It's a bit nerve-racking to write about a moment in time that you weren't around for. You want to do justice by your subject matter and highlight an important piece of history; at the same time, you're wary about projecting a certain contemporary bias onto the past. Such is the inherent challenge when engaging with an archive. You're working, by default, around absence. Op-Docs's latest film, "Two by Louis Johnson," for which I wrote an accompanying essay, represents one of those moments in time. Shot around 1959 in New York City, the film features two dances that in my eyes comment on the Black American experience, though the feelings of joy, pain and alienation they convey are universal. The film was a collaboration between a British avant-garde filmmaker, Richard Preston, and a Black dancer and choreographer, Louis Johnson. Although the details of this collaboration are largely unknown — it is unclear what the film was produced for, and why (thus my time digging through the archive, with limited success) — it seems likely that it was a labor of love. "I think that they just got together and just did it," said Dai Preston, the filmmaker's son, in an interview. "He got his dancer friends together and they just shot this thing." (It is clear how they met: I learned from this interview that Preston met Johnson through Johnson's wife, a Black singer named Gloria Wynder.) "Two by Louis Johnson" is an important piece of dance history, and an incredible showcase of Johnson's talent. And for all my fears about projecting, the themes that came up repeatedly in my research were all too familiar and all too relevant today — specifically, the theme of Black creatives like Louis Johnson being overlooked and undervalued, if not pushed out of certain industries altogether. It is important that the work of figures like Louis Johnson is finally being highlighted today; it is also important to ask why it had to take so long, and what can be done to support the talented artists who are creating among us right now.
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Wednesday, February 28, 2024
Opinion Today: Dancing out of the archive
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