Dancing the Black Avant Garde

Black dance artists who have lived in the world of the avant garde, “downtown dance” scene in New York, and the national and international experimental arenas, experience tenuous associations with the larger (albeit imagined) black community of dance particularly in the United States. Often considered “outsider art” or even “white,” postmodern dance aesthetics that have been embraced by black makers and performers has set those creators in a realm of the in-between. In this paper, I consider how we categorize our work, how that work is received by differing constituencies, and where it is ultimately located both in terms of venue and geographic access.