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This is a thoroughly modern series looking at all aspects of different styles of dance, including choreography, performance and presentation, history, costumes, and music.The stunning design and beautiful photography offer a cultural perspective on dance. It promotes an alternative to traditional sports subjects that will appeal particularly to girls. It covers a high-interest topic to get girls reading. ... Read more

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Mr. F. Russel Ross has found the missing traditional national folk wedding dance of the thirty-five million African Americans. His book The Grandmarch – The Spirit of African Americans provides readers with a personal and well-researched journey that spans two continents and five thousand years. F. Russel Ross presents the lost Grandmarch ritual tradition. Read how Mr. Ross’ great-grandfather, Prince Teague, the Mandingo superstud, brought the spirit of the Grandmarch to the United States via slaveship and passed the ritual orally to his offspring in Alabama. Read how the Grandmarch ritual simultaneously travels back to Liberia, Africa with the free Blacks who returned to Africa in 1822 and battled hostile African tribes.Much of this story focuses on superstud Mandingo Prince Teague and his sexual breeder adventures, culminating in an exciting chapter on voodoo that chills the spine of readers. The Grandmarch gives readers an understanding about the marching tradition of African Americans. Americans need to know about this lost history. ... Read more

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The rhythms and dances of Guinea, West Africa spring to life in this ground-breaking multimedia collection from award-winning author Kalani and noted world percussionist Ryan M. Camara! More than just a drumming book, this easy-to-use method immerses teachers and students in traditional West African music, dance and culture through a step-by-step curriculum that maintains cultural authenticity. The World Rhythms! Arts Program (WRAP) is a multiple-discipline curriculum that incorporates drumming, singing, dance, and culture. Rooted in traditional West African music and dance, WRAP helps develop essential arts and life skills through a holistic approach to music and movement education. A must for your classroom! Curriculum Includes: Authentic Techniques & Rhythms, Performance Arrangements, Energetic Dance Steps, History & Culture, Instructional DVD, Play-Along CD ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Yonkadi/Macru Extravaganza rocks!
Excellent book with a tremendous amount of wonderful information! I LOVED it! So have my students! Really enjoying putting all the parts of this piece together and we plan a performance in April! Can't wait! Its a group of 24 women playing African drums and percussion and these ladies rock the block with these pieces! I am really impressed with the book's format and the ease of following the suggested lesson plans to get to the finish. Very very well done! COngratulations, guys! And THANKS!

Expand your understanding of West African Culture
Whether you are an experienced drummer/dancer, new to drum/dance, an educator or an xenophile, this is a great book to dive into. It is wonderful to see a well rounded presentation of one of the celebrations from one of the many ethnic groups of West Africa. You are exposed to the music, the break down of the rhythms, the dance steps, a few phrases in Susu, a little idea of the food and more. I love this book and hope the authors can bring us more books showing some the many other celebrations from the diverse cultures of West Africa.

Thoroughly honoring the Susu drum and dance tradition while keeping it accessible!
There are quite a few books out there offering "West African Rhythms."Some are better than others, but in terms of cultural relevance, most if not all of these books seem to be missing something.They tend to be big on the "rhythms," and not so big on much else.More time may be spent on echaufements and solo lines than the songs, other instruments, and most importantly, the meaning of that particular music.

At almost 170 pages discussing only two "West African Rhythms," this book offers a true glimpse of the Susu culture; through teaching their history, their instruments, dancing, drumming, singing, and more.History and culture are offered in a straight-forward, digestible fashion... and when I say digestible, I'm also referring to actual Susu recipes.

West African Drum & Dance, a Yankadi-Macru Celebration is set up as a curriculum; one that could be used for an older elementary school class as easily as it could be used at the college level.Musical items are broken down and offered in a progressive fashion so that a teacher can customize the speed at which the material is presented.The DVD helps out a lot here as well, and when they show performances, it's from the actual village!

I've played Yankadi/Macru in various settings with people of various levels, including acclaimed Susu djembefola.Looking through this book, I have an entirely new perspective about what it is....it's not a rhythm, it's an involved, beautiful celebration.

Highly recommended to anyone interested in djembe/dunun, and/orin cultural music curriculums. ... Read more

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Student Enrichment Book to the West African Drum & Dance Book. ... Read more

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At the New School for Social Research in 1931, the dance critic for the New York Times announced the arrival of modern dance, touting the “serious art” of such dancers as Mary Wigman, Martha Graham, and Doris Humphrey. Across town, Hemsley Winfield and Edna Guy were staging what they called “The First Negro Dance Recital in America,” which Dance Magazine proclaimed “the beginnings of great and important choreographic creations.” Yet never have the two parallel traditions converged in the annals of American dance in the twentieth century.Modern Dance, Negro Dance is the first book to bring together these two vibrant strains of American dance in the modern era. Susan Manning traces the paths of modern dance and Negro dance from their beginnings in the Depression to their ultimate transformations in the postwar years, from Helen Tamiris’s and Ted Shawn’s suites of Negro Spirituals to concerts sponsored by the Workers Dance League, from Graham’s American Document to the debuts of Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus, from José Limón’s 1954 work The Traitor to Merce Cunningham’s 1958 dances Summerspace and Antic Meet, to Ailey’s 1960 masterpiece Revelations.Through photographs and reviews, documentary film and oral history, Manning intricately and inextricably links the two historically divided traditions. The result is a unique view of American dance history across the divisions of black and white, radical and liberal, gay and straight, performer and spectator, and into the multiple, interdependent meanings of bodies in motion. Susan Manning is associate professor of English, theater, and performance studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of Ecstasy and the Demon: Feminism and Nationalism in the Dances of Mary Wigman, winner of the 1994 de la Torre Bueno Prize for the year’s most important contribution to dance studies. ... Read more

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The vibrant humor of African American women is celebrated in this bold and unique collection that the Miami Herald describes as "breathtakingly broad and deep." In this "dazzling anthology" (Publishers Weekly), Daryl Cumber Dance has collected the often hard-hitting, sometimes risqu, always dramatic humor that arises from the depth of black women's souls and the breadth of their lives. The eloquent wit and laughter of African American women are presented here in all their written and spoken manifestations: autobiographies, novels, essays, poems, speeches, comic routines, proverbial sayings, cartoons, mimeographed sheets, and folk tales. The chapters proceed thematically, covering the church, love, civil rights, motherly advice, and much more.Amazon.com Review
This massive (nearly 700 pages) anthology offers a fascinating survey of black women's humor, compiled from folk sources, the blues, and poetry, fiction, anecdotal recollections, and routines by such comedians as the late Jackie "Moms" Mabley. The title, editor Daryl Cumber Dance informs, is a "playful entreaty" that black women use to encourage each other or to express disbelief in private conversations when swapping jokes and tall tales. Some of the material in Honey, Hush is a bit bawdy and off-color, and Dance, a professor of English at the University of Richmond in Virginia, warns that "humor is often unkind, unfair, and unjust." Enter with an open mind and a willingness to laugh, however, and you'll be sure to have fun. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Great Collection...a must have.
Very good collection of African American writting.I enjoyed it.

I wish ... had six stars
This books is off the charts! Ive been reading for a long time, and this book just encompasses so much for the African American experience. My favorite parts of each chapter are the anecdotes and sayings found at the end of each respectively. Purchase this book and pass it on other everyone you know who needs a laugh!

Hilarious reading for African American Women and AfrAm. Men!
This book has been the "Hit" of several recent book parties in The San Francisco East Bay and South Bay Areas.Dr. Dance's book evokes memories of Black humor we rarely are exposed to anymore.Theseanthologies are the best I have read in years.We can still laugh atourselves and love the humor in the antidotes.

EVERY BLACK WOMAN CAN TRULY RELATE
This is by far the greatest anthology that I have ever laid eyes on. It was very well put together!

Hilarious, and true.
This is an enormously funny, if often slightly risque, anthology. I took it to the office, and my African American fellow workers can't put it down. Ever since I brought it in, periodically there are howls of laughter fromaround the building. And several of them have told me that they have heardsome of these stories and sayings from their own relatives and friends.Highly recommended! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Excellent and Fun

I truly enjoyed this book.I enjoyed it so much that I spent hours looking at Youtube videos of the people, groups, and dances that were mentioned in the book.What this book did for me was forced me to seek out other information and learn more. Ms. Malone dealt with various aspects of African American vernacular dance i.e., big bands and jazz dancing, steppin' traditions, Black marching bands, etc.

Excerpt I liked:

"Let the Punishment Fit the Crime": The Vocal Choreography of Cholly Atkins, Chapter Seven

"He is the wellspring from which we flow. And the groups that want to be viable go back to Cholly.What he uses is more of a scientific approach than a fad approach. Cholly understand the way that the human body moves, he understand the grace of dance."Melvin Franklin an original Temptations

"From the twenties through most of the forties, American tap dance in the jazz/rhythm tradition experienced its heyday.Suddenly in the late forties, the bottom dropped out for many rhythm tap dancers who had established successful careers in vaudeville, in musicals, and with big bands. By the sixties, even the great champion and chronicler of American vernacular dance, Marshall Sterns, wondered if classic jazz dance was vanishing forever.Although we know now that black vernacular dance evolves in cyclical pattern, no one could have predicted in the sixties that dance movements from the twenties, thirties, and forties would live on through the nineties and beyond in many of the performance traditions that span African American culture.

The lively existence of such black dancing vocal groups as those in the Motown Town Revue helped preserve and recycle much of the vocabulary of classic jazz dance, including some tap.The man largely responsible for this particular cultural transference was Cholly Atkins, a jazz dance artiest who worked as a choreographer for Motown Records from 1965 to 1971.

The Atkins contribution to American culture has been extraordinarily significant.He not only made polished performers out of rock-and-roll singers who started with a hit single and raw ambition. He taught them to perform their music by doing dances that worked their magic not by retelling a song's storyline in predictable pantomime but bypunctuating it with rhythmical dance steps, turns, and gestures drawn from the rich bedrock of black vernacular dance."

In so doing, he virtually created a new form of expression: Vocal choreography.Thoroughly versed in twentieth-century African American dance forms, from social dances like the lindy hop to street-corner (and then stage) sensations like rhythm tap, Atkins gave his singing groups a depth and appeal that was sometimes lacking in their tunes and lyrics.Without knowing, popular groups of the sixties, seventies, and eighties were performing updated versions of dances of the forties, thirties, and twenties - classic black vernacular dances - and projecting them to a larger audience than ever before.Through the good offices of Cholly Atkins, even movements from tap, markedly out of favor in the sixties, were being taught to sixties rock-and-roll stars, who introduced them to the new generation to the United States and around the globe. That the style or body language of rhythm tap is so accessible to young African Americans today has to be due in part to these "underground" efforts of vocal choreographer Atkins.

The book covers so much more.The chapter on Cholly was simply my favorite.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in African American history and culture.

REPRINT THIS BOOK, WE NEED IT
Jacqui Malone's _Steppin on the Blues_ needs to be reprinted so it is available to scholars, musicians, dancers, and the public who need to hear what Malone says. Itis a necessary book for understanding African American life and culture in general, andAfrican American music and dance in particular.Her explanations of how the musics and the dances fit into real social life of Africans and African Americans as well as her examinations of dance in modern social life of African Americans are excellent. While her books is well documented, her style is accessible to all readers.

I've been looking at books on Black dance as part of a larger study of Black music and culture. _Steppin on the Blues_ is essential.While Malone does not offer as full and as documented a history as Emery's _Black Dance: 1619 to the Present_, she provides a good explanation of how dance fits into the culture and life of African societies in Africa and in the Diaspora, particularly in the United States.She explains this in the context of more modern discussions about African and African American identity than any other source.Her references and sources provide a good introduction to question of general African American culture and identity.

Malone leaves aside Black vernacular and folk dance and music when she reaches the development of Black show dancing in the 19th Century and Black art dance in the early 20th century.However, at the close of her book she studies the role of dance in several contemporary forms of Black cultural and social life, stepping at Black colleges, dance in Black social and fraternal orders,and dance in the Florida A. & M, marching band.Each of those three chapters is worth the price of the book. They provide clear studies about how the continuation of African-originated social and cultural forms responds to the real needs of African Americans in 20th and 21st Century life. My favorite was her chapter on college stepping which focused on the history of stepping at Howard University.

Despite the title, Malone says almost nothing about one subject that I was most interested in: blues dancing. While the popular current notion of the blues, especially from without the Blues People, sees the blues as a solo singer's work for concert or cabaret performance, blues especially in its origins was a dance music and new forms of dancing, blues couple dancing emerged as the blues overcame other forms of folk and popular musics in the first decades of the 20th Century.

Still, this is too important a book to be only available at collector's prices.REPRINT THIS BOOK!
... Read more

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The story of one man's resistance to a system and society run by "faceless ones". Dusman Gonzaga lives in a squalid tenement building overrun with cockroaches and inhabited by strange characters. His is a world of poverty, fights, bar women and visits to a doctor who doesn't understand him. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Plight of the modern African
I've never written a review, but seeing that no one has sung this books praises, I thought I would write my first....

The Cockroach Dance, set in modern Nairobi, Kenya, is the story one's mans fight against the system in Kenya wought with curruption and ineptnitude.Dusman Gonzaga lives in an delapidated apartment block filled with a memorable cast of characters, and the story (often hilarious and ultimately uplifting), chronicles Dusman's daily struggles and fights in his attempts to survive in an oppresive, modern African city.

I read this year's ago, so details escape me, but I remember loving it, laughing with and at and empathizing with the protagonist.One scene that has always stayed with me was when a city worker was trying to get Dusman to reveal his tribal origin and Dusman refuses to answer.I brought home all the signifigance of tribalism in Africa and how difficult its restaints are to escape.

A great read for anyone, and particulary for anyone with a passing interest in what life is like for the average African city dweller.

A brief disclaimer, I was sitting in a campsite on the outskirts of Nairobi when I was reading this book so it had a certain resonance that it might not have with someone who has never been to Africa or to Nairobi in particular.

... Read more

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Katrina Hazzard-Gordon offers the first analysis of the development of the jook—an underground cultural institution created by the black working class—together with other dance arenas in African-American culture. Beginning with the effects of African slaves’ middle passage experience on their traditional dances, she traces the unique and virtually autonomous dance culture that developed in the rural South. Like the blues, these secular dance forms and institutions were brought north and urbanized by migrating blacks. In northern cities, some aspects of black dance became integrated into white culture and commercialized. Focusing on ten African-American dance arenas from the period of enslavement to the mid-twentieth century, this book explores the jooks, honky-tonks, rent parties, and after-hours joints as well as the licensed membership clubs, dance halls, cabarets, and the dances of the black elite.

Jook houses emerged during the Reconstruction era and can be viewed as a cultural response to freedom. In the jook, Hazzard-Gordon explains, an immeasurable amount of core black culture including food, language, community fellowship, mate selection, music, and dance found a sanctuary of expression when no other secular institution flourished among the folk. The jook and its various derivative forms have provided both entertainment and an economic alternative (such as illegal lotteries and numbers) to people excluded from the dominant economy. Dances like the Charleston, shimmy, snake hips, funky butt, twist, and slow drag originated in the jooks; some can be traced back to Africa.

Social dancing links black Americans to their African past more strongly than any other aspect of their culture. Citing the significance of dance in the African-American psyche, this study explores the establishments that nurtured ancestral as well as communal links for African-Americans, vividly describing black dances, formal rituals, such as debutante balls, and the influence of black dance on white culture. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Skip Jookin'
Jookin' featured shockingly poor organization, accompanied by shoddy writing that efficiently obscured meaning behind names and dates tossed out with abandon. Though ostensibly about social dance, the writing lacked movement. Hazzard-Gordon rarely got around to interpreting how the changing socio-cultural formations effected the physical movements. (For example: How did movements change to accommodate the smaller spaces of Rent Parties?) Though I slogged through it, I wouldn't recommend anyone e...more Jookin' featured shockingly poor organization, accompanied by shoddy writing that efficiently obscured meaning behind names and dates tossed out with abandon. Though ostensibly about social dance, the writing lacked movement. Hazzard-Gordon rarely got around to interpreting how the changing socio-cultural formations effected the physical movements. (For example: How did movements change to accommodate the smaller spaces of Rent Parties?) Though I slogged through it, I wouldn't recommend anyone else bother.

A good book, but I want to know more about Jookin'
_Jookin'_ is a necessary book if you are on the trail of African American musical and dance culture. Its approach is the acceptance of the integral relationship between music and dance and life among the African peoples enslaved into the current US and its survival and continuation in Black popular dance.

There is much in her discussion of this in colonial times particularly that is useful, especially if read along with other more clearly documented texts like Emery's _Black Dance 1619 to Today_. Indeed, Hazzard-Gordon tend's to go back and forth in regard to what period she is talking about with an inconsistency that makes the historically oriented reader a bit confused and disappointed.

From the title we expect a full discussion, explanation of the life of the blues juke houses that reigned as centers of African American musical and dance creation and celebration from the post reconstruction period to the end of the agricultural Black belt south in the 1950s and 1960s.

Yet Hazzard-Gordon does not stop and dwell upon this phase, but moves forward to a concentration of popular African American entertainment venues in Cleveland, Ohio and their relationship with local politics.For those interested this is an interesting study and brings back aspects of African American life across the country that is rarely documented--urban black popular entertainment in the first half of the 20th century.
Whatever the exact differences between the story she tells of Cleveland and other cities, I am sure both in memory and need for study, this segment of the book will be interesting and rewarding to readers.

However, this segment reflects problems that the book has all along. Hazzard-Gordon feels the need to provide nearly complete explanations of political and economic factors that have impact on her subject. This is commendable. Yet, these explanations get so large that they sometimes overshadow what she really has to say about Black vernacular dance and entertainment, which is what the book is supposed to be about.

Nevertheless, this book is an important achievement as it attempts to capture the essentialness of popular dance and music to African American life and its popular outlets both underslavery and since. Unlike other authors who discuss popular and folk dance only until the development of professional Black entertainment in minstrel shows and the stage, and abandon that once art dancing emerges in the early 20th Century, her focus remains squarely on popular dance from the forced "dancing" on the slave ships to the "dancing in the street" of the urban block parties of the 1950s and 1960s.

While this reader might have wanted more about rural Juke Houses, and more about the experience of their urban descendants, her picture of the mixture of business and politics in the growth of urban clubs, bars, dance halls, after hours joints, and night clubs in Cleveland is quite useful to understand African American urban life in the first two thirds of the 20th Century.

For a broader picture of African American dance and popular music I recommend the aforementioned _Black Dance 1619 to_Today_ and _Steppin' on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance_by Jacqui Malone. ... Read more

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The survival of African cultural traditions in the New World has long been a subject of academic study and controversy, particularly traditions of dance, music, and song. Yet the dance culture of blacks in London, where a growing black community carried on the newly creolized dance traditions of their Caribbean ancestors, has been largely neglected.

This study begins by examining the importance of dance in African culture and analyzing how African dance took root in the Caribbean, even as slaves learned and adapted European dance forms. It then looks at how these dance traditions were transplanted and transformed once again, this time in mid-eighteenth century London. Finally it analyzes how the London black community used the quadrille and other dances to establish a unified self-identity, to reinforce their group dynamic, and to critique the oppressive white society in which they found themselves. ... Read more

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