CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The dance department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is celebrating the work of its Black faculty members and guest artists this season through the theme “Black on Black: A Celebration of Black Dance.”
The celebration is modeled after “Black on Black on Black on Black,” a 2022 Krannert Art Museum exhibition that highlighted the work of Black faculty members in the School of Art and Design.
“That exhibit really inspired me,” said Sara Hook, the head of the dance department. “I thought the work itself was so deep, but also the way they situated it and articulated it was very powerful. There were a lot of other events associated with it. We’re trying to follow suit, not just having it as a theme for several concerts but having a lot going on in coordination with the community.”
The season kicks off with October Dance, featuring a staging of “Afrique,” a 1949 work by Katherine Dunham, a choreographer who is considered the matriarch of Black dance. Dunham’s work appeared on concert stages, in Broadway theaters, opera, movies and on TV. This is the first time a university dance department has been given permission to perform one of Dunham’s historic works from her company repertoire.
October Dance is Oct. 9-11 in the Tryon Festival Theatre at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts.
George A. Miller Visiting Artist April Berry is directing and staging this production of “Afrique.” She has performed many of Dunham’s works, is a former principal dancer with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and she danced with the company when it produced a retrospective of Dunham’s choreography, titled “The Magic of Katherine Dunham,” in the late 1980s.
Berry — who studied extensively with Dunham — said the Dunham technique is a fusion of African and Caribbean dance movements and ballet and is based on primitive rhythms.
“’Afrique’ is not a traditional African dance; it is a theatricalized dance work blending those three styles,” she said.
Dunham considered her work to be “performance ethnographies,” Berry said. The choreographer researched African diasporic dance forms in Afro-Caribbean countries such as Jamaica, Trinidad and Haiti.
“Afrique” is set in a North African village whose local queen makes a visit. Berry said the 13 dancers, most of whom are undergraduate students, portray the tribespeople of the village, the queen and a raffia straw man, who serves as a representation of a spirit or ancestor in traditional African culture and whose costume is the vessel for a spirit temporarily inhabiting the human world. The music accompanying the performance is a melding of African and European music and includes two conga drummers on stage.
The theatrical and colorful costumes are inspired by North African dress and are based on those designed by Dunham’s late husband, John Pratt, for the Dunham company’s performances of “Afrique,” Berry said.
As a guest artist in residence, she has been able to teach Dunham technique classes not only to the dancers in the cast, but also to other Illinois dance students. Berry spent two weeks in residency last November, was on campus for a weeklong summer intensive and has been teaching the technique and rehearsing the cast since early September.
“The Dunham technique is not taught a lot in university dance departments around the country, so this is a unique opportunity to stage a Dunham piece and also teach this many Dunham classes,” she said. “Students are learning about her philosophy as well as her methodology, and who Dunham was as a scholar and an artist.”
Dunham was born in Chicago, grew up in Joliet and graduated from the University of Chicago, so it is appropriate that the University of Illinois is the first academic institution to perform one of Dunham’s company’s works, Berry said.
“Afrique” will open the October Dance concert, which also will feature work from three of the dance department’s Black faculty members. Cynthia Oliver will have several spoken word solos interspersed throughout the evening, including the world premiere of “I Would Not Dance.” She has two pieces that are from evening-length productions. “Her Name Was Music” is from “SHEMAD,” a work contemplating women’s powers and societal strategies for controlling them. “Punish Ya!” is a text from the duet “Boom.”
Roxane D’Orleans Juste will perform “Marassa” with her sister, dancer Sonia D’Orleans Juste. The work, grounded in Haitian folklore about twin spirits, speaks of the lifelong intuitive bond shared between two sisters.
Kemal Nance is premiering “#Hippies,” a work performed by first-year dance students and inspired by the 1960s countercultural “make love, not war” mantra. It explores how a fictional “love” culture can soothe the wounds of daily violence in 2025 America.
Chicago-based choreographer Rena Butler will premiere “Les Pigeons,” an exploration about flight and flock patterning among bird tropes.
A fourth Black dance faculty member, Alexandra Barbier, will premiere an experimental theatrical work at January Dance.
“I hope people learn about how diverse their work is. Black dance artists do not all work from the same artistic impetus or mission. They are very diverse in aesthetic and sense of purpose,” Hook said.
She said she hopes it will help build momentum for other departments on campus to highlight the work of Black scholars.
During the restaging of “Afrique,” the work also is being archived through Labanotation, a form of notation that preserves a dance in written form using symbols that indicate the dynamics of the movement and the body parts of the dancers involved in the movement. It is not a common practice, and the notation work is tedious, Hook said. But having the dance archived in this way will enable other institutions to reconstruct the work, she said. A representative of the Dance Notation Bureau of New York City is archiving “Afrique.”
Editor’s notes: To contact Sara Hook, email sarahook@illinois.edu. More information about October Dance is available online.
