Black Woman Creativity, Resilience, and Celebration in Dance: An Exploration of Divining by Judith Jamison
Jamison, through the ballet Divining (premiering in 1984), seeks to subvert racist perceptions of dance styles rooted in Eurocentric tradition being inaccessible to the Black body, particularly the body of the Black female. Furthermore, Jamison rejects notions of the inability for Black women to be revered and celebrated on stage, while avoiding the reduction of Black womanhood into an object of pleasure for the male gaze. Her work also speaks to the diasporic nature of Blackness, as she blends dance and music from different regions together, revealing the richness of the Black experience in direct opposition to the flattening images of Blackness that are utilized to justify continued exclusionary practices in ballet.
The image of Black women that is socially produced stands in direct contrast to the image of the ballerina, “a sylph-like fairy whose pristine goodness and purity inevitably triumphs over evil or injustice”.[1] The three primary stereotypes of Black women, as defined by McCarthy-Brown, are the Jezebel, the Sapphire, and the Mammy.[2] The Jezebel is a sexually promiscuous Black woman, the Sapphire an angry Black woman, and the Mammy a sexless, subservient Black woman. Black women are marked by society through these “hieroglyphics of the flesh”[3], rendering it impossible for them to exist within mainstream social narratives outside of these stereotypes. Black women ballerinas were historically rejected not only because Black women were perceived as incapable of achieving the femininity necessary to perform in this role, but also because the introduction of the Black woman into classical ballet works would challenge the raced and gendered notions of desire essential to these ballets.
Divining works against the popular belief of Black women’s inability to invoke the image of prima ballerina; in other words, to be the heroine of the work. Jamison completely rejects the male gaze, centering and celebrating the Black woman as a divine being rather than as the object of male pleasure. Divining tells the story of a group of nomads, who, with their leader, seek a space, bless the space, and celebrate the space, before continuing on their journey. Although the aim of the ballet is not necessarily to assert that Black bodies are capable of elegantly performing ballet, the dancers move fluidly throughout the piece, rendering moot prevailing ideas that the Black body is incapable of producing graceful, ethereal movement. This ultimately reveals the flaws of dance critics who support and circulate the notion that Black dancers are incapable of being ballerinas due to the biological nature of their Blackness.
Divining and its portrayal of a nomadic group and their endless movement through space with each other stands in for a larger conversation about the connectivity of Black individuals through diaspora. Although individuals have migrated, both forcibly and willingly, through different spaces on Earth, there is a thread of connection through shared cultural elements. This is displayed through musical and dance elements Jamison utilizes in Divining, such as the drum, the berimbau, an instrument widely used in Brazil for the Afro-Brazilian martial art capoiera, and the brief step performed by the dancers towards the end of the ballet. Jamison is able to blend these styles so well because they all draw upon a common ancestral thread even as they are culturally reproduced in a manner specific to the spaces they arise from.
Through Jamison’s work, we see that there is not one image of Blackness, but multiple representations of Blackness that speak to each other and inform each other. Furthermore, Jamison’s work serves as a demonstration of the ability of Black individuals to master classical ballet form and technique. Through Jamison’s heroine, we can ultimately discard notions that Black ballerinas cannot exist. In fact, Jamison’s piece allows for a re-imagination of the ballerina as a subject that is revered for her divine power, rather than placed within and weakened under the white and/or male gaze.
[1] “A Brief History Of Ballet | Atlanta Ballet”. Atlanta Ballet. Accessed May 7, 2018. https://www.atlantaballet.com/resources/brief-history-of-ballet.
[2] Nyama McCarthy-Brown. 2010. “Dancing In The Margins: Experiences Of African American Ballerinas”. Journal Of African American Studies 15, no. 3: 392 (2010). Accessed May 4, 2018. doi:10.1007/s12111–010–9143–0
[3] Hortense J. Spillers. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”. Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 64–81. Accessed May 7, 2018. doi:10.2307/464747.
[4]https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e8/61/96/e86196de19791992bb652960b5143c9f.jpg
