The Inheritance Beneath Our Feet
What languages does her body speak, and Who has been listening?
The body is a memory keeper. When we move, we remember.
― Syvilla Fort, Oral Interview circa 1970
I was nine, already standing taller than the rest of my peers, when a pair of Black callused hands placed the pink satin pointe shoes in mine like an offering. Pink as velvety camellias and stitched for pain, they rested quietly in my palms, foreign to the inheritance beneath my feet, where power lived in the stomp and not a point. I held them in quiet wonder, unaware that another language of movement lived closer to my bones, a language I would begin to understand when Ms. Shannon, my dance instructor, showed me who we were.
In her high-ceilinged studio room, with its worn hardwood floors and large mirrors, Ms. Shannon would project videos of these captivating Black women in motion onto the unadorned, ochre-colored wall along the back of the room. There, thirteen little Black girls sat with knees to our chests and eyes wide, spellbound by the way their bodies spoke. Each movement translating into language we were just beginning to learn.
Witnessing their kinetic languages, I came to understand that the pointe shoe belonged to a tradition distant from my own. One that lifted bodies off the ground rather than rooting them, that favored stillness over pulse, symmetry over the wild syncopation of call and response.
Yet through the presence of these Black women, carriers of rhythm and remembering, even the satin shoes began to carry the echo of Big Drum dances1 born in the wake of displacement, where djembe drums spoke in polyrhythms and the dead were called back through movement.
They were not just performers but archives in motion, bodies through which history pulsed, rituals breathed, and new possibilities took form. For those familiar, their names might already ring with reverence. But for me, they were an initiation. This reflection is only the beginning. In time, I will continue to trace the lineage of Black dance through the years of research I’ve gathered, lifting the names that remain unsaid, the troupes that disrupted, the movements that sparked something beyond the stage.
Let this be the first entry in a series devoted to Black dance: its matriarchs and rebels, its ceremonies and revolutions.
Judith Jamison b.(1943–2024), often called the Black Venus of twentieth-century dance, danced with the intensity of a rites de passage. Her long, dark amber limbs unfurled like incantations, carving space with the weight of memory. There was a celestial gravity in her control, a sovereign grace that did not simply move through choreography; it extolled it. In every reach and release, I saw phases, like the moon, shifting in her body’s orbit.
She was twenty-one when Alvin Ailey first saw her perform in New York and invited her to join his company. In her, he recognized a vessel capable of carrying memory, mourning, and majesty in a single breath.
In 1971, Ailey created Cry for her, a sixteen-minute solo in three movements, gifted to his mother and dedicated to Black women who have known sorrow, endurance, and joy. The piece was set to the music of Alice Coltrane’s "Something About John Coltrane" (1968), Laura Nyro’s "Been on a Train" (1971), and The Voices of East Harlem’s "Right On, Be Free" (1970). Jamison did not simply perform Cry; she embodied it. Her body became a vessel for unspoken histories, channeling grief into grace, suffering into flight, and pain into praise. Through her, Cry became both elegy and offering.
She would then go on to become a principal dancer and later the artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, shaping its future with the same conviction she carried on stage.
Carmen de Lavallade b.(1931), moved with the grace of sustained adagios, her long limbs unfurling like silk in water, each gesture precise yet unbound. Born in Los Angeles, she trained under Lester Horton, whose technique blended modern dance with theatrical narrative. It was in Horton’s company that she met Alvin Ailey, and in 1954, she brought him to New York when they were both cast in House of Flowers. Her presence on stage was luminous. Her dark-brown tresses lifted in soft spirals, echoing the fluidity of her motion.
In performance, Carmen carried both sorrow and radiance. Her body spoke of grief and resistance, of joy braided with memory. There was something sacred in the way she collapsed, lifted, and reached again. Her movement evoked the archetypal sprawl of the ravaged woman, yet never without power. Her dance, like her people before her, adapted to the contours of new lands, changing form while keeping hold of essence.
She found deep creative kinship in her husband, Geoffrey Holder, a visionary artist known for his commanding stage presence, Caribbean-rooted storytelling, and visual imagination. Together, they built worlds through dance, costume, and theater. Their union blurred the boundaries between life and art. Carmen danced to her own drum, but always carried the ancestral rhythm in her breath. She was both muse and maker, a vessel through which history continued to remember itself.
Katherine Dunham b.(1909–2006) was a conjurewoman of choreography, a scholar, anthropologist, and artist whose work summoned the spiritual, political, and rhythmic life of the African diaspora. Born in Chicago, she studied dance and anthropology side by side, earning degrees from the University of Chicago while traveling to Haiti, Jamaica, and Martinique to research sacred dances. What she returned with was more than field notes. She brought back a language of motion that pulsed with memory and meaning.
Dunham fused diasporic rhythm with classical form, creating a technique that began not at the barre but at the earth. Her technique, a gumbo of Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, and the American South, simmered with spirit and complexity. Her dancers did not simply perform; they remembered. Each contraction, hip isolation, and undulation was rooted in ritual, a coded act of resistance. Through her, I saw how anthropology became choreography and how movement could be both ceremony and protest.
She formed the Dunham Company in the 1940s, one of the first self-supported Black modern dance companies, and toured globally at a time when few stages welcomed Black dancers. Her technique became foundational, influencing generations across modern, jazz, and theatrical dance. She danced on Broadway and in film, yet never strayed from the urgency of her mission. Dance, for Dunham, was a sacred inheritance. Through her, the body became a site of cultural survival.
Syvilla Fort b.(1917–1975), a quiet architect of movement, a dancer and teacher whose legacy echoes through the bones of Black modern dance. Born in Seattle and barred from classical ballet schools because of her race, she turned exclusion into defiance and found her way to the Katherine Dunham School, where she studied, performed, and eventually became one of its most vital instructors. Her influence shaped the paths of Alvin Ailey, Eartha Kitt, Marlon Brando, and James Dean.
Her choreography was earth-honed and percussive, sculpted by both injury and vision. From this tension, she developed what became known as Afro-Modern technique, a language rooted in the floor where weight and rhythm met breath and memory. Even in her later years, when arthritis confined her to a chair, Fort continued to choreograph and teach, using her voice, claps, and breath to transmit rhythm. Her danza moved like invocation.
Each grounded plié, each spiral of the spine, felt like an offering. She danced with a kind of reverent insistence, guiding her students not only through form, but toward remembrance. In her studio, the body became an instrument of lineage, and the floor a sacred terrain.
Through each of these women, I came to understand that studying Black dance is not just learning form but listening to a deeper rhythm, one that speaks in memory, in refusal, in grace. Their movements shaped how I began to see my own, offering a language for what had always stirred beneath my skin. To be a Black woman who dances is to carry thunder in your calves, to stretch a leg into the next world and still feel the weight of the earth beneath you. It is to know that the body holds stories, that sweat is a sacred text, and that no gesture is ever without meaning.
Though I’ve spent eight years away from the studio, far from the ache and exaltation of movement, something in me has begun to stir again.
Now, newly twenty-one, I have promised myself a return to pointing and stomping, to stillness and sweat, to the sacred motion that once taught me how to listen to my own becoming. And if you, too, feel your body growing quiet—stiff, unexpressed, forgotten—then maybe it’s time to move again, too.
A ceremonial tradition from the island of Carriacou in Grenada, Big Drum dances are performed to honor African ancestors and mark rites of passage. Led by female singers and accompanied by drumming in rhythmic patterns specific to ancestral nations (like the Manding or Congo), these dances invoke the spiritual presence of the dead, preserving African cultural memory through movement and sound.
This was beautiful. My heart is full.
Beautiful words and imagery, thank you for the videos too!