Fourteen-year-old Jalaiah Harmon cho-

reographed the famous “Renegade” dance 
in September 2019. She posted it on the 
social video app Funimate and by October 
the bouncy set of moves had been recreated 
on TikTok. It was quickly popularized by 
influencer Charli D’Amelio and by early 
2020 the dance had reached unprecedent-
ed stardom. The choreography floated 
into seemingly every corner of the internet 
and many offline dance parties. But as the 
trend raked in millions upon millions of 
followers, Harmon found herself looking 
on with confusion — she hadn’t been given 
credit for any of it. 

Harmon’s story was eventually well-

documented: The New York Times offered 
a thoughtful deep-dive, and the young 
dancer landed a performance on “The Ellen 
Show” as well as at the NBA All-Star game. 
She eventually met D’Amelio, who seemed 
enthusiastic to have found the dance’s orig-
inal owner. But the “Renegade” story is one 
of many anecdotes often used to describe 
the unfair realities of what NYT called 
“The Viral Dance-iarchy.” Odd nomencla-
ture aside, the phenomenon is real — it’s 
the process by which white mainstream 
TikTok creators co-opt the work of less 
well-known Black choreographers on apps 
like Funimate or Dubsmash. 

While important, many writers who aim 

to bring attention to this issue tell the story 
from a solely technological angle. Tik-
Tok doesn’t include a system for crediting 
choreographers which, while problematic, 
does not tell the whole story. Occasionally 
a more thorough commentary will discuss 
the “Renegade” issue in the historical con-
text of white people co-opting hip-hop 
music and dance, but the reality goes deep-
er than one genre.

At a recent symposium with The Muse-

um at the Fashion Institute of Technology, 
activist and former ballet dancer Theresa 
Ruth Howard gave a presentation about 
Black history in American ballet, telling 
a story remarkably similar to Harmon’s 
“Renegade.” Specifically, Howard talked 
about George Balanchine, who founded the 
School of American Ballet in 1934 and the 
New York City Ballet in 1948. Backed by the 
success of these institutions, Balanchine 
became the most influential dancemaker 
of the 20th century. He choreographed 465 
ballets in his lifetime and with them forged 
a completely new aesthetic with which 
America now approaches the art form. 

Howard quoted historian Brenda Dixon 

Gottschild in saying that Balanchine’s 

technique is marked by “angular arms, 
turned-in legs, bent knees, pelvic and chest 
articulation and displacement, leg kicks, 
heightened speed (and) densely layered 
phrases.” Today, it’s these characteristics 
that are revered as genius innovation but, 
as Gottschild noted, “these same elements 
are basic syllables of Africanist dance lan-
guages.” 

Howard’s talk elaborated on this last 

point: She pointed to the similarities 
between Balanchine’s emphasis of plié and 
the bent-knees of jazz and Balanchine’s 
focus on creating the rhythm of the step 
before the actual movement, a process 
similar to tap dancing. Howard also noted 
Balanchine’s famous intention to create an 
integrated black-white ballet company as 
early as the 1940s, but clarified this overly 
moralistic history with racist quotes that 
suggest his intentions lay more in want-
ing to acquire access to Black musicality 
than actually wanting different skin colors 
onstage.

The presentation also included several 

clips of Arthur Mitchell, who became the 
first Black dancer at NYCB in 1955 and 
later founded Dance Theatre of Harlem. 
Howard’s 1997 clip shows Mitchell telling 
his audience “many people did not realize… 
(Balanchine) told us ‘if you want beautiful 
hands go take Spanish dancing,’ he said ‘if 
you want to use the back take Dunham.’ He 
always used all the different techniques at 
that particular time.” In the clip, Mitchell 
perks up from his seat to demonstrate each 
of his examples, his eyes brightening at the 
prospect of such collaboration. He tells his 
audience about a love of Fred Astaire and 
Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, bouncing out of 
his chair to reenact photos of Balanchine, 
affectionately nicknamed Mr. B: “You 
never never see him (just standing), he’s 
always like this! or that! Utilizing the form 
of jazz, what we call jazz today.”

Thus, Balanchine’s ballet is a diverse 

meld of people and places, and according 
to Mitchell he wanted his dancers to know 
the source of each. As Howard puts it, it’s 
the product of “organic cultural intersec-
tionality influence and cross-pollination 
that is life.” If this is true, why are we not 
teaching our dance students such history? 
Why are we not writing it in our programs? 
Why are we not making sure that every 
generation after Balanchine also under-
stands where this technique comes from 
and how to value the communities that 
supported it? 

7

Thursday, June 18, 2020

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com ARTS

Protests and poetry

BOOKS NOTEBOOK
BOOKS NOTEBOOK

ZOE PHILLIPS
Daily Arts Writer

SUMMER SERIES
SUMMER SERIES

Matching strides, we inch forward and 

we stagger back. We readjust and begin 
again. We are followers of the person in 
front of us and leaders of those behind. 
The uninterrupted balance of bodies bus-
tling close to each other reminds me of 
poetry, the kind written for moments like 
these. There is rhythm behind the pain in 
our steps. There are rhymes in the chants 
we shout. I see the symbolism in the fists 
raised: a sign of solidarity and support; a 
salute to express the united resistance. 

It’s an enduring salutation. The united 

resistance around me thumps like a beat-
ing heart. Underneath us it pulses. The 
heartbeat has revived from a movement 
long ago. In 1935, poet and renowned fig-
ure of the Harlem Renaissance Langston 
Hughes wrote the poem “Let America Be 
America Again.” He focuses on the Amer-
ican dream and the near impossibility of 
many to attain it and protests the Ameri-
can slogan of freedom that excludes him 
and many others: “There’s never been 
equality for me / Nor freedom in this 
‘homeland of the free.’” He identifies with 
all the oppressed peoples that built Amer-
ica and ignites the urge for them all to rise 
up: a united resistance. The repetition in 
his cries for his land and people signifies 
that this fight is far from over; that this 
heart is still beating. 

I stand in the heart of a thousand-

person crowd on one of the busiest inter-
states in Michigan. It’s June 6, 2020, and 
we’re marching for the Black Lives Mat-
ter movement. I’m close behind a young 
Black woman with a megaphone. In it, 
she shouts “When your feet hurt, remem-
ber why you’re walking! When your arms 
hurt from holding your sign, think of how 
many of us have died holding our hands 

up!” 

Maya Angelou wrote the poem “Still I 

Rise” in 1978. The defiant message of the 
poem takes me back to the protest, to the 
speaker in front of me. In the poem, Ange-
lou refuses to succumb to the oppressor’s 
hate: “You may write me down in history 
/ With your bitter, twisted lies, / You may 
trod me in the very dirt, / But still, like 
dust, I’ll rise.” Angelou uses anaphora, 
the repetition of the phrase “you may” in 
the beginning of several verses. It reit-
erates the never-ending attempts of the 
oppressor to keep her down, and serves 
to amplify the inevitability of her defeat 
over this adversity. Both Angelou and the 
protest speaker remind me who we are 
fighting for. 

The arrangement of the individuals is 

like the syntax of a poem; we are each 
unique bodies but the organization of 
us all brings us together. As we march 
entangled together the enjambment of 
our rows signifies that the fight is never-
ending. There is no time for rest. We have 
to keep moving. 

The police at this protest watch from 

their cars. They are parked to block the 
road from the other side of the highway. 
Whenever I spot their vehicles I hear 
Harryette Mullen’s “We Are Not Respon-
sible.” Written in 2002, Mullen narrates 
the dehumanization of the language of 
authority officials in this poem. The lan-
guage she uses is balanced with nearly 
every line having the same amount of syl-
lables. It juxtaposes the threat beneath 
the lines, and emphasizes the final vio-
lent line that fails to fall in order: “Please 
remain calm, or we can’t be held respon-
sible / for what happens to you.” She pro-
tests the misuse of power and degrading 
standards of these officials. 

LILLIAN PIERCE

Daily Arts Writer

What Balanchine got 
from Black dancers

Read more at michigandaily.com

Read more at michigandaily.com

