period, in which there was much racism and stereotyping, ballet was thought of as a “high art” that was reserved for white dancers. Other critics such as Margaret Lloyd praised Beatty's technique in her work The Borzoi Book of Modern Dance. Lloyd wrote that she found his leaps “phenomenal, a sort of universal wish fulfillment to navigate the air”. Themes in choreography Beatty's signature choreographic style was characterized by fast, energetic movements that seemed to explode out of the dancers' bodies. There was an anger and ferocity in his movement vocabulary. Beatty’s work explored themes around the struggles and everyday life of African Americans. Many of his pieces focused on his own “personal statements about alienation, racial discrimination, and the hardships of urban life”. In the film Conversations with Contemporary Masters of American Modern Dance Beatty talks about some of his more well-known choreographic works. According to Beatty Southern Landscape, a five-part dance, is a description of the time right after the Reconstruction period in the South. The dance explores an event in history described in Howard Fast's novel Freedom Road. The plot centers around a group of black and white farmers who had happily formed a community together before being literally destroyed by the Ku Klux Klan. After the slaughter, people went into the fields at night to retrieve the bodies of their loved ones. The most well-known and famous solo section of the dance, titled Mourner’s Bench is about a man returning from recovering a body and reflecting on the ideas of hope and strength. Mourner's Bench The third section of Southern Landscape, Mounrner's Bench is arguable Beatty's most well-known and enduring work. In an interview for the documentary "Free to Dance," Beatty said that he got the inspiration for Mourner's Bench after reading Freedom Road (1944) by Howard Fast. Freedom Road is a historical fiction set in the Reconstruction era that shows the complicated layers of reconstruction in the South directly after the Civil War. Beatty goes on to explain his intention in choreographing Mourner's Bench: "It's a group expression of grief and then it's a personal expression of grief, and he is -- he is thinking upon the events of the day. And he's pushing, and just moving across the bench, and looking out, moving across the bench. All of the movements have to do directly with what he has just experienced that day."His most notable