“Breakin' the Rules”: Eleo Pomare and the Transcultural Choreographies of Black Modernity

Abstract

The radical innovations of African-American artists with artistic form during the 1960s and 1970s, according to black performance theorist Fred Moten, led to a new theorization of the avant-garde. His book, In the Break: The Radical Aesthetics of the Black Tradition, discusses the poetry and jazz music of artists, from Amiri Baraka and Billie Holiday to Charles Mingus, and extols their radical experimentation with the structures and conventions of aurality, visuality, literature, and performance dominant in European art and aesthetics. In this essay, I consider the implications of these processes of resignification in relation to the choreographic legacy of the artist, Eleo Pomare, whose work and career during this period was both experimental and radical and, I will suggest, critical to the formation of a transnational, multiracial conception of modern dance.

“Harlem Knows”: Eleo Pomare's Choreographic Theory of Vitality and Diaspora Citation inBlues for the Jungle

“…Thomas DeFrantz has characterized Pomare's work, especially Blues , as paradigmatic of black nationalist ideologies in Black Arts Movement concert dance: its trenchant commentary on inequality reflected a historical moment of social upheaval (1999). Rachel Fensham situates Pomare's choreographic projects in Europe and Australia in a diasporic framework to focus on his transnational circulation of modern dance concepts (2013). This article builds on this research, positioning Pomare as an artist-theorist by foregrounding his choreographic theory of vitality, which he developed as a result of his time as a diasporic subject in Europe and manifested in Blues for the Jungle .…”

“…He left Germany to work in Amsterdam, before returning to the United States during the peak of the civil rights movement in 1963–1964. He later performed significant work in Australia, as Rachel Fensham has argued, articulating a decolonial, coalitional politics of solidarity with Aboriginal peoples under an expansive global conception of blackness (2013, 55) 10 . Although Pomare did not use the term “diaspora” to refer to his experiences, I argue that his global sense of blackness—becoming black in an antiblack world—gives rise to his articulation of diaspora as a critique of national belonging and an alternative structure of being in the world.…”

“…In New York, at the High School for the Performing Arts, Pomare describes his experience as being like a “fly in a bowl of milk” (Pomare quoted in Fensham 2013, 44; Wilson 1993, 22). His determination to leave the United States was instigated by experiences of racial discrimination and his assessment of the limits for concert dance on the uneven, binary terms that existed in the United States: modern versus Negro dance (Manning 2004).…”

“…Primitivism “assumes a hierarchical and evolutionary relationship between Western civilization and savage, racialized Others” (Kraut 2003, 435). Narratives of Pomare's departure from Jooss's studio frequently quote his declaration: “I just couldn't take that dogmatic bull” (Pomare quoted in Fensham 2013, 46; Johnson 1969; Perpener 2001, 209). Fensham relates this statement to an argument about demands for Pomare to perform shirtless by ballet choreographer Anthony Tudor, reinforcing primitivist conceptions of black dancing bodies on the concert stage and in the European imagination (2013, 46).…”

“…His attention to spectatorship and reception is clear in his embodied Signifyin’ on primitivist expectations from European audiences. For example, in Amsterdam, he “read” the ignorance of Dutch promoters who requested more “African” signifiers in his choreography by performing the exact same modern dance movement in grass skirts to drums the following night (Fensham 2013, 46–48) 12 . What appears to be an accommodation to racist tropes on one level, simultaneously contains a critical dimension that is Signifyin’ on primitivist inabilities to comprehend black modern dance.…”