Dancing herself: Choreography, autobiography, and the expression of the Black woman self in the work of Dianne McIntyre, Blondell Cummings, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar

This dissertation examines the work of three contemporary African American women modern dance choreographers--Dianne McIntyre, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, and Blondell Cummings. The study explores each of the women as artists, delineating the important elements and processes they utilize in creating work and describing the individual aesthetics that distinguish their artistry. It also emphasizes the ways in which their choreography functions similarly to black women's written autobiography in defining and affirming black womanhood. In addition to drawing on the theoretical precepts of written autobiography, and research looks at the choreographers' applications of personally and culturally autobiographical material in dance construction.;Beginning with a brief outline of negative stereotypes of African American women as a means of indicating the importance of autobiography for their self-liberation, Chapter One then discusses black women's written autobiography, distinguishing it from the autobiographies of white women and black and white men. Each of the middle three chapters explores in-depth one of the choreographers of the study. Chapter Two looks at Dianne McIntyre, focusing on her utilization of avant-garde jazz music and African American social dance in creating works that address universal emotions through the expression of African American historical and cultural experiences. In Chapter Three, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar's interest in presenting African American folk and religious traditions in a contemporary multidiciplinary context reveals itself. Chapter Four discusses Blondell Cummings and shows how her work, which is fundamentally autobiographical, relates her own African American cultural experiences to those of people of different cultures. In the final chapter, the study relates these artists to each other and explores the ways that their work debunks negative stereotypes of black women and empowers them through self-affirmation.