Welcome to the Routine Rewind series on the Diamond Dolls blog!

We will be taking a look back at some of our past routines and giving them a historical and cultural context covering things from song inspirations, artist highlights, discussing the origins of the dance styles, and more. Join us on the first of every month right here to follow this new series.

This month we visit our Beatnik routine from 2014 choreographed by Lindsay Ragsdale. This number was inspired by the American subculture of the Beat Generation of the 1940’s into the 1960’s where there was a strong rejection of traditional post-WWII American life and values. “Central elements of Beat culture include the rejection of standard narrative values, the spiritual quest, exploration of Western and Eastern religions, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, rejection of materialism, explicit portrayals of the human life, and sexual freedom and exploration. Because of their values and culture, the members of the Beat Generation developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity.” (www.theculturetrip.com) This period was driven by writers and poets of the time including: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Herbert Huncke, and Lucien Carr, to name a few.

Image Source: Bruce Davidson / Magnum. (https://www.newyorker.com/books/double-take/sunday-reading-the-beat-generation)

The Beat Generation

The Beat Generation was a literary movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-war era. (Wikipedia) At the time this routine was choreographed, Lindsay interpreted a Beatnik as a person belonging to the Beat Generation; a person who rejected the societal norms of the time and valued new ways of creating poetry, art, and music as a rejection to materialism, conformity, and political oppression. In doing research into these themes, she learned that the term “Beatnik” was coined by journalist Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle in 1958 as a stereotype of a person that identified as part of the Beat Generation. Beatnik is a fusion of the words “Beat” (from Beat Generation) and “nik” of Sputnik, the Russian satellite. Because the United States and Russia were in the midst of the Cold War, it was intended to be a derogatory term that would essentially equate these creatives with communists and were a threat to the American way of life – “shallow, goateed, anti-materialistic, slang-using, black beret-wearing, bongo-playing, jazz-listening hipsters reciting nearly unintelligible poetry in dark coffee-houses. They were often portrayed as violent or lacking morals.” (www.emptymirrorbooks.com) Furthermore, the media picked up on this movement and used it to market products to people that admired the perceived “hipness” of the lifestyle without actually living the lifestyle – essentially, a Beatnik was a poseur of Beat Generation creatives.

Upon further research, there are conflicting opinions on whether or not the movement was truly inclusive in terms of race and gender. Racial critique of the Beat movement indicates that it was dominated by white males that fetishized people of color and their respective cultures. “Fundamentally built on the appropriation of black culture, the Beat Generation adopted the term ‘Beat’ from the systematically oppressed—and thus validly marginalized—black jazz musicians of the 1940s. While “beat” was used by “jazz musicians and hustlers as a slang term meaning down and out, or poor and exhausted,” Jack Kerouac learned the term from the white Times Square hustler Herbert Hunke, and as such receives credit for the naming of the counterculture movement. Kerouac’s application of a culturally black term to qualify the sense of restlessness experienced by a largely white collection of male youths living in opposition to the “Age of Conformity” exemplifies the movement’s romantic perception of racial oppression and comfort in appropriating black culture.” (www.paintingbohemia.org) The Beat movement’s rhetoric of oppressed peoples trivialized the actual oppression of these groups, namely African Americans, and likened them to the “voluntary outsiderism of the Beats.” (Stripe, C. M., www.docs.lib.purdue.edu)

Image Source: An American jazz poet, surrealist and a painter, Ted Joans (pictured) was close friends with several Beat generation figures, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and claimed membership of the movement on several occasions. (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/photos/the-beat-generation-portraits-and-images/ss-AAoaYSj#image=14)

Black culture was at the center of Beat culture with jazz music being a significant influence and inspiration for poetry and literary styles. Improvisation in jazz music was translated into how prose was written and performed as a way to extract itself from academia. African American poets of the Beat Generation wrote about race, politics, and Black culture and include: Amiri Baraka, Ted Joans, Bob Kaufman, and Larry Neal to name a few. Notably, Amiri Baraka was a “dramatist, novelist and poet, Amiri Baraka is one of the most respected and widely published African-American writers. With the beginning of Black Civil Rights Movements during the sixties, Baraka explored the anger of African-Americans and used his writings as a weapon against racism. Also, he advocated scientific socialism with his revolutionary inclined poems and aimed at creating aesthetics through them. Amiri Baraka’s writing career spans over nearly fifty years and has mostly focused on the subjects of Black Liberation and White Racism.” (http://www.amiribaraka.com/) Before Baraka leaned into politics in his work, he befriended members of the Beat Generation in Greenwich Village and was said to believe poetry was a process of discovery rather than an exercise in fulfilling traditional expectations.” (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/amiri-baraka) Over the years, Baraka traveled and through those experiences, started incorporating politics and racism into his works. “To make a clean break with the Beat influence, Baraka turned to writing fiction in the mid-1960s, penning The System of Dante’s Hell (1965), a novel, and Tales (1967), a collection of short stories. The stories are “‘fugitive narratives’ that describe the harried flight of an intensely self-conscious Afro-American artist/intellectual from neo-slavery of blinding, neutralizing whiteness, where the area of struggle is basically within the mind,” Robert Elliot Fox wrote in Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany.” (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/amiri-baraka)

*Image Source: https://jenb-writing.medium.com/important-women-writers-of-the-beat-generation-5c6155c39108*

In addition, while there are notable women from the Beat era, their work and contributions are dwarfed by the attention paid to their white male counterparts. Poets Diane di Prima, Helen Adam, Mary Fabilli, Joanne Kyger, and Carolyn Cassady were all associated with the movement, but gained little recognition by male peers who often regarded them as muses or objects rather than creators themselves; these women were always on the periphery of the scene. Misogyny within the Beats was demonstrated in male literary works, “When Kerouac’s female characters are not fulfilling their role as sex objects they are busy executing their domestic duties. Women are portrayed as content at being confined to the domestic realm. Despite their defiance Marylou and Lee Ann still perform their domestic tasks dutifully... Kerouac justifies this domestication of men by having them engage in the “male” pursuit of drinking (drinking in On the Road is inextricably linked to male bravado) at the same time, thereby asserting their masculinity. This betrayal of traditional gender roles is qualified by adjectives that imply it is a man-sized job that a mere woman would be incapable of undertaking. Another time Dean is saved from the emasculation of minding the baby and doing the dishes by drinking beer and doing an inadequate “sloppy” job of the cleaning.” (Walsh, A. www.headstuff.org) As Brenda Knight wrote in Women of the Beat Generation, “In many ways, women of the Beat were cut from the same cloth as the men: fearless, angry, high risk, too smart, restless, highly irregular. They took chances, made mistakes, made poetry, made love, made history.” (Berube, J., www.jenb-writing.medium.com)

*Image Source: https://www.nonesuch.com/artists/david-byrne*

Music

The music from this routine was composed by David Byrne, of Talking Heads, in 1985 and titled, Tic Toc 2 (In The Future). The version used was instrumental and inspired the routine as Lindsay typically choreographs a routine if a piece of music strikes her in an interesting way. This song offered the opportunity to produce a routine full of unconventional movement by such a unique artist. David Byrne is a British-American singer, songwriter, record producer, actor, writer, music theorist, and filmmaker, who was a founding member and the principal songwriter, lead singer, and guitarist of the American new wave band Talking Heads. (Wikipedia)

Byrne is multidisciplinary artist and “has been involved with photography, drawing, installations, performance and design since college and has been publishing and exhibiting his work since the 1990s. Like his music, Byrne’s visual work has the capacity to elevate and transform ordinary elements into iconic ones and challenges our fundamental notions of what can be classified as art.” (www.grandstandhq.com) His accolades and achievements are many and include: an Academy Award for Best Original Score in 2004 for his contribution to The Last Emperor’s soundtrack, and received the Wired Award for Art for his project Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information (EEEI) that used the presentation software PowerPoint as an art medium. Byrne’s work belongs to numerous collections, including the Denver Art Museum and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N.C. (www.grandstandhq.com)

David Byrne is also not without controversy and poor judgement. It resurfaced in the fall of 2020 that Byrne wore blackface and brownface in a 1984 promotional skit video for the Talking Head’s concert film Stop Making Sense. In response, Byrne tweeted:

“Recently a journalist pointed out something I did in a promo video skit in 1984 for the Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense. In the piece I appear as a number of different characters interviewing myself, and some of the characters portrayed are people of color. I’d just about forgotten about this skit and I’m grateful that it has been brought to my attention. To watch myself in the various characters, including black and brown face, I acknowledge it was a major mistake in judgement that showed a lack of real understanding. It’s like looking in a mirror and seeing someone else- you’re not, or were not, the person you thought you were. We have huge blind spots about ourselves- well, I certainly do. I’d like to think I am beyond making mistakes like this, but clearly at the time I was not. Like I say at the end of our Broadway show American Utopia “I need to change too”..and I believe I have changed since then. One hopes that folks have the grace and understanding to allow that someone like me, anyone really, can grow and change, and that the past can be examined with honesty and accountability.” (https://deadline.com)

Lindsay created the Beatnik routine based on a romanticized and glossed version of Beat culture that is presented in mainstream media and film that had initially exposed her to the literary movement. Having learned the origins of Beat culture and the characteristics of the people that defined the movement, this routine seems dated and now looks like a tongue-in-cheek stereotype of a cultural movement that was rife with misogyny and racial cultural appropriation. While the intention of the routine was to explore and demonstrate a more avant-garde approach to movement for the Diamond Dolls, it is recognized that it lacked the necessary context.