Black Dance-USA brings its dizzying array of classes and concerts May 25-29
By Asa Pittman
For the St. Louis American
Black Dance-USA: A Celebration of Movement is more than a dance festival. It’s music. It’s song. It’s history and heritage. It’s a five-day, toe-tappin’, high-kickin’, jazz-jammin’, elbow-rubbin’, face-stuffin’ extravaganza of black artistic expression.
Better Family Life, Inc. kicks off the twentieth year of this St. Louis tradition at the West End Community Center, 724 N. Union, on May 25.
The idea for Black Dance-USA came to DeBorah Ahmed, senior vice president of cultural programs at Better Family Life, during a 1983 fieldtrip to New York City. A professor of African dance at Washington University, she had taken her students to see Dance Black America, a tribute to the dances of the African diaspora presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
“I got so inspired by what they were doing,” recalled Ahmed, “I said, ‘I’ve got to bring this to St. Louis.'”
Ahmed solicited the help of Better Family Life, Inc., the nonprofit she and her husband had founded. In 1983, however, the fledgling nonprofit had no facility, no staff and no money.
But it did have friends. Ahmed called in favors from every one of them. She said, “I’d ask them, ‘Will you believe in this idea? Will you believe in me?'” They did.
Twenty years later, Ahmed still recruits friends to fill her program’s dizzying schedule of events. People like Theodore Jamison, program director of the Katherine Dunham Center for the Performing Arts of Southern Illinois University, East St. Louis Center, and Black Dance-USA Dunham Technique instructor.
“It’s a vast technique that encompasses the experiences of life,” Jamison said of the method taught to him by its originator, internationally renowned choreographer and cultural anthropologist, Katherine Dunham.
Students of the Black Dance-USA Dunham class, said Jamison, will learn about Dunham’s background and philosophy and study her technique, an amalgam of moves from African, modern, and ballet dance melded with the African-influenced dances of Latin America.
Students can attend a calendar of classes offered mid-week through Friday. Fred Baker, founding artistic director of the West Indian Folk Dance Company of Chicago, will show the pupils of his African Caribbean dance class how they jam in his native Jamaica. Brazil-born Wellington “Borracha” Porto will give lessons in Capoeira Angola, a South American dance-like marital art invented by West African slaves. Those who’d rather kick it in a stateside club can take hip-hop class with music video veteran Roland “Ro-Ro” Tabor or jazz and tap with St. Louis legend Vivian Watt.
Participants can even two-step back to the motherland in three traditional African dance classes – West African dance and dances of the Ivory Coast, North African dance, and stiltwalking.
BFL also has arranged a Saturday night performance of the Muntu Dance Theatre of Chicago at the Washington University Edison Theater.
The festival’s spirit of camaraderie plus sheer determination has kept Black Dance-USA going, said Ahmed, while other programs – like Dance Black America, which lasted only two years – die out.
“They had a staff and an institution behind them,” Ahmed said of the now-defunct festival. “We didn’t have anything when we started out, and we’re still going. Now, what does that say about us?”
Black Dance-USA registration packages range from $160 to $88 for adults and $98 to 70 for youth ages three to 15. Participants may also pay for dance and percussion classes individually. Saturday concert tickets range from $25 to $17. For tickets and information, call (314) 367-3440 or visit www.betterfamilylife.org.
