Empathetic embodiment: the dance of Roger Pryor Dodge

I have stacks (literally) of neglected books to read. Prolonged isolation ought to facilitate some serious reading, but instead it only seems to encourage frivolous online twiddling. There’s enough seriousness outside in that there pandemic, without importing it, I suppose.

But one good thing that jumped out for me from my YouTube pickings is this – a mesmerising piece of jazz dance from 1937 by partners Roger Pryor Dodge and Mura Dehn. It’s worth a couple of minutes of your time, I promise. Dodge’s angularly Expressionist entrance is almost a Nosferatu moment.

Roger Pryor Dodge – ballet trained, photographer of Nijinsky, music writer, collaborator with Duke Ellington and the Marx Brothers, and much more – has a full Wikipedia entry, and a good page on his family’s website.  He’s said to have had all the Dodge-Dehn performances filmed, but this clip, online in a few places, is the only example I can spot. I post it for your enjoyment, but also in case someone who comes across it here can point me to any more footage of Dodge and Dehn accessible online. (If you can, please leave a link in a ‘comment’.)

Jazz dance by white Greenwich Village intellectuals might, I suppose, be nowadays damned as an insulting cultural appropriation, but Dodge does not imitate black dancers of the time, let alone parody them. His approach is sympathetic to their art and deeply understanding of it, but his Modernist costume and choreography are essentially original, things in themselves.

Anyway, as the excellent David Olusoga said yesterday (in the context of historical trauma, during an online Q&A organised by the University of Aston), even when we cannot embody, we can at least aim to empathise.  I find that a humane and reassuring thought.

‘Bubber’ Miley and Dodge