Edited by Azizi Powell
This pancocojams post presents an excerpt from the 2019 article
The content of this post is presented for historical and cultural purposes.
All copyrights remain with their owners.
Thanks toFrederick McKindra for writing this article and thanks to all past and present members of HBCU majorette dance squads.
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This excerpt is posted to raise awareness and present information about this subject.
Readers of this excerpt are encouraged to read that entire article.
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Click http://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2016/08/hbcu-majorette-dance-line-terms.html for the 2016 pancocojams post entitled "Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCU)
Majorette Dance Line Terms"
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ARTICLE EXCERPT: THE RICH, BLACK, SOUTHERN HERITAGE OF HIP-HOP MAJORETTES
by Frederick McKindra, BuzzFeed Contributor, Posted on May 7, 2019
The choreography of these college dance troupes makes me feel proud knowing that this artistry is so deeply embedded in black American life, there is little danger of it ever being appropriated.
"As a boy back in Arkansas, we called them dancing girls. These all-women dance troupes combined the energy of the high-step marching style of black college bands with lyrical, West African, jazz, contemporary, and hip-hop choreography.
[...]
Hip-hop majoretting began formally in the late ’60s.
Marching bands had long featured carnivalesque acts pulling acrobatic stunts or
tossing and catching flaming batons as a part of their halftime entertainment,
but dance lines enabled bands to dramatize the popular songs they were
beginning to mine from the radio.
There is some dispute over which school’s dance line debuted first, an issue that still regularly rouses debate from fans online. As the ability to watch black college bands was often limited to spectators at sports games, Alcorn State University’s claim that its Golden Girls made their national debut at a televised 1968 Orange Blossom Classic offers a tenuous origin date for hip-hop majorettes, or “a featured squad with choreographed movements to an HBCU’s marching band’s live tunes,” as the GGs define it.
The Dancing Dolls of Southern University officially date back to 1969, founded by team adviser/coach Gracie Perkins and then–band director Isaac Greggs. The Dolls have enjoyed national acclaim due to the annual Bayou Classic in New Orleans, which is one of the few nationally televised HBCU football games. Jackson State’s J-Settes were founded in 1971, when Shirley Middleton, a former majorette and the squad’s initial sponsor, petitioned for the majorettes to “put their batons down.” Middleton, along with JSU twirler and choreographer Hollis Pippins, and eventual sponsor Narah Oatis, pioneered j-setting, a style so unique its movement is still recognizable in much of hip-hop majoretting today.
Traditionally, majorette fans choose between the more balletic style of the Southern University Dancing Dolls or the more bawdy bucking of the J-Settes. The Dolls’ style privileges fluidity in movement, a quality they describe as being poured “like milk.” They are famous for their port de bras, or arcs made through the air with graceful, supported arms; slow body rolls; and struts and stand counts (eight counts of choreography performed and repeated in the stands of a stadium) which make them look like they are prancing and can be read as prissy.
If the Dolls pantomime seduction, then the J-Settes employ a style that is more explicit. J-Settes prefer grounded, flat-footed movement; they squat or bend or buck. To buck is to aggressively thrust the pelvis forward, a movement that is obviously sexually suggestive — and in the rubric of American sexuality, deviant when cast on a feminine body. It’s almost an inversion of twerking — another dance phenomenon white Americans took some time to fully metabolize. Bucking is done to the bawdy, pulsating fortissimo of a raucous brass section, the crack of a snare, or the explosive boom of a bass drum. Doing so becomes an affirmation that a receptive sexual partner can also claim pleasure by thrusting ecstatically, a rebuff against an American sexual politics that historically resigns the passive partner to demuring sex. Straight black women and gay black bottoms reclaim power through the movement by refuting a white, puritanical dictum that bodies should not desire or enjoy the passive position...though, of course, it’s classier than that.
[…]
Amateur videographers who formerly recorded the entire band
now focus on the dance lines. These videos now serve as an impressive library
documenting the dance genre. “Stand counts” — choreography performed in the
stands, first by the team captain before rippling back through each successive
line of dancers — were once passed down solely through collective memory;
they’re now being preserved on film. Amateur filmmakers like Trinion Winbush,
Marvin Price, and Demaridge have all meticulously compiled footage of
collegiate dance lines as far back as 2011 on YouTube channels of the form,
making the dances available to watch more broadly.
[…]
I’ve been watching majorette videos on YouTube since at
least 2012, back when Charlene and Charlotte Johnson, identical twins, served
as captain and tail of the J-Settes at Jackson State. I remember them because
twins always caused a special frisson on majorette dance lines, even before
Raeven and RaeAna Hall danced with the Dancing Dolls back in 2007. The doubling
only eerily heightened the effect of the line’s call and response, when a
captain throws an eight-count and the team, all of whom are already dressed
identically, meticulously parrot her movements.
Watching these videos in adulthood made me feel proud (as someone throwing a hip to the beat of a bass drum is wont to do), knowing that this artistry is so deeply embedded in black American life, there was little danger of it ever being appropriated. It was mine, something of home to unwrap, even if I was so far away in Brooklyn. The brassy sound of the band from my computer speakers was not unlike how it felt to walk beneath the stands at a stadium for a black college classic as a child, holding the hand of my father, my cousin LaTeisha, my cousin Rita. Even as a grown man, that choreography and sound gave me access to parts of myself both private and dear — Southern, black, sissy, somebody’s child.
The showmanship and glamour of the majorettes had always been the export of my community, carnivals that traveled to sites across the landscape of the Great Migration, carrying the football teams of Southern black schools who once, out of necessity, produced most black college graduates in America. The classics became essential marketing once athletic programs from formerly segregated, all-white state universities — the same schools that had necessitated the founding of historically black colleges in the first place — became integrated and began gutting the football programs of those HBCUs as they looked for recruits. In a way, the band produced proto–music videos, pairing choreography with popular black music from the radio. Black entertainment was again being deployed to ensure the survival of black institutions.
[…]
Over the years, I’ve been transfixed by majorette dancers:
first Kayla Pittman at Southern, then Asia Martin and Ajhayda (Jada) McClain
from the Stingettes at Alabama State. Then Danielle Stamper, a former SU
Dancing Doll, now co-coaching the McKinley High Pantherettes with Lashalln
LaGarde down in Baton Rouge. Now, my affection flits back and forth between the
Dolls and Stingettes… The art form is still mine, intimately so, in the way
much black art remains. It’s just that now the world knows about it. Hopefully,
future generations will too."
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