Equity & Excellence in Education

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Facing and Transforming Hauntings of Race

Through the Arts

Rosemarie A. Roberts

To cite this article: Rosemarie A. Roberts (2011) Facing and Transforming Hauntings
of Race Through the Arts, Equity & Excellence in Education, 44:3, 330-347, DOI:
10.1080/10665684.2011.591260

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2011.591260

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EQUITY & EXCELLENCE IN EDUCATION, 44(3), 330–347, 2011
Copyright

C University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Education
ISSN: 1066-5684 print / 1547-3457 online
DOI: 10.1080/10665684.2011.591260

Facing and Transforming Hauntings of Race

Through the Arts
Rosemarie A. Roberts
Connecticut College

This article examines the pedagogical processes through which dance choreography and performance
embody issues of social injustices. The author draws on ethnographic data of prominent black
choreographers/dancers/educators, Katherine Dunham and Ronald K. Brown, to consider the behind
the scene complex, interdependent practices of embodiment and to explore the ways in which
concealed, yet present, social phenomena are transformed into provocative in-motion stories for
the concert stage. Drawing on social justice education principles and Gordon’s (1997) conception
of ghostly phenomena, the data show that disavowing race and structural racism leave lingering and
weighted traces of racialized experiences, making embodiment a complex and necessary condition
for performing artists who aim to convey the meaning of these traces through dancing social justice.

In 1944 anthropologist, dancer, educator, and choreographer Katherine Dunham toured in

segregated Kentucky with her all black dance company. As an act of protest against a segregated
audience, Miss Dunham pinned a sign reading, “‘No Whites Allowed,’ to the back of one of [her]
fancy little skirts” (Dunham, 2002)1 and walked onto the Louisville Memorial Auditorium stage.
Facing the audience, Dunham graciously bowed to rousing applause. She told the white members
of the audience:
It makes me very happy to know that you have liked us, that you have felt some of the beauty and
happiness that we feel when we perform. But tonight our hearts are very sad because this is a farewell
to Louisville. There comes a time when every human must protest in order to retain human dignity.
I must protest because I have discovered that your management will not allow people like you to sit
next to people like us. I hope that time and the unhappiness of this war for tolerance and democracy,
which I am sure we will win, will change some of these things, perhaps then we can return. Until
then, God bless you—for you may need it. (Dunham, 1944/2005, p. 255)

The silent and concealed dehumanization and alienation that normalized social practice of
racial segregation engenders haunted Miss Dunham throughout her company’s stay in Louisville.
In the end, she performed the angry, seething presence of the “unequal” in the legal doctrine of
“separate but equal” that was used to justify racial segregation. Using body pedagogy (Boler,
1999; Freire, 1997; Garoian, 1999; Harman & French, 2004; Huckaby, 2010; O’Donald, Hatza, &
Springgay, 2010; Sandlin & Milam, 2010; Springgay, 2008) to protest, Miss Dunham’s physical

Address correspondence to Rosemarie A. Roberts, Connecticut College, #5627, Department of Education, 270
Mohegan Avenue, New London, CT 06320-4196. E-mail: rrobert1@conncoll.edu
 HAUNTINGS OF RACE 331

gesture, together with speech, aimed to reveal and rewrite the taken-for-granted or stock stories
(Bell, 2010; Bell & Roberts, 2010) of racial segregation, which “operate . . . to legitimize the
perspectives of the dominant racial group in our society” (Bell, 2010, p. 29).
Contemporary choreographer, writer, and dancer, Ronald K. Brown also faces and animates the
hauntings of racial injustice. In 2002, Brown choreographed and performed a solo tribute to Miss
Dunham and her legacy of creating dance to protest and agitate for social change (Aschenbrenner,
1981; Roberts, 2011). As his dance nears the end, Brown spins and lands at Miss Dunham’s feet,
head bowed, arms outstretched. Brown’s supplicant gesture humbly asks permission to continue
the work that she started more than 50 years earlier. Brown, too, conceptualizes dance as a site
of encounter with social realities we need to unearth and to unlearn. Katherine Dunham and
Ronald K. Brown, two prominent, black choreographers/dancers/educators, use dance to trace
the haunting issues of social injustice and to conjure up and embody ghosts in order both to reveal
and to challenge their presence.
The term social ghosts denotes the internalized dynamics of oppression that individuals adopt
and learn (Bell, 2007; Hardiman, Jackson, & Griffin, 2007) as well as pervasive social injustices
woven throughout social institutions, structures, and bodies (Bell, 2007; Bell, Love, & Roberts,
2007). Conceptually, social ghosts describe the troubling redolent and concealed social issues
that haunt individual lives and plague society. Consequently, no matter the social, political, and
economic resources put to the service of ignoring, obscuring, and concealing them, social ghosts
hover in the shadows ready to be conjured up. Alternatively, they can be embodied in the service
of naming and calling attention to the presence of the social injustices that live on in the present.
Using body pedagogy, Dunham and Brown move between and beyond the socially constructed
boundaries of language and body (Boler, 1999; Springgay, 2008) to conjure, name, and analyze
social ghosts in the service of social justice. Mackendrick (2004) indicates the following:
[Language and body are related and] call to one another . . . each pushes beyond the limits that our
ordinary understanding has set and our ordinary experience perceived, bringing through dancing body
and . . . text open spaces that we had not supposed to be there, that are not supposed to be there:
spaces of transgressive delight. (p. 142)

In body pedagogy, therefore, neither language nor dance alone is as powerful as they are together
to name and call attention to the social ghosts of injustice. Dunham and Brown, though not
teachers in the conventional sense, are pedagogues of the body. Through dance, they transgress
the boundaries of body and language to engage in the kind of teaching/learning that provokes
encounters with the social ghosts of racial injustice. Dunham and Brown engage the moving body
as a mode of inquiry and a device to connect individual and personal stories of oppression and
dehumanization to their cultural, social, and historical counterparts.
Dunham and Brown use African-derived, black dance to call attention to the problem of
racial injustice by following the contours of legitimated, normalized forms of social injustices
that at once haunt and go unnoticed in the public. In the language of social justice education,
Dunham and Brown engage in a pedagogical process that affirms humanity and “the human
capacity to work collaboratively to create change” (Bell, 2007, p. 2). Notably, these artists
use cultural, social, and historical practices to affirm blackness and to reveal the social power
dynamics and social inequality that result in naturalizing institutional and social/cultural levels
of injustices that are overlooked (Adams, Bell, & Griffin, 2007; Hardiman, Jackson, & Griffin,
2007). Hardiman, Jackson, and Griffin (2007) assert that cultural norms often serve the function of
332 ROBERTS

“providing individuals and institutions with the justification for social oppression” (p. 40). Thus,
this process of revelation and affirmation involves naming injustices (Adams, 2007; Fine & Wong,
1995; Freire, 1970/1994; Greene, 1988; Shor & Freire, 1987), examining how different forms of
injustices are linked, and interrogating the contradictions that exist between how injustices are
lived and how they are obscured. That is, naming as a way to reveal injustice is an important
feature of social justice education but alone insufficient to transform racial injustice.
Conceptualizing dance as a critical site of encounter for dancers and viewing audiences,
Dunham and Brown’s body pedagogy is a blend of raising awareness, reflection, and social
action, reflecting core principles of Freirean pedagogy (1970/1994) and social justice education
(Adams, Bell, & Griffin, 2007). In this article, I present Dunham’s ballet drama, Southland,
and Brown’s evening-length dance, Walking Out the Dark, to illustrate their body pedagogy.
Although these dances differ in the explicitness of their political message and, though they were
created at distinct historical moments, they share a significant similarity: Both dances embody
the racial, social ghosts of their time. Southland reveals the normalized practice of lynching
in the segregated South. Walking Out the Dark tells an in-motion story of the humanity of
black families struggling for freedom against the backdrop of racial injustice. These two pieces
embody the ghosts of dominating social and racial formations (Omi & Winant, 1994), such as
lynching, racism, slavery, segregation, and integration that are absent from public dialogue and
consciousness. In my analysis, I show how Dunham and Brown trace the contours of hauntings
and ghostly aspects of social life through the body for the purpose of “finding the shape described
by [its] absence” (Gordon, 1997, p. 6). Dunham and Brown present “invisibilized” histories
of resistance to domination that do not make it into history books (for exceptions, see Katz,
1986; Kelley, 1994; Zinn, 2003) and show the inextricable connections between past and present
structural injustices (Bell, 2007; Roberts, 1998; Tuhiwai Smith, 1999).
Social ghosts as the convergence of social “forces that . . . make [their] mark by being there
and not being there at the same time. . . . are a particular kind of social alchemy that eludes us
as often as it makes us look for it” (Gordon, 1997, p. 6). Through the process of creating and
performing dance, Dunham and Brown reveal the social ghosts that reside inside “the ensemble
of cultural imaginings, affective experiences, animated objects, marginal voices . . . and traces of
power’s presence” (p. 25). The central question addressed in this article is how do social ghosts
become animated and activated toward transforming social injustices?

SOCIAL GHOSTS IN THE ARTS

Many works of art are provocative and, whether stated or unstated, carry a political and moral
agenda (Bolstein, 1998). Theorists have discussed radical performance texts that have come out
of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s (Baraka, 1997; hooks, 1990), feminist and
Chicano/Chicana Cultural Movements (Harrington, 1999; Hurtado, 2000), and, more recently,
popular culture and hip hop (Daspit & Weaver, 1999; Dimitriadis, 2001; hooks, 1990, 1992).
Hurtado observes that “cultural production is a means by which young people can explore
alternative forms of consciousness and social relations” (p. 274). Greene (1995) theorizes that
aesthetic education and the artist play critical roles in stimulating a public toward imagining a
better, more just world. Critical ideas are brought forth and articulated into a public through
the arts and aesthetic education (Greene, 1995). As the methodological counterpart of Freire’s
 HAUNTINGS OF RACE 333

(1970/1994) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Theatre of the Oppressed (Boal, 1992) includes a
framework and a set of methods configured to transform actors into agents of social change and
spectators into actors for social change. According to Boal, “the most important element of theatre
is the human body” (p. xxx). “Theatre,” Boal continues, “is a form of knowledge; it should and
can also be a means of transforming society. Theatre can help us build our future, rather than just
waiting for it” (p. xxxi).
The Storytelling Project2 (Bell, 2010; Roberts, Bell, & Murphy, 2008) and Echoes of Brown
Project3 (Fine, Roberts, & Torre, 2004) are two projects that intentionally brought together
aesthetic and non-aesthetic purposes to engage with questions of power and social justice in and
outside of schools. Both projects used performing arts, such as spoken word, dance, and theatre,
and Theater of the Oppressed games to draw participants and viewers into an interdisciplinary,
multi-dimensional, rhetorical space wherein they moved through a world that had not yet come
into being. During Storytelling Project workshops, Theater of the Oppressed games (Boal, 1992)
were used to embody a word or phrase generated from group conversations following a viewing
of the DVD, “Race the Power of an Illusion” (Adelman, 2003). In groups of three to four,
participants physicalized “power,” “domination,” “segregation,” “resistance,” and “whiteness” in
a series of tableaux (Bell, 2010). Each group presented their tableau for interactive commentary.
Participant-observers stepped into the tableau, changed the picture, and, therefore, generated
new meanings. Moving between still and moving images allowed participants to “open up taken
for granted ideas about how racism works, and consider how location/position differentially
affects individuals and the meanings drawn from different tableau” (p. 99). Moving between
cognition and embodiment provided a powerful opportunity for participants to explore their
emotional “connections and associations with racism” (p. 99) in ways that incorporated all the
participants. On another occasion during the project, participants explored dance as a way to
deepen their understanding of themes of oppression and liberation through the body. During a
workshop, I taught Ibo, a Haitian danced story about slavery and liberation.4 As a professionally-
trained dancer in Afro-Diasporic dance, generally, and in the Katherine Dunham tradition of
dance,5 specifically, I aimed for the workshop participants to embody forced containment that
was prevalent in slavery and the liberation achieved through resistance to social, political, and
embodied oppression. I began the workshop by showing a video of Ibo dance, drawing attention
to the ways in which the historical uses of resistance are concealed “where overt resistance was
deadly” (p. 105). The visual representation also gave participants a historical context and language
within which to situate the dance. Initially, I taught the dance using non-verbal gestures and
movements. As participants demonstrated a basic understanding of the movement vocabulary,
I used a mix of non-verbal and verbal communication. I called attention to the connections
between the idea of oppression and the experience of containment embodied in small, staccato,
foot movements and the idea of liberation expressed in large, open, arm and leg gestures and
movements. After dancing, I facilitated a discussion about how oppression and resistance to
oppression were embodied. Situating oppression and liberation in a specific historical context
and dancing these themes took participants on an embodied journey of meaning-making at the
intersection of oppression and resistance. The experience of physicalizing a historically specific
act of resistance alone would have provided participants with a material and embodied anchor
to release the social imagination toward hope and possibility. However, without the embodied
experience of containment, the presence of its counterpart, a specific racialized form of oppression
would have remained unnamed and unseen. Moreover, dancing the intersection of oppression and
334 ROBERTS

resistance revealed the power embedded in that relationship, both as a form of dominance and as
a form of liberation. The Storytelling and Echoes of Brown projects demonstrate that the arts and
performance are powerful ways to name and give voice and form to injustices in ways that release
the social imagination toward possibility and hope. They offered participants and viewers an
intersectional space where the social ghosts of injustices reside and traces of power are revealed.

PERFORMING THE SOCIAL GHOSTS OF POWER

In a general sense, dance is the art of making patterns with the human body in time and space
(Royce, 1977). Among the arts, dance is also marginal (Chatterjea, 2004). I join Martin (1998) in
arguing that its minoritized position renders its political and social subversion especially powerful.
Born in the soil of power discontent, African-derived, black dance is a critical, performative site
of action for manifesting and embodying power discontent (Roberts, 2005). Sherrod (1998)
asserts that as early as the 1920s, when concert dance was developing, black concert dance
spoke of social, political, and economic experiences. This was the case for both teaching and
performance. Sherrod documented the process through which African, African American, and
African Caribbean dance pioneers of the late 1930s and 1940s conceptualized and taught dance
that reflected their subjugated and specialized knowledges (Collins, 2000; Du Bois, 1953/2003;
Kincheloe, 2008) as black and African peoples in the United States and their research of African-
derived dance in Africa and the Diaspora. Sherrod found that a teaching and performing tradition
developed within black dance that used African-derived movements and concepts to dance themes
of black lived experience, both historical and contemporary. For instance, Browning (1995) says
of samba, an African-derived dance form

In Portuguese, one says that the skilled Sambista is able, and obliged to dizer no pe’ speak with the
feet. No other language is required; song is redundant, words are superfluous . . . In the samba, in
fact, not only the feet speak. The dance is a complex dialogue in which various parts of the body talk
at the same time, and in seemingly different languages. The feet keep up a rapid patter, while the
hips beat out a heavy staccato and the shoulders roll a slow drawl . . . The message is simultaneously
narrative and lyrical. That is to say it spins itself out over time, increasing in meaning as it recounts
its origins; and yet it compresses its significance in a momentary image. Samba narrates a story of
racial contact, conflict and resistance. (pp. 1–2)

Spinning out a historical narrative, remembering origins, conflicts, domination, and resistance
is a feature of the African-derived, black dance teaching and performing tradition. As black dance
has changed and evolved, this historical feature endures as a critical part of African-derived, black
dance. Choreographers and dancers transform dance performance into a social, collective space
where an audience encounters the historical rememberings and specialized knowledges that are
ghosted. For instance, black modern dancer and choreographer Dianne McIntyre says,

I want the dance to have some meaning, some kind of impact on myself, the dancers, and the people
who experience it . . . I want the dance to have a close connection with what people’s lives are about.
Because of that the themes I select often deal with our history and whatever we feel from the inside
in our daily lives. (cited in West, 1996, p. 131)
 HAUNTINGS OF RACE 335

In the hands of Katherine Dunham and Ronald K. Brown, African-derived, black dance is a
provocative encounter with “the world of social domination as well as the resistance to domination
from a Black perspective, especially the nation’s unresolved themes of injustice, marginalization,
and segregation along racial lines” (Cross, 1991, p. 200). Rich in moving historical content,
African-derived black performance dance is a critical site where troubled past and present con-
verge in “a moment of production . . . induc[ing] actively a tension between the present and
the past, between the dead and the living” (Eng & Kazanjian, 2003, p. 5). The dead are the
social ghosts of a national and collective troubled past and the resistance against forgetting a
collective troubled past. Eng and Kazanjian (2003) argue that only by contending with a troubled
past—that which has been rendered dead and forgotten but is, in reality, very much part of lived
experience—can we hope for social change.

PROVOKING CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Through participatory observations, in-depth narrative interviews, and archival data collection
and analysis, I examine three dimensions of critical consciousness: pedagogy, content, and en-
counters. Pedagogy, the process by which dance educators develop a set of instructional and
performance practices and goals for provoking critical consciousness across time, audiences,
and encounter settings; Content, the substance of instructional and performance practices across
time, audiences, and encounter settings; and Encounters, concepts of the social events and ex-
periences of teaching and performing as a site of provocation and social actions employed to
create an encounter. A multi-method approach “reflects an attempt to secure an in-depth under-
standing of the phenomenon in question” (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994, p. 2) and allows patterns
and idiosyncrasies (Lather, 1986) to emerge through distinct methods, in this case, archival data
collection, observations, and interviews. Conceptually, this design creates opportunities to cover
two encounter settings, namely teaching and performance. Within these settings—which include
rehearsals, performances, post-performance talk, and dance classes—I examine the process of
creating encounters for audiences.
Katherine Dunham and Ronald K. Brown were selected based upon the following criteria:
Dance practitioners were6 both based in New York City, globally recognized as a prominent
cultural and dance center; they were both performing and teaching in New York; and their dance
vocabulary incorporated African-derived movements, postures, gestures, and black themes. Sig-
nificantly, Dunham and Brown were also of African ancestry, who each brought to the research
the wisdom gained from their subjugated and specialized knowledges (Collins, 2000; Du Bois,
1953/2003; Kincheloe, 2008) about race and racism. I conducted in-depth interviews with Dun-
ham, Brown, and company members available during the period of data collection.
Based on an initial viewing of the video-taped data (of the dance and choreographic process)
and reading of the spoken/textual data (interview, archival, participant observation field notes) I
developed a coding scheme based on the themes that emerged. Data were then coded by listening
to and viewing the spoken, textual, and dance data multiple times (Gilligan, Brown, & Rogers,
1990; Wilkinson, 2000). After coding the spoken/textual and the dance/action data separately, a
comparative analysis was conducted in order to analyze the relationships among the data sources
and the interrelationship between the data sources across themes (Auerbach & Silverstein, 2003;
Huberman & Miles, 1998). Here I examine how Dunham and Brown provoke awareness of
336 ROBERTS

the social ghosts of racial injustice, and once revealed, contend with them by analyzing their
pedagogy, the content, or danced stories that comprised their instructional and performance
practices and the social events or encounters7 that led to social action.

Embodying the Haunting Traces

Physicalizing and interacting with historical and material narratives of oppression and injustice is
critical to revealing their ghosted presence. These narratives or danced stories are the content of
critical consciousness that are set to dancing bodies. During the choreographic process, Dunham
and Brown create the conditions for the dancing body to become one with the story in anticipation
of the encounter between dancers and audience. Unless the dancers embody and feel the story
from the inside, the audience will not, and a collective body will not be performed or produced.
With a mix of invitation and provocation, the dancers draw the audience from the edge of the
familiar to the depths of the unfamiliar. Carrying stories across national and international borders,
from the African Diaspora to Europe and from Cuba to the U.S., Dunham and Brown infuse their
dance with critical social meaning. When the story is fully embodied, the dancers unleash the
power of its meaning. When the dancers set foot on stage, the audience will encounter embodied,
in-motion stories and, together with the dancers, are transformed into a collective body, united
by means of performance (Martin, 1990). I now turn to two dance works, Southland and Walking
out the Dark, to illustrate this process.

Southland : Framing the Story

In 1951, amidst the cold war, anti-communism, racial segregation, and the emerging Civil Rights
Movement, Katherine Dunham created Southland. Researched, composed, choreographed, de-
signed, and rehearsed at the end of 1950 in Buenos Aires, Southland is a protest dance. Dramatized
for the concert stage, the dance is an embodiment of systematic killing of African Americans
in the U.S. South (Valis Hill, 2002), conceived by Miss Dunham (1951/2005) as “a comment
on violence and its attendant guilt, which often acts in the human individual as the most pow-
erful agent of destruction” (p. 342). Dunham writes in the performance program, “there was no
recorded lynching in the United States” (p. 342). At the world premiere in January 1951 at the
Opera House in Santiago de Chile, Miss Dunham narrated in Spanish the following prologue:
The man who truly loves his country is the man who is able to see in it the bad as well as the good,
and seeing the bad, [denounce] it at the cost of liberty and life. For countries are no different than
men, and all men are made of good and bad, and must see these things within themselves, and strive
toward the good if there is to be any upward moving. North America is a great and wonderful country.
I know it and love it from the hills of San Francisco through the prairies of the Middle West to the
rugged puritanism of the eastern sea coast. The people of North America are great and wonderful too,
in their newness and youth and energy. But there is a deep stain, a mark of blood and shame which
spreads from under the magnolia trees of the Southland area and mingles with the perfume of the
flowers. And though I have not smelled the smell of burning flesh, and have never seen a black body
swaying from the Southern tree, I have felt these things in spirit, and finally through the creative artist
comes the need of the person to show this thing to the world, hoping that by so exposing the ill, the
 HAUNTINGS OF RACE 337

conscience of the many will protest and save further destruction and humiliation. This is not all of
America, it is not all of the South, but it is a living present part. (Dunham, 1951/2005, pp. 341–342)

Miss Dunham uses her knowledge as an artist and anthropologist to frame what the viewing
audience is about to see. She aims to draw attention to the continued racialized violence of the
time that haunted the American South. In the face of warnings from the State Department, which
did not want negative images of American life taken abroad, Southland was performed only in
Chile and in 1953 toured in Paris. This framing is provided to give the audience a context to
understand the ghosts that the dancing body must animate in order for the encounter with the
story to be provocative for the audience.

Walking Out the Dark : The Story Behind the Story

Brown describes Walking Out the Dark as a dance piece that “examines some of what impedes our
individual and collective progress/work” (Brown, 2002). “I built the work as a danced conversation
considering what contributes to the inability to reach a brother or sister in need. The dance will
use a series of letters/poems written to Mother, Brother and Sister, offering confessions of sin and
apology” (Brown, 2002). Walking Out the Dark opens with Brown reading the following poem:
Thank you for meeting me here
I exit my door
Walking buried in pain
Covered in the earth of grief
Terrified to cry for freedom
Too obedient to cry for long
Strength truth
Can’t contain it
We must speak the truth
To each other
Or else stay
Buried in the dark (Brown, 2002)

Southland and Walking Out the Dark narrations differ in descriptive detail. Miss Dunham
opens the dance drama with a prologue that frames the story in socio-historic and political terms
and provides her audience with a narrative that details the story and the characters. In the Walking
Out the Dark program, Brown tells the audience about his artistic and political purposes, about
his inspirations for the piece, and his choreographic process. While each narrates the performance
differently in the level of detail and the features of the story, both momentarily keep the story still
and in place and reveal what the choreographers want the audience to know and how to “read”
the narratives that the dancing bodies will be animating. That is, by framing their stories, they
promote their strategic interests (Bell, 2003) and teach the audience how to “read” the social
ghosts to be embodied.
Significantly, Brown discourages an individualistic reading of the performance. He says,
It is a challenge to be compassionate in the New World where everything is about the ‘I.’ A good
friend recently remarked that in this modern time it is easier to believe that we don’t need each other.
338 ROBERTS

. . . I have the desire to be free and I understand that my liberation is deeply linked to the liberation
of my brothers and sisters around the world and in the Americas. (Brown, 2002)

Pedagogically, Brown uses the program to teach the audience that the problem of grief, pain, and
freedom is collective rather than individual.
Both stories boldly name and reclaim in a public, collective setting black aesthetics, culture,
and lived experience. Before the stories are put in motion, Dunham and Brown provide a socio-
historic context that reveals the ghosts of a nation’s trouble past—its commission of atrocities
that turns the nation away from accepting a positive view of black life. Southland and Walking
Out the Dark resist dominant historical and contemporary notions of Blacks as non-human while
affirming their own humanity. Dunham and Brown set the stage for audience members to connect
individual experiences of oppression and dehumanization to collective historical and structural
enactments.

Embodying Stories in Motion: Southland

Following the framing of the story in a program, the story is danced and performed by cast
members to connect with, engage, and draw the audience into the story. Normative historical
and cultural content that is familiar to the audience is mixed with cultural and historical content
that is unfamiliar and transformed into three-dimensional images. Dialectically related concepts,
such as beauty and the stain, “which spreads from under the magnolia trees of the Southland
area and mingles with the perfume of the flowers” (Dunham, 1951/2005, p. 341) are transformed
into three-dimensional images. These reconstituted images render the content more concentrated,
alive, and vivid, which “confers on them a power to help [the viewing audience] notice what
[they] might otherwise miss seeing (Eisner, 2003, p. 25).
Dunham (1954/2005) asserts that

Dance seeks continuously to capture moments of life in a fusion of time, space, and motion, the
dance is at a given moment, the most accurate chronicler of culture pattern. The constant interplay
of conscious and unconscious find a perfect instrument in the physical form, the human body, which
embraces all at once. (p. 519)

The performing bodies are engorged with the reconstituted images. Through dance, the reconsti-
tuted images composed of the familiar (aesthetically, socially, and historically normalized) and
the unfamiliar (aesthetically, socially, and counter or revised history) are spun out by dancing
bodies so that the audience sees and feels the ghosts of the troubled past as they are brought into
and embodied in the present. Dancer and audience come together through the story and through
this encounter become a collective body. I now turn to how the collective body is rendered and
comes into being.

Embodying Social Ghosts

Turning now to their choreographic process in Southland and Walking Out the Dark, I look at how
Dunham and Brown, respectively, create the conditions for their dancers to face the hauntings
 HAUNTINGS OF RACE 339

of racial injustice and embody the weighted stories of resistance and affirmation that they aim
to tell, such that a collective body will be constructed when dancers and audience are brought
together. In the following excerpt from an interview I conducted with Miss Dunham in 2002, she
recalls working closely with Julie Belafonte, who plays the main character in Southland in the
role of white, Southern society.
Well, Julie had an especially difficult assignment because she had lived as an activist and so had
her parents who’d been in an atmosphere of breaking down not only in theory, but in action, the
restrictions imposed by our society in America on interrelations–intercultural relationships. And this
was her life and to have that something thrown at her as a role in which she would take the exact
opposite stand was not easy. And she wept and she refused and she resisted and she resigned and she
did all sorts of things but she went right on. . . . I would say, “Julie you hate this man because he’s
Black.” Well, she’d worked with that for a day or two. “Julie you hate him because he’s a nigger . . .”
That was the sort of thing that we worked on with everyone in the company.

Julie Belafonte remembers Miss Dunham’s direction in vivid detail. She says,
Miss Dunham would be sitting in the theatre, and our conductor was at the piano and I was on the
stage and she would direct me . . . She didn’t help me in any way to find how to do this, but she was
so insistent, I mean I just had to do it. And the first horrific thing for me was the having to absolutely
scream from my gut the “n” word and I just couldn’t do it. It kept coming out in this little weak voice.
Until finally I realized that I had to call upon this—transferring myself to her, when I really belted it
out. (Interview with Julie Belafonte, October 15, 2002)

Underscoring the difficult task of becoming “the girl,” Belafonte tells me that she “came from
a political family. Case in point and I’m proud of it, during the Spanish Civil War, I told [Dunham
that] I would not tour with her in Spain as long as Franco was a dictator there” (Interview with
Julie Belafonte, October 15, 2002). Thus, for Belafonte to become white southern society, she
had to transfer the weight of the character to another, “a girl,” and find the voice in her body
to scream, “nigger.” In the scene that precedes the lynching, Miss Dunham directs Belafonte
to “just start thinking, ‘Hey, this could be something, if you say he raped you . . . conjure up a
lie—what a great idea.’ Just think about this and live the idea. It gets better and better to you”
(Julie Belafonte at Jacob’s Pillow, June 25, 2002). Having been through a process of embodying
“white, Southern society,” including dying a blonde streak in her raven black hair to give her
“more identity,” Belafonte turns to an imaginary crowd to tell them that she has been raped.
Through the provocative gesture of grabbing her hair and wrapping it around her neck, Belafonte
told the imaginary crowd, “It would be wonderful” if the black man who has raped her is lynched.
Dunham directed Belafonte to “‘respond [to the lynching] as if she had an orgasm and thinks
to herself that she wants a souvenir.’ She tore a piece of his shirt, sauntering off stage” (Julie
Belafonte at Jacob’s Pillow, June 25, 2002). While Belafonte narrates a deep sense of discomfort
and dis-ease with having to confront the historical practices of white women accusing black men
of rape, the gesture, no matter how well executed technically, would not convey its historical
underpinnings unless Belafonte inscribed the gesture with its history.
I witnessed analogous difficulties of embodiment when I attended a Ronald K.
Brown/EVIDENCE rehearsal of Walking Out the Dark. While the dancers were running through
a segment of the choreography, the tension in the air was palpable. I observe Brown urging
the dancers to embody the weighty contours of the story. After rehearsal, Brown addressed the
dancers:
340 ROBERTS

Do you think it’s easier to do the shape, move your arms and legs, do the physical and try to act—try
to get the intensity in your face? Do the motion of the arms and legs and then intensity in your face?
I’d rather you mark it—all the nuances and details rather than do the mechanics. I’d rather you use
the rehearsal to get closer to the work. For real! You have to go for the details, or when else are you
going to get it in your body? [Brown demonstrated a step and continued], [Ask yourself] what does
the step feel like in my body? Let yourself be disturbed by it.

As is often the case, choreographer’s dance notes are filled with critical feedback. According
to Brown, the dancers were not allowing themselves to connect the “mechanics” to the anger and
sadness that the movement animates. Although they danced with great physical intensity, they
had not connected to the “it” of the movement—the felt experience beyond the physicality of
the movement (moving arms and legs). Brown continued to press the dancers to connect to the
feeling that the movement evoked in their bodies. He read through another set of notes and told
a dancer about a dance sequence where dancers are running. He wanted to see them run as if
they were in slow motion. Brown added, “I’m calling it slow motion because I want you to feel
like you are in slow motion” (Videotape, April 3, 2002). There is a long pause and pensive quiet
settled in the room. One of the dancers interrupted the silence, commenting that she wanted her
movements to be clear and when in the emotional realm, she felt that the movements were not
clear. The dancer’s statement is an example of a split between the mechanics of movement and the
emotional content of the movement (or the emotion that the movement evokes). This time Brown
responded with a movement sequence, rather than with spoken language. Moving his arms at first
slowly and then with lightning speed, they are transformed into two machetes, slicing through
the thick air. As he performed this gesture, Brown told the dancer that the shape of cutting does
not magically appear. Following the contours of the shape, Brown’s movements exploded into a
feeling of intense anger that changed into bold defiance. Brown’s demonstration made its most
critical point: Emotions evoked by the movement, as well as the sentience of the movement,
require of the dancer and choreographer an intentional critical reflection of how emotions and
movement interweave and call to one another.
Boler (1999) states, “Emotions are in part sensational, or physiological: consisting of the actual
feelings—increased heartbeat, adrenaline, etc. Emotions are also ‘cognitive,’ or ‘conceptual’:
shaped by our beliefs and perceptions” (p. xix). However, as Boler also argues, “emotions
need to be brought out of the private and into the public sphere; that emotions are a site of
oppression as well as a source of radical social and political resistance” (p. xx). By interweaving
the physiological and cognitive features of emotions in a public setting, Brown, like Dunham,
strategically shifts emotions out of the private and into the public sphere, thereby setting the stage
for at once contending with the social ghosts and creating a provocative encounter. Moreover,
because social ghosts are defined by their haunting rather than by their material presence, Dunham
and Brown conjure them by connecting emotions to their historical counterpart. Behind the
camera, I witnessed Brown’s body shift from one that executed a technically perfect physical
rendering of movement to a meaning filled body, spinning out a story. When Brown’s arms
reached up and struck downward like a machete, a certain anger was unleashed, reminiscent of
his ancestors who used the machete to both toil in the fields cutting sugar cane and resist slavery.8
Once again, demonstrating with movement and language Brown spoke through the sequence:

You can’t have the same feeling. . . . You’ve just finished running through this field. Now you’re
backing up [Brown runs backward, while his hands caress his forehead, nose, lips and neck in a
 HAUNTINGS OF RACE 341

downward motion]. [The feeling] has to change. And if you get there, if you get there, it will change.
Be in the moment with it . . . Allow yourself to be in it and be touched by the moment.

Brown pressed the dancers to connect to the movement because the story that is foundational
to the movement is already rooted in continental and diasporic African dance, the choreographic
content—movements, postures, and gestures—is already full of meaning and historical signifi-
cance. Herein lie the social ghosts, which, like the historical story of African Americans running
through fields and working in fields under conditions of slavery, are defined by their cultural and
historical haunting traces rather than by their material presence. Brown, like Dunham, directed
the dancers to be in it, to be touched by the historical specificity of running through the field and
the use of a machete during U.S. slavery. In Southland, the choreographed gesture of wrapping
hair around the neck and pulling in an upward direction carries with it the historical specificity
of lynching.
Springgay (2008) asserts that body pedagogy involves relationships between bodies. She argues
that inter-embodiment, an approach explored by feminist scholar Gail Weiss (1999) emphasizes
“that the experience of being embodied is never a private affair but is always already mediated
by our continual interactions with other human and non-human bodies” (p. 5). Springgay, further
asserts that “[i]nter-embodiment poses that the construction of the body and the production of
body knowledge is not created within a single, autonomous subject (body) but rather that body
knowledge and bodies are created in the intermingling and encounters between bodies” (p. 23).
Dunham and Brown intentionally interrupt the dancers’ private moment of embodied emotion to
form a link to the historical and historically disavowed histories of oppression and resistance. In
a sense, the dancing body is charged with the work of transgressing time and space by bringing
together the troubled past and the present. Through this action the dancing body is re-engineered
into a public collective body. Indeed, body pedagogy aims to create a collective body by provoking
“a moment of production” (Eng & Kazanjian, 2003, p. 5) where the present and past converge and
an individual, emotionally charged narrative is intentionally connected to a social and historical
narrative (Boler, 1999) and collective body.
Through dance notes and direction, Brown and Dunham pressed the dancers to get to the
weighty, burdensome, embodied places of historically and situated repulsion and desire, hate and
love, cunning and vulnerability, which converge in a three-dimensional moving image.
In The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool, Dixon Gottschild (2003) makes
the point that:

The universality of pain and suffering is made specific through the particular life experiences of
black Americans. This is what I say when I say that soul is what it takes to be black and survive.
The style and aesthetics that evolved from this soul character have given the world—not only black
people—artists and movement that help us navigate the perilous waters of life. (Dixon Gottschild,
2003, p. 229)

Finding the connection between the individual (private) feelings about the story and the struc-
tural social conditions, which are embedded in the story is critical to getting to the soul (Dixon
Gottschild, 2003) of the story where the haunting social ghosts reside. In both cases, the choreog-
raphers, apply their body pedagogy to press and provoke the dancers to interweave the disavowed
culture, history, and emotion, and, thereby, to historize their emotional experience. Dunham and
Brown introduce an approach, which moves away from “a reductive or dehistoricized invocation
342 ROBERTS

of ‘experience’“ (Boler, 1999, p. 132) and through the use of history, embodiment, language, and
dance, Dunham and Brown re-engineer individually conceptualized and situated bodies into a
collective body.

A COLLECTIVE BODY DANCES FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE

Like the Echoes of Brown and Storytelling Projects, Dunham and Brown share commitments to
revealing and facing racial injustices in order to transform them in ways that draw connections
between ideas and experience through body and for bodies. In both the Echoes of Brown and the
Storytelling Projects, young people across race and ethnicity yearn for “spaces and curricula that
provide context and historical knowledge to help them ground their own experiences and analyses”
(Roberts, Bell, & Murphy, 2008, p. 350). Dunham’s and Brown’s body pedagogy contribute
to the growing scholarship within social justice education and activism that acknowledges the
importance of emotion and the body in learning/unlearning oppression. Across these four projects,
race and racism are not only encountered through thought, ideas, perceptions (cognition), they
are also encountered intimately and provocatively in, and through, individual bodies as well as
for a collective body situated in public spaces.
Whether or not they are acknowledged, feelings are nevertheless involved in embodied expe-
riences of the world as well as how we make meaning of the world. As is demonstrated by the
Dunham and Brown dancers, emotions are invoked once the body is engaged as a site of inquiry
and performance of, and for, a collective. Conversely, when emotions are engaged, so are bodies.
With a steady hand, Dunham and Brown dare to trace and draw out the social ghosts of racial
injustice through the cultural and historical dimensions of the dance content and the dancers’
feelings. In so doing, the sensate, embodied experience of fear, sometimes the sheer terror, of
confronting racism is also laid bare.
I have also argued that within a social justice framework, the weight of lived experience must
be shared and the social ghosts must be embodied across racial and ethnic difference. I agree
with Boler’s (1999) assertion that “to develop pedagogies that effectively invite emotions into
discussion as well as develop critical inquiry is not an easy task” (p. 111). The work is further
complicated by the ways in which white racial privilege creates conditions for either not noticing
or having to engage with racism (McIntosh, 1998/2004) and by racial stock stories that legitimize,
rather than contest or interrupt, dominant white racial positionality (Bell, 2010).
In 2001, The National Education Association reported that 90% of U.S. public school teachers
are white, largely female, and middle-class (National Education Association, 2003). On the other
hand, U.S. Department of Commerce projects that by 2050, “57 percent of the student population
in the U.S. will be comprised of African American, Latino/a, and Asian Americans” (Flint, 2008,
p. 61). Given the stark contrast in these demographics and that race and racism are rarely the
topic of instruction or dialogue in schools, the largely white educators need a way to negotiate the
social ghosts of racism that loom large and pervade the classroom in ways that interrupt rather
than reproduce racism, and negatively affect student engagement and teacher/student relations.
Moreover, the work of facing and embodying the social ghosts of racism requires embodied
action that exceeds the boundaries of any one body. Indeed, as I have argued, bearing the weight
of racism requires constructing a collective body based on principles of solidarity. In order to do
so, educators first have to acknowledge that bodies are always raced.
 HAUNTINGS OF RACE 343

In the final days before the Echoes of Brown performance, Ronald K. Brown,9 instructed the
youth to respond physically to an utterance of the word “segregation” by dividing themselves
into racial groupings—Whites on one side and Blacks together with other youth of color on
the other side. Youth guided by academics, artists, teachers, community activists, and cultural
workers spent ten months having long discussions about the effects of segregation on Whites and
on people of color. The adults who had facilitated those discussions, myself included, were not
prepared for the level of distress and discomfort the youth felt with the instructions to embody
segregation.
Suddenly it felt like the air was sucked out of the room as all the students stood staring at us. The
students of color were the first to move; the white students reluctantly followed. As the students of
color moved to one side of the room, an audible sigh of relief could be heard from them. The white
youth were the most uncomfortable with the act of embodying segregation and the most vocally
critical of the exercise. Their racial privilege had buffered them from the pain of racism and from
feeling in their bodies the dehumanizing features of racial segregation. During the Arts and Social
Justice Institute, we had had many conversations about the history of segregation and its present
trajectory in their schools and neighborhoods. These conversations allowed the youth to situate
their personal narratives in a broader socio-historic context of American race relations. Largely
intellectual, these conversations also de-centered the body, which did not allow us to interrogate
the numbing effects of privilege that saturated the white students’ personal narratives and to fully
embody the discomfort of connecting their personal narrative. However, the gesture of physically
separating the collective body destabilized the privilege of not noticing by making the weight of
segregation come alive. For the next hour, Brown and I guided the students in a series of activities
and dialogue that allowed them to reflect upon and analyze the resistance and discomfort that
white students experienced and the ease with which the students of color separated themselves.
Finally, the youth agreed to segregate if they could dramatize their differential experience of the
separating and their collective outrage over past and present racial segregation. Significantly, we
had to attend to the nuanced disconnection between embodied differences and enacted differences
based on race (Fine, Weis, Centrie, & Roberts, 2000). When asked to embody segregation in the
context of the performance, the white students shifted from seeing segregation as a set of ideas
and experiences that happened to others to feeling the weighty experience of segregation from
the perspective and experience of youth of color whom they had come to know and with whom
they had built a community over the course of the 10-month project. In performance, the white
students, the Latino students, the black students, and the American born Palestinian student
practiced the embodiment of segregation. This was a critical move in which the burden of racial
segregation was enacted, shared, and transformed into critical knowledge as it was experienced
and embodied by differently situated individuals to serve a collective body.
As this example illustrates, the transformative power of the arts lies in the possibility of
provocative encounters with social ghosts—to name and animate them and thereby in a moment
of production expose and efface their silent power. When the dancing body is brought together
with pedagogy, history, social and critical theories (Chatterjea, 2004,), and other aesthetic forms,
a project of social justice can be imagined and realized. I suggest that interdisciplinary spaces
that connect art, embodiment, and “collectivity are precisely the kinds of spaces that educa-
tors either need to provide for students or to consider when re-conceptualizing curriculum and
pedagogy that is embodied” (Springgay, 2008, p. 3). Facing and undoing oppression is one of
344 ROBERTS

the principles of social justice education. I argue that body pedagogy holds the possibility of
bringing differently positioned bodies into solidarity to transform social injustices. Moreover, I
argue for a body pedagogy that engages everyday experiences of race and racism in ways that
close the socially constructed distance between feelings and cognition (Boler, 1999; Springgay,
2008), bring together body and language, and allow youth to transform their experiences into
transformative, actionable knowledge.

NOTES

1. There are several documented accounts of this event (see Perrone, 2000; Valis Hill, 2002). According to
Perrone, Miss Dunham found a sign on a bus and pinned it to her dress. Here, I use Miss Dunham’s account,
which she narrated in an interview at Jacob’s Pillow on June 26, 2002.
2. The Storytelling Project (STP) Model and Curriculum invites youth to explore, indeed interrogate, issues
of race and racism in their lives and in their schools through storytelling and the arts. The project was
introduced in 2004 at Barnard College “through the collaborative work of a . . . team of artists, public school
teachers, scholars and Barnard/Columbia undergraduates: Rosemarie Roberts, Roger Bonair-Agard, Thea
Abu El-Haj, Dipti Desai, Kayhan Irani, Uraline Septembre Hager, Christina Glover, Anthony Asaro, Patricia
Wagner, Zoe Duskin, Vicki Cuellar and Leticia Dobzinski.” (Bell, 2010, p. ix)
The project also involved high school and college youth in research of the Storytelling Project Curriculum
(Bell, Roberts, Irani, & Murphy, 2008) and public school teachers in experimentation with the Storytelling
Project Model (Bell & Roberts, 2010).
[Conceptually, the Storytelling Project] is informed by four key interacting concepts:

race as a social construction, racism as a system that operates on multiple levels, white supremacy
and white privilege as key, although often neglected, aspects of systemic racism, and color blindness
as the problematic conflation of race with racism that reinforces inequalities, hierarchies, and racial
divisions while insisting that race does not matter. (Bell et al., 2007, p. 337)

The STP curriculum emphasizes the importance of purposefully building a community in which stories
about race and racism can be openly shared, respectfully heard, and critically discussed and analyzed. Story
is the connective tissue of the STP model and the various art-based activities that ground lessons” (Roberts,
Bell, & Murphy, 2008, pp. 337–338).
3. The Echoes of Brown Project was launched at CUNY Graduate Center with Michelle Fine, Maria
Torre, Ronald K. Brown, Jen Weiss, Roger Bonair Agard, and Celena Glenn. The project commemorated
and examined the gains and challenges posed by the 1954 Brown v. Board of Ed decision. Echoes was
a multi-genre research-to-performance project involving 12 urban and suburban high school and college
youth in a series of Social Justice and Arts Institutes. The project was a blend of history, social science,
and cross-generational experiences of public and social justice education work. Using Katherine Dunham’s
research-to-performance methodology to frame the work, Echoes of Brown culminated in a work in progress
performance at the “Interrupting Oppression and Sustaining Justice Working Conference” held at Columbia
University’s Teacher College in February, 2004, followed by a evening-length, spoken word and dance
performance at the John Jay Theater on May 15, 2004. Over the course of ten months preceding the
performance, 12 youth performers, diverse along lines of race, ethnicity, class, and educational opportunity,
wrote about their individual narratives of public education at the dawn of the twenty-first century and
connected them to the findings of The Opportunity Gap study (Fine, Roberts, & Torre, 2004), which
included data from 10,000 youth responses to a survey administered across the United States.
4. For a description of the workshop, see Bell, 2010, p. 105.
5. Dunham’s dance tradition includes Dunham Technique and research-to-performance methodology, in
which fieldwork and social science research findings are transformed into performances for publics.
6. The use of past tense is because Miss Dunham joined the ancestors on May 21, 2006.
 HAUNTINGS OF RACE 345

7. Cross (1971) developed the notion of encounter to describe an event that could provoke critical con-
sciousness. Cross conceived encounters as the stages of identity development where an individual moves
from a Negro-to-Black conversion experience. I draw on this notion of encounter to conceptualize one of
the three dimensions of critical consciousness.
8. I recognized the movement sequence as part of the dance for Ogun, an Afro-Cuban dance of domination
and resistance, signaling sugar cane cutting on planation.
9. Ronald K. Brown was the performance choreography and Associate Artistic Director.

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Rosemarie A. Roberts is a Social Psychologist and is Assistant Professor of Education at

Connecticut College. She is interested in conceptualizations of social justice in educational
practices, particularly the ways in which social justice projects and the arts intersect to reveal the
complex layers of structural, sentient and epistemological dimensions of education in and outside
of schooling. Professor Roberts takes a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach to research
and teaching, combining theories in psychology, education, philosophy, anthropology, and dance.