Black Dance and the Fight for Flight

Abstract

The arts have fulfilled a major historical role as mediums of expressivity for people of African descent during the 1960s. It is during this important decade that a number of political and artistic movements came to rise—like a pot waiting to boil over—as a result of decades of sociopolitical precedents that came to a head, sparking revolutionary responses by grassroots communities worldwide. This body of writing is an excerpt of a larger study the author conducted on the role of West African dance as performed by Black women dancers in New York City–based dance companies. Because of the techniques of djembe and sabar dance within traditional West African contexts for both dancers and drummers alike, the author closely examines these styles as leading examples of the types of physical movement within political movements of the 1960s era—movements that empowered and liberated oppressed peoples during moments of high tension.