ABSTRACT
When Martha Graham premiered American Document at the Bennington Festival in 1938, none of the critics who reviewed the work considered her choice of a minstrel show frame odd. Original, yes, but not odd. Typical was the comment by Owen Burke in New Masses, who characterized the dance as “an episodic theater piece built rather loosely along the lines of a minstrel show”—and here Burke quotes Alain Locke’s The Negro and His Music-“the minstrel show from which ‘much that is typically American in mood and sentiment was precipitated’” (Burke 1938:29). Burke’s citation to Locke is the closest one comes in 1938 to a black voice commenting on American Document, a black voice ventriloquized by a white writer, appropriately enough for a work framed as a minstrel show, complete with Walk Arounds, End Figures, a Cross-Fire, and an Interlocutor.
