Edna Guy

Edna Guy was born in 1907 in Summit, New Jersey, and grew up in a Black household of the early twentieth century, where the Negro spirituals her mother loved became the seedbed of her life's art. As a girl she was drawn to dance, and at about fifteen she was moved to her calling by the sight of the pioneering modern dancer Ruth St. Denis performing in Greenwich Village.

Determined to study seriously, Guy entered the Denishawn School in New York in October 1924, becoming one of the school's rare Black students under a teacher, Katherine Edison, who grounded her in technique and Delsarte-based dramatic gesture. For roughly three years she trained there, and from about 1927 to 1928 traveled as St. Denis's personal assistant. Yet the color line held even inside an art that prized universality: barred by her race from touring performance, she was confined largely to in-house recitals.

Leaving Denishawn, Guy carried her craft into a new movement of her own people's making. With Hemsley Winfield she helped stage the "First Negro Dance Recital in America" in April 1931, and she gave her dances set to Negro spirituals a public stage, including at the Harlem YWCA that same year. In 1937 she co-organized the landmark "Negro Dance Evening," a watershed that helped bring Katherine Dunham's company and the African diaspora's dance heritage to wider view.

She died in 1982. Edna Guy stands among the founders of African American concert dance, a woman who turned the spirituals of her childhood into a dignified art and opened a door through which others could follow. May her name be honored.