Talley Beatty

Talley Beatty was born on the twenty-second of December, 1918, at Cedar Grove, a community near Shreveport in northwest Louisiana. While still a child he was brought north to Chicago, and it was there, in the city's vibrant Black cultural life, that his gift for movement first found its shape. From his earliest years he was keenly aware of how racial injustice pressed upon every corner of African American life — an awareness that would later become the very subject of his art.

As a young man Beatty studied under two towering figures of American dance, Katherine Dunham and Martha Graham. He became a principal dancer with the Katherine Dunham Company at the age of sixteen, touring widely and appearing in Broadway productions such as "Cabin in the Sky" and in Maya Deren's film "A Study in Choreography for Camera." In time he formed his own company and carried his work across the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Beatty emerged as one of the foremost Black American concert-dance choreographers of the postwar era. His first major ballet, "Southern Landscape" (1947-48), drew on the betrayed promise of Reconstruction; its enduring solo, "Mourner's Bench," remains a landmark of American dance. Later works — "The Road of the Phoebe Snow" (1959), "Come and Get the Beauty of It Hot," and "The Stack-Up" — set the rhythms of Black urban life to jazz and blues. In 1977 he was nominated for a Tony Award for choreographing "Your Arms Too Short to Box with God."

Talley Beatty died on the twenty-ninth of April, 1995, in New York City. He is honored as one of the greatest of African American choreographers, a man who turned the truth of his people's struggle and joy into movement of fierce and lasting beauty.