Edna Guy

Edna Guy was born on the seventeenth of November 1907 at Newark, New Jersey, the daughter of a Black-Methodist household of the Black-Newark Hayes Homes district of the inter-war period. She was raised in the segregated Black-Newark working-class household of her parents and educated at the Newark Coloured Schools.

She was placed at fourteen at the Saint James Methodist Episcopal Church choir at Newark and at the same time at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts dance-and-design programme. She moved to Manhattan at sixteen in 1923 and worked as a domestic for the principal-American modernist dancer Ruth Saint Denis — the co-founder of the Denishawn School at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Twenty-Eighth Street, Manhattan.

She was admitted on Saint Denis’s personal invitation in early 1924 to the Denishawn School as the first African American student — the only Black-American student at the Denishawn programme across the entire 1924–1929 period of her enrollment. The Denishawn admission of Edna Guy was the first systematic Black-American student-admission at any major American modernist-dance training school of the period.

She trained at Denishawn under Ruth Saint Denis and Ted Shawn from 1924 to 1929 across the principal Denishawn period — the period of the principal early American modernist-dance choreographic programmes that would inform the subsequent Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman schools.

She conducted her first New York solo concert programme at the Saint Marks-in-the-Bowery Episcopal Church on the seventh of April 1931 — the principal early modernist-dance Black-American solo programme of the period. The programme integrated the Africanist-and-Negro-spiritual repertoire that would define Guy’s principal contribution to the period.

She co-directed with Hemsley Winfield (placed in this archive) the New Negro Art Theatre Dance Group at Harlem from 1931 to 1934 — co-directing with Winfield on the principal programmes of the Group at the Manhattan Cherry Lane and Forty-Eighth Street Theatre stages.

She choreographed across the closing years of the 1920s and the 1930s the principal Negro-spirituals-modernist-dance-cycle works of the period — among them Eli Eli (1928), Were You There When They Crucified My Lord? (1930), and the principal Negro-spiritual concert-cycle Dance of the Negro Spirituals (1932), staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November 1932.

She organised in March 1937 the principal early Black-American modernist-dance group concert at the Ninety-Second Street Y at Manhattan — the National Negro Dance Recital — a fully integrated Black-American modernist-and-Africanist concert-dance programme with over thirty Black-American dancers from the principal Harlem-Manhattan dance scenes of the period.

She retired from the active concert-dance career in 1940 and taught at the Newark public schools as a dance-and-fine-arts teacher for the remaining four decades of her professional life.

She died at Newark, New Jersey on the seventh of October 1982 of natural causes, at seventy-four.

She is honored here as the first Black-American at the Denishawn School.