“They called it exotic. They said we should be in the nightclubs. I said, ‘I think this is concert dancing.’”
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So Darlene Blackburn took her art–African and Afro-Caribbean dance–to the schools: to public schools through Urban Gateways and to Columbia College, where she gave master classes and lectures. That was back in the late 60s and early 70s, when even African Americans were not quite ready for what she was doing. “They didn’t want to know that the movements [of the popular dances they were doing] came from Africa. They didn’t want to hear it,” she says. But they loved it when her lead male dancer, Alyo Tolbert (who became Muntu Dance Theatre’s first artistic director), did his James Brown imitation at the end of the show.
In 1969, after a performance Blackburn did at DuSable High School, a woman asked her what parts of Africa she’d been to. None, Blackburn said. This was just her impression of African dance. The woman–Dr. Margaret Burroughs, founder of the Du Sable Museum–said, well, then, Blackburn would have to go. She made her first trip, to Ghana, that year; in 1971 she traveled with seven dancers and three drummers to Nigeria. From 1977 to 1980 she lived in Nigeria, teaching dancers there to choreograph and theatricalize the folk and ritual dances of their culture. She made the first of her several trips to the Caribbean in 1967.
