Compton And Los Angeles Are Separate Cities

In the New York Times obituary (July 4, 2025) of the prolific hip hop choreographer for films and TV, Dave Scott, who grew up in Compton, California, and died in Las Vegas at age 52, Compton is described as "the city in South Central Los Angeles." I've lived and attended public schools in both places and know, if the obituary writer doesn't, that Compton is a city near Los Angeles, not in Los Angeles.

The obituary writer would have been on firmer ground if he or she or they had written that Compton is a city located in Los Angeles County.

Choreographer Donald Byrd's Future Plans

Donald Byrd, 40, who "had always wanted to [dance]" but got started late (in his late teens), formed his own dance company--Donald Byrd/The Group--in 1978 in Los Angeles where he decided to stay after touring there as a member of Gus Solomons, Jr.'s company. Five years later, he made the move to New York because L.A. had "no sense of community, no support for the arts. I felt isolated from other people, from other artists."

Since then the North Carolina-born, Florida-reared choreographer's critically-acclaimed, issue-oriented dance works have been set on companies such as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre (which premiered Shards last year at the City Center [in New York]) and the Minneapolis-based Zenon Company.

Also a teacher, Byrd hopes to build a school and performance space through the Donald Byrd Foundation, established in 1985, as a way for him to repay the theatre world "which has given me a lot." He sees the school as "a place where kids can come in and do the kind of work that I see is important work."

Shortly before a one-week tour of Hungary and Yugoslavia, Donald Byrd/The Group performed a children's program on August 11 [1989] at the Harlem School of the Arts. They will next participate in the Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century dance festival scheduled for San Francisco (November 1-12) and Los Angeles (November 12-19). [These were 1989 dates.]

This article was originally published in the New York Amsterdam News (November 25, 1989).

Dancing About Black Males

The two-year-old DeNoble Men's Dance Company, under the direction of its founder, choreographer/dancer Robert Logan Mayo, who danced with the Alfred Gallman and Donald Byrd companies, will present an evening-long concert of  duets and trios called "Men on Dance" on August 13, 14, and 15 [1992] at the Downtown Dance Studios, 69 West 14th Street, near 6th Avenue. This will be DeNoble's first dance concert since March of this year [1992] when they performed a benefit performance for the Upper Room AIDS Ministry of Harlem at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center, where Mayo was a student.

With only a cast of three male dancers, DeNoble will explore themes that range from euthanasia to issues that face black men in general and black gay men in particular.

According to Mayo, who has been dancing for 12 years, DeNoble's repertory consists of seven dance works. By September it will expand to 10. Six of those pieces, three of them premieres, will be on the upcoming program. They include "A Different Testament," a trio choreographed by Mayo, and "Dove," a duo, also choreographed by Mayo, set to music from the gospel musical, The Gospel at Colonus.

This article was originally published in the New York Amsterdam News (August 15, 1992).

N/UM Is The Word

Reginald Wilson is not just a choreographer/dancer. He is unapologetically a black choreographer/dancer, who, as an undergraduate at New York University, studied anthropology and sociology.

These multiple pursuits have culminated in the creation of "N/UM," a male solo, which he unveiled on March 3, 1991 at the 6th annual Morningside Dance Festival that was held at the Theatre of the Riverside Church in Manhattan. (The festival showcased more than 25 choreographers from New York and across the country during its February 25-March 7 run.)

The title of the solo, explained [the then 23-year-old ] Wilson, a Milwaukee native, in a telephone interview, came from one of the Khoi-san languages of South Africa and "means an internal healing force."

Reginald Wilson believes "there's a need for some energy, some source to bring us [black people] together. So many black people are in so many different levels of society now that it's hard to find common ground. That's what n/um acted as in the villages. It was a magical healing power, a common ground for everybody. Everybody had access to it."

Wilson made his professional New York debut in 1989 at the lower Manhattan dance loft called Eden's Expressway, prior to a month-long teaching/performance residency in Juneau, Alaska, with the Israeli-born choreographer Neta Pulvermacher.

During the Eden's Expressway engagement, Wilson performed in two ensemble pieces, one of which he choreographed himself, an energetic and percussive work (he clapped his hands and stamped his feet while five female dancers thrashed about the floor, doing various hand and arm gestures) called "Le Mignon Petit Noir Americain" (The Cute Little Black American). The title came from a French magazine reference to the late fashion designer Patrick Kelly. Like "N/UM," it drew on Reginald Wilson's African-American roots. "That piece, and more so the solo, is very much about being black in the nineties. The structure, some of the movement, is taken from black culture. The rhythms, to me, are taken from ideas of African drumming."

This previously unpublished article was written on February 19, 1991.