Judith Jamison, Michelle Obama, Black Women of Power: Black History Month in Dance, 2021

Black History Month in Dance 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148. September 7, 2010 and December 4, 2008: let not those dates be forgotten. On September 7, 2010, Judith Jamison announced in the East Room of the White House, “Dance is the soul of this nation!” Michelle Obama, First Lady, was presenting a dance performance there in honour of Jamison. Both women spoke. Jamison, one of the great dance orators, said in her speech to Michelle Obama. “Your vision helps us sustain the heartbeat of what this country is about.”

A number of dance performances have happened at the White House over the decades, but the particular political importance of the September 2010 event (photographs 139-143) was due to matters of race and gender. In 1961, the black John Jones and the white mid-teen Kay Mazzo had danced Jerome Robbins’s “Afternoon of a Faun”, with its dream atmosphere and its kiss (photographs 25-31), in the Kennedy White House. Forty-nine years later, the Obama White House was offering a vision of empowered black women in positions of strength. A black First Lady was honouring the black female director of one of the nation’s most eminent dance companies.

The timing was perfect. Jamison was nearing completion of twenty-one highly successful years as artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre; she was now working with her successor, Robert Battle, through the period of transition. The White House programme had begun with Ailey’s “Cry” (danced by Linda Celeste Sims - photos 142-143), the famous solo created by Jamison herself (photo 144). Implicitly, Jamison was also being honoured for her own long and glorious dance career (photos 145-146).

The White House programme also contained items by George Balanchine, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp, as well as break dance and a solo from “Billy Elliott the musical”. Dancers white and black, male and female, were performing. The programme ended with more Ailey: excerpts, of course, from “Revelations”.

The best part, though, had come before Michelle Obama entered. Nasha Thomas-Schmitt, co-director of the Ailey company’s Dance in Education programme, had led a workshop in which a hundred children tried out adult choreography that would fire soul and body alike. Many of those children remained in the audience for the performance that followed. And Michelle Obama, knowing of their work, happily reminded them: “If you’ve done it in the White House, you can do it anywhere.”

Things can get worse as well as better. In 2010, none of us imagined how far from that high point Barack Obama’s successor at the White House would sink in demeaning women and people of colour. But that 2010 performance and those speeches did happen. Let them not be forgotten.

For me, they were a sequel to the most thrilling gala I had experienced in over twenty years: the December 4, 2008, gala at New York City Center, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had just proclaimed December 4 Alvin Ailey Day in New York; Governor David A. Paterson had just honored the company on behalf of the State of New York; and the United States Congress had just called it the nation’s cultural ambassador to the world. And yes: Barack Obama had just been elected President.

And Jamison (photo 147), at the peak of her unsurpassed rhetorical skill, powerfully told the December 4 2008 City Center audience “You must enjoy every moment of this!” - allowing us to enjoy the full ambiguity of quite what was to be enjoyed, dance, politics, and/or history. Another black woman also addressed that City Center audience: Oprah Winfrey. She called dance “the transcendent mother tongue of the world.” As if to prove this, she cited the astounding numbers: the forty-eight American states and seventy-one foreign countries where the Ailey dancers have appeared, the twenty-one million spectators who have watched Ailey performances. The live singers in the concluding “Revelations” Included Ella Mitchell and the Riverside Inspirational Choir, Marion Moore (a peak of beauty in “Sinner Man”), and Jessye Norman (“Fix Me, Jesus”). I have goosebumps as I recall that evening (photo 148): a summit for us all.

At the end of that 2008 gala, Jamison joined her dancers onstage. Suddenly she turned her back on the audience. A photograph of Ailey himself appeared at the back; nineteen years had passed since his death, but his company had amassed greater glory in those years. The dancers laid bouquets before his picture. Jamison was last to do so; she briefly knelt as she did, then followed her dancers into the wings.

Wednesday 24 February