Dancing In and Out of Place: Black Concert Dance Histories and New York City's Clark Center, 1959-1989

Abstract

This dissertation is the first scholarly study of Clark Center for the Performing Arts, an important New York City dance studio and school. Founded in 1959 as a place for black gay choreographer Alvin Ailey to formalize his modern dance company, Clark Center began in a YWCA in midtown Manhattan. Over the next thirty years, it grew to offer a robust slate of intentionally low-priced dance classes to dancers of many walks of life. Specifically, Clark Center aimed to resource African American dancers and emerging choreographers who sought to establish themselves professionally and start companies. Affiliated teachers and choreographers of note included Thelma Hill, Dianne McIntyre, Pepsi Bethel, Charles Moore, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. Using primary-source archival records and oral-history interviews, this project chronicles the history of Clark Center and analyzes its social, political, and cultural significance. Theorizing that Clark Center’s history has been obscured in the discourse of “uptown dance” and “downtown dance,” I coin “midtown dance.” This new paradigm highlights a network of dance studios in midtown Manhattan that offered a pluralistic array of dance forms to a diverse group of people. Clark Center also birthed Playwrights Horizons in the early 1970s, a theater organization that split off soon after its founding. As the Times Square area was subjected to “clean up” efforts, the arts became a tool of redevelopment. Playwrights Horizons inaugurated one such redevelopment project when it moved to Theatre Row, a new block of off-/off-Broadway theaters. After a years-long attempt to establish a dance venue there, Clark Center shuttered in 1989, its mixedness rendered incommensurate with the increasingly homogenized region. This project is especially attuned to the politics of black concert dance extended through Clark Center and that live on today. It argues that Clark Center modeled an alternative, “black-centric” version of racial integration, one that did not undercut black identities. Moreover, it posits that engagement with African-diasporic dance forms at Clark Center engendered in black students expanded conceptions of themselves as diasporically African and historically American. Deploying and contributing to Black Performance Theory, dancing at Clark Center is shown to be black self-making and black world-making.