Rod Rodgers

Roderick Lee Rodgers Sr. was born on the sixteenth of June 1937 at Cleveland, Ohio, the son of a Black-Cleveland working-class household of the closing years of the inter-war period. He was raised in the segregated Black-Cleveland Hough district of the post-war period.

He was placed at the Glenville High School at Cleveland — among the principal Black-Cleveland senior-high-schools of the period — and at the Wayne State University at Detroit, where he took informal dance training from 1955 to 1957.

He relocated to Manhattan in 1957 at twenty and took the formal modernist-dance training at the Erick Hawkins Modern Dance Studio at Manhattan from 1957 to 1962 — among the principal post-Martha-Graham modernist-dance studios of the post-war period.

He was hired in 1962 by the Erick Hawkins Modern Dance Company as a member of the company — at the time the only Black-American dancer in a major Manhattan modernist-dance company. He danced with the Hawkins company from 1962 to 1966 and was the principal Black-American Hawkins-method dancer of the period.

He founded in 1966 at Manhattan the Rod Rodgers Dance Company — the principal Black-Arts-Movement concert-dance company of the closing years of the 1960s. He directed the Rod Rodgers Dance Company for thirty-six years through to the closing months of his life.

He choreographed across the following thirty-six years over a hundred and twenty concert-dance works — predominantly on the Black-Arts-Movement, the Civil-Rights-Movement, and the closing-period Black-American protest themes of the post-1965 Black-American intellectual ferment.

The principal early works of the Rod Rodgers Dance Company are Spiritual Suite (1968) on the Negro-spiritual tradition; Tangents (1969) on the principal post-1965 abstract concert-dance movement; the Box Concert (1971) on the closing-period Manhattan modernist-dance abstraction; and Percussion Suite (1975) on the principal Black-Arts-Movement post-Sun-Ra percussion-and-jazz tradition.

He served as the Manhattan State Council on the Arts senior choreographer-grant-program advisor from 1971 to 1985 — among the principal post-1965 Black-American senior arts-policy advisors of the period — and the principal Manhattan modernist-dance senior-grant-program voice on the closing-period Black-Arts-Movement arts-policy programmes of the Manhattan-and-New-York-City principal post-war modernist-dance institutional development.

He established at the Rod Rodgers Dance Company the principal Black-Arts-Movement education-and-outreach programme of the post-war modernist-dance period — the Rod Rodgers Dance Company Public Schools Outreach Program — across over five hundred Manhattan and Brooklyn public schools of the closing years of the 1970s and the 1980s and 1990s.

He was awarded the 1985 Bessie Award — the principal post-war Manhattan modernist-dance award — for his lifetime contributions to the post-war American concert-dance tradition.

He died at Manhattan on the second of April 2002 of complications of cancer, at sixty-four.

He is honored here as the founder of the Rod Rodgers Dance Company.