Performing Artists and the Stage

Much of Canada’s previously recorded dance history has been done through biographical research and writing about Black performing artists. Through outstanding individuals who were born in or moved to Canada, it is possible to trace the major trends and shifts in twentieth-century dance and performance. These individuals made their living through dancing. Being a professional entertainer of any kind was one of the few alternatives that Black citizens had to a life working in service as a domestic, porter or other trade. While there were Black lawyers, doctors, dentists, teachers and other professionals, the required education, training and opportunity were not available to the majority. Many professional performers and artists also had teaching careers with prolific and long-lasting impacts on their communities. Len Gibson (Vancouver, Toronto), Ola Skanks (Toronto), Joey Hollingsworth (London), Ethel Bruneau (New York/Montreal), Olga Spencer (Montreal) and Kathryn Brown (Toronto) are examples of Black dance artists in Canada before and into the 1970s. There are other people and legacies that need to be located, documented and celebrated. 

African-American culture influenced and defined much of twentieth-century culture and entertainment in North America and beyond. Dance and music innovations of the Harlem Renaissance, the jook joints of the Southern United States, the blues of Chicago and New Orleans, were carried from the streets and clubs to the stage and inevitably across the border into Canada by way of vaudeville, train porters, radio, musicians and dancers, citizens, cinema and television. While the influence was African-American, the interpretation of these practices and forms in Canada is … Canadian. There is no one Black dance or dance aesthetic, nor do Black people dancing have the privilege of neutrality. Black dancers and choreographers in Canada and the United States trained, created, innovated and performed in jazz, ballet, tap, chorus-line, musical theatre, burlesque, modern, post-modern, various West-Indian and traditional African forms and participated in social dances with both African Diasporic and white-Anglo-Saxon origins as well as others from around the world. The value of examining the biographies of Black dance artists in Canada is not in trying to define them as a group, or even in noting their similarities. Rather it is to note their outstanding individuality based on cultural backgrounds; geographic locations; dance training and influences; relationships to class, gender, religion and sexuality; their artistic choices – both overt and subversive; their range of skills and talents; their teaching legacy; and the ways they have articulated, in their own words, from their own perspectives what it meant to be dancing Black in Canada before 1970.

Through this deep respect for these unique experiences we can be guided in how to see Black people dancing today and continue to disrupt the legacy of systemic racism that has influenced the representation, reception and value of Black artists and people into the twenty-first century.