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Borde, Percival  

Thomas F. DeFrantz

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

Afro‐Caribbean dancer and choreographer, was born Percival Sebastian Borde in Port of Spain, Trinidad, the son of George Paul Borde, a veterinarian, and Augustine Francis Lambie. Borde grew up in Trinidad, where he finished secondary schooling at Queens Royal College and took an appointment with the Trinidad Railway Company. Around 1942 he began formal research on Afro‐Caribbean dance and performed with the Little Carib Dance Theatre. In 1949 he married Joyce Guppy, with whom he had one child. The year of their divorce is unknown.

Borde took easily to dancing and the study of dance as a function of Caribbean culture. In the early 1950s he acted as director of the Little Carib Theatre in Trinidad. In 1953 he met the noted American anthropologist and dancer Pearl Primus who was conducting field research in Caribbean folklore Primus convinced Borde to immigrate to the United States as ...

Article

Brown, Buster  

Barbara Bonous-Smit

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

Americantap dancer and choreographer, was born James Richard Brown in Baltimore, Maryland, to William Brown and Marie Ella Otho-Brown. The only boy, he had seven sisters.

Dance played an important part in Brown's life beginning in elementary school. Inspired by Bill “Bojangles” Robinson while at the Douglas High School, Brown developed a serious interest in tap dancing and tapped in his high school annual production, Autumn Follies. He was not given dance instruction but picked up a bebop jazz style of dance from the streets and from performances he attended at the Royal Theatre in Maryland. Brown and his friends imitated and further developed steps they saw at theaters and they also taught each other any new steps they picked up. At the Royal Theatre in 1929 Brown saw an inspiring performance of the celebrated Whitman Sisters and their nephew, Pops Whitman They would have ...

Article

Collins, Janet  

Therese Duzinkiewicz Baker

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

prima ballerina, modern dancer, choreographer, teacher, and painter, was born Janet Fay Collins in New Orleans, the daughter of Ernest Lee Collins, a tailor, and Alma de Lavallade (the noted dancer Carmen de Lavallade was a first cousin on this side of the family), a seamstress. At the age of four Collins moved to Los Angeles with her family, which included three sisters and one brother. In Los Angeles, Collins had trouble being accepted into “whites-only” dance studios, so she worked with private tutors. Her first formal ballet lessons were at a Catholic community center at the age of ten.

When she was fifteen Collins auditioned for the prestigious Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo led by the legendary Leonide Massine Collins was accepted but only on the condition that she stay in the corps de ballet and that she paint her face white to blend in with the other ...

Article

Cummings, Blondell  

Princess Mhoon Cooper

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

dancer, choreographer, artistic director, educator, and activist, was born in Effingham, South Carolina, the eldest of three daughters of Jack Cummings and Carrie Cummings sharecroppers who grew tobacco and cotton When Blondell was a year old the Cummingses like many African American families of the mid twentieth century migrated to the North While both her parents had relatives who previously moved to New York it was Jack who followed two of his four church singing brothers to the city to pursue careers in the commercial music industry Upon the family s arrival in Harlem Jack found work as a taxi driver and Carrie earned a living as a domestic and later completed school to become a health care professional Cummings described her upbringing as very strict and typical of most black families Her mother was the disciplinarian and while her father was not an authoritarian together they ran a ...

Article

Cuyjet, Marion Helene Durham  

Melanye White Dixon

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

dance educator and business owner, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the youngest of three children of Alonzo Durham, a navy yard worker, and Frances Henrietta Morgan, a housewife. Cuyjet's parents hailed from a small community in Cheswold, Delaware, referred to as Delaware Moors. The family had moved to Philadelphia in the early 1900s in search of a better standard of living and educational opportunities for Cuyjet and her older brothers. Cuyjet attended Landreth Elementary School, Barratt Junior High School, and graduated from South Philadelphia High School.

The family settled in the Point Breeze section of South Philadelphia, an area densely populated by African Americans. Cujyet grew up during the Great Migration, during which Philadelphia's black population increased rapidly. Between 1917 and 1930 thousands of blacks had left the south for the urban north in search of employment opportunities The fusion of southern and northern cultures created ...

Article

Dan Fodio, Osman  

Edmund Abaka

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
27 April 2010
Published online:
30 September 2012

Fulani scholar and Muslim cleric Osman dan Fodio was one of the leaders who emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when West Africa had seen a series of revolutions which consolidated Islam in West Africa. Born in 1754 to Fulani parents in Gobir, Osman dan Fodio led a movement for reform caused by political, economic, and social grievances, but voiced through a powerful religious revolution in the Hausa States. It culminated in the creation of the one of the largest Muslim polities, the Sokoto Caliphate, in eighteenth-century Africa.

As a young man, Osman received a Muslim education and studied under a number of famous and reformist teachers who affected his outlook on life and religion. When Jibril b. Umar the last of his teachers fled Agades after an unsuccessful jihad among the Tuareg the twenty year old dan Fodio returned to Hausaland to begin life as a teacher ...

Article

De Lavallade, Carmen  

Pamela Lee Gray

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

dancer, chorographer, and teacher, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and raised by her aunt Adele, who owned the Hugh Gordon Book Shop, one of the most prominent African American book stores in the city. She was influenced by the success of her cousin, Janet Collins, who was the first black dancer to perform with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet company. At the age of sixteen de Lavallade received a scholarship to study at the Lester Horton Dance Theater in Los Angeles. After her initial studies in modern dance, ballet, and various other dance forms, she joined Lester Horton's Dance Theater in 1949 and danced the lead from 1950 to 1954, taking over the roles previously danced by the legendary dance pioneer Bella Lewitzky before Lewitzky's departure from the company. Horton then created chorography especially for de Lavallade, including the role of Salome in The Face ...

Article

De Lavallade, Carmen  

Kitty Cunningham

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
23 December 2004
Published online:
01 December 2006

Known primarily for her work with Lester Horton, Alvin Ailey, and her husband, Geoffrey Holder, de Lavallade has also been a successful interpreter of the works of John Butler and Glen Tetley.

De Lavallade grew up in Los Angeles, where she studied ballet with Carmelita Maracci and modern dance with Horton. She made her debut in 1950 in Horton's Face of Violence, dancing the role of Salome. When the Lester Horton Dance Theatre first performed in New York City in the spring of 1953, critic Walter Terry singled out de Lavallade for critical attention: “The body instrument is strong yet fluid, excellently disciplined, technically and wonderfully responsive to musical and dramatic nuance” (New York Herald Tribune, 5 April). These attributes continue to distinguish her beautiful performances.

From 1952 to 1955 de Lavallade appeared in four films produced by Twentieth Century Fox ...

Article

DeLavallade, Carmen  

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Born to Creole parents in New Orleans, Louisiana, Carmen DeLavallade was raised by an aunt in Los Angeles, California. At age sixteen she won a scholarship to study with modern dance pioneer Lester Horton. Horton gave her broad training in ballet, modern, and ethnic dancing as well as in music, acting, set design, costuming and lighting. She became a lead dancer in Horton's company in 1950, dancing as Salome, a role he created for her in The Face of Violence.

At this time DeLavallade began her long professional association with Alvin Ailey, whose dance career began after she introduced him to Horton. Between 1950 and 1954, she danced in four films, including Carmen Jones (1955). She later performed in several television productions, including Duke Ellington's A Drum is a Woman (1957). Moving to New York, New York in ...

Article

DeLavallade, Carmen  

Robert W. Logan

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 May 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

The illustrious career of Carmen DeLavallade began at the midpoint of the twentieth century and continued into the twenty-first century. In that time she graced the arenas of dance, theater, movies, and television as one of the great dancers of her time, as well as a distinguished choreographer, actor, and teacher.

Carmen Paula DeLavallade was born in Los Angeles, California, to Leo Paul DeLavallade, a bricklayer and postman, and Grace DeLavallade She was a student at Thomas Jefferson High School in Los Angeles when she won an apprenticeship in the Lester Horton Dance Theater Horton a pioneer of modern dance believed that a dancer s education should be well rounded and his apprentices were taught ballet modern and ethnic dance forms as well as painting sculpture and acting Being a Horton apprentice also meant learning from experience the rudiments of scenic design costuming and stage lighting With ...

Article

Dickerson, Glenda  

Felicia A. Chenier

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
30 September 2014

black theater organizer, writer, director, folklorist, chorographer, and educator, was born in Houston, Texas, the only daughter of Gerthyl Rae and Harvey G. Dickerson, an army officer. As a military child Dickerson traveled extensively with her parents and brother, Harvey. After graduating high school in Syracuse, New York, Dickerson studied at Howard University in Washington, D.C. While there she studied theater and was mentored by noted educator and writer Owen Dodson, who was then the Drama Department chair. Noteworthy of her experiences at Howard is her discovery of writings by Zora Neale Hurston. After receiving a bachelor of fine arts (BFA) from Howard in 1966, Dickerson received a master of fine arts (MFA) from Adelphi University in Long Island, New York, in 1968 During the same year she returned to Howard as an assistant professor of drama and staged her directorial ...

Article

Ellington, Mercedes  

Pamela Lee Gray

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

dancer, choreographer, and teacher, was the only child born to Ruth V. Silas and Mercer K. Ellington. Ellington's parents divorced less than a year after her birth. Her mother remarried the Philadelphia obstetrician and gynecologist James A. Batts, but Mercedes was raised in New York by her mother's parents, Louise and Alfred Silas. Mercedes had two half brothers, Edward and Paul, both of whom were musicians.

Ellington's family was involved in the arts for two generations. Her grandfather was the legendary jazz great Duke Ellington. Her father, Mercer Ellington, was an arranger, composer, and trumpeter who toured, arranged, and performed with the Duke Ellington Orchestra off and on from 1940 through 1965 and eventually took over operation of the orchestra when Duke Ellington died in 1974.

Ellington took dance lessons from an early age and attended Our Lady of Lourdes School in Harlem ...

Article

Fort, Syvilla  

Barbara L. Ciccarelli

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

dancer, choreographer, and dance teacher, was born in Seattle, Washington, the daughter of Mildred Dill. Her mother tried to enroll the four-year-old Syvilla in ballet classes, but teachers refused her entrance because they were afraid they would lose clientele by admitting an African American student. Her mother then recruited a group of black children interested in learning dance and hired the advanced white ballet students to teach them. At nine Syvilla had private teachers and was on her way to becoming an African American pioneer in ballet and modern dance.

Sensitive throughout her life to discrimination, Fort passed on what she learned to other black children. As a high school freshman, she taught ballet, tap, and modern dance to as many as sixteen children under the age of thirteen for fifty cents a lesson. In 1935 Fort received a scholarship and became the first black ...

Article

Gaston, Felecia Gail  

Marilyn L. Geary

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

performing arts educator, was born in the Fort McPherson Army Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, the daughter of an air force serviceman, George Gaston, and a U.S. Post Office worker, Roberta Lofton. Roberta Lofton Gaston later married and became Roberta Lofton Hayes. The same day Gaston was born, Rosa Parks made history in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to let a white bus rider take her seat. Parks's refusal and subsequent arrest made a crack in the wall of segregation that ultimately caused the inequality barriers to crumble, yet segregation was still very strong in the South when Gaston was a child.

Gaston's parents separated when she was a year old, and she and her mother lived with her grandmother, Estelle Lofton, in Marietta, Georgia. Her mother worked long hours at the U.S. Post Office, and Grandmother Estelle became Gaston's primary caregiver.

In her grandmother s care ...

Article

Hall, Arthur  

Sibyl Collins Wilson

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
30 September 2013

dancer, choreographer, and university professor, was born in Memphis, Tennessee, to Sally Yancey and Joshua Milton. He was their only child. After Arthur's mother and father separated, Sally Yancey raised him with the help of her mother, Emma Yancey, and then moved to Washington, D.C., where she married her second husband, Patrick Hall. Arthur eventually took Hall's surname and joined the family in D.C. In 1950, Hall made his dancing debut in The Ordering of Moses, a production sponsored by the National Negro Opera Company.

The following year, 1951, Hall and his family moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he continued studying and performing as a dancer at the Judimar School, which had been founded in 1948 by Marion Cuyjet Hall studied modern dance at the University of Pennsylvania under the direction of Malvina Tase Some of his mentors and instructors included Cuyjet a ...

Article

Jamison, Judith  

Melanye White Dixon

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

dancer, educator, choreographer, and artistic director, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the younger of two children of John Henry Jamison, a sheet-metal engineer, and Tessie Belle Brown. Jamison's parents had left the racially segregated South during the African American Great Migration of the 1920s in search of a better way of life. Jamison was born after the family had settled in the Germantown section of the city. The African American community in which she grew up built institutions that addressed the social, cultural, and political needs of its residents.

Jamison's parents held high aspirations for their daughter and their son, John Henry Jr. and attendance at Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal AME Church was an integral part of family life Jamison s mother and father who had met through their involvement in the church choir made sure that their children were active in ...

Article

Jamison, Judith  

Jacqueline M. Jones

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
09 February 2009
Published online:
01 December 2009

dancer, choreographer, teacher, and author. Jamison was born in Philadelphia to John Henry Jamison of Orangeburg, South Carolina, and Tessie Belle Brown of Bartow, Florida. In 1943 Philadelphia's African American population was steadily growing because of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North. As a result, throughout her early life Jamison was immersed in a strong African American community, a community that empowered her to pursue her interest in the performing arts. Jamison's parents, who loved opera and classical music, encouraged her to cultivate her interest in dance.

Jamison began her dance career at the age of six. She was discovered by Agnes de Mille at the Judimar School of Dance, where she was studying under the tutelage of Marion Cuyjet. At the age of ten Jamison first saw the work of Pearl Primus the anthropologist and dancer who ...

Article

Jamison, Judith  

Leyla Keough

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Judith Jamison started dancing at the age of six at the Judimar School of Dance. At seventeen, she left to study psychology at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. After three semesters, she returned to Philadelphia to continue her dance training at the Philadelphia Dance Company (now University of Arts).

After a 1964 appearance with Agnes de Mille's dance troupe in New York, Jamison joined the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre (AAADT) in 1965. Because of this company's financial difficulties, she danced with the Harkness Ballet for the 1966 season. But in 1967 she returned to AAADT to become its premier dancer. With this company she toured the world, dancing in Cry (1971), her signature dance, which Ailey choreographed to honor the strength and dignity of African American women. For her performances, she won an award from Dance Magazine in 1972 ...

Article

Jamison, Judith  

Howard S. Kaplan

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
23 December 2004
Published online:
01 December 2006

Jamison began her dance studies at the age of six under the tutelage of dance pioneer Marion Cuyjet at the Judimar School of Dance in Philadelphia. She subsequently studied with Antony Tudor, John Hines, Delores Browne, Maria Swoboda, John Jones, and Joan Kerr. After attending Fisk University as a psychology major, she enrolled at the Philadelphia Dance Academy (now the University of the Arts), where Agnes de Mille discovered her and brought her to New York to dance in The Four Marys for American Ballet Theatre's twenty-fifth anniversary on 23 March 1965. Shortly after, at an audition for Donald McKayle, she caught the eye of Alvin Ailey, who subsequently asked her to join his company. She stayed with the company for fifteen years, including a short period in 1966 when the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater joined with the Harkness ...

Article

Jamison, Judith  

Jaime McLean

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 May 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Judith Jamison has spent most of her life perfecting her craft. As a dancer, choreographer, teacher, and artistic director of the internationally renowned Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Jamison has attempted to foster an appreciation for modern American dance and African American cultural expression in both her audiences and her students. She stresses the universality of dance and its ability to promote cross-cultural understanding through the expression of human experiences. “When you come to the theater,” Jamison says, “you open your head and your heart and your mind because we are there to transform you. I’m a human being who has seen the world, so I’m giving you that perspective.”

Jamison, the younger of two children, was born in Philadelphia Her parents instilled in her a passion for the arts As a young child Jamison studied piano and violin before shifting her focus to dance At age six Jamison ...