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Doris Green is a Retired Fulbright scholar to Africa, creator of Greenotation, certified teacher of Labanotation, and U.S. State Department Cultural Specialist to Ghana. She is publisher of Traditions Journal.

Doris is the fourth child born to Addie B. McClure-Lewis Green and father Floyd Green Sr. There were six children in total who lived in a gorgeous red brick house on Madison St. in Brooklyn, New York. From her earliest recollection, Doris realized that boys were accorded greater opportunities than girls. This would establish the mind-set to challenge the boys and beat them on their own turf. If they were good in ball games, be it stickball, or punch ball she was better. Doris was a superior athlete. The inequality between males and females led Doris to create an occupation that would distinguish her from everyone else.

Institutional racism and devastation beset her on all avenues, particularly limiting her school time to only 'four' hours a day during her primary years from the kindergarten through the end of the fifth grade. Doris would struggle to overcome this fault and excel becoming part of the Honor Section in high school, earning a number of honor certificates in route to graduation.

Doris was always interested in music and dance and began music and dance training in her early childhood. She was mesmerized by rhythm and was awarded a solo spot in the annual dance recital at Carnegie Hall. To fulfill this task she had to choreograph a new dance routine each year. The drummers could not read music and never played the music the same way twice. Therefore, she decided to use her musical skills to create a system to write music specifically for drums.

To dance on the Broadway stage was her dream, but opportunities for aspiring young black artists were slim to none. She enrolled in college to study Labanotation, a system designed to write dance movements on paper. This led her to combine her work with this system to create a score that would reveal both the music and dance in a single integrated document. Doris did her undergraduate and graduate studies at Brooklyn College and New York University respectively. Little did she know that Africa had been seeking such a system to transfer their oral traditions into written traditions!

The sixties was a turbulent decade the States. Everyone was disgruntled. The youth were upset with the draft; women were arguing for 'equal work for equal pay'; and the Black populace was fed up with their shabby treatment since their ancestors were kidnapped from Africa and brought here. The federal government, in an effort to quell some of the dissension on the campuses, issued a decree that courses on Black and minority studies be included as part of the curriculum with all deliberate speed. Institutions that failed to comply would have their federal funding cut. Department chairmen scurried to ascertain what courses they could offer and to find faculty to teach these new courses. As one of the only four Blacks in the department, we were called to a meet with the department chair. I suggested that they offer courses in African music and dance. They were already familiar with my work in dance on the stage and theaters of the campus. They deliberated and after graduation, I became the first person to teach African dance and music in Brooklyn College. Things began to accelerate and I would win the first of three faculty research awards to study in Africa. My first trip was to East Africa, principally Tanzania, Uganda, Zanzibar, and Kenya. There were numerous instruments and dances that were garnered and brought back to her college students. Doris was no stranger to the stage, theater or television. She created a performing troupe on the campus and they appeared on Brooklyn College television, theatrical performances and in other schools. Doris would win three faculty research awards and continue to return to conduct research in Africa from East to West for the next thirty-three years. This would include a Fulbright award 1986-87 to teach and conduct research in Ivory Coast, and the schools of Gambia, West Africa. Her greatest thrill was demonstrating to Africans that their music, particularly their drum music could be written on paper just like the western system accommodates western music.

Her system, Greenotation, attracted the attention of a number of legends of African culture, primarily The Timi of Ede Oba Adetoyese Laoye of Nigeria, Duro Ladipo of Nigeria, Washa Ng'Wanamashalla of Tanzania, and the legendary Maurice Sonar Senghor, creator of the National Ballet of Senegal. Mr. Senghor applauded the work and personally promoted it in Senegal and in French territories of Africa and in Europe.

Her writings have appeared across the board in newspapers, scholarly journals, radio, television, the Internet, books, magazines and in exhibits as an author, critic, and reporter. She is the creator of Traditions, a journal dedicated to the preservation of African music and dance.
Http://www.brooklynx.org/neighborhoods/panafrican
http://www.freewebs.com/onlyonlineexhibitions/greenotation.htm
http://www.hugeaux.com/thespiritexhibition.htm

These are a few of the sites on the net where you can view her work. Throughout the years, she has written many research notes and student texts such as Ngoma Sindimba film and pamphlet on the Wamakonde puberty dance. Sangba: The Origin of the Djimbe; Percussive Notes, The Journal of Percussive Arts Society, February 200;. The National Dance Company of Senegal, International Encyclopedia of Dance, Oxford University Press, 1998, Volume 4; Traditional Dance in Africa. African Dance: An Artistic, Historical and Philosophical Inquiry. 1996

Doris earned her undergraduate degrees at Brooklyn College AA 1968 and BS 1969. She was awarded a NDEA Doctoral Fellowship to study at NYU, but the institution was not amenable to the field of African music or dance and fought her every step of the way refusing to permit her to teach percussion notation on the campus. As what happens to a number of pioneers in a given specialty, there is no one to assess their work. There was and still is no jury of her peers. This does not mean that humanity should not benefit from her knowledge. She passed the doctoral certifying exams and graduated in 1972 with a Masters and excessive credits. Now retired she is looking for a university that will gratuitously accommodate a senior citizen consenting to her writing a dissertation in the still virgin territory of transferring oral traditions into written tradition to give them perpetuity in the future.