Years ago, another low-profile word, “my,” caught my attention. I started bristling at the equally commonplace phrase: “my dancers.” And I find it increasingly problematic, especially in light of our woefully overdue national reckoning with systemic racism and the most recent stripping of women’s agency over their own bodies.

So here’s my gripe with the possessive pronoun “my.” It suggests ownership. And authority. Efficient as it may be, the term indicates ownership not just over dances but, more alarmingly, over people and their bodily labor.

While the phrase “my dancers” may not deliberately subjugate dancers, the notion of ownership over other bodies, their work and their ideas is linked to patriarchal traditions and the legacy of slavery. With that in mind, the linguistic habit, used mostly as a shorthand—or even a term of endearment—becomes rather alarming. I can’t ignore the histories and politics of race, class and gender that underscore any inclination to discount the physical labor of people with less power.

Performer Sarah Parker has written about the structural problem in choreographic credit attribution. Despite fluid boundaries between dancers and choreographers, presenting structures and educational models tend to rely on a single-author model to credit choreographic ownership, even when work is highly collaborative. In practice, however, the term “choreography” has expanded to suggest a mode of inquiry rather than a practice of arranging. But we don’t yet have an adequate system of discussing the exchange between choreographers and dancers that is so central to the creative process.

In the U.S., with some notable exceptions, most dancers work with multiple choreographers, and many concurrently create their own work. Whereas codified movement techniques used to be tethered to a single creator (Martha Graham, Katherine Dunham, Merce Cunningham, for example), the closest things to codified techniques in recent years include William Forsythe’s Improvisation Technologies or Ohad Naharin’s Gaga, both of which offer strategies for developing complex physical skill (aka dance “technique”) by exercising independent agency in improvisational explorations. Many choreographic processes leverage such improvisational techniques as they rely on lateral dialogues rather than top-down processes.

Now, when students in my classes use “my dancers,” I usually say something like: “Even though it is a norm in this field, I don’t use that term anymore and here’s why…” Then, I encourage them to think critically about what to call their peers in a process. In essence, the dialogue between choreographer and dancer operates as an exchange that is much more lateral than hierarchical. My friend Betsy Miller deliberately reverses the traditionally assumed dancer–choreographer power dynamic in her american/woman project, in which dancers do not serve a predetermined vision. Instead, she tries to help dancers unearth their own solos through a collaborative process. This kind of mutual inquiry characterizes artists’ creative processes much more often than we may think. Dances could not happen without the dancers. They do not carry out a choreographer’s singular vision, they co-create it.

As a choreographer, I seek out dancers I admire, whose skill and intellect will enrich our process. When I developed Bigger, Faster, Better with Kendra Portier, her physical prowess made my dancing better. And I’m not sure I’ve had more fun in the studio than with Jenna Riegel and Kellie Lynch in developing Lies Come Easier, which structured playful one-upmanship inspired by the basketball game HORSE. They layered awe-inspiring—and sometimes actually impossible (they spot each other in that case)—physical feats with absurd challenges: diving into a handstand, then slowly lowering to a headstand, while singing Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River” and upside-down stomping a rhythm on the studio wall. Now that those pieces have been performed by several other casts, the choreography is additive. The pieces contain the permanent stamp of the original collaborators and each new dancer inhabiting the structure. In performance, embodiment and identity are bound, visible and powerful. Dancers make physical choices that reflect the particular physics of their bodies, training histories and subjective experiences in the world. That is just as true in my work with students as it is with professional artists, none of whom are “my dancers.”

Choreographers and dancers alike should, of course, celebrate what they do. Continuing to attach names to choreographic products allows us to recognize marginalized voices in a field that has embodied identity as its center. We can, however, retire language that positions dancers as metaphoric tools used to execute a work. Might we, instead, adopt new habits that more accurately reflect the distributed process of intellectual and physical labor of dancemaking? It might require more words—“the dancers I work with” or “the dancers in this piece,” for example.

When else do the words we use betray—even undermine—the ways we understand our field, functionally, ethically and structurally? For example, the rhetoric of passion and love we so readily assign to the drive to dance sometimes makes us forget that it is indeed real work. We co-create dances with, about and because of bodies beyond our own. Now, let’s get back to work!

The post Why it’s Time to Stop Saying “My Dancers” appeared first on Dance Magazine.

People would hear my narrative and say, “You should write a book.” I have read every book by every ballerina and I have lived the life. I thought I should wait a bit to tell my story because­ I knew that I would have to tell the truth. So I had been putting it off. I met this wonderful woman, Tamara Washington, who is my manager now. She wanted to get a timeline and plan together. I wondered, Who am I going to trust with my story? I started to request the recordings from all my interviews. I figured I would put them together and make a book.

And then I got an email from poet Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton. She had done a spoken-word piece with Houston Ballet after Hurricane Harvey, so I knew her work. She wanted to have a meeting with me. I assumed that she wanted to pick my brain about an education project, so I said sure.

When she told me that she wanted to write a theater piece based on my life, I literally shrank down in my chair to make myself as small as possible. “You want to write about me?” It wasn’t what I was expecting. Why? My usual ballet story is so boring, because I had not told anyone the real story—which includes my struggle with addiction and eventual recovery—especially to someone not in the recovery community.

In the beginning, Deborah was so respectful of my time. I told her about my childhood, we talked about surface-y things—I am good at telling a story. What was interesting is that she asked me how I felt, not just what happened. That brought me closer to her. I started thinking, Wow, she really wants to know my story. When the media asks me about my life, they want juice, they don’t care how I really feel. They want to focus on fame.

After a year and a half of interviews, I felt like we could go deeper. We met sometimes twice a week. This was around the time that George Floyd died, so it was a charged time, and my emotions were right at the surface. I was being asked to speak on a lot of panels about how we feel as Black dancers. Then I got tired of talking about that. “I am not here to tell you how you should feel. Your feelings are legitimate.” After saying that so many times, it started to work on me.

I am not a choreographer. I can re-create a production, but I don’t have that gene. Deborah, though, is a choreographer of words. As we spoke, I kept seeing idea bubbles explod­ing over her head. One of the most flattering things she said to me was that I made things easy for her. Because I am descriptive, and that’s because I am an actress, a dancer and a performer. I have to have that running dialogue in my head to make an audience believe what I am doing. She turned my words into a full-blown dance-theater piece. When she handed me what she had written, it was like a road map of my life, including exact moments from my childhood. Young Lauren enters and turns around, plays with a ball, flips over the handlebars of a bike. There were dancers coming on- and offstage. She literally had written out her total­ vision with complete stage directions, even some lighting cues. I just thought, Wow, this is spectacular.

After a second reading, we corrected a couple things, switched some timing around, little bitty things. She wanted it to be accurate and authentic, so she sifted through every word. She had this desperation to get it right. At some point, I had to let the script go because it’s her theater piece. But she got it right. One scene even portrays a time when Carlos Acosta and I went salsa dancing, and it absolutely changed our partnership onstage. I had to relinquish control to him, which had been uncomfortable to me until that night out with him!

The story is told through the lens of recovery because that is where I am right now.

If you’d asked me to do this 20 years ago, it would have had a different flavor. But I am 57 now, and recovery has given me a solution-oriented point of view. I don’t think there are problems, just solutions. If I was still in addiction, I would have to leave all this stuff out and only tell one part of the story: my dance life. But in Plumgshuga, addiction and abuse are shown strongly through dance and, of course, spoken about. I was coping with all kinds of pressure, not necessarily success—because I never really felt successful, and that was part of the problem, not liking myself. At first it was just fun, but then I drank and did drugs to feel better about a lot of things, to forget about some things and to not care about others. I know that sharing this will help other people.

I can tell you that when I watched the performance workshop, it was devastating. It was beautiful and wonderful, but at the end I was emotionally exhausted. I was so proud, proud of the piece, proud of myself because I know what I went through. I was amazed with Deborah, and Stanton Welch and Harrison Guy for their choreography, and so honored knowing what everyone poured into it.

Afterwards, I sat on a panel in front of a group of people who’d watched the most amazing parts of my life and the jankiest parts of my life, and felt all the feels. Then came a barrage of compliments that I could not handle. I turned to Stanton and said, “I don’t know how to do this.” Then I told Deborah that I needed to go back to therapy to learn how to say “thank you.” It was interesting because usually I love applause.­ Plumshuga makes me feel everything, and that’s a lot. Oh, about that book, Deborah will be writing it.

The post The Iconic Lauren Anderson’s Life Story Onstage appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Taking advantage of the faceted atrium’s unusual acoustics, Park’s original score for electric guitar, percussion and eight laptop computers emanated from small amplifiers distributed throughout the skylit room, whose tall panels of teakwood resonated with every whisper and rhythm. At one point, the entire ensemble of dancers rushed from one end of the space to the other, as if the McGregor Center was a cruise ship rocking and rolling in turbulent seas. Cloud cover during the 3 o’clock performance brought somber qualities to the action, but, when repeated at 5 o’clock and lit vividly by the setting sun, it was an ascension.

Every dance is site-specific in some sense, but, in a warming world changed by war, political upheaval and a pandemic, some choreographers forgo traditional venues entirely. Whether their work is about climate change, social dynamics, systemic oppression or community vibrance, they’re all drawn to the friction between moving and staying in one place.

Fields of Infinite Potential

“Sites outside of a dance studio are fields of infinite potential that can be very generative as places we have relationships with,” says transmedia artist d. Sabela grimes, a professor at the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, who grew up on California’s central coast and attended UCLA. While he lived and worked in Soweto, South Africa, and Philadelphia, grimes maintained a connection with the Leimert Park Village neighborhood of Los Angeles, where the community weaves performance—both planned and spontaneous—into daily life along Degnan Boulevard.

Before COVID-19 vaccines were available, “when we were all in our homes—do you remember?—I can’t explain to you how important it was, how valuable it was, how special it was, to be in public space with people making music, to see them dancing, to be in communion and fellowship,” grimes says. Even as in-person classes and shows resumed indoors, grimes stayed involved with the vibrant scene around Degnan Boulevard’s street vendors and businesses, like Anthony Jolly’s Hot and Cool Cafe and its adjacent alley. “The streets continue to be a driving force and wellspring of knowledge production and transmission,” he says. One night reminded grimes how performance can be not only site-specific but a way to bring the essence of one place to another: TOB, a band that plays go-go, a variant of funk music specific to the nation’s capital, played Leimert Park Village from a stage on top of a bus booked by Jolly and Long Live GoGo DC. Dancing ensued. “I had no idea so many people from Washington were living in L.A.,” says grimes, who remembers the southeast District well from summertime visits with his mother’s family. “It literally was like the spot turned into a street in DC.”

As a continuation of his series called Dark Matter Messages, grimes is currently developing PARABLE OF PORTALS (POP), supported by a National Dance Project production grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts. By apply­ing augmented-reality technology to intentionally chosen, real-world locations, grimes says one question POP asks is, “How can the experience of dance happen in a variety of sites simultaneously?”

At a May 2022 work-in-progress showing in Chicago of reorientations, by SLIPPAGE resident artists Kate Alexandrite, who is white, and Thomas F. DeFrantz, Ayan Felix and MX Oops, who are Black, Alexandrite wore virtual-reality goggles while the other three interacted and made eye contact. The four artists might technically have shared space, but, experientially, Alexandrite was often somewhere else. A large screen periodically displayed a live feed of video from inside the goggles, revealing to the audience where Alexandrite “was” and what they were doing there.

Site as Body, Body as Site

As a choreographer of mixed European and Moose Cree First Nation ancestry, Starr Muranko’s work as co–artistic director of Raven Spirit Dance in the Canadian city of Vancouver is informed, she explains, by Indigenous values. “A lot of our research is land-based and takes place outside,” says Muranko. “Even though the work might eventually end up on a stage, it’s often rooted in a particular place or in going home.” For a piece titled Before7After, about seven generations of Cree women, Muranko traveled to an island in the Moose River in northern Ontario, 500 miles from Toronto. “The idea that I wouldn’t go back to the land for that project made no sense. How your body moves is influenced by certain surfaces, by the land around you, by the temperature, by the climate, by the time of year.” After developing material on location, Muranko and her collaborators sometimes return to the studio, where “we then have that landscape and that map within our bodies, as well as within the space. It’s not a ‘blank studio’ or a ‘blank theater.’ It’s where that river is, where that mountain is.”

In creating The Sky Was Different for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s Season 43: A Virtual Homecoming, the company’s 2020–21 virtual season, company alumni Jonathan Fredrickson and Tobin Del Cuore collaborated with Hubbard Street’s dancers on a 50-minute film, shot in and around the 1938 home and studio of architect Paul Schweikher in the Chicago suburb of Schaumburg. “For me, site-specificity is about utilizing a space by being aware of it and letting it dictate what happens,” says Fredrickson, a choreographer now based in Germany and a guest artist with Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. “The house itself was a character, this body in which the dancers were its organs, its bloodstream, its brain, its heart. The narrator of the piece was the house itself.” In long, meticulously choreographed takes, Del Cuore’s eye-level camera glides through the house’s rooms, giving The Sky Was Different a sense of actively involved curiosity reminiscent of movies like Roma, by Alfonso Cuarón.

Fredrickson choreographed a solo for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Jamar Roberts in director Bram VanderMark’s I Carry Them, produced by Jacob Jonas The Company. Released in May 2022, the five-minute film uses an editing technique called cross-cutting to move Roberts from place to place, while his fluid dancing continues uninterrupted.

Site as Signifier

In addition to honoring or recontextualizing a place, site-informed performance can be a way to raise awareness of threats to a community’s existence, says Millicent Johnnie, founder and CEO of Millicent Johnnie Films and chief visionary producer at 319 productions. In 2013, Johnnie and her collaborators, including New Orleans–based companies ArtSpot Productions and Mondo Bizarro, won a Creative Capital Award to develop Cry You One, which addressed the impact of climate change on wetlands in southeast Louisiana. “I’d always done site-specific studies and generated choreography in connection with the land,” Johnnie says, “but Cry You One is when I really started to sink into making dance in relation to site and started using the term ‘site-responsive,’ which was introduced to me by Mondo Bizarro, which came from the principle ‘You cannot walk into a space and impose yourself on that space.’ ” Johnnie says that Cry You One asked the question “What happens to art and culture that’s tied to land when that land disappears?” After premiering in St. Bernard Parish, the project toured for two years, bringing with it the artists’ embodied knowledge of its source.

Sometimes, site-specific research plants seeds for works that bloom elsewhere. During the four years Johnnie lived in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, she would often visit the Tijuca rainforest­ to write, improvise movement and develop studies for future projects. When Toshi Reagon, then the festival curator for the Women’s Jazz Festival at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, paired Johnnie with Ethiopian American musician Meklit Hadero, “that wasn’t intended to be a site-responsive work,” Johnnie says, “but there were certain sounds and textures I kept hearing in Meklit’s music that paralleled sounds and textures from the Tijuca rainforest. That helped me create and build the world that I needed to improvise with Meklit.” Johnnie recently collaborated with Urban Bush Women founding artistic director Jawole Willa Jo Zollar on Where Water Is Not Thirsty, responsive to Tallahassee, Florida’s Lafayette Heritage Trail Park and Lichgate on High Road, and captured on video by a camera built into a remote-controlled drone.

Before the pandemic, the Bay Area dance company FACT/SF presented work in both traditional dance venues and places that resist the ways dancers’ bodies can be abstracted,­ generalized or objectified onstage. For Invidious, a sextet custom-created­ in 2014 for a patron’s San Francisco home, choreographer and artistic director Charles Slender-White staged solos in the bathroom and kitchen, and duets in the bedroom and living room. Audiences of 16 people at a time, divided into four groups of four, encountered these dances at different times, making each attendee’s experience of Invidious fairly unique—and each role an exercise in energy modulation.

“We talk a lot in our practice about adopting a disposition that allows people to view you, not as a set of ideas or shapes or even kinetic factors, but as a person, occupying the same space,” says Slender-White. “When the dancers do that, it invites the audience in and then, probably because of mirror neurons and social empathy, the exchange becomes more generous and supportive.” Since FACT/SF uses live performance to investigate group dynamics, Slender-White says the company is continuously challenged by the ongoing, ever-evolving COVID-19 pandemic. “The relationship between an individual’s concept of self and experience of self, and the way that those things interplay with others’ perspectives or perceptions of self, have been central to my work since the beginning.” The fall 2021 premiere run of FACT/SF’s Split comprised 248 performances for audiences of one, present either in person or virtually.

Exploring sites of a certain type can prompt touring pathways outside the presenting networks that link similarly sized, like-minded venues. The Consumption Series: Part II brought Slender-White and FACT/SF colleague Emily Woo Zeller to every single Walmart store in the state of California—173 at the time. But that project wasn’t about the stores themselves, Slender-White explains. “We weren’t really interested in the structures, the cars in the parking lots, the lighting fixtures over the aisles,” he says. “It was specific to a certain context, a type of sociocultural site, an economic site, a site of commerce, where we could ask, ‘What is happening here?’ ”

They Got Out—But Will They Stay Out?

Dance companies large and small pivoted to site-specific, digital filmmaking as part of their pandemic responses. At New York City Ballet, this widened the spotlight to showcase more of the company’s home, the David H. Koch Theater, than just its storied stage. New works in 2020 and 2021 by choreographers Kyle Abraham, Sidra Bell, Andrea Miller, Justin Peck, Jamar Roberts and Pam Tanowitz brought at-home viewers backstage, into pools in the plaza at Lincoln Center, and up to the ceiling of the theater’s Promenade to look straight down on dancers below—a screen-based amalgam of Modernist architecture, Busby Berkeley and contemporary ballet. Time will tell whether major dance institutions continue such location-based experimentation.

The post Exploring Site-Specific Performance Here & Now appeared first on Dance Magazine.

My name is Stefanie Batten Bland. I am an interdisciplinary director and choreographer. An American of African and European heritage, I am a woman of brown tones and reddish-brown bushy, curly hair that has volume and unapologetically takes up space. I’ve lived the better part of my life in spaces that weren’t necessarily designed for me, and yet I’ve thrived.

Being seen for who you are—with casting, lighting and costuming choices that support that—is an incredible feeling. But it is a state with which I have a complex relationship. I grew up needing to negotiate familial spaces and, as such, was always hired as a type of hybrid mover, sprinkled in hybrid genres. I know how a person’s identity is tied to their reality—and how that spills into their work, whether a production is thematically abstract or a fictional narrative.

Inside of ballet, I was an inaugural choreographer for ABT’s Women’s Movement, for its Studio Company in 2019. I see the ballet industry beginning to examine its hiring practices and role-distribution policies. Now, further spurred on by the theatrical justice movement during the pandemic, it is immersive theater’s turn to change patterns as we move with pride into the rest of this century.

Outside of my own work with my Company SBB, I am casting and movement director, as well as performance and identity consultant, for Emursive Productions, the producers of large-scale immersive theater in New York City and across the globe. Immersive work is a form that often engages with being seen and not—through mysterious lighting, enticing characters and stories that center audience members and set them free to chase, follow and choose how close they get to the cast.

However, there is a profound difference between BIPOC immersive­ performers not being seen by choice and not being able to be seen at all. This is where I come in. I aim to ensure that directors, producers, scenographers and designers dream up shows with a lens of inclusivity. How can they meet diverse performers in auditions, imagine them in all roles, and then make sure audiences can see them, literally? How do light levels, instruments, costuming, approaches to character description and all the other visual cues, from the space to the sound, help performers play their best fiction while living their truth?

Art-making is complex, controversial. I know what I am doing cannot fix everything nor please everyone. This theater practice has been mainly made for and by people of European ancestry. Not to say BIPOC performers weren’t in these shows. But they weren’t centered around us, our tones, our skin bounce. My work inside of Emursive is profound as it shifts what “absence in plain sight” means in this proximity-based work. My weapon of choice is what great performance is rooted in: imagination. I open up our framework of imagining people by how we see them to also include how they see themselves. Our daily life biases are present in all we do, so I start where I see absence.

In our new show, I help develop characters that previously would have been considered supporting roles. (Just think about how BIPOC performers are often cast as exotic, magical or humorous characters who are short-lived or featured for only a few minutes—like the Black kid in the horror movie who gets killed first.) Some of my approaches to moving beyond­ “traditional” character decks include shifting to BIPOC-centered imagery in lieu of past predominantly white typecasting patterns. Then I explore the first- and second-degree resources (real people, living or dead, who share a character’s bio or archetype similarities) and ensure they are also BIPOC. I focus on finding the best performer for that character.

From the moment a BIPOC performer walks into a space, they/we should feel empowered. During auditions, the hiring process and the special walk to the dressing room, we should feel normal because our space is made for all to succeed. My work centers on putting into practice a majority–minority cultural shift in performance and identity.

In shows that are already up and running—and this is where the unicorn again raises its head—I apply the same techniques to move a production into present/future time, as opposed to the past. I’ve been in these shows myself and noticed as patrons saw me as an “angry Black woman” instead of the character I was portraying. I saw their fear because of my proximity to them—a result of their biases, even though they’d paid to be inside of a fictional theatrical space. It was humiliating to lose an audience at moments when my colleagues of Euro-based heritage did not.

I help shows rework material in ways that simultaneously honor the scripts while addressing the many complicated facets of life here in the U.S. It has been a lonely labor, but now I am seeing immediate changes. I am needed once again for my hybrid sensibilities, and I not only feel good in my skin, but I can ensure all who come after me will feel good in theirs. When I see the success of this work, it is reflected in the performers, the shows and the spectators. It is thrilling. Creating and re-exploring productions in partnership with people of different skin tones makes more performance opportunities for all.

Race is imaginary. The representation of all in our performing arts shouldn’t be. So says the unicorn.

The post Why Crafting More-Inclusive Immersive Theater Matters appeared first on Dance Magazine.

As part of the ensemble cast of seven Black women, Miller barely leaves the stage for the full 90-minute run time. Directed and choreographed by Camille A. Brown (nominated for two Tony Awards for her direction and choreography), the play is athletic and rigorous—jumping, skipping, stomping, drumming on bodies, rolling on the floor, pushing out breath to communicate through sound in addition to speech. As Lady in Red, Miller goes through the emotional wringer, delivering one of the most tragic poems of the piece, “Beau Willie Brown,” about an abusive relationship and a woman who watches her children die at the hands of their father, her ex-lover. Managing all this is impressive enough, but (as of publication) Miller is also just over 38 weeks pregnant.

“My doctor was like, ‘We’ll wait to the 30th [of May], but right now where you are, she’s viable, so she can come whenever she wants,’ ” says Miller. “Getting ready for the show I’m like, ‘Little girl, do not come onstage, do not make your entrance onstage.’ ”

Miller wants to give herself over to every last performance of this work (which was set to close early, on May 22, but has been given an extension until June 5—thanks to the boost from a Twitter campaign and seven Tony nominations, including one for Miller). Still, she says that listening to her doctors and her body is the priority.

“I wanted to be a part of this production for a long time, and my husband and I have wanted a child for a very long time,” says Miller. “It’s just so many dreams coming true. I don’t take it for granted at all. The nomination is a huge gift, but she’s the prize.”

Miller and her husband have been married 17 years and had “given up” on conceiving a child, but her community and cast have carried her through this moment of great surprise. “I’m so grateful, and to have such a tribe of women that every day—from day one—they have lifted me up, made me feel really strong and supported.” Brown leads that tribe.

Miller and Brown worked together on the Broadway revival of Once On This Island, and Brown asked Miller to do a workshop of for colored girls before casting the production. That’s when Miller found out she was pregnant.

Miller discreetly shared the news with Brown, who said they’d take it one step at a time. “I still had to audition for it. It really came down to the ability to tell the narrative as well as do the physicality. But from the beginning, she expressed her belief in me.”

“I had never been pregnant before, and she’d never worked with a pregnant woman before,” Miller continues. “But she said, ‘As long as your doctors say it’s okay, if you’re safe, then let’s [go].’ ”

This exchange in and of itself is an anomaly in theater—certainly on Broadway. “I had a woman come up to me after the show and she said, ‘You don’t know what seeing you up there pregnant did for me, because I stopped performing because I got pregnant, because I didn’t think I could do it and I didn’t think I would be hired,’ ” Miller recalls. “You have in your mind: You’re pregnant; you got to sit down at this point. But she said, ‘To see you up there just made me like ‘Wow.’ That was really special to me.”

Miller’s presence on the stage of Broadway’s Booth Theatre, with her visible nine-month pregnant belly, declares: Artists do not have to “sit down” while their bodies change. They do not have to surrender their artistry to pregnancy and motherhood. Miller is proof that creative teams, and mothers themselves, must reconceptualize what is possible.

Since the early rehearsal process, Miller hasn’t modified her choreography beyond making minor adjustments to accommodate the baby bump. Her body, even while changing, is used to it. In fact, movement has been beneficial to Miller and her baby. “Before I started this job [and early in pregnancy], I was not doing anything and my body felt awful. I felt stiff. I didn’t feel connected to my physicality at all,” Miller says. Now, “I feel like I have more energy. I feel like I’m listening to my body more closely than ever, which makes me feel closer to my baby. Even talking to my doctors and staying in communication with them so much, they’re always asking ‘How active is she? Is she moving?’ And I’m like, ‘Yes, she moves a lot.’ ”

It’s a different take on for colored girls for audiences, too, as no major production has featured a visibly pregnant woman. “I don’t know the show any other way, except to think that these are archetypes of women and there’s so many different types of us and that me being pregnant is just a representation of another side of a woman,” Miller says. “That’s a beautiful thing about the colors of the rainbow—even the primary colors have different hues.”

These hues add nuance and stakes; a pregnant woman crying out for the loss of her children lands with profundity. The image shakes viewers into noticing the process of creating life as we talk about losing it. The end of the monologue—a ritual known as the “laying on of hands,” where all the women of the rainbow touch Miller to heal and empower her—reads with new sacredness.

“She’s a little human being who’s going to not just experience joy, but she will experience pain,” Miller says of her baby. “But it is the resilience and the strength…It’s about how we pick ourselves up or how we, innately as women, always find a way to lift another woman up. That’s what I’m hoping she absorbs. That’s what affects me.”

The post This Broadway Star Dances 8 Shows a Week—While 38 Weeks Pregnant appeared first on Dance Magazine.

I was posing this question to a group of some 80 dancers auditioning for my company, The Victory Dance Project.

The air in the room got tense. There was nervous fidgeting.

To me, this wasn’t merely a hypothetical question. My role as choreographer and director of The Victory Dance Project and CEO at Amy Jordan Speaks was not planned. My dream as a girl and young adult was to dance professionally. I trained tirelessly in high school, moved to New York City, then Los Angeles in pursuit of my dream.

What I didn’t realize then was that my lifelong training as a dancer was preparing me with tools to later overcome life-and-death obstacles as I built a new dream. 

At 21, it seemed like my performance career was ending prematurely. Visual complications from Type 1 diabetes had cost me much of my sight, and I became legally blind. Unknowingly, this was my first foray into transforming trauma into triumph, the start of my first reinvention. I write about the concept of acceptance in my book, Dance Because You Can. We don’t have to like the circumstances that may occur in life, but we do have a choice in how we respond.

My heart and soul were still that of a dancer. It took me a long time to get back to class and find a new way to work around my visual impairment.

On May 1, 2009, things took a dramatic turn. While crossing the street in New York City, I was hit and run over by an express bus that pinned me under a tire. I had no feeling in my right side, and my first thought was, Oh no, there’s no leg, and that I would never dance again. My second thought: If I survived the night there would be a “victory dance.” I vowed that if I lived, I would dance again.

Though I was graced with surviving, my right leg was nearly amputated. Twenty surgeries later, my leg has been literally rebuilt. During the many months I spent in a burn intensive care unit, my physical therapist told me over and over that, due to my training as a dancer, I was much more likely to have a positive outcome and walk again.

Dance training had given me an inherent discipline and determination to push through the challenges and the pain to achieve the goal of walking again.

When I was in the ICU, I would get into trouble due to my flexibility. I didn’t want to bend my knee because it hurt too much, so I bent over my straight leg, reaching my feet to put on my socks. My rehab team simply rolled their eyes, saying, “Dancers.”

The rehabilitation was grueling, but my single focus was to move again. I literally took one step at a time. While learning to walk again, I treated it like choreography and counted to 8. 1, 2: push walker; 3, 4: move right foot; 5, 6: move left; 7, 8: stand straight. I continued this over and over until I could walk down the hall using my walker without assistance.

Five years after the accident, I lived true to the vow I’d made while pinned under the bus tire. The Victory Dance Project premiered on May 31, 2014. Its mission: to make the impossible possible with the power of movement. Though I wasn’t performing yet, I was finding a new voice as a director, producer and choreographer.

In 2017, I did my actual “victory dance,” performing with the company for its third-year gala. The evening also honored Broadway legend Chita Rivera and was a tribute to my doctors and medical staff for saving my life and rebuilding my body.  

My victory performance, along with auditions, rehearsals and testimonials, was chronicled on film and became Amy’s Victory Dance, a multi-award-winning documentary feature film directed by Brian Thomas, himself a dancer and former choreographer for Michael Jackson, Beyoncé, Whitney Houston, Liza Minnelli and a host of entertainment icons.  

Today, my essence and spirit as a dancer continue to keep my life moving. With each new obstacle, I was able to put my dance training to work to help create a new pathway.  

Little did I know that the accident and rebuilding my body would also prepare me for life in a pandemic. When the COVID-19 lockdown hit, every artist I know had their lives and livelihoods wiped out in an instant. Sometimes our dreams get derailed, and we are faced with the task of reinventing ourselves as artists and people. The question then becomes: Will we create a new pathway or focus on what was lost? 

This was a fierce challenge, but the alternative was to give up or become a victim of the present circumstances. If I had learned anything from having lost most of my vision and mobility, it was that there is life after trauma. I developed the fundamental courage to meet the challenge of the moment and support others to do the same.

Since Amy’s Victory Dance premiered in 2017, it has amassed 39 nominations, awards and official selections from film festivals across the globe. Now available for preorder on Apple TV/iTunes ahead of its May 13 digital release (on additional platforms, including Amazon, Google Play and Vudu), the film represents hope, possibilities and the power of the human condition. This message is timelier now than even a few months ago. Once again, the power of dance represents a never-give-up spirit, no matter what is happening in our external environment.   

Frankly, if I was not a dancer, I don’t think I would have survived the bus accident and the challenges that followed. While the ways in which I dance and spread dance have changed, one thing remains clear: We should dance because we can.

The post Making the Impossible Possible With the Power of Movement appeared first on Dance Magazine.

“Decolonizing flamenco” is a label used to describe this movement. K. Meira Goldberg’s 2019 book Sonidos Negros—On the Blackness of Flamenco and Miguel Ángel Rosales’ 2016 film Gurumbé: Afro-Andalusian Memories help us understand the deep, sub–Saharan African roots in Spain’s and Portugal’s history and culture. Frequently, flamenco is described as a melding of Roma, Arab, Jewish and Iberian elements; the Black African imprint is rarely credited, although it is indelibly stamped on these Mediterranean nations that sit near the African continent and were major colonizers in the African slave trade. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, up to 10 percent of the Spanish population was Black. Many of the enslaved were retained by their captors and over generations assimilated and contributed to the culture.

Today, a cadre of Black artists, including Phyllis Akinyi, Aliesha Bryan and Yinka Esi Graves, personify why, dancewise, flamenco is their native language. In leaning into this genre, they are tapping into their cultural roots and embodying a sea change in the art form, one that is more a calling than a trend. All have trained in Spain with esteemed maestras. Launching their unique international careers, they utilize flamenco as the basis for traditional and experimental work. Like the impasse facing Black ballerinas, they are on a path posted with “no trespassing” signs. Yet, they persist.

Phyllis Akinyi

Raised in Copenhagen by Danish Kenyan parents, Phyllis­ Akinyi describes flamenco as “a melting pot of outcast cultures.” Trained in college as an anthropologist, she now lives in Madrid­ and performs internationally while pursuing a graduate degree­ in flamencology at Barcelona’s Conservatory of Music.­ Calling flamenco “divine intervention,” she turned to this form for rehabilitation in 2003 following an injury dancing hip hop for a concert in Denmark. With a laugh, she explains: “When I discovered flamenco and the variety of emotions that I’m allowed to have while dancing, that changed my life, because it was a home—a home I didn’t know that I didn’t have, and a home I didn’t know that I could have!” Anthropology studies and Kenyan ancestry help her probe Africanisms in flamenco—its polyrhythms, ancestral respect, movement sense and use of the counterclockwise circle.

Yinka Esi Graves

Afro-British Yinka Esi Graves grew up in London, Nicaragua, Guadeloupe and Cuba, and now lives in Seville. She came to flamenco by chance after having studied ballet and Afro-Cuban genres. As a student at the University of Sussex, she started taking weekly flamenco classes off-campus as a diversion. She completed her degree in art history and began her career in the arts, but flamenco eventually became the unanticipated priority and focus of her attention. After an internship at the Studio Museum in Harlem was derailed due to visa problems, she found herself more interested in dance than in museum and curatorial work. Graves makes a serious claim to her flamenco rights, declaring that, spiritually speaking, she encountered “the long-forgotten Afro-Spanish ancestors who I now understand to also have their part to play in the legacy of flamenco. Bringing this to the surface, in my own body, is what today informs and inspires my work.”

Aliesha Bryan

Aliesha Bryan’s path to flamenco began fortuitously while she was a French/English/Spanish translator for the 2009 UNESCO World Heritage Committee in Seville. The convocation’s gala featured an authentic flamenco performance in a traditionally intimate, improvised setting. Bryan was enthralled to see a voluptuous woman, empowered and self-possessed, dancing and singing. “The fullness of her figure was satisfying and affirming,” declares Bryan, “and I understood that, in flamenco, all bodies are accepted, as well as emotions” beyond the standards of behavior and presentation she was taught in conventional dance training. Born in Brooklyn, New York, to Jamaican parents, she has studied ballet, modern/contemporary, continental and diasporic African genres, as well as Pilates and somatic practices, like Gyrokinesis. With an MS in dance/movement therapy from Sarah Lawrence College, she fuses her movement knowledges­ with her primary calling as a flamenco artist. Bryan adopted Pájaro Negro—”blackbird”—as her professional name.

There is gravitas combined with a joyful delight as these women recount their “coming-of-age” stories, having embraced flamenco in their 20s and now pursuing it for 10 to 15 years running. Following in the master–apprentice relationship that applies across flamenco studies, they cite specific teachers and cities—Seville, Madrid, Granada—as key to their loving, learning and adopting the form. Adept in dancing traditional flamenco styles—soleares, siguiriyas, bulerias, alegrias—each of them has branched out to improvise and choreograph, collaborating with other dancers, singers and musicians (generally guitar and percussion) in the communal aura that is an essential ingredient in flamenco.

Moving in unique trajectories inspired by the spirit of tradition and innovation, these exceptional artists represent a growing international community of Black dancers staking a claim in the land of flamenco. Experienced in the genre and unswerving in personal commitment, they extend, enliven and enrich flamenco’s flavors and futures. They deserve a hearty Olé!

The post Decolonizing Flamenco Through Exploring Black Influences appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Noticing how the choreographer gravitated towards some dancers and away from others, Nelson became focused on creating something worthy of approval. “But as someone new to the choreographer, I never felt like I got to learn her personal aesthetic or movement style,” she says. “I didn’t really know what was expected of me, and it felt like a stab in the dark.”

Nelson’s exchanges in the room made her question whether choreographers and dancers are always on the same page when it comes to movement development—and, in turn, credit for what they create together. “What are we calling this process?” she asks. “Are we making it a hierarchy with a choreographer and dancers, or are we all collaborators, and you’re just the person who brought us together in the room with an idea?”

Opening the Conversation

In a time when many old systems in our industry are being reevaluated, dancers are taking a closer look at how the dynamics­ among collaborators and creatives seem to be shifting; the boundary between dancer and choreographer is not always as clear as it once was, and the common hierarchy of choreographer/associate choreographer/dancer does not always accurately reflect what is happening in the room. While the desire for choreographic credit can seem territorial, the conversation happening throughout the community is generally less about ownership and more about clarity and respect. Stories from a diverse range of artists on both sides of the table show that projects can vary widely in their creation structure and leadership, and an expansion of dance industry terminology and job titles could be a first step toward building a more inclusive space where everyone’s contributions are recognized.

Another dancer, who asked to remain anonymous, crafted a striking movement phrase during the creation of a new piece for the company he’s a member of, and it ended up as a prominent motif in the final work. As he watched the choreographer receive praise for that specific part, he silently wished he had kept it for a project of his own. “Obviously as a dancer you walk into the rehearsal room and you’re ready to offer your creativity,” he says. “But it’s not like they came up with the movement and I enhanced it with my artistry. I came up with the movement and I also enhanced it with my artistry, and all the other dancers enhanced it with their artistry too. So I can’t help but wonder, what did the choreographer do?”

Defining Terminology

The accepted definition of “choreographer” is the person who composes the physical steps—not necessarily completely on their own, but the majority of the movement creation stems from that individual. So when the process is more of an exchange, other terms could help properly distinguish everyone’s roles and relationships to the material. “Movement director,” “movement stager,” “editor” and “collaborator” all mean different things, and one might be more appropriate in a certain situation than another. A single label is not applicable to every creative project. In the above dancer’s case, he feels one solution could have been to credit it as “choreography by the dancers, staged or directed by X.”

“As a collective, there needs to be a clarification and accounta­bility of these roles, what they entail, and the financial and career rewards that come with each of them,” says Betty Weinberger, a dancer and choreographer who has worked as an associate and collaborator alongside many choreographers. “There are dancers who don’t have a desire to be a part of the creative conversation,” she says. “But then there are also dancers who are innately extremely creative and conversational. They care a lot about the storytelling; they’re willing to voice their opinions and ideas. It’s a completely different skill set.” 

Even though many, if not most, choreographers rely on creative contributions from dancers and are often happy to say as much, the lack of formal, written acknowledgment of dancers’ concrete input can create barriers for artists, like Weinberger, who are interested in advancing their careers further into choreography. Without specific recognition in printed programs or choreography credits on their resumés, it can be difficult to prove the depth of their experience to potential employers and funders.

“Unfortunately, dancers get taken advantage of,” she says. “It’s frustrating that we often feel like we don’t have a voice, but then when we’re asked to have one in a creative space, we don’t get credit for it.”

A Structural Problem

All these artists emphasize that the discourse is not driven by malice. They deeply respect the choreographers they’ve worked with, feel grateful for the opportunities and think the shows they’ve created are beautiful. The issue isn’t personal, it’s structural. 

“It’s not about how much we’re going to really break things down and claim ownership over each move,” says Amy Gardner, a freelance choreographer and director who is now working primarily in film and commercial dance. “It’s more about changing the environment and removing some degree of the capitalistic hierarchy, to level the playing field and honor all parties.” This issue gets highlighted when it’s time for the industry to give out awards, such as the Tony Awards for Broadway shows and the Bessies for New York City concert dance. The honors go to the credited choreographers whose work stood out most during that season—not to the dancers and assistants who may have helped create the movement—and the winner gains prestige and greater opportunity.

Brinda Guha, a New York City–based South Asian dance artist, is commonly brought onto projects as a “cultural consultant,” an ambiguous term that implies she serves in an advisory capacity to ensure the work is culturally appropriate. But she often ends up choreographing a portion of the movement that gets presented onstage or in live workshops, without any credit.

“This has been the age-old problem,” says Guha. While many artists of color are excited to share their voices and knowledge with big industry names, the contributions and compromises often don’t lead to the further work they hope for. “There were limited resources coming in for us to build our own craft,” she says. “So we would go toward these gigs as a networking or door-opening opportunity that would then lead nowhere, but would benefit everybody else.”

Steps Forward

In 2019, Actors’ Equity Association—the union representing theater performers—and The Broadway League—the trade group representing theater owners and operators, producers, presenters and general managers—agreed on a new contract for developmental labs, which are used by productions in the early stages of a show’s creation. The contract stipulates that dancers, actors and stage managers who take part in that developmental process will split 1 percent of the show’s profits for 10 years after it recoups 110 percent of its initial investment. While 1 percent is a small number to a successful show making a million or more dollars a week, receiving a consistent portion of that can make a big difference in the life of an artist. In the concert dance realm, A.I.M by Kyle Abraham offers ongoing royalties to its dancers who participate in both the creation and premiere of a piece, even if they leave the company and the work continues being performed by others.

More administrators and presenters are also prioritizing clarity, says Clarissa Soto Josephs, the executive director of Pentacle, a management support organization that helps dance and theater artists with the business side of running their companies. A decade ago, many dance artists weren’t even using contracts, and if they were, the agreements were often very informal. “But now I’ve seen choreographic or collaborative credit become much more important,” she says. “And I’ve seen some artistic directors embracing that from the start and automatically stating it as part of the job.”

And artists like Guha are feeling more empowered to advo­cate for themselves. “It’s trying to balance what to be grateful for and what to speak out for,” she says. Along with others in the community, she is in the process of crafting language around asking for credit as well as for more clearly defined­ differences between the roles of associate, consultant and co-choreographer. “But everything still doesn’t have a place,” she says. “And if that means we need to create more language and create more roles, then that’s what we have to do. But we have to start with definition. What is everyone actually responsible for?”

The post Credit Where It’s Due: Handling Credit on Collaborative Creations appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Personally, I don’t think time spent on technology is actually more valuable than time spent on art, but these narratives persist. Consider the myth of the starving artist (that you have to be long-suffering and poor to make good art) or the apprenticeship myth (that mastery of craft requires indentureship to an established, i.e., financially successful, artist). The stories we tell about artists’ labor are in pointed contrast to folks in tech: They get to move fast, break things and get rich.

The disparities between the dance and tech communities can seem pretty vast, yet the two have found an odd, contemporary synergy in NFTs: non-fungible (as in, one-of-a-kind) tokens (as in, a thing). NFTs are digital items that—despite the fundamental, unlimited duplicability of virtual media—can notionally be owned by a single individual. This ownership is documented by a cryptocurrency proof-of-purchase enabled by a technology called “blockchain” (a public, digital ledger that documents online transaction data). NFTs are thus digital objects defined by artificial scarcity. In contrast to the JPEGs and video files they are virtually indistinguishable from, NFT art is supposedly scarce, making it ostensibly collectable and valuable.

You’re not alone if you find this convoluted. Since the first NFT was minted in 2014, nerds across the art and finance worlds have argued about whether literally any of this makes sense. It’s not really clear that it does. Press coverage of multimillion dollar NFT sales by already prominent digital artists have had the effect of making NFTs appear like a means for artists to monetize their work, while simultaneously serving as a winner-take-all cash grab. Both perspectives have their merits.

Since then, several high-profile dance artists have minted NFTs of their work. Tap dancer Savion Glover is selling an NFT video of himself discussing his creative process; as of publication, this costs about $90 and includes a physical, signed commemorative print. Ballet star Natalia Osipova recently sold an NFT video of a solo from Giselle for about $15,000. That similar media is available, for free, through platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and libraries, hasn’t stopped folks from paying for the right to claim ownership of stuff graced—however contortedly—by Glover’s and Osipova’s aura. NFTs are an emergent expression of an old dance-world tradition. The image of 19th-century ballerina Marie Taglioni, for example, appeared on collectible snuffboxes, and her pointe shoes were hocked to fetishists. Selling stuff associated with famous dancers is a pastime almost as old as the Western dance tradition.

Controls built into NFTs grant artists unique means to maintain authorship and fiscal transparency. I, for one, believe artists having financial power is a good thing, and I support dancers maintaining agency in their careers as well as the ability to monetize anything they want. (Grab that cash, Glover and Osipova.)­ It is, however, worth noting that these artists were international stars before releasing NFTs. This technology works for Glover and Osipova because they were already demonstrable commercial hits, an economic phenomenon referred to as a “winner-takes-all market.” There is little evidence that NFTs are a practical means for most dancers to make money.

Still, the complex procedural qualities and algorithmic labor contained within NFTs have already provided useful compositional grist to many choreographers. Michelle Ellsworth and her colleagues have minted NFTs that are “owned” by a fake rock that they made and left in a desert (the digital key is inside cement), essentially preventing the transfer of ownership of her work. Choreographic technologist and Dance Magazine “25 to Watch” inductee Maya Man recently sold an NFT titled “can I go where you go?” to scrutinize software as a form of choreography. Artist and dance culture warrior Lisa Niedermeyer takes 3-D scans of subjects and creates NFT portraits that in effect concretize each person’s ownership of their own bodily data. Dancer and physicist Mariel Petee created an artificial intelligence that choreographs in response to her dancing body, and is selling NFTs of the resulting media to pay for a performance of AI-generated choreography. These examples, among many others, illustrate the potency of NFTs as a platform for creative exploration beyond the transactionality of digital dance pay-for-play.

While there is much to be excited about where NFTs meet dance (or, more broadly, where choreography meets computation), the story I’ve heard most frequently centers on the hope that dancers’ NFT sales might be a salve for our recessionary, COVID-inflected moment. Such uplifting narratives can be read darkly, though, and reveal the longstanding desperation of a creative community unable to save its least empowered members from precarity. Whether you think NFTs are a way for artists to manage authorship, an emergent performance platform, or a metastatic outgrowth of tech-bro capitalism, you’re right.

The post The Unlikely Pairing of NFTs and Dance appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Native American dance is often believed to be a purely “traditional” style, and while tradition is reflected and preserved in the dances, the form is so much more than that. For generations, dance has been a central mode of emotional expression, leading to a diverse array of dances rooted in the heritage and cultures of the many Indigenous tribes of North America. There are religious and ceremonial dances not open to the public, traditional dances, and social dances such as many powwow dances. Dancers’ responding to their environments is inevitable, as is young dancers’ interest in mixing in contemporary ideas that reflect their current experiences. In the past few decades, this has given rise to the growth of a new fused style: Native American hip hop.   

This innovation has produced a style of steps and movements that are not discernably different from hip hop. There is, however, a distinct flavor which is created by hip-hop music fused with Indigenous song and by movements that expand the distinct urbanism of hip hop’s repertoire with an expressive embodied reference or reverence to nature. It’s a contemporary storytelling of the Indigenous experience in the U.S. that bridges rural and urban, oppressed and empowered, individual and collective.

Native American dance and hip hop began weaving into a unique urban and contemporary form in the late 1990s. Yet dancer Anne Pesata, who is Jicarilla Apache, notes that there were already internationally recognized Indigenous hip-hop dancers, such as b-boy Ariston Ripoyla (aka “Remind”), who were building their careers even earlier. In an interview with the multicultural platform Rep Ur Tribe, Remind describes himself as being activated through hip hop to recognize his Native roots and remember his culture: “Breaking is not so far out from what tribes were doing already,” he says.

Pesata describes the fusion in similar terms. “In neither powwow nor freestyle are steps taught,” she says. In the context of competition, both styles encourage dancers to showcase their best moves and signature phrases to illustrate what they can do, rather than relying on the lens through which Eurocentric forms understand dance steps. Pesata regards movement as existing in a fluid state rather than the solid state of permanence that conceptualizing “steps” creates.

Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, Nakotah LaRance, a champion hoop dancer who toured with Cirque du Soleil, became known for incorporating modern elements, such as hip hop and moonwalking, into his hoop dances. Often dancing in modern casual clothing to EDM/Indigenous-fused music, LaRance switched seamlessly between traditional and contemporary hoop-dance performances.

More recently, Native American hip hop was brought into the spotlight by the crew Indigenous Enterprise when it appeared­ on Season 4 of “World of Dance” in 2020. Although­ founder Kenneth Shirley clarifies that it’s not a typical style for the troupe, “For ‘World of Dance,’ we included a section to draw in the audience and the judges with music and dance they would relate to.” (Although he felt the approach­ was effective, the crew was nonetheless eliminated in the qualifiers round.)

Yet fusing other styles into the movement isn’t something that’s out of the ordinary for Indigenous dancers: Shirley notes that hip hop is not absent from his traditional dance. “I have integrated hip-hop or ballet steps that have inspired me into my fancy dance,” he says, of the popular powwow dance. “Adding contemporary movements is part of natural evolution of the tradition.”

Those unfamiliar with this practice, however, often view fusion as a form of inauthenticity, which has become a challenge to widespread acceptance. “Mainstream narratives tend to relegate Native peoples and practices to the past and view them as ‘inauthentic’ when they incorporate aspects of modernity,” says UCLA assistant professor of dance studies Dr. Tria Blu Wakpa. In contrast, Blu Wakpa says the fusion can more realistically be understood as “an extension of Indigenous practices.”

From the perspective of the hip-hop community, Indigenous­ dance fits right in. “Long ago, hip hop’s architects envisioned a creative community where anyone’s heritage, culture and identity could be grafted onto a core set of artforms and principles: deejaying, emceeing, breaking, graffiti and knowledge,” says Ben Ortiz, assistant curator of the Cornell Hip Hop Collection, which collects and archives historical artifacts of hip-hop culture at Cornell University. “Traditional powwow dancing collaged with popping or breaking is not only dope, it feels completely natural and at home in the hip-hop community.”

Pesata describes the crossover being possible because “both communities share a similar socioeconomic experience, so both communities relate to one another.” The diverse people of color who make up the hip-hop community and the Indigenous communities have both dealt with appropriation and being tokenized, oppressed and marginalized. And both have remarkable parallels in cultural practices: Drumming parallels the deejay, chanting the emcee, and petroglyphs the graffiti art. Pesata points out that the concept of “battle” is core in both styles. Historically, there are war dances in Indigenous tradition and today, there’s high-stakes competition powwow dancing. In both hip hop and Native dancing, the competition inherent in battles has pushed innovation, driving the forms’ evolutions.

Blu Wakpa sees Native American hip hop as part of Indigenous futurism: “The weaving of hip hop and Native dance can be viewed as an innovation, an indigenizing of hip hop that provides generative possibilities for Native creativity, expression, healing, joy, resistance and connection.” By evolving tradition to reflect the world these artists live in today, they’re becoming more visible as part of contemporary society, changing the narratives fueled by the reservation system while also reconnecting with pride to their own history.

The post Evolving Tradition With the Fusion of Hip Hop and Native American Dance appeared first on Dance Magazine.