape, choreographed in 1947, Pretty Is Skin Deep, Ugly Is to the Bone, choreographed in 1977, and Such Sweet Morning Song, choreographed in 1991. These were rare chances to dance Beatty’s works as they are not ubiquitous and are not performed nearly as much as I believe their relevance to be. Each of these ballets were unique, extremely challenging and rewarding. They gave me an outlet to own my blackness and DANCE!
[Music Interlude: “Get Up and Dance” (1982) by Alphonse Mouzon]
[Music begins, composed and performed by Jess Meeker]
Norton Owen: That’s it for this episode of PillowVoices. Thank you for joining us today. On behalf of Jacob’s Pillow we look forward to sharing more dance with you through the films, essays, and podcasts at DanceInteractive.jacobspillow.org and of course through live experiences during our Festival and throughout the year. Special thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts for helping launch this podcast series. Please subscribe to PillowVoices wherever you get your podcasts and visit us soon, either online or onsite.