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>> Hi, we're back. I left you with a cliff hanger. I hope you've been thinking
about what is jumping the broom. Well, let's just review really quickly. We are
talking about these special occasions for dances. We talked about this Saturday
night of frolics and the corn shucking and the Christmas dancing. And then, we've
gone into the wedding dances, and with the wedding dances, you have a phrase, and
it was an action called "jumping the broom." As I said last time, the plantation
owners did not want the slaves to marry. They didn't want any kind of legal
documentation of them being married. So, what they did was they borrowed from an
African tradition, which was you would jump, they would lay down a broom, and they
would decorate the broom, and the couple would jump together over the broom.
Sometimes, they would jump individually, and then they would jump back together.
They had different ways of doing it, but basically, jumping the broom was symbolic
of them going into a new household together, into a new life together. And the
reason why they used the broom is because they were basically sweeping away their
past, their past problems, their past relatives, you know, the hold that your
parents have on you, etcetera. They were sweeping that away and saying they were
going into a new life together. So, that was their symbolic representation of them
being married. It was called "jumping the broom," and many times the plantation
owners would be involved in this whole ceremony going on. You had funeral dances.
Now, the funeral dances were more processional kind of in the way we talked about
the old, dance in the old kingdom. They were processional, and they moved through
the woods. Basically, funerals were only allowed to be conducted at night because
during the day the slaves had to work. So, at night they would carry torches, and
they would go through the woods, and they would sing, and they would bury whoever
was deceased. What they would do then is they would take a clump of the dirt that
was in the graveyard. They would bring it back to their house and at the doorway of
the house they would put this dirt, and this was symbolic to all the people in the
community that they had participated in this funeral. So, that's the funeral
dances. Also, they had balls. These balls basically mimicked the plantation owners,
and a lot of times the plantation owners would like to have mistresses that were
slaves. So, the slaves would dress up, and they would go to a facility where they
would, they would be beautiful, and they would dance, and the plantation owners
would, not all of them, but if they chose to, they would go to this ball and there
they could meet women that they wanted to be their mistress, African slaves. So,
that was another way of sort of intermingling the owner with the slaves, sort of a
society based kind of setup, but it had a different purpose, okay. So, then, those
were the occasions for dance: Saturday night frolics, corn shucking, Christmas
dances, wedding dances, funeral dances and balls. Now, in Africa, religion was very
important, and in the lifestyle many of the activities had some religious
connotation to them. Africans were a very spiritual people. So, what happens is
that on the plantations, you also have religions, and the religions were, of
course, expressed, and the use of worship was through dance. Basically, in Africa,
you have three basic characteristics for your religious dance in Africa. One, it
was part of living. The religion was a part of living. Two, you had ritualistic
movement, which was more so a repetitive movement, sequences repeated and repeated
and repeated, so that is ritualistic. And this was done not just in dance, but it
was also done through song. The third one was the fact that the ultimate goal of
the dancing and of the religion was to have the God in which you were worshipping
totally possess you. Remember when we were talking about masks, and we were saying
that there were three kinds of masks. Well, basically, those masks usually
represented gods or ancestors, and the dancers who would wear these masks, usually,
they were trained, and when they put these masks on, they would take the physical
movement, the physical characteristics of whatever this God was, and they would
start to manifest this particular movement. Sometimes, you will see snakelike
movements. Sometimes, you will see sort of mechanical kinds of movement. Sometimes,
you will see more of a flowing kind of movement. Sometimes, you'll see a sterner
movement, but it was whatever character that ancestor had or that god had, and the

dancer basically would allow himself to be indwelled, if you will, by that
particular god. And so the supreme goal is basically to be possessed, and so you
have these qualities that were in the religion in Africa, and they traveled here to
America. You have, basically, three religions on the plantation. The first one is
called the Yoruba religion. Let me spell that for you. It is Y-o-r-u-b-a., Yoruba
religion. With the Yoruba religion, basically, that religion had a lot of gods, and
when the people who were practicing this religion came to the United States, and of
course the plantation owners were really against the way Africans would worship,
what they did was that they basically took their gods, and they substitute them for
the Catholic saints. So, that way, they could still practice the religion under the
guise of Catholicism. So, that was your Yoruba religion, which also involved dance.
Two, you had Voodoo, or they called Hoodoo. That's spelled V-o-o-d-o-o. Hoodoo, Ho-o-d-o-o, one word. The Voodoo, or Hoodoo, was practiced in the, on the
plantation. A lot of times they were sort of isolated when they would practice this
because sometimes there were sacrifices of animals that would be involved, and
there were very long sessions of really trying to get the essence of whatever
entities that they were worshipping. And we have a slide of that. There's the
Voodoo dance, and you can see some of the lights, and you can see a basket. Let me
see if I can -- these are the lights, the candles, and you see a basket and
sometimes there could be animals sacrificed. We don't see that there, but you can
see that everyone is really involved in what's going on, and it is evident as well
in their movements.
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You also had Christianity. Christianity had two dances involved with that. They
were called shouts. You had the ring shout that was basically started in Georgia
and in South Carolina, and you had the solo [phonetic] shout that was started in
Virginia and North Carolina. The ring shout was performed, as it says, in a ring
and, of course, they moved counter clockwise. I did get to see, when I did the
research, I did get to see a footage that was just an instant long, and I saw that
they were moving in a circle. Instead of clapping their hands flat, they would cup
their hands. It gave a different kind of sound, and it was almost like a shuffle
that they were doing around in a circle, sort of like the Charleston. It's a
shuffle that was performed, and they did it in groups, and they went around in a
circular formation. Now, with your ring shout, you also had what they called "the
solo shout," and the solo shout was individual. A person could just get up and just
dance. And again, this was a take-off, again, of the African tradition in that the
dancer wanted to be filled with the Holy Spirit, which is similar to the African
trying to get possessed by a God. It's the same sort of idea of being filled with
the Holy Spirit, and you can see this in Baptist churches and what, the churches
that they call Holy Roller churches, where this is still something that is done,
and it's still dances performed in the churches. Now, in the early shout, not now,
but in the early shout there were two taboos for the shout. First, your feet were
not allowed to leave the floor, and that's why you had this shuffling kind of
movement that I saw. Second, your feet weren't to cross. Haven't found a lot of
research on that one, except that I did see that some felt like it was defaming the
Lord because it was crossing the feet, and it's simulating a cross, so it was not
to do that. So, you had those two restrictions; one, the foot could not come off
the floor, and two, you could not cross the feet. Now, those are your three
religions, and those are the dances that were affiliated with them. That's,
basically, the Protestants felt like dance was sinful, especially the way the
Africans were doing it because they weren't used to that. But the African slaves
wanted to worship the way that they felt free to worship. And so, therefore, the
plantation owners would build for them what they'd call Praise Houses. The slaves
could go in the Praise Houses. Usually, it was off, back in the woods because the
plantation owners didn't really want to see the dancing, but they would go back
into the woods into these Praise Houses, and they had freedom to worship the Lord
however they wanted to, and this was basically for your Christian based dances. And

they could be free to move around in this particular Praise House, and they could
stay there as long as the master allowed them to stay. So, these Praise Houses were
really for the freedom of the slaves to worship the way they wanted to worship.
Now, I wanted to just mention to you, two ladies, and we won't go deep into their
backgrounds; we will when we talk about modern dance. But two are Katherine Dunham,
Katherine with K, Dunham, D-u-n-h-a-m, and Pearl, like a pearl, Primus, P-r-i-m-us. Both of them, they did not work together, but both of them were, of course,
African American women, who were give a grant to go to various places to find out
the authentic dances there, and they would come back -- they had companies that
they would put the dances on these companies, and they would show people these
authentic dances. As both of them went to their respective places, they were really
respected by the people who were there. Katherine Dunham went to Haiti, and she
became so involved in the dance there, which was really revolved around religion,
was mostly Voodoo, that she became a Voodoo Priestess. They allowed her to become a
Voodoo Priestess. Katherine Dunham did most of her work in Africa, and she was
called -- actually, they gave her a nickname -- woman, or a child that's returned
home. And so these people really embraced these two, even though they weren't at
relatively the same time, but they didn't know each other. While Pearl Primus, in
her study of Africa, says that she had no doubt and no question that the dancing
that was done in the Christian Southern Baptist churches were emerging, or had
emerged from your African tradition of dance. So, the freedom of the dance of the
Southern Baptists and the Holy Rollers, and those kind of denominations, that
freedom came from the African expression of dance. Well, we've gone through the
plantation, and we've talked about the dances in the plantation, and I hope that
you enjoyed it, and next time, we will go further on into the survey of African
American dance. So, until next time, bye.
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>> If you are interested in any other UNLV Distance Education course, please call
us at 702-895-0334.
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