General Notes (above)

Negro ballet, now being seen in this country for the first time, is something novel and vital in choreographic art, totally unlike those tap routines which Florence Mills, Nina Mae McKinney and Josephine Baker have already performed for our delight in revues of the “Blackbirds” calibre. Negro ballet is a serious art form, as significant in dancing as Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” in music. As conceived by Pasuka, it is essentially an expression of human emotion in dance form, being the complete antithesis of Russian ballet, with its stereotyped entrechats and point-work.

In times of grief and joy the Negro dances as naturally as he sings spirituals in moments of nostalgia. These ballets, created by Pasuka, are evolved from a blending of spontaneous and basic steps and rhythms. Since much of the dancing is extempore, inspired on the spur of the movement, the dancer does not necessarily express his mood on every occasion by the self-same steps and gestures. Yet when an artist touches what he considers the peak of expression in certain sequences of his dance, such movements are captured and repeated without variation at every performance. They tend to become standard basic steps, subsequently used by the Negro choreographer as a foundation for his ballets.

The music is provided by piano, tom-tom and maraca, a form of native rattle, similar to the calabash used in rumba bands. The only other sound is a series of varying low notes produced in the stomach of the dancers, a Negro counterpart of the wild shouts of the Polovtsian warriors in ”Prince Igor”. With no written music as a guide, the Negro tom-tom players always follow, and never lead, the dancer. They merely reflect and accentuate in sound the visual beauty created by the performer on the stage.

Pasuka’s ballets, which have been created specially for this season, are emotional dance-dreams, illustrating the culture of the Negro race as vividly as the primitive carvings of those nameless African sculptors who caused us to reassess our valuation of such established masters as Michael Angelo and Auguste Rodin.

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