Work by artists of African, Caribbean and Asian backgrounds began to be funded in Britain in the 1970s under the banner of ethnic arts or ethnic minority
arts.2 The Minority Arts Advisory Service, for example, supported the
establishment in 1977 of the MAAS Movers, the first funded Black-led dance company (Thorpe 1984, p.175). However, coming into the 1980s, these terms fell out of favour. The 1980s was a time of race riots and heightened political agitation and an active Black Arts Movement. ‘Ethnic arts’ and similar terms began to be seen as Eurocentric (Owusu1988, p.2). Most vitriolic in the condemnation of the term was the cultural activist Kwesi Owusu whose description of ‘ethnic minority arts’ places it in a colonial discourse. He
describes champions of ethnic minority arts as dividing tradition and modernity so that non-western forms inhabited the former and European forms, the
latter(Owusu 1986 p. 64). He also describes the ethnic minority arts as ignoring the transnational dialogue that Black artists were having with counterparts in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, and seeking to ‘ghettoise them within the British nation-state’ (Owusu 1988, p 2). By ignoring this dialogue, funders were in effect ignoring the discursive context of these artists’ work.
‘Black’ for this and other reasons became the ‘banner’ under which people of colour - Asian, Caribbean, African – organised and resisted racism. This usage of the term was different to how it was used in America then or how it is used in Britain now, which is in reference to people of mainly African descent
(Alexander 2002, p. 554).
2 Most of this chapter has been published in British Dance: Black Routes edited by Christy Adair and Ramsay Burt in an article entitled
The construction of the Black dance/African peoples dance sector In Britain: issues arising for the conceptualization of related choreographic and dance practices in British Dance.
Understandably black dance in the 1980s was used similarly as a political banner. In his book Black Dance (1984), Edward Thorpe uses the term ‘black
dance’ to encompass a number of groupings: dance companies that were led by Black people, dancers who were Black but worked with predominately white companies, and dance productions which displayed dance forms from Africa or the diaspora or whose choreography drew on these forms. A section in this book provides historical information on British companies such as Adzido Pan- African dance ensemble, IRIE! Dance Theatre, Phoenix Dance Company and Union Dance Company as well as Black dancers who were dancing with mainstream companies such as Namron and Kenneth Tharp in London
Contemporary Dance Theatre (Thorpe 1984, pp.169 -185). I would argue that Thorpe’s book does not place its subjects in a choreographic discourse or history of dance but a history of Black achievement and pride. It contributes to a discourse formation that addresses issues around minority status (Pirker 2011, p. 18-19). Thorpe’s book highlights the work of dance pioneers and companies who had made an impact in a cultural context from which Black people had been historically excluded. It also places value on dance productions where the forms and aesthetics of Africa and the Diaspora are displayed but which were often overlooked by critics.
If Thorpe’s book had addressed issues of choreographic practice, it would have probably interrogated the fact that the Black-led dance companies that it
produced work with different aspirations, as well as discussing the relationship between the term black dance and choreographic practice. Dance scholar Thomas DeFrantz, for example, finds Thorpe’s book ‘highly inadequate’ as an example of dance research or theory, and essentialist in its theorising of black dance (DeFrantz 2002, p. 15). Neither is choreographic practice or the politics of theatrical production the focus of the other well-known book of the time, Lynne Fauley Emery’s Black Dance in the United States from 1619 to 1970
(1972). Thomas Defrantz, describes Emery’s book as presenting a history of Black choreographers and dancers as victims of white oppression, located outside of mainstream America (DeFrantz 2002, p. 13). In short, though
providing useful information, these books did not address the conceptual issues raised by the work of Black choreographers. They did contribute, however, to histories of Black presence, pride and achievement and the politics of minority status faced by Black dancers.
The Black Dance Development Trust (BDDT) was formed to support a group of dance companies, which began to emerge in the 1970s, due to a growing interest in African and Caribbean dances. At the time, due to the strong pan- Africanist ethos of Black community organisations, the term African dance was often used as an umbrella term to encompass traditional Caribbean dance forms as well. Some of these companies, including three of the most popular ones, Ekomé, Lanzel and Delado, arose from community outreach programmes run by Steel ‘n’ Skin, another of the early recipients of Arts Council funding. Steel ‘n’ Skin was a dance and music outfit which organised community and
outreach programmes all over Britain. Adzido Pan African Dance Ensemble, mentioned in Thorpe’s book, started as part of this movement. For the members of these companies, they were a platform for spiritual, cultural and political expression.Theydid not receive regional arts funding but were engaged by local councils for community relations and by schools for education projects. They were also involved in employment schemes. The 1980s was a period of social deprivation, and riots, which were led predominantly by disenfranchised Black men. The agendas of funders were therefore to boost job creation, urban regeneration, and improve race relations. The Manpower Services Commission was a prominent funder (Brown 2012).
Leaders of some of these dance companies began to canvass for an umbrella organisation to aid their professional development. They approached Bob Ramdhanie who was working at the CAVE Arts Centre in Birmingham. Ramdhanie, a pragmatic visionary with a track record of successful projects established the Black Dance Development Trust (BDDT) in response to their requests. Ramdhanie states that ‘black dance’ was used in the title of the trust because it was a political label that resonated with many black Britons. He, however, insists that trust’s focus was on the development of a practice that used African and Caribbean dance forms in the British professional context (Ramdhanie 2005, p.256).