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Is race still an issue in dance? Dance Magazine looked to key people in the dance community to take the pulse of prejudice in American dance. Is it dead, or dying? Or is it "rearing its head in new and more complex ways"? Black-white bias: problems, tension, debate.

Article Excerpt
When Michael Flamini, a senior editor at Palgrave-Macmillan, approached me about writing a history of "black" dance, I responded that, instead, I wanted to tell the story as a geography of the body itself. I wanted to travel around the black dancing body the way an explorer would approach an unknown continent. So I made chapters devoted to what I call the "embattled territories" of the black dancing body--feet, buttocks, skin (color), and hair.

I BEGAN to examine both black and non-black body image as I went to performances, screened videos and films, and interviewed dance practitioners about their perceptions and opinions on this topic. I realized it was important that this work have material representing my research on African American dance aesthetics as well as the contemporary voices of current dance practitioners. So I interviewed a spectrum of people--black, white, and brown, ranging in age from early thirties to early seventies, representing tap, African, modern, postmodern, Broadway, and ballet genres, as well as several dance writers and a librarian.

I uncovered a range of perceptions, images,...

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