Making Moves is a meditation on how Black performance is imagined in and through American basketball. The elite world of sports capitalizes on the athleticism of Black men while also attempting to control them. This dissertation interprets over the span of 100 years specific virtuosic and improvisational movements performed by basketball players as acts of radicalism oriented towards a kinetic knowledge of freedom. By adopting basketball as an embodied art that utilizes improvisation, costumes, an ensemble and stage, the project highlight ways in which sport and the performing arts intersect. It particularly foregrounds the crossover—various configurations of handling the basketball to keep it away from the opponent—performed by specific players as a Black imperative through its aesthetic structures akin to African American aesthetic structures found in the jazz tradition. The project is significant in two major ways: first, research on athletic Black bodies expands and enhances the discourse on blackness that pervades American popular culture; second, the project supports the fight for the abolition of forms of oppression.

Basketball possesses lyrical combinations of movements that lend themselves to further performance analysis, and Black male bodies primarily constitute professional basketball team rosters. Furthermore, sport platforms, such as NBA arenas and facilities, recently became polling and voting centers for the recent 2020 election, further delineating the basketball court as a political space. Chapter 1 of the dissertation interprets the imagined basketball world of Uncle Drew in his 2012 Pepsi Max commercials and 2018 film. The next chapter analyzes Separate and Equal, an Off-Broadway 2018 theatrical production about the relationship between white and Black teens who play a forbidden game of basketball in 1950s Jim Crow Alabama. Subsequently, Chapter 3 features the all-Black New York Renaissance Professional Basketball Team who played basketball on the floor of Harlem’s Renaissance Ballroom and won the first national professional basketball tournament in 1939. Black male virtuosity throughout each chapter reveals embodied histories resistant to subjugation.