UC Riverside

This dissertation analyzes Alvin Ailey’s seminal ballet Cry as a cultural product for the purpose of examining how modern dance choreography has been used throughout the twentieth century in social resistance and political response to the gross depictions of black womanhood in America. In doing so, this dissertation contemplates how Ailey as a choreographer, like many modern dance artists of his era, routinely used the concert stage to account for those aspects of black life that were thought to be inconsequential to wider society. This is presumably most observable in the subject matter of his earlier ballets like Blues Suite (1958) and Revelations (1960) which helped to recast the social topography of the juke joint and the Black Baptist Church as spaces that were culturally relevant to the broader theatrical project of staging America. Similarly, the argument being made in this dissertation research is that Cry’s debut at City Center in New York City on May 4th 1971, on the heels of the Black Liberation Movement, among other social and political movements of the time, served to un-apologetically restage the bastardized iconography of black womanhood in America. This dissertation research also argues that reading Ailey’s autobiography, Revelations, alongside select revisionist histories of black women in America from slave culture to the 1970s reveals that Ailey’s Male Black Feminist inspiration for choreographing, then dedicating Cry to his mother and in homage to all black women is a foreshadowing of the formal political organizing of the Black Feminist Movement. A foreshadowing that contemplates the modern dance choreography of Pearl Primus in Strange Fruit (1943) and Katherine Dunham in Southland (1951) as radical precursors to Cry (1971) in a trilogy that uses the concert dance stage as a bully pulpit in contestation to the violent sexual politics of being black in America, but more especially, being a black woman in America.