Fürth, on Tour

In the 1960s, James Brown’s brash singing style and aggressive, muscular dance moves revealed a thrilling side of the black male entertainer. “A dancer like James Brown, largely self-taught,” Brenda Dixon-Gottschild writes in her book The Black Dancing Body, “brought footwork to new heights in his fast-paced, raw execution.” The once tortured and lynched, and too often invisible, black body almost instantly came to symbolize a new style in American culture. Kids wanted to “dance black” and many did.

Black Americans took up Brown’s mantra, “I’m Black and I’m Proud” and he became known as “the hardest working man in show business.”

A 2014 biopic, Get On Up and the Apollo Theater’s 2013 Get on the Good Foot project recently commemorated Brown, who died in 2006 after decades of expressing soul, unabashed sexuality and civil rights through song and performance. The Apollo was Brown’s early laboratory where he tested and perfected his moves. Director Otis Sallid conceived and directed the project, working with The Philadelphia Dance Company, known the world over as Philadanco.

The Get on the Good Foot project is a labor of love fashioned as a dance and music spectacle. Choreographers ...