Join Jawole Willa Jo Zollar in conversation with author Halifu Osumare at Greenlight Bookstore May 21st

Join Jawole Willa Jo Zollar in conversation with author Halifu Osumare at Greenlight Bookstore May 21st

Halifu Osumare, author, dancer, and professor emerita of African American Studies at University of California, Davis, presents her globe-trotting, decades-spanning, deeply personal new memoir. Dancing in Blackness: A Memoir is the inspiring story of an accomplished dance artist and world-renowned dance scholar who boldly developed and proclaimed her identity as a Black woman. Equal parts memoir, history, cultural analysis and catalog, Dancing in Blackness: A Memoir finds Osumare using her extraordinary experiences to reveal the overlooked ways that dance has been a vital tool in the black struggle for recognition, justice, and self-empowerment.

Osumare discusses her new book in conversation with Jawole Zollar, founder of Urban Bush Women. A signing and Q&A follows the conversation.

Event date: 

Monday, May 21, 2018 at 7:30pm

Event address: 

Greenlight Bookstore Prospect Lefferts Gardens Store

632 Flatbush Ave.

Brooklyn, NY 11225

ABOUT THE BOOK: Dancing in Blackness is a professional dancer's personal journey over four decades, across three continents and twenty-three countries, and through defining moments in the story of black dance in America. In this memoir, Halifu Osumare reflects on what blackness and dance have meant to her life and international career.

Osumare's story begins in 1960s San Francisco amid the Black Arts Movement, black militancy, and hippie counterculture. It was there that she chose dance as her own revolutionary statement. She moved to Europe, where she taught "jazz ballet" and established her own dance company in Copenhagen. Returning to the United States, she danced with the Rod Rodgers Dance Company in New York City and played key roles in integrating black dance programs into mainstream programming at the Lincoln Center. After dance fieldwork in Ghana, Osumare returned to California and helped develop Oakland's black dance scene. Along the way, she collaborated with major artistic movers and shakers: among them, Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Jean-Leon Destine, and Donald McKayle.

Now a black studies scholar, Osumare uses her extraordinary experiences to reveal the overlooked ways that dance has been a vital tool in the black struggle for recognition, justice, and self-empowerment. This is the inspiring story of an accomplished dance artist and a world-renowned dance scholar who has boldly developed and proclaimed her identity as a black woman.

The Dance Claimed Me: A Biography of Pearl Primus By Peggy Schwartz and Murray Schwartz

The Dance Claimed Me: A Biography of Pearl Primus By Peggy Schwartz and Murray Schwartz

Pearl Primus (1919-1994) blazed onto the dance scene in 1943 with stunning works that incorporated social and racial protest into their dance aesthetic. In The Dance Claimed Me, Peggy and Murray Schwartz, friends and colleagues of Primus, offer an intimate perspective on her life and explore her influences on American culture, dance, and education. They trace Primus's path from her childhood in Port of Spain, Trinidad, through her rise as an influential international dancer, an early member of the New Dance Group (whose motto was "Dance is a weapon"), and a pioneer in dance anthropology.

Primus traveled extensively in the United States, Europe, Israel, the Caribbean, and Africa, and she played an important role in presenting authentic African dance to American audiences. She engendered controversy in both her private and professional lives, marrying a white Jewish man during a time of segregation and challenging black intellectuals who opposed the "primitive" in her choreography. Her political protests and mixed-race tours in the South triggered an FBI investigation, even as she was celebrated by dance critics and by contemporaries like Langston Hughes.

For The Dance Claimed Me, the Schwartzes interviewed more than a hundred of Primus's family members, friends, and fellow artists, as well as other individuals to create a vivid portrayal of a life filled with passion, drama, determination, fearlessness, and brilliance.

Peggy Schwartz is professor emeritus of dance and former director of the dance program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Murray Schwartz is former dean of humanities and fine arts at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He teaches literature at Emerson College.