Border Crossings: Dance Seen Through the Lens of Injustice

By Kellen Beckett

Katherine Dunham at Villa I Tatti in Florence, Italy, 1949. She is known as the ‘matriarch and queen mother of black dance.’ This is the lead image of the exhibit.

Carmelita Maracci crossed many borders in her quest to radicalize dance training in the US. She taught Flamenco, Spanish dance, classical ballet technique, modern dance, and Latin/x forms, as well as art and history.

Black and White, by Allison Burroughs and Edith Segal, was one of the first interracial dance performances in the United States. The pair utilized dance performances for the sole purpose of achieving social and political objectives, using workers as participants in performances.

The Federal Theatre Project was a theater program established during the Great Depression to fund the arts. This pamphlet features the Federal Negro Chorus, which provided much needed work and exposure to hundreds of black actors, directors and playwrights.

This piece of anti-fascist propaganda uses dead children and blood-colored red to make it impossible for dance artists to claim ignorance of the Spanish Civil War. Legendary Roma Flamenco artist Carmen Amaya, actor Paul Robeson, Spanish dancer La Argentinita, radical dancer Edith Segal, and tap dancer Paul Draper gathered in stadiums to protest violence and raise money for refugees and war orphans.

Uday Shankar in 1931 established the first Indian Dance Company in Europe. Billed as “Uday Shankar and his Hindu Ballet,” the company was also the first full-scale dance company to tour the US.

“Dear Miss Collins; Our Committee would like to thank you for your wonderful contribution to our Negro History Week celebration. We are justly proud of you, and regard you foremost among Negro Artists who fight in the vanguard of freedom for all minorities. With people of your ability and understanding to support our cause, we feel sure that we shall achieve our goal, –freedom for all. We are grateful to you for your cooperation, and we look forward to seeing you again in the near future.”

Black dance artists created works that drew from several sources: Afro-diasporic and labor dances from the sharecropping fields of the south, the emerging urban choreography of Jazz flappers, and by the 1940s, Afro-Cuban Jazz musicians. Early black female dancers would invent modern Jazz dancing.

Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson created the famous ‘stair dance,’ where he tap danced up and down a flight of stairs both backwards and forwards. The beloved entertainer started performing in local beer gardens at age 5 before becoming a world-class star in Hollywood films.

Hover over each photo to see its description.

UC Santa Barbara is keeing good company in hosting the exhibit Border Crossings: Exile and American Modern Dance, 1900–1955, which is featured at the New York Public Library as well as simultaneously by UCSB’s Art Design & Architecture (AD&A) Museum.

The exhibit “celebrates the heroism of immigrant and BIPOC artists” and “challenges previous histories to consider how war, exile, inequality, and injustice shaped 20th century performance art,” according to the AD&A Museum description.

It was conceived by UCSB Theater and Dance professor Ninotchka Bennahum and Bruce Robertson, emeritus professor in History of Art and Architecture. Border Crossings examines how artists of color and indigenous artists had a deep impact on dance as an art form — through the lens of injustice and border crossings. The exhibit also shows how the history of dance has been archived — from photographs to copies of artwork, to costumes, to videos of performances.

Border Crossings opened at the AD&A Museum on campus on January 25th, and subsequently held a two-day symposium which included panels, artists’ roundtables and a reception. On January 8th, Hatlen Theater hosted one of the very dance companies whose history the exhibit chronicles: The Limon Dance Company. Based in New York City and co-founded by acclaimed dancer and choreographer Jose Limon, it performed excerpts from “Exiles, Danzas Mexicanas,” and “Chaconne” followed by a Q&A with current artistic director of the company, Dante Pueleio. The UCSB Dance Company, which has toured annually in Europe since 2011, also performed. Santa Barbara Dance Theater presented both new and original works supporting the core themes of the exhibit.

Events affiliated with Border Crossings and all the artists it celebrates continue and the UCSB Dance Company will again celebrate the bi-coastal exhibition, performing at Hatlen Theater this Friday March 15th and Saturday March 16th from 7:30-8:30 p.m.

Kellen Beckett is a fourth year Political Science and Writing and Literature major.