Guest Post by: Jennifer Fisher, Associate Professor of Dance at the University of California, Irvine
When visitors from the University of Ghana, Legon welcomed a UC Irvine dancer exchange in 2010, then visited our campus in the years afterward, they inevitably asked about Donald McKayle. When would he come to Ghana; they were anxious to honor him, to host him, to learn his dances. They brought McKayle a raft of gifts, from traditional fabric to sculpture and beaded ornaments. The longtime chair of the dance department at University of Ghana, Legon received his MFA at UC Irvine in the 1980s, when he starting to write a history of dance in Ghana. They tried to entice McKayle to make the trip and see how their own growing dance department resembled and differed from the American version. Alas, McKayle, who always wanted to visit the land of his ancestors, was never able to make the trip. He died at the age of 87 on April 6 of this year. But his legacy still speaks. Though he will be sadly missed here, where he was a Distinguished Professor, his impact will continue to be felt in the dance world and beyond. From the time he started choreographing at age 17, he contributed dances that embody the suffering, and celebrations of the disenfranchised.
Nearly 60 years ago, Professor McKayle made a dance about men in chains who dreamed of freedom. The men in his signature work Rainbow Round My Shoulder had been imprisoned—we didn’t know why or how—or else they represent a kind of cage we all live in when injustice prevails. Since then, Rainbow has been hailed as a masterwork of modern dance and a powerful political statement. McKayle himself, after a lifetime of providing dance for Broadway, Hollywood, and the concert stage, as well as dancing with luminaries from Martha Graham to Diana Ross, was declared a national dance treasure by the Dance Heritage Coalition. And that award was only one among many—his UC Irvine office walls were lined with honors.
In January of 2018, when Rainbow was performed in Los Angeles on a program at the conference of the International Black Dance Association, the iconic line up of Rainbow’s seven dancers, with arms linked in rhythmic solidarity, had barely made their way onto the stage when wild applause broke out. To the driving melody of a work song, the men’s struggle could still become a focal point of human dignity and solidarity, continuing to speak about the universal longing for liberty and the specific plight of black and Latino men who might have been arrested and tried in a racialized atmosphere.
Sound familiar? Rainbow’s power as commentary seems as relevant today as it was in mid-century America. But has dance changed any attitudes about injustice over the years? Scholar Rebekah Kowall thinks so and hailed McKayle’s seminal work as an artistic embodiment of sit-ins and marches during the Civil Rights era. His dance “spared no moral indignation in its presentation not only of the results of a broken judicial and penal system,” she wrote, “but also of the adoption of human strategies to transcend and even to protest it.” Making his way into a largely white modern dance world of the 1950s, McKayle brought with him his cultural specificity. His childhood playground chants became Games, a complex dance of fun mixed with lurking danger, and he also choreographed dances with the universal themes of jubilation and human longing.
Professor McKayle made a solo to a Langston Hughes poem (“I’ve known rivers…”) and a powerful solo to Roberta Flack singing about why there are no black angels (Angelitos Negros). In recent years, as an emeritus professor at UC, Irvine, where he was my colleague, he made a dance about the plight of migrant farm workers (Uprooted) and just last year, one inspired by the refugee crisis in Syria (Crossing the Rubicon). As surely as a body out of place at the front of the bus, McKayle continued to challenge theatre-goers to see injustice, to see his community as a rich one, and to understand commonality and nobility on the level of the human body. He never gave up on the power of art to win hearts and minds.
In a nation marked by the brutality of past and present racial inequities, can modern dance really matter? When Professor McKayle was a young dancer, he encountered signs at Broadway auditions that said, “No Negroes needed today,” yet he lived to find out just how much he was needed—recently as a veteran choreographer who still watched the news. In an interview in February, he spoke about how much he admired the embodied protests of Colin Kaepernick, the NFL hopeful who caused such controversy simply by kneeling during the national anthem to call attention to injustice. McKayle noticed how other players, by linking their arms in solidarity at subsequent games resembled the men in Rainbow Round My Shoulder. These actions by athletes were choreographies of protest—mild-mannered and respectful, but powerful. What could be more respectful than kneeling? It’s what the devout do in prayer, it’s how we honor those above us, or sink in reverence to higher powers. Unlike McKayle’s dances, the choreography of football players was not interpreted and written about by dance critics who are trained to find the meaning in historical context. But it was not hard to see the meaning.
Freedom and protest have always been compatible in democratic countries. The United States is the nation that once fell into Jim Crow inequities, but it’s also the place where Donald McKayle, child of Jamaican immigrants, grew up to make us all think about the value of the human spirit and how it can be embodied powerfully in dance. He will be missed, while the embodied legacy he left us still continues to grow.