Talley Beatty

Talley Beatty was born on the twenty-second of December 1918 at Cedar Grove, Louisiana, the son of a Black-Louisiana sharecropping household of the post-Reconstruction Louisiana sugar-and-cotton belt. The family moved to Chicago in 1923 and Beatty was raised in the segregated Black-Chicago Bronzeville district of the inter-war period.

He was placed at the Bronzeville-area Phillips Academy at Chicago and at the Englewood Technical High School at Chicago. He was given his first formal dance training at fifteen in 1933 at the Katherine Dunham (placed in this archive) Chicago studio at the corner of South Parkway and Fifty-First Street — among the first Black-American students at the Dunham programme.

He trained at the Dunham studio from 1933 to 1936 and was one of the principal Dunham Chicago-period dancers at the Katherine Dunham Dance Company’s principal early concerts at the Goodman Theatre at Chicago and the Lake Forest Stevens College.

He relocated to Manhattan with the Dunham Dance Company in 1939 and continued at the Manhattan-based Dunham Dance Company across the early Manhattan period from 1939 to 1941 — at the principal early Dunham Forty-Eighth Street Theatre programmes of the period.

He was hired in 1941 by the new American Negro Theatre at Harlem as the principal choreographer-and-leading-male-dancer of the Negro Theatre productions across the closing year of the inter-war period.

He took further training at the New Dance Group at Manhattan from 1944 to 1946 under Anna Sokolow and Sophie Maslow — the principal post-war modernist-dance training of the period.

He choreographed in 1947 his first major solo-concert work — Southern Landscape — on the post-Civil-War American South for the New Dance Group concert at the New York City Center on the eleventh of November 1947. Southern Landscape was the first major Black-American concert-dance work to win the New York Times principal dance award of the season.

He choreographed in 1959 the principal work of his mature career — The Road of the Phoebe Snow — on the New York Central Railroad route from Hoboken to Buffalo on the Phoebe Snow train, with the Talley Beatty Dance Company at the Manhattan Phoenix Theatre on the third of November 1959.

He choreographed across the following thirty years over forty principal works for the principal Black-American concert-dance companies of the post-war period — the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (placed in this archive), the Dance Theatre of Harlem (Mitchell, placed in this archive), and the Philadelphia Black Dance.

The principal Beatty works at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater are Toccata (1965), Come and Get the Beauty of It Hot (1960), Black Belt (1969), and The Stack Up (1982). The Stack Up was the principal post-1980 Beatty work on the closing-period New York City heroin trade and the inner-city Black-American urban deterioration of the late 1970s.

He died at Manhattan on the twenty-ninth of April 1995 of natural causes, at seventy-six.

He is honored here as the choreographer of The Stack Up.