UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title As the Flesh Moves: Lon Fontaine, Black Dance, and Strategies for Rendering Presence Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/97c6j164 Author Brannum, Barry Ajani Publication Date 2021 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles As the Flesh Moves: Lon Fontaine, Black Dance, and Strategies for Rendering Presence A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Culture and Performance by Barry Brannum 2021 © Copyright by Barry Brannum 2021 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION As the Flesh Moves: Lon Fontaine, Black Dance, and Strategies for Rendering Presence by Barry Brannum Doctor of Philosophy in Culture and Performance University of California, Los Angeles, 2021 Professor Susan Leigh Foster, Chair My project surveys the work of Lon Fontaine, a dancer who performed, taught, and choreographed for many of the twentieth century’s most prominent black American entertainers. Though Fontaine collaborated with several important black social, commercial, and political institutions, his work has been largely overlooked—and was, in his opinion, underappreciated in his own day. I take Fontaine’s anxieties about (a lack of) representation seriously, especially because they resonated with similar concerns within Fontaine’s broader context of the Civil Rights era. To this end, Fontaine’s work helps me ask how the question of representation informed black cultural politics (specifically within the United States) during the Civil Rights movement.
I center my investigation around the distinction between ‘body’ and ‘flesh,’ as theorized by black studies scholars like Hortense Spillers, that conditions black ontology in the wake of chattel enslavement. I argue that the former realm is the domain of ii subjecthood, agency, and representational politics (and a politics of representation), while the latter—which marks black being after chattel enslavement—eludes conventional understandings of these concepts. Importantly, I argue that distinctions between embodiment and enfleshment are not given, but produced through various means of ‘doing’ corporeality—a process I refer to as rendering presence. I therefore investigate the array of practices Fontaine and his peers adopted in the process of learning, making, performing, and teaching dance.
Three case studies focus on a specific decade in Fontaine’s career, each asking how he and his projects (Larry’s Steele’s Smart Affairs, the NAACP, and the Temptations, respectively) addressed urgent concerns about sense-making, aesthetic production, sociocultural identity, and (black) being. This project’s core data is drawn from archival research, interviews, and choreographic analysis. My analytic framework is grounded in critical dance studies scholarship and is bolstered by insights from queer/black studies and critical race studies. These lenses expose the stakes of carving out space for oneself as a ‘legitimate’ black choreographer—whether of dance or social movement(s)—in a context where integration, representation, and legibility are not obvious or given political aims, as is commonly presumed in mainstream accounts of the Civil Rights movement.
Such legitimacy is tenuous, not least because antiblackness’ operations extend well into the present day. I track more recent manifestations of the phenomenon by reflecting on my own dancing experience. In particular, I revisit my work with choreographer Deborah Hay, asking how her creative practices enact their own strategies for rendering presence. I conclude that, while the body/flesh distinction continues to hamper dancemaking, it also offers antidotes to the antiblackness deeply engrained in conventional doings of embodiment.
iii The dissertation of Barry Brannum is approved. Anurima Banerji Uri McMillan Janet O’Shea Susan Leigh Foster, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2021 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract of the Dissertation. ii Committee Page .iv Table of Contents .vi Vita/Biographical Sketch. 1 Just a Moment: On Rendering (Black) Presence .5 Who (and Where) is “Lon Fontaine”?.
9 What is ‘The’ Civil Rights Movement?. 17 Black Studies: Ontology, Embodiment, (Un)Disciplinarity. 23 Black/Dance Studies: Orienting Within the Field. 33 Putting It Together: Methodology.
“Just a Chorus Boy”: The Smart Affairs ‘Family’ and Divergent Strategies for Rendering Presence. 56 “The Man with the Golden Arm”. 61 The Patriarch: Larry Steele. 64 Becoming a Family: The Beige Beauts and Modern Harlem Girls.
70 Becoming (Self-)Possessed: Lon Fontaine. 81 “His Own Creating”: Sir Lionel Beckels, the “Man with the Golden Arm”. “I Wonder Why Some People Don’t Like Me”: The NAACP’s Freedom Spectacular and Black Presence in the Shadow of Brown v. Board of Education.103 “I Am That Child, and So Are You”.
110 “Making Her Way through a Man-Made Junkyard of a City”. 116 Evil versus Good / Paradox. Shaky Ground: The Temptations and (Fontaine’s) Pedagogies of Presence. 142 Detroit, 1966: “Now We Call It ‘Choreographed’”.
150 Los Angeles, 1975: “Being Able to Take Direction”. 162 Detroit, 1986: “One, Two, You Know What to Do”. Here and Gone: Reflections on Deborah Hay’s Figure a Sea .186 Seeing and Being Seen. 191 The Furthest I’ve Travelled.
195 It’s Just a Dance. 216 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS At its core, this dissertation is about teaching and learning. I want to start by thanking my family for imparting the power of education to me from a young age. Thank you, Mom (Barbara Brannum), for being my first teacher; Dad (Barry H.
Brannum), for being endlessly curious and passionate; and Bashan, for balancing skill and sensitivity with humor and coolness. You all remind me that learning does not begin or end at the walls of the academy—and that the latter is just a stop on the former’s journey. Thanks to Aunt Dean for your advice and encouragement regarding the PhD process (your dissertation might have been the first one I ever looked at!). I also want to acknowledge those ancestors who lived to learn, and who have passed those gifts onto me.
Thank you, Dorothy Ellen Davis, Effie Lou Gibson, Carrie Mae Alford, and the many other educators, learners, and creators who lit a path for me. You’ve all given me something great to work with. My dissertation would not exist without the guidance and support of the WAC/D faculty and staff. Thank you, Susan Leigh Foster, not just for chairing my dissertation committee, but for being a steadfast guide, cheerleader, advocate, and interlocutor.
I have learned a lot from your candor, clarity, and full-out commitment to dance and dancing; I also appreciate the ways I’ve seen your own thinking, writing, and practice shift over the last near-decade. Your work has been essential to my growth and development as a writer, teacher, and maker. I also want to thank the faculty members whose work has nurtured my project in important ways, starting with committee members Anurima Banerji, Uri McMillan, and Janet O’Shea. All of you have inspired me to continue whetting my analytical skills, even beyond the scope of this project.
Thank you to those professors whose technique and composition courses have greatly enriched my embodiment practices: Dan Froot, Lionel Popkin, Natsuo Tomita, Jason Tsou, Ros Warby, and Cheng-Chieh Yu. At some points in this process, I spent more time in the dance studio than writing—but that practice, and these teachers’ skill and wisdom, made my dissertation what it is vi today. I also want to thank WAC/D staff members past and present for their tireless work. Erica Angarano, Marcia Argolo, LaDonja Horn, Tiffany Long, Hayley Safonov, Lynn Tatum, and Megan Taylor have all played an indispensable part in getting me across the finish line.
However dramatic it may sound, I cannot thank them enough for their thoroughness, kindness, and care. Finally, thank you to Arsenio Apillanes, Meryl Friedman, David Gere, Mark Goebel, Ginger Holguin, Jackie Lopez, Peter Nabokov, Al Roberts, and David Shorter for supporting my work in many ways, both big and small. Because this project carried me beyond the bounds of critical dance studies, I am thankful to those professors who helped give my hunches a solid scholarly grounding. Devon Carbado’s introductory Critical Race Theory course in the UCLA School of Law upended my understanding of race and racialization, as did Aisha Finch’s seminars in the Department of African American Studies.
Their impactful insights completely inform the frameworks I implement throughout this dissertation, and have transformed my life in fundamental ways. Thank you also, Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, for your guidance during the earliest stages of my writing process. My research came vividly to life through the conversations I had with some of Lon Fontaine’s peers. Thank you, Steve Binder, for screening what may be the sole existing recording of the NAACP Freedom Spectacular; Michael Henderson for discussing Fontaine’s time at Motown; to Ralph E.
Hunter for ushering me through the incredible collection of ephemera and artifacts housed at the African-American Heritage Museum of Southern New Jersey; Debora Kodish for sharing information about the unsung labors of black female chorus dancers; Victory (Vicki) Levi for offering leads on former entertainers to contact; Jacqueline Morillo for hosting my research at the Atlantic City Free Public Library, even amid massive budget cuts and extensive restructuring; Ronald J. Stephens for offering advice on how to find information about Lon Fontaine; and Yvonne Walton, for reflections on dancing with Larry Steele’s Smart Affairs. It has been an honor to meet some of the people who make history happen. (The people who vii archive history are just as important! I extend special thanks to Tom Tryinski, webmaster of Old Fulton New York Postcards.
Many of the newspaper clippings I reference in this dissertation were sourced directly from his astounding digital collection of early- and mid-twentieth century ephemera.) I am immensely grateful to the friends and colleagues who have supported me through eight years of exploration, uncertainty, frustration, and triumph. First, I want to thank the folks in my dissertation writing group: Amy Alterman-Paradiso, Zena Bibler, Saroya Corbett, Marko Icev, Natalie Kamajian, Christina Novakov, and Arushi Singh. The laughter, tears, encouragement, and scrutiny truly showed me that communal learning is a real possibility. (They also forced me to draw up a schedule for writing, which, bless.) This group’s support with feedback and editing was a boon in the final stretch of the writing process.
I am deeply grateful for the many other WAC/D students who have shared this experience with me. There are too many to name, but I want to shout out the now-and-forever Military House crew: Jenna Delgado, Mana Hayakawa, Andrew Martinez, Rita Rufino-Valente Quinn, Carl Schottmiller, Pallavi Sriram, Elaine Sullivan, Sarah Wilbur, and Alessandra Williams; and the members of my Culture and Performance cohort: Sevi Bayraktar, Cyndi García-Weyandt, Ellen Gerdes, Melissa Melpignano, Jeremy Peretz, and Thalia Torres. I am so thrilled to see where their work has taken them. Many other folks have provided emotional, mental, intellectual, and material support throughout this process.
Among them are Grace Alterman-Paradiso, Agnes Borinsky, Anya Cloud, Christina Campodonico, Tamsin Carlson, Dr. Medria Connolly, Alison D’Amato, Katy Dammers, Dorothy Dubrule, Brigette Dunn-Korpela, Nina Flagg, Luz Foerstner, Margit Galanter, Mark Gutierrez, Elyan Hill, Jasmine Jawato, Kevin Le, Dixon Dahlia Li, Hope McCoy, Julio Medina, Olivia Mole, Monica O’Connor, Ariel Osterweis, Ethan Patron, Joshua Ross, Karen Schaffman, Antwann Simpkins, Joe Small, Luis Tentindo, Addison Vincent, Samuel viii Wentz, and Kevin Williamson. From rides and meals to hard conversations about life and work, I appreciate all the ways these individuals have kept me going during graduate school. This project is a testament to the tangibles of creative practice.
For that reason, I am profoundly grateful for the people who have inspired, witnessed, encouraged, and aided my efforts to turn my concepts into vivid realities. They include Makisig Akin, Héctor Alvarez, Gregory Barnett, Effie Bowen, Heidi Brewer, Bernard Brown, April (Axé) Charmaine, Jade Charon, Stacy Dawson Stearns, Samuel Draper, Nick Duran Fair, Doran George, my friends in the HUT, Lluvia Ibarra, Rhia Jade, Laurel Jenkins, Sarah Leddy, Carol McDowell, Samantha Mohr, Darrian O’Reilly, Harvey Peralta, Anna Luisa Petrisko (and the Vibration Group), Priyanka Ram, Elliot Reed, Alexx Shilling, estrellx supernova (and the u. crew), Tom Tsai, devika wickremesinghe, Tiran Willemse, and Grace Winston.