Dance — Andscape https://andscape.com Andscape -- Sports, Race, Culture, HBCUs and More Fri, 26 Jul 2024 12:28:57 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.5 https://andscape.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/cropped-andscape-icon.png?w=32 Dance — Andscape https://andscape.com 32 32 147425866 Meet Charm La’Donna, the choreographer behind Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Not Like Us’ video https://andscape.com/features/charm-ladonna-choreographer-kendrick-lamar-not-like-us-video/ Fri, 26 Jul 2024 12:28:55 +0000 https://andscape.com/?post_type=tu_feature&p=326766 In the world of dance, where rhythm and artistry meet, Charm La’Donna stands out. A veteran choreographer and artist, La’Donna has worked with musicians like rappers Dr. Dre and Lil Baby, and singers Dua Lipa, Selena Gomez, Meghan Trainor, The Weeknd, and others. Behind her success is a story of determination and a desire to create space for others to shine. La’Donna’s passion for dance is evident in how she talks about her career and how her eyes light up when asked about her journey. But it hasn’t been easy.

“Sometimes [my] counterparts get more than I do, even though I know I’m capable and have the same résumé. There are moments when I’m the only Black person, let alone woman, in the room — and I take pride in that,” La’Donna said of her experience in the entertainment industry. “Many ask if I’ve ever felt imposter syndrome. I say no because I know I belong there. I’ve put in the work, the hours, and dedicated myself to my craft.”

For the Compton, California native, working with rapper Kendrick Lamar on his concert, The Pop Out: Ken and Friends, the “Not Like Us” music video and representing their city felt like a full circle moment.

“Something about being with Kendrick and being home, it just hits differently. I’m just overwhelmed with joy all the time,” La’Donna said. 

In a recent interview on Andscape’s Rhoden Fellows podcast, La’Donna reflected on her career, her inspiration, the challenges she has faced in the industry, and her dreams for the future.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you get the opportunity to work with Kendrick Lamar?

I’ve been working with Kendrick for about 10 years. My mentor, Fatima Robinson, first started working with him when I was assisting her. As our relationship grew, we just began to vibe. And then I started choreographing for him.

Can you walk us through your creative process when it comes to choreographing?

I hope this is not a cliché when I say this: I do what I feel. I never create anything before I walk into the room. I always create only in spots in real time because that’s where I draw my inspiration from — what’s happening in real time. Sometimes, going in with a plan of what you think should happen could block you in creativity because you’re trying to set that one thing that in your mind should work this way, and sometimes it doesn’t work like that. I take into consideration how the artist feels and how the dancers feel. So, I would tell you I’m all about space in real time.

Who has been your biggest inspiration throughout your journey?

Well, I will say my mom. She was the woman, amongst many in my life, who has pushed me and inspired me to be me, and to attack any and every dream. I can’t mention my story without mentioning Fatima Robinson and her impact on my life since I was 10.

My grandmother passed away last year. I remember not knowing what my purpose was or how I was going to do this. She would always keep me grounded and remind me, ‘You are exactly where you’re supposed to be.’ So those are my key inspirations.

As a Black woman in your field, have you faced any hardships?

100%. I will say I’ve been blessed and fortunate to be under a mentor, Fatima Robinson, who’s also another Black woman who’s opened a lot of doors for me, and even though there are some doors she’s opened, there are some doors I’ve had to open for myself. I fight for what I’m worth.

I’ve done everything to prepare myself to be in the room, and all I gotta do is walk in there like God sent me. There have been situations and things that have been said, but nothing stops me, and I truly believe nothing stops us. As one door closes, I open five more for the girl behind me.

What motivates you to keep going through hardships?

It’s knowing my gifts and loving every aspect of what I do. It’s getting the message from the girl saying, ‘Charm, you’ve inspired me. It’s getting videos of the little girls looking at my work and dancing; they have somebody who looks like them that they can emulate. I’m so blessed and grateful to do what I love and make a living. I pour my heart into it and don’t take any of it for granted. But there are days when I just don’t wanna get up. I’ve lived in survival mode my whole life. Sometimes, I’ve had to stop and tell myself that I’ve made it, stop surviving, and start living because I constantly go.

For a very long time, I didn’t know how to say no because I thought that if I said no, I was missing out. So now I’m in the space where I’m truly living, and I’m appreciative of everything I’m doing—those things that keep me going.

What has been the most fulfilling memory you’ve made thus far?

It’s hard to pinpoint one moment, but every project and artist I’ve collaborated with has been fulfilling in its own way. I’m just in awe of how we can explore art — whether it’s pulling off a Super Bowl performance in a week or connecting with artists from different backgrounds.

I’m from Compton. And there’s a connection between Kendrick and me, coming from where we come from. But, connecting with other artists from different places and being able to help execute their vision is very important to me. I find little things in every single project. You know. I was able to choreograph the Super Bowl during COVID-19. We pulled it off in a week. In every project, whenever I feel like I can’t do something, I can do it.

You’ve already accomplished so much in your career. What is your end goal?

I want to have a nonprofit with dance. I want to get into directing movies, making films, bringing dance stories to life in a different way, and writing. I’m a kid of the arts. I love it all. I just see myself forever growing. I still do my mentorships. I bring young, aspiring choreographers or just young girls to my team. Some of my girls have turned into assistant managers, and all these things just to be around, and that’s what I want to take on another level.

]]> 326766 Nilea Cosley https://andscape.com/contributors/nilea-cosley/ Nilea.Cosley@espn.com LaTasha Barnes looks for the roots linking Black dance styles https://andscape.com/features/latasha-barnes-looks-for-the-roots-linking-black-dance-styles/ Thu, 16 Nov 2023 13:16:54 +0000 https://andscape.com/?post_type=tu_feature&p=307368 In 2004, award-winning choreographer LaTasha Barnes was hit by a car while in a crosswalk. At the time, Barnes, an Army sergeant first class, had just been assigned to the White House Communications Agency and was years away from accolades in the performing arts. The accident broke her hip, back and wrist. Dance —and in particular, popping — was recommended as part of her physical rehabilitation.

“Not to be cliché, but it was a happy accident. Because the universe, absolutely, was trying to tell me that I was not in alignment,” said Barnes, who is an assistant professor of dance at Arizona State University. “But I kept trying to do, as we say now, the Black elitist thing, to figure out the route that I needed to take to be stable and have financial security. I was doing high level work, I was utilizing my talents, but I was not spiritually in alignment with what I’m supposed to be doing for my life, until dance reentered the picture.”

Popping led Barnes to study other Black social dance forms. She not only healed her body with movement, but won international competitions in Lindy Hop and house dancing. She wanted to understand how these dances from different eras were linked, especially because forms that were developed by Black dancers, such as the Lindy Hop and jazz dance, no longer had many Black practitioners.

All those connections can be seen in Barnes’ hyperarticulate body and the party that is The Jazz Continuum. Coming to the Kennedy Center in Washington on Friday and Saturday — it has received a 2023 Bessie Award — it features musical direction by Christopher McBride, emcee Melanie George, and a cast of musicians and dancers weaving an expansive tapestry of Black dance to live music.

Barnes describes the production as an “offering” rather than a show, an offering that sublimates her scholarly research into a raucous celebration. In that vein, The Jazz Continuum varies from performance to performance, with the artists responding to the environment and each other. In Washington, it will include local DJs and dancers, many of whom were mentors and colleagues of Barnes, and a section choreographed by jazz dance legend Mickey Davidson that refers to major influencers, such as Norma Miller, the “Queen of Swing,” and Frankie Manning. This iteration will also emphasize specific influences in music and dance in the area, including go-go (a style of funk that originated in Washington in the 1970s), D.C. hand dancing (a form of swing dance), Beat Ya Feet (a dance from the 1990s defined by rapid footwork), New Jack Swing-style hip-hop, and several line dance traditions from the area.

“There’s Inception levels of unfolding in the work,” said Barnes. “It is an offering back to all those people that made us who we are.”

Andscape caught up with Barnes by phone to discuss what led her to this moment and the need to honor the vast canon of Black dance and culture.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Dancing and being in the military are both traditions in your family. How were those passions passed on and shared with you?

I guess I’d have to blame my dad. I got to the military in middle school. I was a junior Marine Corps, Junior ROTC, and was always hanging out with my father who was AGR [Active Guard Reserves], which is not a designation that they have anymore. I went with him all the time to the base. Seeing the practice of preparation, the discipline, the commitment to being prepared, that was what I grew up witnessing.

Whenver LaTasha Barnes’ (center) family got together, dancing was an expectation.

Steve Pisano

There was this tradition of initiative that existed within my family, literally bringing the family together, whether coming together to support, coming together to celebrate, to discuss, to plan. I think that was always a kind of impetus. It came clearly from my dad’s military planning and my mom’s existence growing up as an Army brat, having to plan moves or mitigate whatever would happen.

And whenever the family got together, there was the expectation that there would be dancing and that there would be this bit of competitive exchange about who has the best moves or who is listening to the best music or who had won the most recent recreation center contests or who’d gotten a contract. And it wasn’t in an unhealthy way, just we’re out here living and doing and celebrating ourselves.

When you joined the military, you brought your dancing spirit with you. Is it true that when you were stationed in Belgium, you were out causing a scene at the club?

My bestie and I were just commenting on all our shenanigans when we were in Belgium—that was over 25 years [ago] now! Even if you weren’t the best hip-hop dancer or the best line dancer or the best salsa dancer in your family in the unit, you were the only person that knew [those dances]. This is where I really established my method of dance education because it wasn’t about making people perfect, it was about helping people be better dancers. So then at the NCO club that week, whenever we went, everybody would be able to have a way to survive to the music, so that they could have some sort of fun, even if they weren’t the best at doing the thing.

That’s not something that I feel like a lot of educators focus on. In their efforts to maintain the technical standard, they forget about what dance is for. And I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have a technical standard. And this is also a routing of that notion that street and club styles don’t have technical standards, because they absolutely do. But it doesn’t matter how well you can direct this turn, if you’re not paying attention to the person that you’re dancing with.

How was dance therapeutic for you when you were recovering from the car accident? Was it spiritual as well as physical therapy?

Oh, absolutely. My spirit was enlivened by my renewed ability to control my body. And it just kept feeding itself. My excitement and joy about the things that I was able to rediscover about moving and functioning just made me want to learn and do and train more. It was the contraction of the muscles, and literally, neurologically pinpointing which muscle I was aiming to engage, and directing that energetic intention of contract and release. That helped me really get in touch with the depths of my musculature, and how I could use my body to speak. And not just in that eccentric contraction, that hard hit for popping everybody knows.

Because it wasn’t just about the hit, how hard can I hit? And can I rev up this hit? Can I make it a micro hit? Like, what other things can I do? It gave me a way of knowing myself and my capabilities that I probably would have overlooked. I mean, I was always an athlete. But after that car accident, the rehab that I went through, those subsequent dance classes were invaluable to me. And then my body refused to accept speaking in any way that was not as full as those experiences.

And those experiences led you to start exploring other styles of dance at Urban Artistry studio?

Dancing became therapeutic for LaTasha Barnes after her car accident.

Jerry Almonte

The popping is where I encountered Rashaad Pearson. Urban Artistry did not yet exist—I was one of the formative members and directors. I started taking classes with dancers who were also part of the formative cadre of UA at DC Dance Collective. He [Pearson] was excited about my dancing and my hard hit, because I did powerlifting for the Army as well. But he said that I didn’t have as much stillness to really articulate or to showcase the hits and the shapes that I was making. He thought I should talk to his mentor Junious Brickhouse and find out about more about house dance. And I was like, house? Like CeCe Peniston house? (Laughs.) And sure enough.

I hadn’t had any codified education about street and club styles. I was just in the spaces and communities with my friends and my uncles. I still remember that first house class. He said, ‘jacking,’ and I was like, what are we doing? And then he started doing it and I was like, ‘Oh, yeah.’

You started to find links between all these different social dance styles, between popping, house, Lindy Hop, hip-hop, and jazz. What gets lost if those connections aren’t clear?

The thing that’s lost when they’re not linked is us. It’s not the dance, it’s us, and our ability to connect and relate. What we need to do is remind people that it’s Black.

I was so incensed just being in grad school. The use of multisyllabic, esoteric language to talk about cultural experiences, and cultural understanding, and the alignment of social practices and humanities — this is why people don’t engage with this. People feel like they need to have a Ph.D. just to talk about who they are.

Was that frustration the seed for The Jazz Continuum?

The crux of this really cemented for me in bell hooks’ work about the oppositional gaze and me thinking about the ways in which my great-grandmother had encouraged me. She’d grown up in the South and when you were encountering white people, you were supposed to look away. It was this notion of having been taught to look away from white spaces. But now white spaces are the spaces where my culture is held. So I am just supposed to look away? No.

It wasn’t so much in the sense of taking over or reclaiming, as it was acknowledging that it was there. And not only that it was there, but also that there’s this tendency for Black America now to look to being held in those spaces, spaces that are ‘venerated,’ or ‘high art,’ to being the best of us. So [it is about] bringing who we are, naturally, to those spaces. And having Black audiences reconcile themselves, not just ‘Ooh, I could be up there, doing that,’ but yeah, we’re up here doing that thing that you do in your living room, just maybe at a higher level. But it’s still that thing that you do in your living room: the way we hoot and holler for each other, the way we jeer at each other, the way we egg each other on, the way we aim to acknowledge and celebrate those who have gone before us, those who have just transitioned and those who need restoration.

Whether our hands are on our knees, whether our tongues are out, whether we have on a four-piece suit, whether we have on sneakers, or whether our hair is coiffed or ‘froed or bald. Who we are is worthy of celebration and acknowledgement. Not just for ourselves, but for each other.

]]> 307368 Candice Thompson https://andscape.com/contributors/candice-thompson/ ‘Heart of Brick’ recognizes the quieter moments of Black queer nightlife https://andscape.com/features/heart-of-brick-recognizes-the-quieter-moments-of-black-queer-nightlife/ Thu, 14 Sep 2023 12:16:51 +0000 https://andscape.com/?post_type=tu_feature&p=303048 Imagine a nightclub stripped bare of the blaring music, strobe lights, and anonymous bodies crowding the dance floor. Instead, Heart of Brick, a new theatrical production from experimental R&B musician serpentwithfeet (aka Josiah Wise) offers seven dancers and a singer with an otherworldly falsetto.

This clutter-free approach makes room for the more intimate moments of connection that Wise, 35, and his collaborators have found in their experience of Black queer nightlife: the first tentative touches between soon-to-be lovers, the self-effacing humor embedded in flirtations, and the cajoling and teasing among friends.

“A lot of times we think about the bombastic and flashy parts of the club,” Wise said, “and that is definitely an essential part to nightlife. But I think there’s also really quiet moments that happen. Moments when maybe you don’t feel as cute at the club, and, and you get some encouragement. Or maybe you don’t get encouragement, and you go home and process that and then you come back the next time and feel more confident. What is the moment when you flirt with somebody and you’re not sure how into you they are … is it just going to be a dance floor romance? Or is it going to extend? I wanted to make songs for each of those moments.”

Wise has released two studio albums (Soil in 2018; Deacon in 2021) and collaborated with artists from Björk to Ty Dolla $ign. As he wrote songs for a new album (the release date hasn’t been announced), he began to think of how they might take theatrical form. A producer connected Wise’s team with The Joyce Theater in New York City, which has long been a home to concert dance, it seemed a natural fit. The group that brought Heart of Brick to the stage included director Wu Tsang, choreographer and dramaturge Raja Feather Kelly (A Strange Loop), and Donte Collins, the 2016 winner of the Seth Frank Most Promising Young Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets.

“We were really drawn immediately to the idea that the story was about Black queer spaces and would be told and shepherded by Black queer artists,” Ross LeClair, in-house producer for The Joyce Theater, said. “But the idea that this show would be the representation to go along with this new music and would be performed with this music [live], felt like something we don’t see very often.”

The show had its world premiere in Germany last month and begins its American tour this week in New York. The production will make stops in several major cities through the fall, from Los Angeles and Seattle to Boston, as well as smaller towns such as North Adams, Massachusetts, and Bentonville, Arkansas.

From the first scene, Wise addresses the audience, turning spectators into confidantes. His eponymous character, serpentwithfeet, is cozy on the sofa and reluctant to go out lest he should run into his ex. But a sense of adventure is rewarded when he encounters a bouncer named Brick. A love story unfolds and Wise’s mundane decision to go out leads to a metamorphosis. While the show is not autobiographical, the reverence for the dance club is real.

Choreographer Raja Feather Kelly tried to embody the thin veil between the subconscious and conscious in Heart of Brick.

Alex Kikis

“Going out clubbing, going out dancing, raised me a second time,” Wise said. “I learned more about my body. I discovered more about the way it took up space. I found a new sense of humor and a new way to establish community. Also just discovering new music that I hadn’t heard was always a magical thing. It was sort of like a second coming-of-age.”

This idea of club culture as an opportunity to come into one’s own and integrate different identifications, drop various shields, or forge new personas resonated with the show’s collaborators. 

“I avoided going out to nightclubs,” said Kelly, whose dances often refer to pop culture. “I was like, I’m not good enough. I’m not what the boys want. I’m not what they call ‘trade.’ … So what is the thing that gets people going, right? For me, my MO was dance. I’m not trade, I don’t have a clique of friends, I’m not a big drinker, I’m not going out to do drugs and lose myself, but I’m gonna go and dance and think about my body, I’m going to live that.”

Collins, who co-wrote the book with Wise, said their experiences in the club have been tender.

“It’s a place that you show up open and agree to the music or to conversation or to just be present with your breath,” Collins said. “And I love that. I think there are few places where you can go and be unabashedly in your body and with other people who are unabashedly in their bodies and not be judged.”

Along with the celebration of the body, the present moment, or a particular night, the club can also be an environment for finding peers.

“Who are my people? What’s my culture inside this culture? For some queer people, the nightclub is a bridge to that second coming-of-age,” Kelly said. “It’s certainly a place where if you have the means and the interest to go out and explore, you start to learn more about how the culture exists, and how the culture manifests, and how you want to participate in that, which can be both social and very political, very personal, and very public.”

Collins agrees. “Queer men are often robbed of acting on desire young, right? We’re closeted. And we don’t have queer community young. So often our teenage desires and longings are acted out in our mid- or late 20s. I mean sexual desire, but I also mean just a desire for closeness, a desire to see yourself in another person.”

In this space of discovery, new love and friendship blooms between characters and, ultimately, triumphs over doubts, gossip and a close encounter with death. Wise’s conversational lyrics — “I don’t want to make a mess, I don’t want to move too fast, but let’s not avoid the deep end” and “I’m your safe word”— have the suave quality of ’90s R&B in Wise’s crooning, but ripple over layers of orchestration that refer to a wide range of musical forms. Like some of Wise’s previous music, fantastical elements are at play and the plot of Heart of Brick has the feel of a fable. Among the lovers and clique of friends, there is a prophet character, modeled on both Pilate from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Puck from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“I think of it as this Afro-surrealist experience that doesn’t waste the audience’s time,” Collins said. “He [Wise] wanted it to be mundane and clear. He also wanted it to be light, but to have a lesson, to have that sort of fable feeling. There is no veil between you and the language.”

The dancing also aims for accessibility, favoring the movement language of love, desire, and empowerment over more abstract gymnastic or virtuosic steps. Midway through the show, a warm exchange between Brick and Wise turns into a slow duet. When three more pairs join in behind them, their simple movements and unison dancing amplify a shared experience.

“It’s a thin line between these people just behaving and then dancing,” Kelly said. “And what I wanted to get at and what I think serpent [Wise] and Wu [Tsang] and the performers wanted to get at, is that very thin veil between subconscious and conscious. You can catch someone’s eye, and you’re like, wow, we’re having the same experience, right? How do you embody and exemplify that consciousness while everyone’s in their own little world? Unison is impossible [in the club]. And yet you feel the sensation of everyone doing the same thing at the same time.”

Those feelings of synchronicity and fellowship found in the club were mirrored in the creative process. Wise sought to create a warm environment where support, kindness, and transformation were built into meetings and rehearsals.

“It was like being welcomed into this beautiful queer space,” Collins said. “I felt seen, and I felt valued and that’s rare.”

serpentwithfeet (seated) and Dylan M. Contreras (front) in Heart of Brick.

Justin French

“I wanted to try things that were new and difficult,” Wise said. “And I wanted to also know I will be met with kindness and provide that same thing to the others. I said to the team: ‘I want to be transformed by this process. I want to walk out on the other side of the show as a new person.’ ”

Like any good fable, Heart of Brick comes with a moral, in the form of a friendly reminder to get out in the real world and in Wise’s words, “take a healthy risk and trust.” Wise is taking that risk onstage, performing live in every show, and trusting in the other cast members and audience. He hopes Heart of Brick will pass on that encouragement.

“Each time you go to the club, it could be a new fairy tale. It’s like a children’s story for adults,” Kelly said. “What lesson are you going to learn at this club? Maybe it’s a lesson about rumors. Maybe it’s a lesson about embodying yourself.”

“You theorize about what a queer utopia could be,” Collins said, “but you have to feel it. And the only way to feel it is to go [out], to curate it. I think it’s a lesson that you learn many times.”

]]> 303048 Candice Thompson https://andscape.com/contributors/candice-thompson/ Lawsuit accuses Lizzo of sexual harassment and creating a hostile work environment https://andscape.com/features/lawsuit-accuses-lizzo-of-sexual-harassment-and-creating-a-hostile-work-environment/ Wed, 02 Aug 2023 14:55:00 +0000 https://andscape.com/?post_type=tu_feature&p=300072 LOS ANGELES — Lizzo has been sued by three former dancers who accuse the Grammy winner of sexual harassment and allege the singer and her production company created a hostile work environment.

The civil lawsuit filed Tuesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court claims Lizzo pressured the dancers to engage with nude performers at a club in Amsterdam and shamed one of them for her weight gain before firing her.

Plaintiffs Arianna Davis, Crystal Williams and Noelle Rodriguez make numerous charges including sexual, religious and racial harassment, disability discrimination, assault and false imprisonment.

The legal complaint seeks unspecified damages and names Melissa Viviane Jefferson, known professionally as Lizzo, her production company Big Grrrl Big Touring, Inc., and Shirlene Quigley, captain of the performer’s dance team.

Representatives for Lizzo didn’t immediately respond to emails seeking comment on the lawsuit.

The court filing claims that after performing a concert in Amsterdam, Lizzo and her crew attended a sexually themed show at a club in the city’s notorious Red Light District where “Lizzo began inviting cast members to take turns touching the nude performers.” During the show, Lizzo led a chant pressuring Davis to touch the breasts of one of the nude women performing at the club, the filing states.

“Finally, the chorus became overwhelming, and a mortified Ms. Davis acquiesced in an attempt to bring an end to the chants,” the complaint states. “Plaintiffs were aghast with how little regard Lizzo showed for the bodily autonomy of her employees and those around her, especially in the presence of many people whom she employed.”

Lizzo, who routinely champions body positivity, is also accused of calling out Davis for her weight gain after accusing the dancer of not being committed to her role. Davis was fired in May for recording a meeting during which Lizzo had given out notes to dancers about their performances, according to the complaint.

Quigley, who served as a judge on the singer’s reality show Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls, is accused in the lawsuit of pushing her Christian beliefs onto dancers. The court filing claims Quigley referred to Davis as a “non-believer” and told co-workers that “No job and no one will stop me from talking about the Lord.”

Earlier this year, Lizzo won the Grammy for record of the year for her hit “About Damn Time.” A global tour supporting her fourth studio album, 2022’s Special, wrapped up last month.

]]> 300072 The Associated Press https://andscape.com/contributors/the-associated-press/ Virginia Johnson, who rescued Dance Theatre of Harlem, is saying farewell https://andscape.com/features/virginia-johnson-who-rescued-dance-theatre-of-harlem-is-saying-farewell/ Wed, 19 Apr 2023 12:55:03 +0000 https://andscape.com/?post_type=tu_feature&p=291793 When Dance Theatre of Harlem returns to New York’s City Center stage this week, the program will show off the company in top form: from George Balanchine’s highly technical Allegro Brillante to the New York premiere of Tiffany Rea-Fisher’s Sounds of Hazel, inspired by jazz musician and civil rights activist Hazel Scott. This season is even more significant and bittersweet, though, because it is the last one for artistic director Virginia Johnson, who, after many years as a company dancer, returned as an executive a decade ago to rescue the institution from oblivion.

In June, she will step down and resident choreographer Robert Garland will become the ballet company’s third artistic director.

Way back in 1969, Johnson’s decision to take a leave of absence from New York University to become a founding member of Dance Theatre of Harlem wasn’t popular with either her parents or her peers. The former wanted her to enter a profession like medicine or law and the latter frowned upon ballet as a white man’s art. Yet her decision would not only launch a notable artistic career — it would also shift the art form of ballet toward a more progressive future.

Virginia Johnson took a leave of absence from New York University to become a founding member of the Dance Theatre of Harlem.

Theik Smith

“The thing about the company, in those first days in the basement of St. James Presbyterian Church, was that each and every one of us had been told we couldn’t do this, that there was no place for us in classical ballet,” said Johnson. “We had trained all our lives to be ballet dancers, usually the only Black person in the classroom. But we all knew that we belonged in this art form — it’s just the art form didn’t believe it.”

The first artistic director was Arthur Mitchell, a famed performer with New York City Ballet. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, Mitchell and Karel Shook decided to return home to Harlem to start a school to bring ballet, along with its joys and discipline, to young people. That school eventually gave birth to a professional company.

“He gave us the chance to make a place for ourselves,” said Johnson. “We were thrilled. But we were also challenged because he was a very difficult taskmaster. If you’re going to change people’s minds about something like ‘Do Black people belong in ballet?’ then you must show them all kinds of excellence that they did not expect, they did not know was possible. So it was completely wonderful to be dancing with Dance Theatre of Harlem from the beginning, but it was so difficult and excruciating to do at the same time.”

Johnson navigated that demanding path, and Mitchell’s brutal leadership style, with talent, an uncompromising work ethic, and a humility and grace that left a deep impression on her colleagues, dance critics and balletomanes. She became known for her moving portrayals of characters as diverse as the fragile, broken-hearted Giselle in the ballet company’s Creole Giselle and the brooding axe-murderer Lizzie Borden in Agnes De Mille’s Fall River Legend. She also animated the steps of abstract works “by means of her uncanny physical imagination,” according to dance critic Elizabeth Kendall. And she sustained such greatness for nearly three decades, a feat matched by few other dancers.

The final line of Kendall’s appraisal of Johnson’s dancing career, written for Dance Magazine on the occasion of Johnson’s farewell performance in 1997 at the age of 47, read: “It is for her generosity to ballet that she should be remembered.”

That line would prove prescient. After retiring from the stage, Johnson returned to school, majoring in communications at Fordham University. Her goal was to find a way to bring ballet to television. But discovering the financial obstacles in presenting art via a largely commercial medium, she pivoted to print media. At a job interview for Dance Spirit magazine, the publisher asked her what she thought should be in their new ballet magazine. Her outline — which included everything she wished she had known about ballet as a young person — became Pointe magazine. Johnson was hired as its first editor-in-chief.

“When I was a performer, my focus had been on myself and making brilliant performances and so I was extremely blinded,” Johnson said. “And through the process of working on different stories and interviewing different people, I got to see what the universe of ballet was, and it was a real education. I couldn’t be an artistic director now if I hadn’t had that interim phase.”

Artistic director Virginia Johnson (seated, center) will step down in June and resident choreographer Robert Garland will become Dance Theatre of Harlem’s third artistic director.

Dance Theatre of Harlem

Meanwhile, the Dance Theatre of Harlem was foundering amid mounting financial troubles and in 2004, the company went on hiatus. The organization was reduced to a school and a small pre-professional ensemble at its home in the Sugar Hill neighborhood. When Mitchell called Johnson in 2009 to ask her to be the next artistic director, the future of the company was anything but certain. Yet, she didn’t hesitate to take on the challenge.

“Dance Theatre of Harlem gave me the life I dreamed of,” said Johnson. “And this was Arthur Mitchell on the line saying he wants me to take over. And I couldn’t say no. It was my turn to pay back. He’d given me so much, I had to return.”

“When Virginia took the reins of Dance Theatre of Harlem, it was a very, very challenged situation,” said Anna Glass, the current executive director. “The company had such a huge reputation and legacy, and she herself had a huge reputation and legacy. But she took it on with such grace, not being concerned with what if this falls apart, will this ruin my reputation. And I think for most people, that would have been a consideration.”

The obstacles were immense. There were debts to be repaid and restarting the company required both significant fundraising and finding new dancers. Somehow, Johnson saw opportunity.

“It was a chance to bring back another vision for ballet, that he [Mitchell] had started all those years ago, that people had forgotten in a mere seven years. It could be something other than what they were thinking,” she said.

Looking to return with a less expensive model, and a repertoire that could be performed with fewer dancers, Johnson received support from the Ford, Andrew W. Mellon, and Rockefeller foundations. Together with consultants from the foundations, and then-executive director Laveen Naidu, she spent two years planning for the company’s return. The old ballet company toured with 54 dancers and two trailers of scenery. Today, the company has 18 dancers touring by plane with wardrobe tucked into checked baggage.

“It’s a starkly different company from the company that was that closed in 2004, you know, and a lot of that is economic,” Johnson said. “A lot of it is because we must be a touring company. We have an image that we have to carry across the world. It’s not like we do a five-performance series in [New York] City Center every year. It’s about being able to reach people in lots of different kinds of locations.”

But before those first performances and tours, dancers had to be found.

“It was an organization with a big name, but from an artistic standpoint, it might as well have been a startup company because she had to start over,” said Glass.

“We did a national tour looking for dancers for the new company. There would be 200 people in the room and maybe 10 of them were Black. And maybe one of them had the level of training that I needed to make the company alive again,” Johnson recalled. “It was very sobering. People had forgotten so quickly, or this entrenched idea of ballet being for white people only was still so prevalent. It was very disheartening.”

There is no official count of the percentage of Black dancers in American professional companies, but anecdotally the number is likely in the mid-single digits. To get Dance Theatre of Harlem back off the ground, some dancers were promoted from the small performing ensemble that had been started as a kind of second company during the hiatus. But most were found and developed from the audition tour. Rebuilding quickly, the young and mostly green dancers arrived in May 2012 with performances scheduled for that fall.

In the studio, dancers encountered a very different person from Mitchell at the front of the room.

“As a dancer, you always have someone that tells you what to do,” said dancer Ingrid Silva, “and with her, it’s funny, she asks you a question. What do you think? Or what are the things that you want to work on? What do you want to achieve? It was eye-opening and shifted everything.”

Her approach is not only a departure from Mitchell’s dictatorial style, it is also a new model of leadership for an industry rife with stories of trauma and abuse.

Dancers rehearse for Allegro Brilliante.

Dance Theatre of Harlem

“I did not want to be the kind of harsh leader that Arthur Mitchell was, even though I completely understood his why,” Johnson said. “But it’s not my temperament. I wanted to give dancers the chance to have a voice, to be self-activators, self-actualizers. You get the best art from that place. We’ve all seen the autobiographies of people who were wrecked by their career, but I don’t think that’s what ballet is. Ballet is about an ideal.”

“Virginia always said that she wanted dancers who could think for themselves, who saw themselves as citizens of the world and not solely vessels, who were willing to embrace and embody the mission and vision and values of Dance Theatre of Harlem. When she’s in the studio working with the dancers, it is from that that framework,” Glass said.

Along with a more empowering vibe in the studio, Johnson also pushed the repertoire into the 21st century, commissioning choreographers with a fresh perspective, many of them Black women.

One of those commissions was Passage, a ballet choreographed by Claudia Schreier to a score by Jessie Montgomery — a rare collaboration for ballet between two Black women — that honored the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to North American shores.

“It was an incredible thing to be taken on under her wing and to have had her support behind me throughout the entire creation process,” said Schreier. “But more generally, in terms of female choreographers, the thing that is less public is that she’s so nurturing and supportive behind the scenes, and very quiet and humble about all the different feelers she has out, all the different connections she’s making all the time. I’m so grateful for all the ways in which I know she has had a hand in helping me get to different places, certain opportunities, and being able to branch out and have new experiences.”

That willingness to network has benefited the whole ballet community. In 2017, Johnson and Glass spearheaded The Equity Project, convening 14 American artistic and executive directors for a discussion about diversity and inclusion efforts. A year later, the conversation became a three-year initiative that is now bearing some fruit, as more Black dancers than ever can be seen throughout the ranks of ballet companies in America and worldwide.

“Virginia is very passionate about the work that we’re doing with The Equity Project and she has really spoken up about that,” Glass said. “And because she is so well respected among ADs, they listen to what she has to say. The only reason why we’re seeing the shifts that we are seeing in ballet now is because of Virginia.”

“Throughout her career at DTH, Johnson has been a bridge from the era in which the company began to the present day,” Lydia Murray, managing editor of Pointe, said in an email. “There has been significant progress in diversity in ballet, from who is onstage to whose stories are told [though there is still much work to be done], and her efforts have been profoundly instrumental in that shift.”

Ever the calm captain, she remained unflappable as she steered the company through the coronavirus pandemic and the protests after the murder of George Floyd by police, creating digital programs such as DTH On Demand and helping the dancers confront the injustice just as the founding members confronted King’s assassination.

“We have work to do. Our work is ballet. And we’re going to do it because we can change the world with it,” said Johnson.

Dance Theatre of Harlem’s current annual budget is $7 million, Glass said. With a $10 million gift, secured in 2021 from philanthropists Mackenzie Scott and Dan Jewett, along with another significant gift from the Ford Foundation in 2020, there is reason to hope that their work can continue.

Johnson said her job has been too all-consuming to put plans in place for her next act. But she knows two things: She has 12 college credits left to fulfill a promise to her parents, and she wants to get back to being an artist, perhaps returning to two novels that are in the works. No matter what lies ahead, her legacy in ballet is already written.

“She’s a living legend and the company just simply wouldn’t be what it is without her,” said Schreier.

]]> 291793 Candice Thompson https://andscape.com/contributors/candice-thompson/ Doris Duke Foundation announces major increase in cash prizes to dance, jazz and theater artists https://andscape.com/features/doris-duke-foundation-announces-major-increase-in-cash-prizes-to-dance-jazz-and-theater-artists/ Tue, 14 Feb 2023 13:14:33 +0000 https://andscape.com/?post_type=tu_feature&p=285013 Tap dancer Ayodele Casel was driving when she got the call. A representative from the Doris Duke Foundation was on the line to inform her she was one of six artists in the newest class of Doris Duke Artists and, in honor of the 10th anniversary of the award, the prize had been doubled to $550,000. Casel had to slow down.

“A community of people put me up for it. I couldn’t believe it, it was just so beautiful,” she said.

The awards program, which focuses on contemporary dance, jazz and theater, announced this year’s winners Monday evening in a ceremony at Lincoln Center in New York. Along with Casel, they are: composer and trumpeter Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, director Charlotte Brathwaite, composer and vocalist Somi Kakoma, choreographer and performer Rosy Simas, and playwright and performer Kristina Wong. This cohort reflects a focus on cross-disciplinary performance and a commitment to advocacy as part of their creative practices.

“This award is the pinnacle of this type of energy that’s intentional about changing the world for the better,” said Adjuah. “I was grinning ear to ear [upon receiving the news] because I would be tethered to that energy.”

Previously, the unrestricted individual grant was $275,000. The foundation also announced it was giving an additional $20,000 to each of the previous winners of the prize. The foundation also announced it has set aside $30 million from its endowment to lock in the increased amount for future awardees.

“What a decade of this award has revealed to us is that if you trust extraordinary artists and give them the conditions to thrive, they will go beyond the boundaries and expectations that you or anyone else could set for them,” said Maurine Knighton, chief program officer at the Doris Duke Foundation. “They will open doors to worlds previously unimagined and unlock new levels of creativity.”

Matthew Murphy

Ayodele Casel
Maya Iman

Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah
Barbara Anastacio

Charlotte Brathwaite
Terrence Jennings

Somi Kakoma
Tim Rummelhoff

Rosy Simas
Joan Marcus

Kristina Wong

Receiving a monetary award this large can be life-changing, the honorees said.

“By the grace of the universe, I’ve survived and managed to create my work — at times it’s felt like I’ve done so against all the odds,” said Brathwaite. “This award opens up space to take a deep breath and say to myself, ‘Hey, sis, you’ve endured, and you’ve done some pretty remarkable things while enduring, so how will you celebrate this thing called life?’ It lets me exhale into gratitude for a future which is more certain, and ground myself in dreaming, which is impossible to do when you’re just trying to make it safely through to the next project, the next opportunity, and sometimes just the next day.”

For Adjuah — who owns a record label and develops new musical instruments, along with making music and touring — the money is an opportunity to reprioritize.

“It takes you out of a space where you’re scratching your head and trying to figure out how to get everything done,” said Adjuah. “Sometimes because of the larger environment, and trying to keep a business thriving, you have to be more practical in what it is that you are you’re doing. What I love so much about this award is that it allows artists to take more care of what it is that they love.”

Inherent in the grant is the promise of increasing audiences through new networks, formats, and venues.

“I am quite sure that I’m not even privy to all of the ways that this is going to expand and bless my life,” said Casel, who looks forward to meeting with a financial planner for the first time. “But I know I want more than seven nights for a show. I want to expand the stage, and I am thinking about television, film, and [working with] brands. There was a time when there was not a performer that did not tap dance. And I don’t even think we’ve scratched the surface of all the ways that media can interact with it.”

There are already positive ripples. Adjuah will hold a series of free concerts beginning Feb. 25 at the Aileen Getty Plaza at The Geffen Contemporary MOCA in Los Angeles, with more dates in other cities to follow.

“I’ve spent so many years of touring in great jazz halls where it’s $65-$120 per ticket,” said Adjuah. “This puts us in a position where I can say: Anyone in Los Angeles that wants to come hear stretch music can come down and we will accommodate you. It gives us the ability to pay it forward.”

]]> 285013 Candice Thompson https://andscape.com/contributors/candice-thompson/ Rennie Harris and Puremovement celebrate 30 years of breaking on stage https://andscape.com/features/rennie-harris-and-puremovement-celebrate-30-years-of-breaking-on-stage/ Tue, 07 Feb 2023 14:53:20 +0000 https://andscape.com/?post_type=tu_feature&p=283538
Hip Hop at 50 logo

Hip Hop at 50 is our yearlong look at the people, sound, art, and impact of hip-hop culture on the world.

Thirty years ago, dancer Rennie Harris returned to his hometown of Philadelphia and thought about retiring. He had spent years dancing with hip-hop crews and touring with rappers, but it seemed like it might be time to get a job in another industry.  

“I was 27 but I’d been dancing professionally since I was 14,” said Harris. “I was vexed, and I didn’t have that much money.”

But then veteran director Michael Pedretti called with a commission. This time it wouldn’t be for the club or a commercial, but for a theater. And so Rennie Harris Puremovement, the longest-running hip-hop dance company in the country, was born.

Now celebrating its 30th anniversary, Puremovement is busy with a slate of new works in development. It’s also reviving one of its influential early works, Rome & Jewels, which reimagined Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story for a new generation. The piece won three Bessie Awards, a Shakespeare Award, and a nomination for the United Kingdom’s Lawrence Olivier Award. On Tuesday, their tour will make a stop at the Joyce Theater in New York.

Harris laughs now recalling how “hilarious, and arrogant, and dumb,” his plans for early retirement were.

Harris’ works resonate because of the frank way they address social issues such as incarceration, gun and sexual violence, race, and religion. Besides the dances he created for Puremovement, Harris’ works can also be found in the repertoires of companies such as Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, and Philadanco.

He sees himself as an ambassador for street dance and its numerous styles, from popping and locking to house and stepping. Always the educator, Harris founded Rennie Harris Awe-Inspiring Works, a youth organization that trains “hip-hop hopefuls” in dance techniques and elements of professionalism and production, and more recently, Rennie Harris University, a certificate program that covers Harris’ street dance pedagogy and serves as a model for teacher training in the field.

Andscape spoke with Harris recently about longevity, legacy, and his North Philly style.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Rennie Harris’ Puremovement is the longest-running hip-hop dance company in the country.

Osamu Inoue

When you founded Rennie Harris Puremovement, what was going on between the street dancing community of Philly and concert dance?

I had no clue what was going on in concert dance because I wasn’t in concert dance at the time. I came up in hip-hop and the commercial world. In 1991, Michael Pedretti came to me and said he wanted to commission me to create some work. I had basically been dancing and choreographing all my life. But at that time in hip-hop, for street dancers, no one really looked and saw themselves as choreographers in that way, even though we were one and the same. And I didn’t call it ‘choreography,’ I called it a ‘routine.’ At that time, I don’t think I did anything past 10 minutes. And he [Pedretti] wanted 45 minutes. So he commissioned me $1,500 to do that and that’s how the company got started.

Was it daunting to move from making a 10-minute routine to a 45-minute production?

I honestly didn’t even think about it. What was daunting was that as a street dancer you want to knock it out of the box all the time. The whole game is to be on 10 when you’re dancing, right? And you can’t be on 10 for 45 minutes. I mean, that would be a circus. It made me think about it differently, creating the sort of ebb and flow for the night that could sustain 45 minutes to 60 minutes with all street dance … what I call a hip-hop production.

d. Sabela grimes, who originated the role of Ben V (aka Benvolio) in Rome & Jewels, once said that your work has a North Philly style that helped contribute to your success.

When I became a popper, I moved to New York for a few years. Every time we would go to a club, go to say the Roxy and battle, people just thought, automatically — because they had never seen the way we dance, the way we pop — they just thought that it was from California. Everything’s sort of homogenized now, but before when you traveled, you could see the unique aesthetic from that city.

Puremovement revives one of its influential early works, Rome & Jewels, at Joyce Theater in New York on Feb. 7.

JHsu Media

Philly has its own way of moving, a type of speed that came from its history as a tapping town and a style called GQ [also known as ‘stepping’] that came out in the ’60s. And my generation probably was the last generation to learn it and to battle with it and all that. Because of that, there’s just a sense of timing, and rhythm that’s unique to Philadelphia, specifically North Philadelphia. My generation, and even some of the kids a little bit under me, they still dance a certain way, but they might not know what it is they’re doing if they don’t have the history of Philly.

When I’m dancing, doing house, or footwork, I’m listening to a whole different beat. Like, I hear the beat, but I call it dancing through the raindrops, an in-between space in timing. Dancers often keep trying to find the one [in the music]. But I’m playing with them choreographically, telling them to let the one go.

Were the dancers that you cast from your community? Was there a point when you started to hold auditions?

You know, in 30 years I’ve had two auditions and that was only under pressure from admin. What I did was I went around to the clubs in Philadelphia and invited dancers that I thought were dope to come to rehearsal. And none of those dancers showed up. [Laughs.] And then I got these younger dancers who showed up, but they weren’t as skilled. That also sent me on a different path because the top dancers were, for lack of a better word, divas in a way, and so this was the beginning of me training dancers to do what I need them to do for the work that I wanted to do. Part of that also had to do with work ethic. People would come late. One dancer said, ‘I got the choreography, why do we have to keep repeating it?’ It was stuff that I hadn’t thought about. At that time there was no academy, no real academic process for teaching [street] dancers to become professional. So I had to go through all of that before I could even get to the work. I had to learn to manage people, that was more the work than to figure things out choreographically.

Over the years with Puremovement, did the audience change?

Our audience changed from the gate as soon as we hit the first theater. It was all white and everybody was so quiet. We hadn’t experienced that before. As we’re walking on the stage for the bow, the audience stood up, clapping and screaming in a standing ovation. We couldn’t believe it — what the hell was this? It was older white folk, but over the years that changed, suddenly became younger. And then it was like gray hair and young people and then that became mixed and multicultural.

But one of the things that has not changed is that street dance still is seen as this sort of youth movement. Which is good, but when it comes to street dance theater, people often feel like the circus has come into town, so they bring their kids. But my work has always been adult content. Even early work in the ’90s was about molestation and rape and religion.

Once we danced at the Spoleto Festival in South Carolina and the headline read, ‘Harris brings angst dance’ and then said, ‘If you can get through the first half, the last piece is amazing.’ We called the first 45 minutes the walkout zone. In the very beginning, people picketed our shows, would send cops to our shows, because they didn’t have a clue what was going on. No one was doing what we were doing at the time. Yet juxtaposing hip-hop and theater was definitely not new.

So we cracked up and loved it when people left the show. But the people who stayed? That’s what it was all for.

What about Rome & Jewels? Did people leave that show when you first performed it?

Oh, yeah, people leave it still. We just did it in Philly and people were leaving. Because they were bringing their kids, and this is an R-rated show. The work was actually fashioned after West Side Story and played on the idea of Romeo and Juliet. But it’s not about that love story, this is a whole different thing. Rome is objectifying women, creating women who he wants them to be, for him, he’s in love with the idea of love but meanwhile, there’s a war going and this man is fighting himself. Rome & Jewels is short for ‘roaming for jewels,’ a jab at the hip-hop community because we are always searching for the Holy Grail. The opening lines are given by Ozzie Jones who plays the Old Man narrator, like the Tony character in West Side Story. He opens it up with:

Big and Pac roamed for jewels, but don’t we all? You ain’t nobody until you’re somebody on some motherf—er’s wall. One big, black, fat, and ugly, the other scarred up like tags on a train. Spitting freestyles for thirty Gs with pounds of weed on the brain. Now here, heartbreak gets popped too — while bullets crash through. ’Cause in the jungle sometimes what love got to do? When all your eyes are set on nothing, you get tempted like David Ruffin. ’Cause in the death angel’s arms, our screams sound like mumbling. Through Rome, we see Jewels, and Rome stands for quest to get love, props, or dough before he dies from the stress.

This is not about unrequited love. He opens it up by telling you this is about class. This is about something bigger.

How did the script come together?

I started writing the script in 1996. Around ’97 or ’98, we were performing at Bates College. And Laura Faure was the director of the dance program at that time, and she was looking over my shoulder as I worked on the script. She got people interested to give me some money to create the work.

So now we have rehearsal. Sabela and Rodney Mason, they start doing their own poetry with it, that just blew everything up. They never asked me, they just would come in and start going and when I saw that, I was like, dope, let’s keep it. And then Ozzie, who was the dramaturg at the time, wrote his intro.

This new production is part of Rennie Harris Puremovement celebrating 30 years. Do you have a vision for the next 30?

This is a surprise to me. Often, I just put my blinders on, and I keep moving. I don’t look left, don’t look right. I can’t look to see what this person is doing, or what that person is doing, I just keep moving forward. I’m really in a mode where I feel like I want to create as much as I possibly can. I’m hopeful that we’re still around for another 30, that the company can make it past my demise.

]]> 283538 Candice Thompson https://andscape.com/contributors/candice-thompson/ Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater revives tribute to Winnie and Nelson Mandela after more than 30 years https://andscape.com/features/alvin-ailey-american-dance-theater-revives-tribute-to-winnie-and-nelson-mandela-after-more-than-30-years/ Tue, 06 Dec 2022 13:17:42 +0000 https://andscape.com/?post_type=tu_feature&p=278043 As Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater returns to New York for its winter season, it will perform Revelations, of course, as well as a world premiere from in-demand choreographer Kyle Abraham. But it will also feature a work that has not been seen for more than 30 years: a wrenching tribute to Nelson and Winnie Mandela titled Survivors.

Robert Battle, who has been artistic director of the company for more than a decade, has commissioned work from notable Black choreographers such as Rennie Harris and Ronald K. Brown and brought in works from other modern dance luminaries such as Paul Taylor and Twyla Tharp. But as much as he looks forward, Battle also dives into Ailey’s catalog for inspiration.

“It’s a very seductive thing to always be thinking about the new, but the roots are as important as the branches,” said Battle.

He found contemporary resonance in Survivors, which premiered in 1986, four years before Mandela was released from prison. The head of the African National Congress, Mandela had been imprisoned for 27 years by South Africa’s apartheid government before he was elected the country’s first Black president in 1994. His wife, Winnie, became a prominent and controversial representative of the anti-apartheid movement during his decades in prison.

Robert Battle is the artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

Andrew Eccles

Ailey’s former associate artistic director, Masazumi Chaya, who assisted on the original production, led the painstaking work of restaging Survivors from video. Co-choreographed by Mary Barnett for seven dancers, Survivors is accompanied by an intense percussion score by drummer and composer Max Roach, featuring the anguished calls of singer Abbey Lincoln.  Metal prison bars, from Douglas Grekin’s original stage decor, haunt the stage.

“There’s a certain rawness about this work, and the collaboration,” said Battle. “Some other [Ailey] works are a little more buttoned up, but in this one, Alvin was really expressing his rage. And oftentimes, Black people couldn’t risk that.”

Andscape spoke with Battle a couple of days before the opening of the company’s New York City Center season.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

When did you first encounter Survivors?

I encountered it a few years ago by videotape. I was just curious about the work, wondering why we hadn’t done it in so long — it’s so topical. It’s about Nelson and Winnie Mandela, but it’s also a story about injustice and how Alvin Ailey used his art as a weapon for change, to shine a light on the issues of the day. It was his way of being a part of the conversation. When I saw the work on tape, it just jumped off the screen. And I thought, this is the time to do this. I wanted to do it a couple of years ago, but obviously everything shut down.

Were you drawn to Ailey’s collaboration with composer Max Roach?

I mean, it’s two brilliant artists: Max Roach, the famous percussionist and who was, for a time, married to the singer, the extraordinary Abbey Lincoln.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Ghrai DeVore-Stokes rehearses Alvin Ailey’s Survivors.

Danica Paulos

I think Alvin was intentionally fed up and making a statement and the music echoes that. Abbey Lincoln is singing, yes, but she’s moaning. She’s like a wounded animal at times or somebody mourning for the dead, a mother weeping for their child. There’s this kind of nonverbal, guttural response to the situation.

The work also incorporates a set that is more than just evocative of Mandela’s imprisonment.

He [Ailey] was very specific that he wanted real prison bars. He didn’t want it to be done by the effect of a circle of light or something, because he thought that the texture, the heat, all of that sort of contributed to what it was he wanted the audience to experience. I’m going to be fascinated by how people respond to the work. And if they’re uncomfortable, well, that’s good, too. Modern dance has that kind of history, but I think ultimately the work is about resilience. It is about hope.

Why do you think it hasn’t been performed in so many years?

Well, Ailey has so many works, and so many that really lean into social justice. When you have a genius like that and works as brilliant as Revelations, some works just get a little bit forgotten. I was consciously trying to find works that are not as well known, which is hard to do.

You’ve brought a lot of new works to the company, but do you also spend time digging in the archives?

I don’t know if I’ve ever been in the archives. [laughter] Usually, I’m having a conversation with Masazumi Chaya, who was the associate artistic director, and worked very closely with Alvin in many of these works. Sometimes he’ll mention a work and then I’ll go and check it out. I spend equal time thinking about the legacy and thinking about the history, in the same way I think about the present and how that moves into the future. If you lean too heavily on one, you kind of lose the heart and soul of the company.

At a recent preview, you mentioned the significance of Ailey founding the company in 1958 during the civil rights movement and wanting to bring more awareness to that fact.

When Alvin Ailey founded the company, it was one of the first modern dance repertory companies, meaning the company performed not just his work, but other choreographers that he curated. At that time, there weren’t very many modern dance companies at all. And there are so many companies now, right? That can get lost. The fact that this company was not just founded for the love of dancing, but because people were not able to study at different places if you were Black or of color, that our stories weren’t being told in an expansive way on the concert dance stage.

And there were risks, particularly on the road. When Survivors was touring in Florida early on, the work was performed despite security threats. I imagine that wasn’t the first time that happened.

In the ’60s and ’70s, touring not only in this country, but in other countries, but certainly in this country, dancers were the first to integrate certain hotels, maybe even theaters. We can’t imagine some of the large and small kinds of challenges that the company had to meet in order to make sure we could stand on the stage and tell our stories. I think that it’s no accident Alvin Ailey called it the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, not the Alvin Ailey African American Dance Theater, and not the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, but it was the ‘American.’ I think he was saying something about the people who helped build this country and certainly whose culture has always been imitated and fused with others. I think he was reclaiming that notion — as Langston Hughes’ poem says, ‘I too sing America.’

Will Survivors tour next year, after this New York City Center season?

This will go on tour. I think it’s so important when we’ve been dealing with not just a pandemic but racial injustice, the murders of innocent people of color. We’ve always dealt with that. But when we were sheltered in place, I think people paid more attention. It also affects the dancers and the notion of, what can we do about it. But the work has resonance and that’s what Alvin Ailey was able to do about it. So I think living inside of works like Survivors gives the dancers, and certainly the organization, a voice.

The other thing is that even though so many young people took to the streets, which was so important, sometimes in order to take a stand, one can take a seat and see a work like Survivors. That too is a form of demonstrating your value system and what you believe in. It can entertain and enlighten but also make you understand that this is about your life, too.

]]> 278043 Candice Thompson https://andscape.com/contributors/candice-thompson/ Tap dancer Ayodele Casel is ‘Chasing Magic’ https://andscape.com/features/tap-dancer-ayodele-casel-is-chasing-magic/ Wed, 02 Nov 2022 13:12:06 +0000 https://andscape.com/?post_type=tu_feature&p=274898 When tap star Ayodele Casel and jazz pianist Arturo O’Farrill improvise together, it is impossible to tell who is leading each new thought as O’Farrill shifts between melodies and Casel varies the tempo and temperature of her sounds. The whole thing feels like a curious and intimate conversation, the kind you want to eavesdrop on. As Chasing Magic makes its way to The Joyce Theater stage Nov. 2-13, New York City will have the opportunity to listen in.

Casel describes Chasing Magic as her “pandemic baby.” The project was conceived as a film for The Joyce Theater’s digital program in early 2021. That fall, the film was reimagined as a stage show to open up American Repertory Theater’s return to live performances. The plan was to return to The Joyce for a run in early 2022, but the omicron variant forced its cancellation.

Ten months later, things are looking up. Performing Chasing Magic again, a full year since its stage premiere and nearly two years since the film was made, feels cathartic after all the interruptions, postponements, and adaptations.

But at the very start of the pandemic, Casel wasn’t sure if she would ever return to the stage. While many dancers were moving the furniture around their homes to make room to train, Casel spent the better part of the year reflecting on her career and wondering about the path forward.

“I decided to just sit down. I mean, I was really tired anyway,” Casel said. “Basically, it was a lot of mental work asking what have I accomplished. And if this is the end — because we didn’t know what was happening — then how and what does that look like moving forward?”

To say Casel is accomplished is a gross understatement. She is tap choreographer for the Broadway revival of Funny Girl; won a Bessie Award in 2021 for Chasing Magic’s virtual presentation; and has had posts at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Harvard University. Learning to tap as a college student and coming up as the sole woman in tap legend Savion Glover’s company Not Your Ordinary Tappers, she has gone on to be named one of the “Biggest Breakout Stars of 2019” by The New York Times and was featured on one of the U.S. Postal Service’s 2021 stamps honoring tap.

Tap dancer Ayodele Casel (center) and the Chasing Magic cast practice for their November shows in New York.

Anthony Geathers for Andscape

But any swagger emanating from the artist comes from the contrast of her expressive feet and magnetic presence, against her cool, collected style. Casel’s interest in the power of identity — as a queer woman who is Black and Puerto Rican — seems to be mirrored in her unique tapping style, which folds in diverse influences such as the salsa music she listened to as a child and her obsession with old films featuring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

“It’s like she is dancing on water,” said tap artist Naomi Funaki. She met Casel when she first moved to the United States from Japan and wasn’t yet fluent in English. “Like, not even water, I think she is dancing on air — her weight changes are a miracle. She taught me that I can literally have a conversation with people, deep communication, without language, through tap dance.”

When the Chasing Magic cast gathered on a Monday in October for their first rehearsal in almost a year, the small, wood floor studio shuddered with a torrent of sounds, percussive and celebratory. Quick with a laugh or to swoop in with a hug, Casel flowed in and out of the group, her long hair styled in her signature topknot.

At one point during a section of solos, the 47-year-old Casel hammed it up when it was her turn by playing the old lady, clutching her back and miming the use of a cane. Even as she paused to consider the details of the show order with director Torya Beard or to offer advice from the front of the room, any sense of hierarchy melted the moment she jumped into the dancing. The mood of the room was more like a band fine-tuning a groove, Casel humming the phrasing and accents as they tapped, than a dance company doing the drudge work of cleaning up steps.

And as a bandleader, Casel is more interested in imagining a future for tap than holding court.

“What became really clear [during 2020] was that I feel very fulfilled in my career and I wanted to amplify the voices of my community,” she said.

When Aaron Mattocks, then director of programming at The Joyce, approached her in 2021 about a project for their digital season, the filming and storytelling process was not entirely new. Casel and Beard had already been making the documentary video series Diary of a Tap Dancer for several years.

Freddie Thornley (left) and Ayodele Casel (right) perform during the 2019 SeriousFun Children’s Network Gala at Cipriani 42nd Street on May 23, 2019, in New York City.

Mike Coppola/SeriousFun Children’s Network Inc./Getty Images

At home with Beard, her wife and artistic collaborator, Casel began brainstorming. With dancers having relocated all over the country, they focused on getting videos of choreography she had created with Anthony Morigerato to the crew that was still in New York. Since coronavirus vaccines were not yet available, they shot the film in a six-hour marathon on location at the theater after just one day of rehearsal. Filmed as a series of vignettes, Chasing Magic stood out in the avalanche of virtual dance content created during the pandemic — for the high quality of the dancing, Kurt Csolak’s cinematography, and its thematic structure.

“I think people loved seeing the theater in that film,” recalled Casel. “They loved that we offered dances that represented chapters or feelings in our lives, like gratitude and joy, culture and legacy, magic and inspiration. Those were themes and words to really ruminate on at a time when we were very isolated.”

Those key words also offered windows into the personal meaning of the dances, deployed as titles leading into each section.

“At first we thought we were going to do [a] voiceover leading into each thing,” said Casel. “It was sketched out and I was trying to record it as I was watching what I was doing [on the screen]. It sounded so cheesy and corny. I was like, ‘No, I’m not going out like that.’ ”

Instead, she tried to distill what each dance meant to her.

“It’s like it came punching out through the screen,” Casel said of the themes. “For me and Arturo, it was trust because I never worry at all about what is going to happen when we get in the room together and to be able to share whatever happens in the moment without judgment and with a lot of freedom, requires a lot of trust. And I love him for it.”

Tap dancer Ayodele Casel’s (left) mission is to transform the way audiences view tap dancing.

Anthony Geathers for Andscape

The feelings are mutual.

“I feel such a bond with Ayodele, it’s almost a spiritual alignment,” said O’Farrill. “Her energy is really electric, I almost sense [her] as soon as she enters the room. I think that’s who she came to us as, this spirit of light and energy and electricity. When we enter into that dialogue, it’s very purposeful. We’re really watching each other’s eyes, each other’s hands, each other’s feet. We’re focusing in on the very mechanisms that allow us to be able to improvise on the spot in front of hundreds of people.”

“Some days the way it syncs up, it’s a little crazy,” said Casel. “To have the same musical impulse at the same time, to voice it when you can do any kind of rhythm on that piano, or I can do anything. And then we both do that. It’s just bananas.”

As Chasing Magic returns to the stage, Casel and O’Farrill’s duet continues to be an integral section. But the evolution from film to live shows has required other adjustments.

“I lined everything up and thought about where can we do seamless transitions. What do we need to fill it in?” said Beard. “And most importantly, I was interested in trying to see how we could maintain the feeling of intimacy.”

Through Alan C. Edwards’ lighting design and splitting the stage into zones, Beard found ways to almost enclose the dancers with the musicians. Besides O’Farrill, this iteration features original compositions and music direction from singer/songwriter Crystal Monee Hall and additional compositions and performances from percussionist Keisel Jimenez and pianist Anibal César Cruz. More dancers were added to the cast, which now includes Jared Alexander, Amanda Castro, Naomi Funaki, Quynn Johnson, Sean Kaminski, and Dre Torres, who is understudying all of the parts but still performs. Funaki will take on what was Casel’s part in the Fred Astaire-and-Ginger Rogers-style duet titled “Inspiration,” set to Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek.” A cameo with choreographer Ronald K. Brown remains but is integrated as a film clip. (Brown suffered a stroke in April 2021 and has yet to return to live performance.)

The Chasing Magic cast during rehearsal on Oct. 24.

Anthony Geathers for Andscape

Casel’s mission is to transform the way audiences view tap dancing and with Chasing Magic, she is making good on her promise, provoking the full range of emotions tap can inspire.

“People sometimes have had a very narrow view of what tap dancing is and what tap dancing can do, though a shift is definitely occurring,” she said. “Most often people think it’s entertaining, which it is, and that it’s fun, which it is, and that it’s joyful, which it also is, right? Those things are true. But, if you only think of the art with that lens, then when you see something that speaks with more depth or has resistance in it, or another kind of message, then you might easily dismiss that.”

She is also aware of the pitfalls of celebrity in the field — the household names such as Astaire, the Nicholas Brothers, Sammy Davis Jr. and Gregory Hines — and the tendency for the industry to get stuck in the style of one individual.

“I wanted to allow the space for all of it and point out that if we look at tap as one thing, we cut off a whole group of artists who are really doing great work and who are showing all of the facets of tap dancing. It’s so expansive and it always has been.”

That tap is having a resurgence in popularity may have something to do with Casel’s star power or her conversational style of tapping. But it may also be due to her impressive reach as an arts leader and curator in several presenting organizations such as the New York City Center, Dance Lab New York, and Manhattan’s Little Island park, and her mentorship of younger artists such as Luke Hickey, Dario Natarelli, and Funaki, who are now choreographing their own shows. When asked about it, Casel credits Mattocks and The Joyce for changing the scarcity paradigm and programming three separate tap artists in one concert dance season — a rare move, indeed, and one that points to the abundance of talent in the field.

Looking ahead to the moment when she is reunited with an audience again, Casel remembered an earlier preshow talk she had with dancers where she shared what she describes as a mantra:

“I said, ‘When we are on that stage, you bring your f—ing star self to the thing. Do not hold back. Do not dim the light. I don’t care whose name is on the marquee, let’s show out.’ ”

]]> 274898 Candice Thompson https://andscape.com/contributors/candice-thompson/ Why Princess Lang wanted to bring an all-Black majorette team to USC https://andscape.com/features/all-black-majorette-team-usc/ Tue, 27 Sep 2022 16:27:25 +0000 https://andscape.com/?post_type=tu_feature&p=271526 Black majorettes and Black band culture have reentered the mainstream — thanks to a renewed interest in historically Black colleges and universities, helped, in part, by Beyoncé’s Homecoming and coach Deion Sanders’ Jackson State University tenure. But Black majorette groups — which first made their debut at HBCUs in the 1960s and combine “the energy of the high-step marching style of Black college bands with lyrical, West African, jazz, contemporary, and hip-hop choreography” — don’t exactly come to mind when you think of the University of Southern California. But Princess Lang is working to change things.

“Majorette is one of the few soulful dance forms that brings everybody together,” Lang told Andscape. The 20-year-old participated in dance teams growing up and was excited to attend USC to continue her studies. “Using your whole body and being able to get other people excited really makes a difference.”

Lang is a junior and a member of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority (where she’s the step and stroll master of her line). She’s also the founder of The Cardinal Divas of SC, which became an official student organization in March. When Lang posted a video announcing that she’d started the first majorette team at USC, it quickly went viral.

Messages of support flowed in from all corners of social media — from HBCU grads to others such as P-Valley star Brandee Evans, Lang’s soror. Some kids majorette teams also contacted Lang with requests to collaborate during future USC games. The attention has been overwhelming.

“This week alone has been so emotional for me,” Lang told Andscape. “I have not cried this much in so long. It’s crazy.” 

Lang, who studied majorette dancing in middle and high school in her hometown of Chicago, first conceived the idea to start a majorette team at USC in 2020. But her freshman year was completely derailed by the coronavirus pandemic. Now, her team is filled with 10 diverse Black women from every interest under the sun.

While the Cardinal Divas have received a ton of positive press, there were those who protested the team’s creation, claiming HBCU culture should stay on HBCU campuses, and that Lang should have attended an HBCU if she wanted to be a majorette. USC has a history of all-Black dance teams, dating back at least 20 years with the creation of the Fly Girls, a hip-hop alternative to USC’s storied Song Girls. Also among the critics were the – so far unfounded — fears that white students would overwhelm the majorette team at a predominantly white institution (PWI) and supplant Black dancers. But Lang remains undeterred by the social media criticism — which is outnumbered by the support she’s received.

“I hope that this empowers other Black girls to create these spaces,” she said. “It’s imperative. We deserve to be recognized and appreciated on all platforms.”

Recently, Andscape caught up with Lang to talk about her dance experience, what it was like starting a majorette team in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic at a PWI, and how she plans to make the most of her time at college, even though she’s lost a year to the pandemic.

“To those who want to have different opinions and beliefs, you deserve that, but I am not allowing anyone to take away my joy and pride. I’m here to continue building and uplifting Black community,” Lang said.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How long had you been planning on starting the majorette team?

I’d been talking about it since I started going to USC. My freshman year in 2020, we were all online and at home because of COVID-19. When we finally got on campus my sophomore year, that’s when it all got physically done, and we became an official student organization in March of 2022.

How did COVID affect you planning the majorette team? 

I had to hold off on everything because I wasn’t in person. I didn’t know who I could contact and I didn’t know how to even apply to become an organization yet. Everything was closed off. Like, you couldn’t get on campus. You could email professors, but you couldn’t do any other activities. Everything was done for, unless it was school work. Being literally across the country in Chicago, it was like, ‘What can little old me do?’ And I hadn’t even stepped on campus yet, so I don’t even know how they work over there yet. So I had to wait a whole year. I had to wait until I could even try to talk to people about it.

Were you a majorette in high school? 

I went to high school at Chicago Academy for the Arts. They did not have majorettes, but I joined a dance studio called the Diamond Dance Company in Chicago. I got training in majorette, but also in jazz and modern techniques, such as the Horton technique. It brought me so much joy and fulfillment.

My majorette teacher in high school was Jasper Reed, he still owns the dance studio. He also has a high school team for Proviso West High School. With him, you got to learn so much more or you got to learn it in a different way. He makes sure that you know you’re family as soon as you walk through the door. He’s not comparing you to another girl. He’s gonna push you to your limits. He’s gonna make sure that he believes in you, and you believe in yourself. It was a great way to build up confidence to be a dancer and also build up confidence around each other and camaraderie with each other. I learned how to really get in my bag with certain styles of dance and gain confidence while dancing and learn how to be serious and learn how to move certain ways.

What was growing up in Chicago like?

Growing up in Chicago was a great experience because there’s so much Black history there. I was always surrounded by Black people, Black classmates, Black teachers. It wasn’t just a great experience for me as a young Black girl, but also as a Black girl that wants to be an entertainer and an artist. I got the chance to do off-Broadway shows and professional work starting my sixth grade year, and got to do professional shows every year after that.

And you’re a Delta, right? 

I’m a part of Delta Sigma Theta Inc. I come from a D-9 family. My mom is a Delta – she went to Western Illinois University — so I’m a legacy. And my dad, he’s a man of Omega Psi Phi, and he went to the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. My parents ended up meeting each other through a friend at a club or a party or something like that, after college. They knew each other for less than a year. And then my dad proposed.

But the Divine 9 was just always around me. And now I’m able to finally immerse myself into it, because of how inspiring my parents have been. It was just like a whole other world that opened up to me. Being part of Delta Sigma Theta was just another way for me to continue to make change and continue to be a part of my Black culture and my community and just trying to continue to uplift people. It was always meant for me to stay involved in my culture. 

You started the majorette team, what’s left on the list? Or what are some other things on the list that you’ve already done? 

I told myself that I was going to be more open-minded to trying new things. I’m a very picky eater, for example. I said that I was gonna get back into athletics. I started working with them and I even found out I like the other side of athletics, not just being in athletics, doing their social media content and, like, working in the equipment room and meeting new people, learning so many different things.

I really enjoy doing that. I still work there to this day. Love it there. I love the people that I work with. They’re also supportive. It’s just such great energy. 

I also said that I was going to try to be more vulnerable. I’m not a very emotional person. I also said that I was gonna try to fall in love and get a boyfriend. That’s still in the works. But I never did that in high school. I was always just a busy girl. I grew up really fast because I was traveling so much as a gymnast and as a dancer doing competitions and then I started doing professional plays. I just grew up really fast and I never thought about relationships or any of that. I don’t even know how to ride a bike.

Why’d you choose USC? 

I didn’t really apply to that many schools. I applied to like 13 schools because I already knew what I was gonna do, entertainment. I was like, ‘I don’t know, mama. I don’t know, daddy.’ But you know parents, they’re gonna make you go to school. The only thing that I would ever want to go to college for is the arts, musical theater. I can sing, dance, and act at the same time. With a lot of the programs, there was always more emphasis on one more than the others. USC was really the only school that emphasized all three — singing, dancing, and acting. It was like a conservatory style major, meaning you automatically start into your program. But you’re still surrounded by students that are involved in so many different majors.

]]> 271526 Nylah Iqbal Muhammad https://andscape.com/contributors/nylah-burton/