Marriage of Figure and Ground

This is a re-post of an essay originally commissioned and published by SFMOMA's Open Space. Tragically, SFMOMA has decided to shut down Open Space, a vibrant forum for interdisciplinary writing about the arts courageously edited in recent years by Claudia La Rocco. I am re-publishing this piece so that it has a place in the HMD archive. — Hope Mohr

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May 12, 2021

Marriage of figure and ground

by Hope Mohr

for you, you for
whom I have lost

I’m driving toward the sea. An angular silhouette rises up out of my lane: a square, skeletal piece of machinery is on the road. Inside the wreckage crouches a woman. She faces oncoming traffic in the posture of a sniper. I swerve.

under me the
road moves we are
remaindered bands
of light

The air in California is porous, diffuse. You can’t rely on the physical environment to feel your edges. You have to build your edges with your mind.

///

In dance circles these days, there’s a lot of talk about decolonizing the body.

“He owns form,” “doesn’t he?” “The tyrant” “owns form.” (Alice Notley)

Other people’s gestures are imprinted deep in my fascia. This is a dancer thing. It’s also a person thing.

archive of flesh
unseen trash fire
a tissued nest
cold gyre

What kind of dance do you see when you imagine moving free from the imprint of other bodies? Do you see a dance without form, without edges?

An elusive quest. How do you know what is non-form without knowing form? This is the holy grail of improvisation: to lose yourself in nameless, burgeoning potentiality. For skilled improvisers, the environment is not a static plinth, but an extension of the body itself.

Eadweard Muybridge presented action as a sequence of static forms, thereby proposing that everything, no matter how liquid, how kinetic, can be grasped. In the stutter of a Muybridge stop-action series, movement is broken down to its constituent parts, coaxing the mind to provide the connective tissue.

“It is the edge separating my tongue from the taste for which it longs that teaches me what an edge is.” (Anne Carson)

It’s impossible to rid the body of the imprint of other bodies. We’re born already encoded by our mother’s encoded body.

But I can imagine setting the terms of transmission. I can imagine a room in which we offer each other moves. No one’s watching. Each of us chooses whether or not to absorb the offerings.

That moment of apparent decision. Enmanuel Ghent writes about the difference between surrender and submission. You can decide to submit to someone. But you cannot control the terms of surrender. I think my body knows the difference, but I am not sure. I have submitted to the bodies of other people as a way of approaching surrender, thinking: this is as close as I can get.

to let someone
dwell in you to
be written on
emptied

///

We have been without the proscenium for more than a year.

Proscenium (n.) c. 1600, “stage of an ancient theater,” from Latin proscaenium, from Greek proskēnion “the space in front of the scenery,” also “entrance of a tent,” from pro “in front, before” + skēnē “stage, tent, booth.” Modern sense of “space between the curtain and the orchestra” (often including the curtain and its framework). Hence, figuratively, “foreground, front.”

The conventional stage foregrounds the figure. The dance is properly lit. The action is understood.

Experimental performance, in contrast, often risks “unrecognizability as a subject.” (Judith Butler) Performers obscure their bodies, ask audiences to be satisfied by glimmers of action in near darkness. This kind of dance says: to love me is to let me stay unknown.

Recent email subject line from Lincoln Center: “When will you feel comfortable returning to Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts?”

The proscenium has closed for business. Not all of us can afford to sit around and wait for the machine of production to crank up again. Some of us are tired of navigating a field that devalues us. Some of us are just tired. I know dozens of professional dancers who this year decided to end their careers to go into social work or ASL or performance studies or law or movement therapy or studio art. I want to bear witness to this cultural migration.

Of course, dance will continue. The wealthy will still want to take children to The Nutcracker.

My friend Parker says, “I hope that the dancers who come back learn to ask for more.”

Sometimes you decide to stop dancing. Sometimes the decision is made for you. Often it’s a combination, which feels complicated. Did you secretly want to get injured? Or get fired? This is absurd; no one wants to get injured or fired. But this is how some of us think.

///

What happens inside a dancer when they leave the proscenium behind?

Virginia Woolf, in her ecstatic conclusion to The Waves, a novel preoccupied with seeing and being seen, writes: “The face looking at me has gone. The pressure is removed.” In solitude, she finds that: “From me had dropped the old cloak, the old response; the hollowed hand that beats back sounds.”

My body, once relentlessly in the foreground, softens into my life. New parts of myself emerge, as if finding a new lover. Under the skin, currents shift. Circuits re-wire.

Desire changes form as conditions dictate.

///

As I dance less, I write more. To paraphrase Renee Gladman, who writes of the symbiosis between writing and drawing: I dance myself out of dancing not because my taste for it has diminished nor because I have lost content, but because I have begun to say what I need to say elsewhere.

My body moves across the page.

In language, I want to be braver than I have been as a dancer. Braver than I am as a person. Less hidden.

In writing, I reach for the same thing that drew me to dancing: surrender. I want to stay with desire until it rips into illogical conclusions. I want to write in “a language lined with flesh,” to summon “a whole carnal stereophony.” (Roland Barthes) I want to use language to destabilize itself, to force a stuttering of form “as though possessed with the force of other things.” (John Rajchman on Deleuze) To send words careening into each other. To write myself into abstraction. To imagine abstraction as a liberatory tool.

flouresce organ
tampdown denrage
bisect bloodtight
searstare ashword

Yet habits persist. Do you see the swerve away from your line of sight? The same dilemmas hover — the dilemma of surrender, the dilemma of being seen — on the page as when I danced on stage and you sat in darkness.

“As soon as I desire I am asking to be considered.” (Frantz Fanon)

form is a fence
with five fingers
asking

///

I am lying on my right side on the Great Highway, which is now closed to cars. The earth presses into my outer arm and leg like a good bruise. My weight pours sideways through my chest. To begin to roll backward, I lever into the ground with the outside of my right thigh as my left hip pulls back. My knees separate. I roll across the back of my ribs, over the knuckled ridge of my spine, onto my other side.

Over the dune to my left, surfers scramble in the water. I can’t see them, but I imagine them.

People pass like neon tracers, like sonic waves. I am part of a motley procession in retrograde. A dog rolls by on a skateboard. The dog is pushing the skateboard with its back left leg.

This didn’t happen. Well, there was a dog on a skateboard. But I didn’t lie down in the road. I imagine it. I imagine it so hard I feel it. I imagine you so hard I feel you.

I imagine running toward you as I try to make a prolonged sound. I imagine raising my arms to signal you from a great distance. I imagine you half-closing your eyes with pleasure, opening your mouth in an O and holding it there. I imagine holding your saltiness close and whispering:

Let’s be excessive. Let’s pump our legs. Let’s crest the hill toward the sea. Let’s speed. Let’s release a yell into the evening. Let’s rub against our bicycle seats. Let’s sweat under our clothes. Let’s spit out the lost objects we’ve absorbed. Let’s howl in the dunes in the tangerine light with the shit and the plastic trash and the dead birds.

an offshore signal
ripple underground
intermittent moan
fading

Self and System (re-post)

This is a re-post of an essay originally commissioned and published by SFMOMA's Open Space. Tragically, SFMOMA has decided to shut down Open Space, a vibrant forum for interdisciplinary writing about the arts courageously edited in recent years by Claudia La Rocco. I am re-publishing this piece so that it has a place in the HMD archive. — Hope Mohr

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October 24, 2019

Self and System

by Hope Mohr

HMD’s The Bridge Project and SFMOMA’s Open Space commissioned ten Bay Area artists — Sofía Córdova, Alex Escalante, Maxe Crandall, Dazaun Soleyn, Danishta Rivero, Julie Moon, Christy Funsch, Jenny Odell, Nicole Peisl, and Sophia Wang — to participate in a two-week residency with choreographers and former Cunningham dancers Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener, and then to make new works. These will premiere alongside performances of repertory excerpts by Bay Area dancers Emily Hansel, Sarah Bukowski, Traci Finch, and Stacey Yuen at ODC Theater on November 8 and 9, 2019; an artist talk between Rashaun Mitchell, Hope Mohr, and Claudia La Rocco will also be held on November 7.

Twenty years ago, while I was on scholarship at the Cunningham studio in Manhattan, I kept a journal of every correction I received from teachers there. Here are some of them:

It’s not about how you feel. It’s how you move through space.

When you straighten your leg, totally straighten it. When you bend it, totally bend it.

Don’t contract the space around you when you run.

Move from the pelvis.

Take bigger steps.

Don’t shrink.

For me, Cunningham technique was an invitation to realize a potential. To be more fully in the world.

•

Signals from the West is the first time this choreography has been taught in a multi-disciplinary setting in order to facilitate the authorship of new work. Following the project’s first phase, which included two artist potlucks and a reading period, the commissioned artists and selected dancers gathered with Silas Riener and Rashaun Mitchell for a two-week residency in August. Riener and Mitchell talked about how they had “no blueprint” and “no model for how to proceed” in this context. The residency was also an experiment for the commissioned artists, who entered a conversation with Cunningham’s work and with each other, tasked with responding to an icon at a time when traditional canons are being rethought. Competing desires occupied the theater: the desire to move versus being still and observing; the desire to collaborate with others versus processing history alone. The transmission of historical dances occurred in the same space and at the same time as exercises designed to generate new material, so that various aspects of Cunningham’s work — its formal vocabularies, its compositional structures, its archive, its sociopolitical context — rubbed up against each other.

I first saw the Merce Cunningham Dance Company perform live at BAM in 1997, and fell hard. The choreography shimmered like an unattainable, Platonic ideal. Its whiteness did not occur to me back then, as a young dancer; I felt no opposition — only longing.

After college, I moved to New York to train at the Cunningham studio. I took class religiously, often twice a day, six days a week. After a while, I was invited to take company class, including Monday mornings with Cunningham himself. Among modern dancers, Cunningham technique is notoriously difficult — it’s an exaggerated version of a signature experience in the performing arts: you train for an elusive experience of personal transformation. More often than not, you miss the mark. But there are moments when everything aligns — your sleep, your food, your warmup, your psyche, the repertory — and it’s like one of those flying dreams that feels like swimming through air, your mind diffused through your muscles. My time at the Cunningham studio made the rest of my dancing career possible. It made my body stronger and — more importantly — it unleashed in me a desire. The experience of wanting made it possible to want other things.

The first week of the Signals residency, the group shared a morning warm up. Having trained dancers in the room modeled an at-homeness in the body that invited everyone, including people without a physical practice, to have an embodied experience. Riener and Mitchell alternated improvisation with traditional Cunningham exercises, and brought in aspects of their own practice, which observes and responds to external stimuli as well as the internal landscape of the body. Day one began with an exploration of walking as a starting point for making choices about direction, speed, facing, rhythm, posture, and style. (“Walk formally. Now walk informally.”) Two subsequent days began with all of us creating spinal pathways while seated, a somatic exercise that eventually moved into the Cunningham spinal lexicon: curve, arch, twist, and tilt. Riener and Mitchell guided the group through increasingly complex movements.

Riener taught the group “The Run,” a walking and running pattern from Dime a Dance (1953) featuring changes of direction and rhythm. True to the practice of the Cunningham company, the Signals artists executed “The Run” in silence, a powerful collective experience in holding a form. It was also a barometer of success: as Riener noted, you “can hear it in the footfalls if the rhythm is skewed.” 1

Following morning movement practice, Riener and Mitchell spent time teaching repertory to Emily Hansel, Sarah Bukowski, Traci Finch, and Stacey Yuen. Their instructions echoed the corrections I had received twenty years ago:

Get there all at once.

Get there and then go further.

Each change in the body is separate.

You’re trying to eat up space.

Beyond the transmission of steps, there are values: clarity about the shape of the body and its location in space, initiation from the center, succinct arrivals and departures, and rhythmic specificity. Certainty is an overarching value. Change in the body happens definitively and abruptly; shapes don’t cross-fade. Riener, again: “It’s like erasing the doubt around your body. It’s calming. It’s also deeply male. There are no questions.” A group discussion in response to the prompt “What is the work?” yielded the following: virtuosity; a drama that arises from contrast and the impossibility of physical task; as well as, from the dancers’ perspectives, effort, tension, and joy. We also discussed classical hierarchy (Riener: “The dancer Merce was most interested in would get the solo that year.”) and the decentralization of space. As Mitchell explained: “In opera or in ballet, you go to the center and you project out to the front, and there’s an important part of space and there’s a less important part. Whereas in Cunningham, it’s all important. You can be facing upstage the whole time or you can be in the corner. There can be several things going on simultaneously. The viewer has to decide what’s the important thing.”

And then, of course, there is also the curious way the sanctity of the legacy becomes the legacy itself.

Cunningham was famously reticent; often, he would simply describe the physical task to be executed, such as “lift your leg to the back.” Feedback after performances was limited to whether the entire run was too fast or too slow, down to the second. This left the dancers to find their own internal experience. Mitchell:

You’re not talking about it, you’re not preparing to do it. You just only do, do, do, do, do, do, do. We almost never talked about anything. Nothing was ever explained. You never got any kind of coaching or corrections. You just did it again, and you did it again, and you did it again.

Cunningham’s work is non-narrative and non-representational. As Mitchell explained it, “I don’t think any kind of definitive meaning making was happening. I think he was very much interested in you having your own experience with whatever was in front of you. Always, when he was asked about meaning, he would say, ‘It means this is what I’m doing.’” The bodies themselves move through crystalline shapes, far from visual ambiguity. In this way, the dances stand in contrast to a common contemporary choreographic ethos that resists the “tyranny of the visible [and] the legible.” 2

Cunningham’s notes on his methods for creating specific dances have only recently become available (albeit on a restricted basis). Access to a wealth of such archival materials allows people, in the words of Dazaun Soleyn, to hear Cunningham’s “voice through the notes and the systems.”

Indeed, several of the commissioned artists noted that access to the archive humanized Cunningham and his dances. Often, as Maxe Crandall put it, “tradition means erasing” and “lineages are cleaned up.” But in this residency, the group talked openly about the fallibility of the work — how it was and remains radical in some ways, but not in others. For example, Riener told us that although “there were tons of queer people around and there was acceptance of that, the assignment of parts and the partnering was very binary in terms of gender.” Cunningham’s work parallels the way in which Judson Church democratized the body, but not the field. I found it odd that in his notes for Fielding Sixes (1980), Cunningham refers to himself in the third person. (For instance: “Merce Cunningham would then roll the dice for position in the space.”) Does this reflect an egotistical belief in his inevitable legacy? Or a disconnection from the self?  As Danishta Rivero said, “I have a much better appreciation for his work because I see all those parts that are a bit messy and contradictory.”

For the Merce Cunningham Trust, a vital question is: How to balance fidelity to legacy with the permission to leave aspects of that work behind? When contemporary artists want to shift the work from its original state, how far is too far? As the artists worked in response to the archive, questions arose about whether the identity of the work was in the body, in the compositional system, or somewhere in between. Does Cunningham’s work reside, as The New Yorker’s Joan Acocella asks, “in the dancers and their specific way of moving, or does it lie in the dances themselves, if such a thing can be conceived of in art that has no original texts?” Extracting the body from a choreographic legacy can make the work accessible to artists from different disciplines. But if we extract Cunningham’s work from the body, is it still his work?

Cunningham used chance operations (including rolling dice, casting the I Ching, flipping coins, and pulling playing cards) to make decisions about compositional variables. It was “the application of rigorous governing logics, rather than […] personal decision making.” 3 Riener took pains to point out the difference between chance methodology and indeterminacy, which allowed for dancers to make choice within a limited band of options, such as “to do or not do a phrase of movement, to do a prescribed form but without a fixed duration, to choose a direction or a tempo.”

Cunningham worked with chance alone, and before rehearsal. Riener estimated that he relocated most of his compositional decisions to the dictates of whatever system he was using. For the most part, movement was ready-made and not subject to dancer input. This approach “made the decisions untouchable,” as Mitchell put it. In contrast, in many contemporary choreographic processes, if a choreographer creates a phrase of movement (or has the dancers do so), it is only a starting place: the dance is built through a combination of editing and dancer manipulation of the material.

After learning about various chance procedures, the commissioned artists designed their own compositional systems.  As they were sharing the results of an assignment, Riener fastened on one moment as being a “Cunningham moment.” No signature elements of the familiar Cunningham body were present. What made it a Cunningham moment? When pressed, he offered a few possibilities: simultaneity, complexity, and perspective.

Many artists have used rigorous aleatory compositional systems; what makes any of them distinctive is the dynamic conversation between body and system. As the dancers in the Cunningham company became more virtuosic, the system responded. When the system (eventually aided by the Life Forms software program) generated increasing complexity, the dancers mastered its patterns. The body can be both a way out of a system and the way in.

The Cunningham ethos of removing the ego from the creative process is one of modern art’s most enduring tropes. 4 But for many of the Signals artists, learning Cunningham’s compositional systems exposed the subjectivity in the work. Sofía Córdova said that after learning about Cunningham’s methods, she had “moved away from seeing Cunningham’s work as strictly formal”:

The systems are a way of giving the world meaning outside of the body and the ego and then spitting it out in a way that another body can represent it. So it loses its formality. It goes into another, warm-blooded thing.

Access to the archive also revealed Cunningham’s process as one of front-loading artistic choices, rather than eliminating them altogether. In the words of Jenny Odell, employing Cunningham’s methods means that “you have to make decisions about what you’re making decisions about.”

How much space does a compositional system leave for the psyche? The painter Cornelia Parker writes:

For me the conscious part of making a drawing is deciding on a process. What the process then releases is something else. Your unconscious mind always knows more than your conscious […] What you need is a catalyst to unleash that knowledge. A concept can be that catalyst or a decoy. 5

A compositional system exposes the voice of the reacting self. Some of the Signals artists chose to reject outcomes that seemed silly, impossible, or against their aesthetics. Christy Funsch said that using chance procedures “illuminated the sloppy places” in her work, noting that it was interesting what she was willing to give up and what she wasn’t. Rivero said she either needed to surrender all artistic decisions to chance or none at all — a mixture of the two felt intolerable.

Employing Cunningham’s methods forced the commissioned artists to operate, as Córdova put it, in a “tight mental space.” But how tight was it? A big question that arose was the extent to which the artists allowed themselves to override the roll of the dice. By opting out of the system, weren’t they depriving themselves of the benefit of the constraint? In order to counteract this, Riener and Mitchell encouraged them to refine their systems. But beyond this prompt, they declined to cross the line from transmission to mentorship. 6

Why even try to remove subjectivity in art making? I think of Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, reflecting on Shakespeare: his mind was “free and unimpeded” because he was a man and therefore had no “desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to pay off a score, to make the world the witness of some hardship or grievance.” Who wouldn’t want the luxury of a “free and unimpeded” mind? But as a female in a sexist culture, what would I lose if I removed my voice from the creative process, when locating and trusting that voice has been such a valuable struggle? My body, in contact with the world, is a source of wisdom.  As Sara Ahmed writes: “It is the practical experience of coming up against a world that allows us to come up with new ideas, ideas that are not dependent on a mind that has withdrawn (because a world has enabled that withdrawal), but a body that has to wiggle about just to create room.” 7

Where the body is the medium (and when is it not?), withdrawing the world from the art, or the art from the world, is a fiction. As a young dancer, I was drawn to Cunningham’s work because, as a physical practice, it offered me the possibility of burnishing my body.  But there was never any chance of me escaping myself. It — and the world — always found a way in.

Compositional systems filter the world through a combination of solipsism and openness. Cunningham’s methods could have been an attempt to conceal or control the self — or an attempt to let the world in. Some artists are freer than others to set the terms of that balance.

The commissioned artists entered this project with varying degrees of opposition to the specter of the white male genius. Many had a sense that Cunningham’s work was “inaccessible,” as Sophia Wang argued, or something they had always “experienced from afar,” as Soleyn observed. Funsch recounted that when she took class at Cunningham studio, she “never felt like she belonged”; the whole idea of lineage, she said in an email before the workshop, makes her “panic a little, as if I have to measure up to all who have lived and made before.”

The friendly environment of the residency, made possible through the artists’ generosity and responsiveness, diffused some understandable tensions. Politics did not loudly enter the room. On the one hand, this encouraged exploration — there is something to be said for creating a sanctuary for artists to set aside political struggles. On the other hand, does any creative process stand outside the messiness of the world? Aruna D’Souza has asserted that there can be “no fiction of the autonomous realm” in art: “Institutions either have to actively work to dismantle racism, or they are reinforcing it.” The body and its techniques are “never abstract, but rather ineluctably located within a historical moment and a cultural/political system.” 8

The residency is long over and the Signals from the West artists are finishing up a two-and-a-half-month period of creating work in conversation with the experience. I am curious how they will respond to the dusty archetype of the artist as the lone hero making his mark. I am curious what counter-narratives will arise — perhaps that of the artist simultaneously marking the world and being marked by it.  Perhaps the archetype of a group of artists in conversation with each other and the world.

Citations.

1. Riener said that generally, in executing the work, there were “multiple expressions of correctness.” But Mitchell was quick to add that acceptable variation existed only “within a miniscule range.”

2. Jenn Joy quoting Georges Didi-Huberman in The Choreographic (MIT Press, 2014).

3. Mel Bochner, “Serial Art, Systems, and Solipsism,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, by Gregory Battcock (University of California, Berkeley, 1968); see also Donna De Salvo quoting Sol LeWitt, “Where we begin,” in Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970 (Tate Publishing, 2005).

4. This ethos is also associated with Cunningham’s longtime partner, John Cage.

5. Mick Maslen and Jack Southern interviewing Cornelia Parker in The Drawing Projects: An Exploration of the Language of Drawing (Black Dog Publishing, 2011).

6. Mitchell in an email, before the project began: "As far as the individual artists' process is concerned, I don't think that is necessarily our purview. We haven't commissioned them after all. I think our focus and role is to facilitate practice and dialogue around Merce's ideas. What the artists decide to do with that is up to them."

7. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Duke University Press, 2017).

8. Katherine Profeta, Dramaturgy in Motion: At Work on Dance and Movement Performance (University of Wisconsin Press, 2015).

Behind solidarity statements

by Hope Mohr

This writing emerges out of my ongoing work and conversations with a community of thought partners that includes Safi Jiroh of LeaderSpring, HMD Co-Directors Cherie Hill and Karla Quintero, the HMD Board, the HMD Equity Committee, and many artists, including Chibueze Crouch, Belinda He, Yayoi Kambara, Julie Tolentino, Jarrel Phillips, Zoe Donellycolt, Hannah Ayasse, and David Herrera. I am deeply grateful to all of you for your generosity, wisdom, and friendship. 

Earlier posts in this series can be found here (value-driven re-structuring) and here (notes on moving/stepping back).

“There is an intimate link between the mastery enacted through colonization and other forms of mastery that we often believe today to be harmless, worthwhile, even virtuous.” 

–Julietta Singh, from Unthinking Mastery

“Every single mistake moves us forward.”

-Shira Hassan, from Beyond Survival

“Go before you are ready.”

-Jeanine Durning, choreographer

As a white ally of racial justice working in the arts, I write this out of a curiosity about how narratives about anti-racism have the potential to replicate the very harms that white allies claim to be fighting. How do white allies speak up without re-centering whiteness? Where is the line between amplifying a voice and becoming the voice?

It’s been many months since I last posted about the work of distributed leadership inside HMD.  Although I’ve wanted to respond to calls to share our learning about this work, I’ve also been holding the words of Safi Jiroh, the consultant at LeaderSpring who has been supporting HMD in this transition. Safi cautioned me, as HMD’s white founder, not to control the narrative about the work. “You author something, you own the story,” she said. Other people have also cautioned me against trying to “own” racial justice work because, ideally, the entire community should own it. Also, I’m aware of the primacy of the written word in white supremacist organizational culture (i.e., unless it’s written down, it doesn’t exist). 

For these reasons, over the past six months, I’ve resisted writing about distributed leadership work. HMD’s three co-directors—Cherie Hill, Karla Quintero, and I—have been sharing the work through non-written forums: on panels, at conferences, with press, and in ongoing conversations with colleagues, Board, advisors, artists, and each other.

The written word has been, and continues to be, a big part of HMD’s distributed leadership work. Language can be the outward manifestation of a shared learning process in which a group of people moves toward shared understanding and trust. HMD staff and Board are in the process of co-authoring many documents, including a new statement of values and operating principles; a new mission statement; new by-laws; and a new racial equity statement.

This wordsmithing is an important part of articulating intention and value-aligning an organization.

Equity narratives are also increasingly part of applying for funding. The California Arts Council has begun asking applicant organizations to submit a racial equity statement in order to be eligible for funding. Arguably, this requirement is a way to assess an organization’s commitment. Arguably, it will catalyze overdue conversations. Yet some see this requirement as problematic because it is unavoidably performative. 

Is it naïve to hope that language can move us forward? 

Can language move us into spaces where bodies cannot go? Mixed groups engaging in anti-racism work often re-traumatize BIPOC artists. In anti-racism work, whiteness often ends up the focus, even if white allies sincerely want the focus to be on POC artists and their needs. For these reasons, white people are being called upon to do our work in separate spaces as BIPOC people gather on their own terms. Is writing one way we can move toward each other?

Language is not innocent. It overwrites nuance. It elides source material. 

Slick press releases and funder-friendly statements will not build trust between white-led arts organizations and artists of color. Organizations wait until they have a clean, well-edited solidarity statement to share with the public. What is the language for the messy, fumbling mistakes that are a central part of this work? Dare we share that?

Writing solidarity statements and racial equity statements is of course the right thing to do. But when everyone has one, what do these statements actually mean? “We’re woke, so give us money?” Are white people using cultural equity narratives to secure our existing positions, rather than change them?

Arts organizations, through their public-facing language, often metabolize demands for social justice. But of course, language is not enough. Armed with only language, many progressive whites have disengaged. Commitment rooted only in aspirational language will not support sustained anti-racism work, which calls for ongoing action in the form of personal, structural, and organizational culture change.  

I often hear BIPOC colleagues talk about how white people need to do their own work. That means something different for everyone, but below are some current areas of learning for me as a white person involved in anti-racism work in the arts. I pose related prompts for reflection that I hope are useful. I also indicate artists and activists who have been my teachers, lest their labor and wisdom go unacknowledged.  

·  Notice habits of initiation. How can I collaborate without controlling outcome, keeping in mind that process determines outcome? (thank you Safi Jiroh)

·  In both artistic and organizational spaces, make time and space for people stepping into power to envision the future they desire. How can I let go of the narrative? (thank you Safi Jiroh)

·  Don’t expect or wait for BIPOC people to call you out or be responsible for your learning. How can I see my own blindspots? (thank you Cherie Hill)

·  Before you rush to build “woke” public programs, take the time to build community trust. If the work isn’t anchored in authentic relationships, the work isn’t liberatory for anyone. How can my focus be not on organizational or career advancement, but on furthering the movement of which an organization is a part? (thank you Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mina Morita). 

·  Don’t try to own or take credit for anti-racism work. How can white allyship be impactful without being extractive? How can white people co-lead from the back? (thank you Abby Reyes)

·  Take accountability, but don’t take so much accountability that it becomes all about you. How can I take responsibility for harm without centering myself and adding to the harm? (thank you Daria Garina and Bhumi Patel).

·  Process this work through the body. How can I move through uncomfortable feelings? How can I breathe into stillness and silence? (thank you Karla Quintero)

·  Examine private narratives. I hear some white choreographers draw the line on equity work at the studio door because making dances the way they’ve always made them is “how I am in the world” or “it’s what I do.” How can I revise my own narratives?    

If we dig behind white solidarity, we often find sticky discomfort. What is the language of discomfort? Is it silence?

Awareness follows language. Language follows awareness. 

It’s useful to have aspirational language to guide and inspire us. It’s also useful to find the language for where we are now--the not yet, the partial, the becoming.

Reflections on Dance/Life Experience via Power Shift

by Cherie Hill, HMD’s Director of Art in Community

The Bridge Project’s Power Shift: Improvisation, Activism, and Community Festival focused on artists of color working in improvisation. A subject that is not explored and funded enough. In my dance experience, the majority occurring within academic institutions and private studios, improvisation was not offered as a course or a foundational dance form except when I attended graduate school. In dance theory classes such as Dance History, lessons about improvisation focused on the Judson Church era and primarily white dance artists. We touched on the Harlem Renaissance and swing dance, and later Butoh, but these forms were not directly categorized as improvisation. So to co-curate this festival felt uncanny and welcomed. 

I write this standing on one leg.

I view improvisation as a connection to the divine. When I’m moving freely yet directed, I am in touch with the subconscious. I recall during Power Shift’s Daily Improvisation Practice with Sherwood Chen, one of the scores included rain, smoke, incense, and wet newspaper. As I danced it in my own time and space, I forgot about the zoom screen, and after a while, I felt utterly submerged, my senses acute and body moving in the direction of its own. I was present in my environment while simultaneously not.

I write after inhaling a mix of citrus, pine, & diesel.

Before receiving an MFA degree in dance, I had never taken an improvisational course. I felt called to improvisation, though, and I opened myself up to and sought experiences. One of my first was working with Onye Ozuzu. Her first piece I danced in, Tall is Her Body, required everyone to tap into shared energy. We were all parts of “Her” body and worked together to make “Her” physical. I describe it as coming out of your own body to share in bodies with others. It was playful. (Onye was scheduled to teach a “Space Carcasses” workshop for Power Shift, but this was postponed for 2021).

I viewed this type of play swivel between person and screen during PURPLE is, a Power Shift performance with Judith Sánchez Ruíz and sam wentz. The background of one body on-screen was larger than life while the other advanced and retreated, changing their size and distance in comparison with the live projection. My curiosity peaked, not knowing when they would switch, come back, or end. 

While dancing around in my small bedroom and conjuring images and memories of my friend and teacher Kathleen, who recently transitioned, I write.

Kathleen Hermesdorf and Albert Mathias were two of my first improvisation teachers. I had taken a couple of workshops from them while a student at UC Berkeley, and then they were guest artists during my graduate studies at CU Boulder.

During their residency, I soaked them up like a dry sponge in need of freshwater. I took all the classes; I performed in their piece. I hung out with them around town. I admired Kathleen for her power, edginess, mastering of elements and improvisation, and her phrase work. Albert’s music took me to other places. The unification of music and dance is a special treat, especially within improvisation. There are so many elements to explore. I continued to explore this after graduation while taking Kathleen and Albert’s classes in San Francisco.

I write this because I said I would.

During the planning phases of Power Shift, co-directors Hope Mohr, Karla Quintero, and I indulged in many conversations regarding improvisation, power, and freedom as we created the festival theme and searched for a title. Improvisation and freedom are words often joined but seldom explained. What is freedom? Who is free? Is freedom the point of improv?

As I think about improvisation and freedom, a poignant moment that comes to mind is an experience I had during Anna Halprin’s workshop at the Esalen Institute. For a week, I ate excellent vegan food, soaked in natural hot springs, meditated in the Jedi dome above a creek, and learned about my body, emotions, and movements. One day I took to improvising on the rocks, and I stripped my clothes for the ocean. I imagine this is a type of freedom.

I write because I hear a whisper in my ear that I should.

What is your Kuleana? During Power Shift’s last workshop, “The Keystone of the Arch: Embodied 100 Years Vision'' with Yalini Dream and Tammy Johnson, they introduced us to Kuleana, your sacred responsibility. I continue to meditate on my Kuleana and the power involved in integrating dance, vision, and liberation. Together, we connected our goals for societal change with movement. 

I write because my experience matters.

Through my choreography, I’ve identified my Kuleana to be sharing the black female experience. At HMD, I help support underrepresented artists’ voices and talents, especially those of color. Power Shift provided a rare opportunity to learn from and discover the teachings and work of Black, Latinx, Asian, Queer, and Social Justice artists working in improvisation. We slingshot forward to evolve and connect with that which is sacred and integral through our presentation of these artists. We continue our work as we envision an equitable world.

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You can read and see more about Power Shift through the festival’s virtual exhibit, a collection of interviews, essays, visual art, and resources that offers pathways into the art, practices, and perspectives of Black/African American, Latinx/Latin American, Asian American, female-identifying and queer improvisers and social justice activists.

CHERIE HILL co-directs The Bridge Project with Hope Mohr and Karla Quintero. She is HMD’s Director of Art in Community. Hill is a choreographer, dancer, teacher, and scholar, whose art explores human expression and how it is conveyed through the body in collaboration with nature, music, and visual imagery. A lover of dance research, Cherie has published essays in Gender Forum, The Sacred Dance Journal, Dance Education in Practice, and In Dance, and is the creator of the Sacred Dance Guild's blog, "Sacred Dance Trends." She has presented at multiple conferences, including the International Conference on Arts and Humanities, the Black Dance Conference, and the National Dance Education Organization Conference. With her dance company, IrieDance, Cherie has held artist residencies with Footloose Productions, Milk Bar Richmond, and CounterPulse's Performing Diaspora Residency Program. As a performer, she has worked with Bay Area Repertory Dance, Makomba West African Drum & Dance, David Dorfman, Kiandanda Dance, & Helander Dance Theater.

Cherie received her BA in Dance and Performance Studies and African American Studies from UC Berkeley, where she focused her research on dance and Black female identity. With support from the McNair and Haas scholars programs, she spent a summer in New York City conducting research and visits with the Urban Bush Women Company. Upon graduation, the Stronach Baccaularette Prize awarded Cherie funds for research on dance and ancestry in Jamaica. She continued her pursuit of dance and research as a graduate student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she focused on cultural studies studying West African dance, earning an MFA in Dance Choreography and Performance with graduate certificates in somatics and women and gender studies. Cherie is Co-President of the CA Dance Education Association and a former Dance Teaching Artist and Director of Community & Culture at Luna Dance Institute.

Life, Storytelling, and Activism As Improvisational Practice: An Interview with Debby Kajiyama & José Navarrete of Naka Dance Theater

This conversation took place over zoom on September 9, 2020 as part of The Bridge Project’s festival Power Shift: Improvisation, Activism, and Community.

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Hope Mohr:
I want to thank you so much for your time. We are so happy to be talking to you today.

Karla Quintero:
Let’s dive right in. I’d like to start by inviting you to share something about your work and your history of working together.

José Navarrete: We established NAKA Dance Theater about 20 years ago. We are interested in the intersection between social justice and contemporary art. The more we do, the more the work reveals to us. I think there was a shift when we started working on a project called Revenge of Huitlacoche in which we were dealing with corn and food sovereignty. We spent four months in Oaxaca, Mexico dealing with GMOs, genetically modified organisms. We were looking at the ancestral knowledge of agriculture based on corn and how it has been assaulted by these big corporations like Monsanto. When we did the cabaret sketch Revenge of Huitlacoche, that was a shift for us because we love culture. We love storytelling. That is something that makes us really happy, to meet people by sharing stories.

We did previous work with communities, like the Japanese-American community in San Francisco, dealing with Día de los Muertos, Day of the Dead. Then we worked with the Gay Latino community around Está Noche, a bar at 16th and Mission in San Francisco. We created a dance theater piece that dealt with identity and queer culture. But Revenge of Huitlacoche really brought up social justice. From there, our work started taking shape. We started really looking at our structure. Thinking about how we express ideas through our vernacular and through our vocabulary, which is contemporary art. We are movers. We love contact improvisation and Axis Syllabus. We love somatic material.

Debby Kajiyama:
In our past three and half projects, we've worked with a group of people to highlight their stories. They performed in the works even though some folks had never done a performance before in their lives. I'd say probably since 2012 or 2013 we've been doing work like that.

Karla Quintero:
Are there other aspects or forms of improvisation that currently inspire or influence your practice?

Debby Kajiyama:
I love the question and I love the focus on improvisation because I love improvised dance. Sara Shelton Mann’s class puts me in my happy place. But I feel like the process that we go through as artists, you wouldn't recognize an improvisational dance class in any of our processes. It's improvisation more in terms of just life. Life practice as an improvisational practice. This is one of the things I learned from working ABD/Skywatchers on a project called Race: Stories from the Tenderloin. 

I remember right after we had started rehearsing, we had a meeting with the MAP Fund in New York. They brought a bunch of artists together and asked us to talk about one question we had in our work at that time. The question that I had was, "How are we going to make this piece happen?” I wasn’t sure if the performers were going to show up for rehearsals or on the day of the performance. There's a lot happening in that community. They have to tend to things that are much more important than a dance piece. Going into it I felt like I had to change my concept of time. I had to stop thinking that I had so much power, not that I think that I have that much power normally anyway, but I had to relinquish a sense of control. The rehearsals and the performances became indistinguishable from each other. Now I don’t know when I am rehearsing and creating or when I am performing or when I'm just alive. 

We used to rehearse individually because we were working on individual stories. We worked with Kim, who's this amazing singer with really intense stories to tell. It would be hard for her to come to rehearsal. I'd call her before I left the East Bay to go to San Francisco and say, "We have rehearsal." Then we'd go. I'd call her when I got there and she'd answer her phone and say, "Okay. I'm coming down." We'd wait 20 minutes and we'd call her again. She'd say, "Yeah. I had a little problem, but I'll be down. Don't worry. I just have to take care of something." We would end up waiting sometimes an hour or an hour and a half for her to come down. Then we'd rehearse and it would be really intense and joyous. 

It reminds me of the time we spent in Oaxaca. I was visiting a friend's family and the couple were orthodontists. They were originally from a tiny mountain town in the mountains of Oaxaca. One day they said, "Why don't you come to the town and visit with us?" It was so beautiful there. Once a month they worked as dentists in the tiny town where they were from. Laura, my friend said, "I want to show you the town; let's go for a little walk. Let's go for a little hike." An hour later, after we had visited the market, we came back to the office and there were patients that had been sitting there waiting for their dentist appointment. I was like, "Oh my god. How horrible that they had to wait so long for you!" But they were fine and she was fine and nobody was tripping except me. I was like, "Okay. This is how it is.” This is a long way of saying that I feel like the improvisational practices are more teaching me how to be improvisational than me teaching others how to do improvisation.  

Karla Quintero:
So improvisation not as a tool to necessarily generate material for a performance, but improvisation is the process in a sense.

José Navarrete:
Yeah.

Debby Kajiyama: I think we definitely used improvisation in the process also, but it's a different kind of improvisation. In order to make an environment that's conducive to improvisation, again it comes back to the difference between a rehearsal and everyday life and the performance. I wrote down in my notes, “what is a rehearsal?” It's not renting studio space from 1:00 to 3:00 on a particular day and inviting specific people to go there and having a private space to work on your piece. It's more like going to Mujeres Unidas y Activas, the office, where everybody's walking in and out and you have a table. You've invited a bunch of people, but the people that come might not be those people. Other people will come and you find a connection with them. You notice something that people already feel confident in, or good at, or are interested in, and you follow that connection. They're in a space where they feel comfortable, it's their cultural center, it's their home. I'm there to listen and figure out what's really burning in this person's spirit that they want to tell me? What really excites them? 

Right now we're working with Julita, a woman from Guatemala. She's an amazing seamstress and an amazing knitter. She knits and crochets amazing stuff. How can we figure out how to use this kind of work? And so we get online every day and we're talking about her dream. She has this dream of abundance where she's in the countryside and there's tons of chickens and they lay tons of eggs everywhere. We don't want them to get damaged, so we have to go pick them all up. She's telling me the whole dream. Then we asked, do you think you could crochet this scene? And yesterday, she crocheted chickens, and they're beautiful! She's never made a crocheted chicken before and I've never seen a crocheted chicken before. We're probably going to make a film out of her story. Chickens will probably be in the video.

Karla Quintero:
At what point and how do you introduce movement into your work? I saw Race: Stories from the Tenderloin and there was a lot of movement in it. At what point and how did you introduce movement in this process and how did it relate to themes you discussed around improvisation?

José Navarrete: With Skywatchers, because there were a lot of Gospel singers, we went to Gospel. We were like, let's bring the pandeiro, let's bring the drums, let's bring some songs of the church, let’s start undulating our spine and moving. That was very powerful for them. We created a lot of work through them remembering songs that they were singing in church.

They also brought the song “Iko Iko” from New Orleans that most of them knew, and we ended up using that. We animated the feeling of the song. We would say, let’s look at how this person is moving. Let's try to feel that. Let's try to stay with that for a bit. So we generated movement through particular cultural elements that they knew.

For instance with Mujeres Unidas, all of them are immigrants. They love Latin music like Salsa, Merengue, Sonidera, and we go to that. We started doing research to see what activities they have that are physical. With Monica -- she loves step aerobics, con banco. So we decided to take the class with her and her friends. I think we spent three months trying to learn Step together in her classes. That became part of the show. That was very successful because we stepped aside and said, “Okay, this is what you want to learn. We want to learn that.”  

Debby Kajiyama:
That was important because not only was it a movement practice that they were into, but also the teacher was a good friend. We asked her to choreograph a little routine. All of Monica's friends who supported her through this difficult time were all in the class. It felt important. I had never done Zumba before. In addition we added, “What if you lean into me and give me your weight?” “What if five people lift you up into the air?” I feel like then, they were willing to try the “wacky” stuff we wanted to do. 

There was also a section in the piece in Race: Stories from the Tenderloin, do you know Kevin O'Connor? He recently finished his PhD at UC Davis. He's an amazing circus trained dancer and also a beautiful improviser. He was one of the key artists in Race and he did a Contact duet with one of the residents, Lee, who had never danced before. [Lee] is a very thin, slight man. I don't have any idea how it happened, but somehow Kevin convinced [Lee] that it would be fine if he lifted him on his shoulder and spun him around. Literally he was flying through the air. Lee told a story about a time when a friend of his invited him to fly an airplane. It was a harrowing story. They were drinking and they went and flew this airplane. The first part of his story told the story of the airplane. We had three young dancers who did a really great job of improvising in the telling of the story. Then Lee would stand up, very naturally, as he would normally do, and correct them. Tell them they had gotten the details wrong. So it became this improvisational story among four people.  

We didn't sit down and say, “Let’s think of some movement.”  We didn't even go through a process. It was more of trusting, and then lean into me, and [Lee] was so open to it. It was just about listening. That's the only guidance that was given. They just listened to each other and that was all.

José Navarrete:
The work that we do, it's contemporary. Dance can be abstract. One of the things that we have done is we invite people like passerbys or people that are in the building into our rehearsals. We do a show for them, and ask them, “Tell us a little bit about what you think about this?” I think that intention and that attention is really powerful because it offers some kind of trust. We had an amazing conversation with somebody that had not had an experience of contemporary art, and they said, "Oh my God. You make me feel like she was floating into the air." It has to do with the space. How do we contain the space for those conversations to happen?

One thing that also keeps coming in my mind, we did a trio where we were lifting Gizeh [Muñiz]. We were rehearsing in the building of Mujeres Unidas but we were outside and they had their membership meeting. We asked them if they could give us five minutes to show them what we were working on. We went to the meeting and showed them. It was really powerful. They felt emotionally uplifted by what we were doing. "Oh, oh, oh. Oh yeah." They started imagining things through what we were showing to them. It helped us to figure out where we needed to go with our movement vocabulary.

Debby Kajiyama:
In terms of eliciting something physical from people, we work a lot with sculptural set objects. In the Anastasio Project at Eastside Arts Alliance, we used a string sculpture. There are two posts in the middle of the room and then we had some clothesline that we wrapped around it to make a wall. It's two layers of string. I’ll show a section of it. This is Patricia Barajas and Simone Nalls.

Photo credit: Scott Tsuchitani

Simone hadn't performed like this before. We asked her to do some improvisation with the object. At first she was really shy, and was like "I don't know what I'm doing. I can't do it." She said to us, "You have to understand that I am an African-American woman and I cannot look stupid no matter what I do. This is how I live my life. Not being able to make a mistake. I have to be on my game all the time because I'm judged too quickly, too readily."

But we kept working with her to rehearse and offered a narrative of someone who had disappeared at the border that she might be looking for.  Eventually she said, “I can do this.” In some ways I feel like it's easier to have an interesting object to play with instead of only moving your body. 

Hope Mohr: That's powerful. In working with community members, how do you invite people into embodiment, especially people who don't have a movement background or people who feel inhibited? Are there other techniques, tactics, or scores that you offer to extend that invitation or to draw people in?

José Navarrete:
We saw this film called After Life, it's a Japanese film.

Hope Mohr:
I love that film.

Karla Quintero: That's a good one.

José Navarrete: It takes place in the liminal space between life and death. And the office workers in this place are helping the people who have just died archive the best memory of their life for eternity. It's based on decentralizing yourself. It is not your vision, it's the vision of the people. The people that are telling the story. I don't know if that’s technique or an exercise, but it has been very powerful for us to be able to decentralize ourselves to bring the vision of the community, especially the people that are willing to be with us in the artistic process.

There is a moment in the process when they get so invested. Suddenly, it's not NAKA’s piece. You can tell me your stories and then I provide you some ideas. We have been really lucky because the people we work with match our aesthetics. It’s very fulfilling when we get to that moment when they recognize the work that we do, but they also have agency to fulfill their vision. That has to do a lot with improvisation.

This happens also in terms of writing. Debby is really good at writing stories. She hears something from Kim, writes it down, and then is like, “Kim, this is the story that you said, what do you think?”  Kim reads it and says, "Oh yes. Oh no." She starts adjusting based on what we heard from her. That's how we create text. You listen for what they already have.

Debby Kajiyama:
Also we create a container for the process. Usually it will be other dancers or us. If they don't remember what comes next, then there are others in the space that are holding their story carefully. Even if they don't do anything but stand there, we can frame it and make it look like that is what is supposed to happen.

We’ve worked with several people who couldn't even be in the room. They would be too anxious and they would leave. You'd know that they'd kind of want to be there, because they would show up every week. First it would be one minute, then it would be three, and then a little bit longer. But on bad days they couldn't stay at all or they didn't come.

That happened with Silver Sonic, who lives in the Tenderloin and paints himself with silver paint as part of his performative identity. He would always tell these stories about why he couldn't be there. But then José worked with him one on one. At first he was still skeptical. Finally at one point he said, "You know what I want to do? I want you to rig me, fly me up into the air." Do you know the Tenderloin National Forest on Ellis with the huge red gates in front of it? He's like, "I want you to fly me to the top of those red gates and I'm going to play my bass guitar as the opening of this entire piece. And I want a fog machine." All of a sudden he had a vision of how he wanted to tell his story. We said okay and ran and got the fog machine. Kevin is a rigger so he knew how to rig him to fly him up. And that was the opening of the piece. He and José also danced a duet.

José Navarrete: One of the things that also was very interesting for the connection was I said, "Hey Silver. I want you to paint me like you. I want to be like you." That was very moving for him because he said, "Nobody has ever wanted to be like me." That was a deep connection because I said, "I want to be like you, so you need to paint me. We're going to dance together and you're going to go up and you're going to play your bass.” That was really powerful because in one moment in our process, we thought Silver was not going to come through. We were very skeptical. He's very sensitive. But he managed. He did the whole process and he's still doing a lot of work with Skywatchers.  

Karla Quintero:
This is bringing back all these memories from that piece. 

You mentioned the Anastasio Project, a project that had a specific political demand. Is it different when you're working on a project where the focus is explicitly political versus a project that is driven by community building and expressing people’s stories?

Debby Kajiyama:
Did you say the Anastasio project was that way for you?

Karla Quintero: Yes, when I looked at the footage, that's how I interpreted it.  

José Navarrete:
The Anastasio Project was a long process. It took us six years to work with the community. It took us a long time. The process of Anastasio went both ways. We were challenged by their political narrative and also they were challenged by us--by our contemporary aesthetic. Can you do your story in a different way? Can it be possible to say your story in a different way? It was like that. It was a mutual conversation and process.

What I remember with Anastasio was Kev Akhidenor, he's an amazing intellectual. He talks for hours about everything. In the rehearsal we were trying to contain him. We would say, you did that, don't do that one more time. We managed to contain his monologue to 20 minutes. But then we couldn't control his performance. We took a leap of faith with him. Audience reaction to Kev’s section was mixed. Scholars and dance makers thought it was too long. But for the community, it was really powerful. They were saying, "Wow. Kev made the piece." 

Hope Mohr:  
In making socially engaged work, how do you balance your aesthetic desires with your activist desires? Do you feel like those two things line up or sometimes diverge? If they diverge, how do you navigate that tension inside you?

José Navarrete:
It's interesting, this idea of improvisation and open spaces. In the process for Dismantling Tactics, I wanted to use improvisational techniques, but with a sense of agency. I couldn't figure out how to leave the performance open. In the white community, the dance community, and for white audiences, there’s a tendency to talk about improvisation as being open-ended. But that doesn't make any sense to me. For me, as a person of color, I have agency. I have a purpose. Yes, I want to use the devil's tools, but it needs to be in a different way. I always struggle in trying to figure out how open should improvisation be. I am always navigating between improvisation and agency.  What is my purpose? There’s always reflection and conflict when we are doing work.  

Hope Mohr:
You both work at the intersection of movement and social justice. What do you think movement brings to social justice work that other modes of engagement don't offer? What are the gifts that you've found working on political issues through movement?

José Navarrete:
Redemption. Movement is ephemeral. The body is a vehicle of energy. It doesn’t stay. It’s always moving. It creates magic. It elevates the mind to another state of consciousness. When there is so much pain and historical trauma and when you surrender to the moment, that moment is magical. 

Hope Mohr:
I'm filled with gratitude and appreciation for both of you and for the work that you do. Thank you.

Karla Quintero:
Same. It's really nice to hear about your work from your own perspectives and hear about some of your works. I feel really lucky to have been able to get all this context and to be able to include this information as part of our rumination on improvisation and what it contributes to social justice-driven artmaking. Thank you.

José Navarrete & Debby Kajiyama: Thank you! 

Karla Quintero:
Bye. Adiós.

José Navarrete: Adiós.

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Visit the Power Shift Virtual Exhibit, a collection of interviews, essays, visual art, and resources that offers pathways into the art, practices, and perspectives of Black/African American, Latinx/Latin American, Asian American, female-identifying and queer improvisers and social justice activists.

See the full Power Shift festival line-up HERE.

"Resistance and Freedom are Two Sides to the Same Coin": A Conversation with Jarrel Phillips about Capoiera

This conversation between Capoeria artist Jarrel Phillips and The Bridge Project’s co-director Hope Mohr took place over zoom on September 15, 2020 as part of Power Shift: Improvisation, Activism, and Community.

Jarrel Phillips will be performing live as part of Power Shift on October 9, 2020. Tickets are available HERE.

Jarrel Phillips is a performance artist utilizing mixed media to tell, preserve, and connect our stories across the globe. Drawing heavily on experience as a San Francisco Fillmore native and student of Capoeira, much of his work explores the beauty and resilience of the African diaspora and its global presence and influence. Phillips’ work emphasizes “living folklore,” the unfolding and continued cultivation of our lived experience, from the past to the present, through our community history. www.jarrelphillips.com

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I'm Hope Mohr. I'm one of the co-curators of the Bridge Project, along with Cherie Hill and Karla Quintero. I'm here today talking with Jarrel Phillips, who is one of HMD's current Community Engagement Residency lead artists and a featured performer in Power Shift: Improvisation, Activism, and Community. We're going to talk about Jarrel's practice as an artist. Hi Jarrel.

Jarrel Phillips:

Hello. How are you?

Hope Mohr:

Good. How are you?

Jarrel Phillips:

Chillin’.

Hope Mohr:

Can you talk about what your path has been as a capoeirista? How did you get started?

Jarrel Phillips:

I started when I was seven years old at the African American Art and Cultural Center in the Fillmore [District of San Francisco] at a program called Wajumbe. It was a place where we explored different art forms of the African diaspora. We learned about everything related to Africa and African arts and African storytelling. Capoeira was one of the things we did. I did that for almost two years. I received a belt in 1994. I returned about 10 or 11 years later as an adult and found the same teacher. I’ve been doing capoeira ever since.

Hope Mohr:

Can you say more about who your important teachers have been in the practice? Either here or in Brazil?

Jarrel Phillips:

I started with three teachers. In the program we went by aunties and uncles. So it was Uncle Urubu, Uncle Lowe and then Uncle Mike. Uncle Mike is African-American. I train now with Uncle Urubu, he's my teacher still to this day. I went to visit him actually recently for his birthday. I can name teachers that I visit when I'm in Brazil: Mestre Nenel and Mestre Valmir Those are people I train with when I'm out there.  

Hope Mohr:

I know you go to Brazil a lot. Can you talk about why that's important to your practice and what you do then when you're there?

Jarrel Phillips:

The Capoeira here is a little and a lot different. It’s definitely a higher level of capoeira in Brazil because it's so much a part of the culture. More people are able to partake in it. It’s for the physical push, but it's not just physical. It's to immerse myself in the culture. To immerse myself in the language. I believe language is key to culture. Typically, it’s the first thing that colonizers have taken from us. And so I go there to learn Brazilian-Portuguese, which is for them a colonized language, but nonetheless is the language that is in relationship to capoeira. The songs are in Portuguese or Brazilian-Portuguese. And the movements are all in Portuguese. When you get a nickname, you get a Portuguese nickname. My nickname is Chumbinho, which is like a little piece of lead or a BB like in a BB gun.

I go there to be in the place. My favorite place there is Bahia. They say Brazil has the largest population of Africans of black people outside of Africa. And Bahia is the Mecca of Capoeira. I say it’s Blackland. That's where all the black people are, in Bahia. Northeastern Brazil is heavily saturated with African influence. So you get things like, Samba, Frevo, Maracatu, like here we have tap dance and jazz and blues here. 

What's cool for me is that Bahia means Bay. A bianu means somebody from Bahia, somebody that's from the Bay. I'm not a bianu, to be clear, but I am from the Bay in the sense of the San Francisco Bay. I think that's kind of tight.

Hope Mohr:

Yeah. How is Capoeira different here in the States? How has the tradition morphed here?

Jarrel Phillips:

The form brings people together, regardless of where you are. When I go to Bahia, I see more Black people doing a capoeira, which is very key for me. Here, I don't see much of that. It’s more of a commodity here. Here it's clearly a situation with masters and students. I'm not downing that part. It's actually extremely important. But it’s an issue of access here that relates to race and intersects with class. Who can afford to go into these spaces? And then the individuals that are in these spaces, typically, once they're in them, it becomes a dominated space by whomever was there first.   And so typically it's people that could afford to be there, not just monetarily, but also in relationship to time. They have the time. They can afford to give their time to be in these places. So, then often other people don't feel like they fit or belong. They don't feel comfortable in those spaces. So then you have a culture within a culture.

A lot of people here come for exercise as if it's just a physical thing. Their teachers’ job is to serve them. When there’s payment and service, there can be corruption of the form. It affects how the art gets passed down. In Capoeira you get people that come because they want to dance, you get people that come because they want to flip, you get people that come because they want to do martial arts. And then you get people that come for the culture, for the heritage. But you're not necessarily going to get the heritage all the time. Because not everybody wants to hear about the cultural heritage, especially when it comes to things that are very Black. Unfortunately in this society and in many ways, in this world, the idea of whiteness and blackness are tethered. And very much polarized. So anything spoken about Black often makes people go away. So that stuff isn't talked about the way it could and should be talked about.

Hope Mohr:

Can you talk more about the heritage of Capoeira? I know in part it's rooted in resistance to slavery.

Jarrel Phillips:

This is about folklore. Folklore is often something thought of as being in the past. Something becomes folkloric unless it stays current and relevant. Modern dance could one day become folkloric. Capoeira is adaptive in nature, just like B-boying and hip hop. It probably will never fully be folklore because it's always innovating and recreating itself. Capoeira has a very old history and comes from a very, very rooted place, but it's in many ways forever contemporary. Some people even say it's like the modern dance or contemporary of the martial arts. There's so much to it. There's the spirituality and the movement practices that are in relationship to the spirituality. There are the art forms that can be juxtaposed to Capoeira like maculele, samba, or batuque. 

I know people like to say Capoiera was created by slaves who were trying to disguise their martial art. I imagine that there's an element to that. I imagine also that Capoeira was formulated even more after slavery. It depends on what we even mean by slavery. Slavery has manifested itself on people in different ways. That too continues to change. 

I believe that Capoeira, even with its history of resistance, is joy. We play Capoeira. Just like dance, it allows you to transcend things. I mean transcend suffering or just the mundanity of everyday life. We look forward after work to do our capoeira or play. It is also aligning. Like dance, it allows you to align your spirit and your soul with your emotions and your body. It grounds you. It doesn't necessarily make you escape. It brings you even more here. And so, it is an art form of resistance. There’s a saying that I like: “resistance and freedom are two sides to the same coin". 

Capoeira is push and pull. People say “give and take,” but I like to say, “give and give.” There’s a reciprocity to Capoeira. It's a circle. All the movements are reciprocal. We play in a circle. It’s a manifestation and an adaptation of values and traditions that our ancestors held and that we continue to create and recreate: the value of being together; the relationship between a student and the teacher; taking care of one another; how you dance with conflict; music and rhythm, storytelling through song and prayer. Ashe. Spirit. It's all of these things in one thing. And you play it.

Hope Mohr:

That's beautiful. Can you talk more about the elements of play and surprise in Capoeira? About Capoeira as an improvisational practice? 

Jarrel Phillips:

This is all my perspective. I'm no authority.

Hope Mohr:

I don't know. I think you are.

Jarrel Phillips:

Trickery is key to Capoeira. The same way as being sneaky is fundamental to being a Ninja. In the United States, the trickster, for African Americans, the trickster is a hero. The trickster is so tricky that we often forget to take them seriously. There’s Br’er Rabbit. There’s Anansi the spider. The trickster is the god who talks to all the other gods. You can't get to the other gods without talking to the trickster first. The trickster sits at the crossroads. The trickster can do a power play with words. The trickster is the one that can outwit the biggest opponent, like David and Goliath. 

I think Audre Lorde said, "you can't dismantle the master's house using the master's tools.” Yes and no. 

Hope Mohr:

Say more about that.

Jarrel Phillips:

It depends on how much you associate the master’s tools to the master. How much you allow them to own those tools and how much we own the tools for ourselves. Words come in many forms: stories, hieroglyphs, poems and prose and verse, through song, through phrases, idioms, hyperbole, onomatopoeia. They're signs. They point to something inside. Words express consciousness. We can talk about the master's tools as being the English language. There’s the King's English over in Britain. But then you come here to the United States and you talk that very same language. It's different, different and the same. As a Black individual, words hold the nuance of my culture. Of our race, of our experiences, of sexuality. Everything is different and the same.  

So I understand what Audre Lorde said about the master’s tools. Yes and no. The ability to create and recreate. To transform something. I believe that when you dance, when you move, when you enter into that circle and play Capoeira, when you're moving with the music, with that band of instruments, when you're moving in relationship to yourself and another individual, there's a transcendent space that you are a part of. I believe play in its essence is creativity. I believe play is more of an attitude or an approach. But play, like the trickster, can be anything and everything it needs to be and wants to be.

Hope Mohr:

Sometimes we forget to play. I forget.  

Jarrel Phillips:

Sometimes your work is play. But we have to remember to play in other ways. So that play doesn't become work.

Hope Mohr:

Thanks so much for sharing your words and your thoughts and look forward to seeing you play Capoeira on October 9th. Thanks Jarrel.

Jarrel Phillips:

Likewise.

Embodiment, Strategic Movement Building, and Long Range Visioning: An Interview with Aisha Shillingford

This interview took place over Zoom on September 8, 2020 as part of the Online Exhibit for Power Shift: Improvisation, Activism, and Community. Visit the online exhibit throughout Power Shift for more interviews, resources, and inspiration.

Cherie Hill:

Welcome to The Bridge Project’s Power Shift Interview Series. My name is Cherie Hill and I’m here with Hope Mohr. We’re co-curators, along with Karla Quintero, of The Bridge Project.  

Today we have the pleasure of interviewing Aisha Shillingford, Deputy Director of Innovation Strategy at Movement Strategy Center (“MSC”). Aisha is an artist, designer, daydreamer, facilitator, and strategist.

At MSC, Aisha leads collaborative design thinking processes within the Transitions ecosystem to design systems, environments, and programs that unleash imagination and generate transformative leaps across networks, programs, and teams. Aisha was born in Trinidad & Tobago and was raised in the hills of Port of Spain by her artist/actress/director mother and her economist/professor/consultant father. She considers herself Caribbean and Afro-Diasporic and believes in the power of small places to effect enormous change. She is an artist, organizer, cultural strategist, searcher, and dreamer. Aisha is a commitment to spiritual, cultural and social transformation:

From isolation to interdependence
From exploitation to love
From disconnection to community
From extraction to regeneration
From competition to collaboration
From exclusive ownership to the commons

Aisha has earned a BA in Environmental Analysis and Policy, a Masters of Social Work with a focus on Community Organizing, and a Masters of Business Administration with a focus on Innovation, Creativity and Social Entrepreneurship. Prior to joining MSC, Aisha was a Senior Associate at the Interaction Institute for Social Change facilitating collaborative capacity building and racial equity change processes with social change organizations and networks. Before that, she was the Director of Racial & Economic Justice at the New Economy Coalition and the Program Director/Lead Organizer at Close To Home Domestic Violence Prevention Initiative and the Muslim American Society Boston Chapter.

Aisha has also worked as an independent organizational development and business strategy consultant with cooperative enterprises. As a member of the Intelligent Mischief collective she works to unleash black imagination to shape the future by using art, narrative and design thinking processes and developing artistic & pop culture interventions.

Welcome, Aisha. We're really excited to have you join us today.

Aisha Shillingford:

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Cherie Hill:

Our first question is, what is your current job with Movement Strategy Center (MSC)? Can you talk about the kind of work that MSC does and how you fit into that broader vision?

Aisha Shillingford:

My current role is Deputy Director of Innovation Strategy. I lead the cultivation of MSC’s core network, the Transitions Community and support MSC’s other program leads in areas of Climate Innovation and Cultural strategy. In the past six years, MSC aligned its purpose around accelerating the transition from a world of violence, domination, and extraction to regeneration and interdependence.  My primary role is to cultivate a broad community of people who hold a similar purpose and mission. To bring folks together to learn how to navigate that transition and to learn from each other. Now my work is primarily focused on cultivating a network of beloved communities—groups of people in places dedicated to ushering in this transition.

Hope Mohr:

Aisha, you talk about accelerating transition and change. How do you do that as an organizer?

Aisha Shillingford:

Central to accelerating change is building a long vision. One thing that I've noticed organizing over the past 22 years is that what we are moving towards is almost the most important element in how fast we move. Our vision can be within a four-year election cycle or a two-year election cycle. It can be within a one-year legislative budget or legislative cycle. It can be within a six-month listening campaign. So much of accelerating transition is about having a transformative vision. Part of that means lengthening the range of vision beyond what we are used to. When we started working with Norma Wong,, who is a mentor to us, we started asking: How do we want our communities and societies to shift in 100 years? How do we work backwards from that and ask ourselves, given where we want to be in 100 years, what do we have to do in 50 years, in 25, in 12, and in three?

What we found is that using a long range approach, in combination with embodiment, changes how we are aligned with our visions. What we think might take 12 or 20 years to accomplish can actually happen in three years. When we focus on what we want to see 100 years down the road, we start to make it real. Sometimes this happens in a subconscious sense by practicing it in our daily lives.

Another thing is remembering that transformation isn't linear, especially under unknown circumstances. It involves leaps. We can't always predict exactly where the leaps will come. So we have to be in a stance of alignment with our vision. We have to be ready to shift and change depending on what comes across our path. We have to be able to make decisions based on where we're going.  All of those shifts can accelerate if we're leaning into the moment, able to shift our direction as needed, while remaining in alignment with our long arc vision.

Cherie Hill:

That's so inspiring. Can you talk more about how embodiment plays a role in your work and in your practice?

Aisha Shillingford:

There are communities I work with that do Tai Chi together. Some groups do somatic practices together. Some groups dance together. Some groups sing together. It depends on their vision and what values that vision implies. At Movement Strategy Center, we do 10 steps of Tai Chi together because those 10 steps reflect different moments of strategy and different ways of being as organizers and movement builders.  

Embodiment is an attempt to interrupt habits that we often have in social justice spaces of approaching strategy as something you sit around the table and think about. But really strategy is something that we embody with every cell of our body. There's an article by the cultural somatics coach Tada Hozumi where he says that social change is in the body. He talks about how, at the level of the soma, the change that we want is what actually shifts who we are and how we are. When we practice physically together, it shifts the way we approach strategy together.

As a network weaver, my role is cultivating relationships between people and supporting people to tell their stories. But I don't want to be the center of the network. I want to be someone who's pulling a thread from one part of the network to another part. It doesn't have to go through me. So I took an actual weaving class. I thought that if I could practice with my hands and my body enough to the point where I built a muscle memory around that act of weaving, when I go to think strategically about weaving, I can learn from what my body already knows how to do. 

Cherie Hill:

That's fascinating. This approach seems so holistic. Dance tends to be one of the lower ranked arts or careers you can take. And that partly is because we live in a society that's body-phobic. People aren't comfortable being in their body. Our society tends to privilege mind over the body. We see this a lot starting with education, with children being forced to sit more than move. What has been your experience getting people to embrace this idea of the body as a vehicle for social change?

Aisha Shillingford:

It’s challenging for all of the reasons that you shared. Some people with trauma don't want to arrive in their bodies in public space. Some people deprioritize physical practice. They think we're doing this embodiment thing so we can get to the thinking. Some of the work we've done is bringing the strategic question that we have, and then asking, what does that question feel like in your body? For those of us who do Tai Chai, we might ask, which Tai Chi moves come to mind as you grapple with this strategic question?

Sometimes we start with breath, which can be the most accessible way for folks to come into bodily awareness. Recently I did a racial equity training where we said, if this conversation brings up fear or discomfort, pay attention to that feeling in your body. If you want to respond to that feeling through touching something, through pressing on certain points of your body, or through shaking your leg under the table, it’s ok. 

The lessons are about how we can transition to being in balance between our minds and our bodies. To expect the answers to come from what our bodies are doing. Looking across cultures, particularly different indigenous cultures around the world, their relationship between embodiment and spirituality shows us that in order to hone intuition as a way of knowing, we have to be aware in our bodies. That only comes from embodied practice.

People may still be skeptical. If people don't like it, they'll tap out, and that's fair. Our goal is not to have everyone do it, but to be in alignment with people who are interested in approaching life through increased embodiment. We encourage people to find what works for them. Even if someone's playing soccer every day or going for a walk every day, that's important. Find the practice that works for you. And then really practice it. Do it every day.

Hope Mohr:

How has your work changed over the past 10 years? Have you shifted the way you approach working with communities? What lessons have you've learned? 

Aisha Shillingford:

A lot of what has changed is my understanding of myself and my role in the midst of an organizing practice. When I first started organizing 20 something years ago, I was taught that your work is a sacrifice. I was working in pretty under-resourced organizations in communities that were my own. I bought into the idea that the work was a sacrifice I was making and that the more sacrifice I could make personally, the more impact I would have and the more of a good person I was. Over the last five to six years, I’ve started understanding that I cannot annihilate it myself. It's not about destroying myself in order to make someone else whole.

I'm still working on it. It’s a totally different paradigm for me to put myself first for the first two hours of the day. That can have a big impact. That's not taking away from communities that I'm supporting. Actually, if I nourish myself, I’m nourishing them through coming to the work as a more whole person. I think a lot of my organizing experiences were codependent. It was almost like, I'm going to annihilate myself and in exchange, you’ll accept me into community as a good person. That's shifted. Now I have to be a balanced person. I have to do my meditation and I have to do my art first thing. I have to nourish my body and pay attention to my needs. That will cultivate the abundance from which I have something to give to the work. That's been huge. That's still a work in progress. I still journal every day to make myself believe that. It's a totally new experience for me.

Cherie Hill:

Yes, too often we apply a scarcity mindset to ourselves. I think a lot of nonprofits have been modeled around this kind of mentality of “give everything you can, but don't take care of yourself.” We should be bringing abundance to ourselves and making sure that we're balanced so that we're better for the communities we’re serving. I think that's a transition a lot of us are going through individually and organizationally.

Aisha Shillingford:

It’s taken a long time for the foundations that support us to allow circles of self care. For so long, many foundations gave us no general operating support. And so you kind of couldn't take care of your staff, you had to put everything into programming. I feel like foundations are finally starting to realize that general operating support makes the work better in the long run.

Cherie Hill:

We're also wondering about transformative strategies. Can you tell us more about how these manifest within the work that MSC is doing?

Aisha Shillingford:

Sure. When we started the Transitions Labs, we started off with a framework called “transformative movement building.” That was based on a theory of change that we had developed in work we were doing to end violence against girls and women. We designed a framework that involves long arc vision, embodiment of that vision, connection between the people that are aligned around that vision, and then strategic navigation. 

We then took these values and applied them to larger needs for transformation of power in society as a whole. We now have a body of work at MSC that's all about community-driven planning. It addresses governance and deep democracy. If communities can be involved at all levels of decision making around the matters that impact their lives, this can be inherently transformative, especially if there is a long range vision at the center.

This community-driven planning work gets implemented particularly through our climate work. Climate work in cities is very amenable to community-driven planning. We've also worked with restorative economics: exploring the relationships between solidarity, economies, land reparations, and cooperative economics.

Our most recent area of work has been transformative cultural strategy. Here we think about how our communities are involved in shaping narratives and cultural experiences. What narratives do we want to integrate into our cultural forms? How do we work in collaboration with people in various forms of media and local artists to create a culture of the future?

Hope Mohr:

Can you say more about examples or stories of how communities can gain agency or a voice in creating culture? What does that look like?

Aisha Shillingford:

One of the Movement Strategy Center fellows, Calvin Williams, has done a lot of work with the Oakland Cultural Council thinking about how do you invite communities to envision the future of their city. How do people find themselves in positions of relative power and therefore with the capacity to implement that vision and to engage community in that vision? How do you bring together a collective of cultural strategists to share that vision? 

Calvin curated an exhibit at the Betti Ono Gallery that was based on Afro-futurism. He used the context of that show to invite people to engage in the idea of a long range future for the city from their perspective as community members. It was a reverberating process because he invited people to talk about Afro-futurism in an innocuous way, through prints and some paintings, but people came in and felt like it was a space reflecting them. And that's really interesting especially as downtown Oakland undergoes a wave of transformation that people feel disconnected from. They're not sure what the new buildings going up are. Like, can we access the We Work building? Is this for us or not? And with this exhibit, people would walk in off the street and engage in conversations around what do we want Oakland to be looking like because we didn't have a say in these new buildings? How do we express our desires? The next step would be to collectivize those desires and then translate them into policy.

Cherie Hill:

I'm attracted to long range visioning. I don't feel like there's much opportunity where we as a community can think about 100 years from now. Especially now during COVID, I feel like it's day by day. Can you share more about long range visioning and how you've seen it change people's work?

Aisha Shillingford:

One thing that I learned about long range vision is from indigenous communities, who started the idea that we have a sacred responsibility for both the places that we're in and also for seven generations of our descendants, whether blood descendants or whoever will be in this place.

There are three stories I want to tell. There’s a project in Idaho called “We choose all of us.” They want to have an Idaho where everyone feels welcome. This project is aspirational because it doesn’t reflect the current political reality of their state. But over time, it has attracted people who, even as they're grappling with their relationship with communities that they may not have grown up in or feel connected to, feel connected to the idea that we choose all of us.

We recently did an exercise where we invited people to imagine that in 100 years, human beings are no longer the dominant rulers so other beings have taken responsibility for governing the planet. We invited people to imagine what governance might look like if it had the attributes of other beings like stars, planets, water, or earth. This exercise invited folks to step out of deeply held assumptions about how we manage our resources, finances and relationships. The exercise created some powerful strategies.

In the transitions network, where we generated a 100 year strategy together. We asked questions like, what's water like in 100 years? How are children learning in 100 years? How are we treating the elderly in 100 years? Based on the responses, we generated a beautiful mural. We also found that a lot of folks in our network went off and started aligning their work with aspects of that vision that felt most prescient to them.  

Recently we had a gathering at a former plantation in North Carolina. While we were there, some people felt uncomfortable, like there were things that were not resolved in the energy of the space. Being interdependent has to involve both acknowledging the past and also being brave about what we want the future to look like. We need to repair harm. But we're not going to try to reverse harms by flipping them, that is, by exercising harm on communities we feel may have caused harm to our communities in the past, or even present. We want to transition to black liberation and indigenous sovereignty in a peaceful way that is desirable and interdependent for all people. That's the vision.

Hope Mohr:

That's inspiring. Thank you for sharing those stories. We're talking with you in the context of a festival called Power Shift: Improvisation, Activism, and Community. We're curious about whether improvisation comes into your practice and what that looks like? Sometimes I think of improvisation as choice-making within constraints. As an organizer, how do you balance strategy and improvisation?

Aisha Shillingford:

In our work, we're guided by a North star. And there are milestones or stopping points along the way. But if a storm happens, we're going to probably get thrown off course. Strategy is figuring out what to do in that moment. We know what skills we need to get there. We know that we need to travel with people who know how to navigate and with people that we can trust. But we may have to adapt our path as we go. We know where we're trying to go but everything else is adaptation, improvisation, and emergence. When you practice improvisation, your body gets used to not knowing and then trusting and then adapting.

Cherie Hill:

Is there anything else you want people to know about MSC or about your own work?

Aisha Shillingford:

I'm trying to do a collage practice as a way to allow things to flow. It’s a work in progress to let the art tell me what it wants to be. That’s my way of navigating unknowns right now. It’s a practice of every day waking up and starting to approach life like I knew it, and then saying, wait, I don't know if that thing is going to be there anymore. I've been doing collage as a speculative practice. It’s putting together a bunch of things that didn't start off together. Rearranging and adapting things so that they fit into a brand new context that also might seem impossible feels like a good exercise right now. 

Hope Mohr:

Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and your experience, it's really inspiring.  

Cherie Hill:

Thank you so much, Aisha, for spending this time with us and sharing all the amazing thinking, embodiment, and planning that goes into your community organizing work. It’s been really great to get to know you more through your stories and your examples. We really appreciate having you. 

Aisha Shillingford:

It’s my pleasure. Thanks so much for the opportunity to reflect together.

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If you want to engage in embodied long range visioning, please join us for The Keystone of the Arch: Embodied 100 Year Vision, a workshop with Tammy Johnson and Yalini Dream, part of Power Shift: Improvisation, Activism, and Community.

On Embodied Feeling, Intentionality, and Decolonizing Movement

By Suzette Sagisi

A note from HMD

With the intention of sharing learning about the work of decolonizing our physical practices, HMD is happy to share reflections by dancer and HMD Board member Suzette Sagisi on a recent project, BLACKSTAR, with choreographer Maurya Kerr. 

An Introduction from Maurya Kerr

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, blackstar (a performance that was set to premiere April 2020), became BLACKSTAR (a film). I entered this isolated, personalized, sheltering-in-place process with the dancers armed with one movement phrase and an urgency to explore what a decolonized mind, body, and imagination might look like, feel like, act as, dream as. And ‘armed’ feels regrettably apt, given the savagery of white supremacy. All of us (including white people) have been deeply colonized—some minds, bodies, and imaginations of course much more violently and fatally than others. 

What I expressed at the close of BLACKSTAR’s initial screening can’t be said enough: don’t get galvanized only by Black and brown trauma and death and the spectacle that gets made of them. Please get as galvanized, if not more, by Black and brown joy, quietude, brilliance, tenderness, and dreaming. 

BLACKSTAR exists as my documentation of our communal endeavor, of their bravery. I also asked each dancer to offer me some document of their process: below is Suzette’s brilliant self-reflection.

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On Embodied Feeling, Intentionality, and Decolonizing Movement
By Suzette Sagisi

Throughout the process of making BLACKSTAR, a dance film created by Maurya Kerr of tinypistol, Maurya asked us, “How might a decolonized body move?” My attempt to answer involved a further question, “What is virtuosity?” The necessity of the second question felt both important and unnerving. White neo-colonial (1) standards of dance (of most things, really) are so deeply pervasive and stubborn that what is considered virtuosic in American and European concert dance is inextricably linked to what white culture has colonized and continues to colonize.

“Oh, look,” I'd tell myself as I worked through the movement phrase for BLACKSTAR, “your colonized mind—and, in turn, body—is showing.” 

My internalized oppression runs deep.

It’d show up in many ways. In rehearsals, I would catch myself defaulting to conditioned habits and wanting to demonstrate certain abilities that are accepted widely as virtuosic in white concert dance in America and Europe. For example, I would showcase my ballet and postmodern training, attempt to look as long and as thin as possible on camera, and prioritize abstraction, which involved trying to not appear ‘too’ emotional or aggressive. I was dancing for the white spectator. But that felt off and unsatisfying and irresponsible to the work, myself, and my pursuit of more culturally equitable dance. 

I also tried actively to incorporate movement elements from my hip hop background, but that seemed to me like playing the ‘othered’ role of feeding into stereotypes of how Black and brown bodies move. I’ve learned that, in amplifying a distinction between what white supremacist culture asserts as the aesthetic standards of concert dance and what it considers ‘urban’ or ‘ethnic’ or ‘gritty,’ Black and brown bodies performing the latter often become more agreeable to white audiences. Reductive, yes. Oppressive? Also yes.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm performing being brown by exaggerating or making obvious my decision to hit or pop certain moves, display rhythmic variance, ride a beat, or “be grounded” because I've ended up a reflection of the way others in power—mostly white people—see and value me. And by doing so, I perpetuate their biased expectations. This loop of white expectation and my performative response continues ad infinitum until I don’t know where the caricature of me ends and the real me begins. What helps me to find that delineation, or, more strictly, a grounding, is when I don’t have to dance for white-dominant audiences or in primarily white spaces. Usually when I’m with my Black and brown friends, with my family, or alone in my room without task or expectation, I can be and dance like myself, still playing with rhythms and dime stops and incorporating other hip hop elements as well as elements from my ballet and modern training. But it’s no longer a show. And I can feel the difference. 

I don’t want to or believe that I need to dismiss completely my Eurocentric training because it is also a part of me. As Peiling Kao, a dance educator, artist, and friend of mine said, “I don’t want to devalue what I have cultivated in my dance trainings, even though they are mostly European/American, because they are all mine.” They belong to artists of color, too. What I reject is the idea that ballet, modern, and postmodern are the only or superior representations of a universal virtuosity. And even more, I want to safeguard against the assumption that they are necessarily examples of virtuosity at all.

As a non-Black person of color, specifically, a Filipinx-American, I have both suffered and benefited from white supremacy culture. In dance—in everything—I am trying to both i) exist and move as my full self in my brown body and ii) confront my own privilege in that body.

During the BLACKSTAR rehearsal process, Maurya gave us a task: to embody feeling. Each of us dancers took on this task separately through personal research. We began with learning a movement phrase that was gestural and at times extremely kinetic. Maurya provided us imagery to help us better understand the vocabulary and origins of the movement. For instance, she described one specific movement as “a reaching across with a feeling of both feathery and furry...smaller, bigger, diaphanous.”  

In thinking about these images alongside doing the moves, I found myself unfelicitous in completing the task of embodied feeling (which Maurya defined as distinct from dancing emotionally). I felt like I was hiding behind layers of ideas and habits. I felt like I was leaning heavily on the imagery and, even more so, my beliefs about them. Everything was so noisy in my head! Maybe all the thinking and goal-reaching was superfluous. Counterproductive even.

Perhaps the body is enough. Perhaps my body is enough.

I thought of the questions at hand. A search for decolonized bodies moving. A dropping of attempts at “virtuosity.” And more than a trying on, what I (read: my body) needed was a letting go.

So, I just did the moves. Over again and in different ways. And I listened to my body. Insofar as I could, I did only what I wanted with the movement. Then I felt something. Sometimes it was joy. Lots of times it was anger (about not ‘getting it right,’ about how tired my body was, about loving dance styles that don’t love me back, about Black people being killed, about structures that are antithetical to equity, about getting older, about not doing enough, about thinking too much, about defending my and my loved ones’ experiences to white acquaintances, and a thousand other things that were and remain opaque to me). 

This alternative approach of release and listening through repetition evoked a kind of moving for me that was qualitatively different than my first attempts. I was able to get to something that was nuanced and honest and cathartic. Intentionality made the difference. I use the word ‘intentionality’ here not in the colloquial sense, but as defined by contemporary Western philosophy of mind and language, i.e., the representation or contents of my mental states or what my mental states are about. I was able to tap into this mode of moving and feeling when the intentional object was my moving body, as opposed to my thinking about moving from or with my emotions. 

Any resulting emotion I had from moving felt okay so long as the intentional object wasn’t a concept, but the body itself. That’s to say, with this approach, what I was reacting to—what I was feeling and thinking about—was what my body was doing. I understand this difference in intentionality as the causal arrow going in the opposite direction of my initial efforts. Rather than first having an idea that elicits a feeling, which then moves me, I move first and whatever I feel—joy, pain, freedom—results from the movement. A more accurate term than ‘embodied feeling,’ then, is ‘felt embodiment.’

The movement is enough. My body is enough.

This somatic practice of felt embodiment, a kind of de-intellectualizing of the process towards decolonized moving, allowed me to center myself and my own body without the myriad normative lenses and overtly (and overly) scholastic approach towards which I often gravitate. Frequently, and here in this case, I find a Western academic approach to be an instance of colonization. My turning to the body itself and listening to it seemed less so. 

Admittedly, talk of the body as the object of intentionality might be criticized as replicating the colonizing mind-body split. That is not my aim. I want to assert not an account of mind-body duality, but instead a kind of embedded sense of thought and feeling within the body. Because the body is a thinking and feeling thing, I do not need to focus on a separate additional thought (or image or idea or emotion) in order to access or express through movement what I am thinking or feeling. 

Having the body itself, rather than an image, feeling, or narrative, as the intentional object resulted in an encouraging outcome of feeling embodied and embodying my feelings. One compelling explanation as to why this is the case is that the human body has some kind of special, direct access to what human beings need. For my brown body, what I need is a centering and caring of Black and brown bodies, and the very act of doing so is a decolonizing one.

I don’t know what a fully decolonized moving body looks or feels or acts like or if it is even possible as long as we live and move in our current structures. But I am learning what the process of getting closer to such an ideal might be. I believe that the oppressed, othered body—in this case, I am speaking particularly about the Black or brown body—decolonizes itself when it sheds what’s been forced upon it. I believe that Black and brown movers decolonize themselves when they care for and center themselves, take up space, and move so that they may exist freely and fully, whether in ways they’ve been excluded from or that have been dangerous for them historically and culturally, or in ways that white supremacy culture tries constantly to dismiss or discredit or appropriate. It’s the non-Black body, such as mine, listening to, holding space for, and moving in true solidarity with Black bodies. (2) It’s more Black and brown movers in all spaces. I see these as acts of returning to our decolonized selves.

Watch BLACKSTAR HERE.

Watch a clip of Suzette in BLACKSTAR HERE.

(1) Here I say ‘neo-colonial’ (‘colonizing’ would also work) in an attempt to account for different temporalities, but I haven’t found a clearcut or satisfying solution for talking about different types and times of colonization.

(2) I am still trying to figure out how to do this, especially in isolation with no shared physical space. The BLACKSTAR process happened during COVID-19. I’m curious about how it might have been different if I could have interacted in person or virtually with the other dancers.

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Born and raised in California, Suzette has danced for artists such as Beyoncé and Fabolous, and has appeared on shows such as MTV's Made and America's Best Dance Crew. Her company credits include Hope Mohr Dance, Sandra Chatterjee, Maurya Kerr’s tinypistol, Brice Mousset, James Alsop, Gerald Casel Dance Company, dazaun dance, Katie Faulkner's little seismic, Zhukov Dance Theatre, and others. Suzette holds a bachelor's degree from UCLA and a master's degree from Tufts University, both in Philosophy. She serves on the board of HMD and resides in Berlin, Germany. 

You can reach Suzette at sagisi@gmail.com or on IG @suzettesagisi. 

Maurya Kerr is a Bay Area-based choreographer, educator, performer, poet, and the artistic director of tinypistol. She was an ODC artist-in-residence from 2015 to 2018 and holds an MFA from Hollins University, focusing her thesis on how systemic racism denies Black and brown people access to wonderment—her choreographic work is an extension of reclaiming birthright to wonder. Maurya was a member of Alonzo King LINES Ballet for twelve years and teaches extensively in their educational programs. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Hole In The Head Review, Blue River Review, River Heron Review, Inverted Syntax, and Chestnut Review.

You can reach Maurya at mk@tinypistol.com or on IG @tinypistol.

Taking Action toward Distributed Leadership

by Hope Mohr

This post is the second in a series about HMD’s move to distributed leadership.
The first post (on “Stepping Back”) is here.

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Value-Driven Action

Sometimes a model of distributed leadership in the arts is expedient—founders move on or die and a team must step in to fill the gap. Distributed leadership models have clear benefits, including:

·      Maximizing creativity by opening up space for everyone’s self-expression;

·      Increasing staff ownership over the work;

·      Creating a more sustainable, resilient organization by locating energy in multiple people and avoiding founder burnout;

·      Creating opportunities for learning and change within the organization.

HMD did not decide to move to distributed leadership for any of these reasons. We did not make this decision because it was expedient. In fact, the work is slow, time-consuming, and expensive. I was motivated by a moral imperative bound up in my longstanding activist commitments. On the Continuum of Becoming an Anti-Racist Organization, a “commitment to institutional re-structuring” is an essential step in becoming a “Fully Inclusive Anti-Racist Multicultural Organization in a Transformed Society.”  

HMD began the work of moving to a model of distributed leadership in the fall of 2019. At that point, I had become uncomfortable with the disconnect between our internal structure, which was a traditional, hierarchical, white-led nonprofit, and our public programs, which had become increasingly driven by cultural and racial equity values. In my personal and working relationships with artists of color, I heard increasing calls for white people to step back. I wanted to apply that call to action to myself.

The Subtext of Action

When distributed leadership is anchored in a commitment to cultural equity and racial justice, the action looks differently. More is possible. More is at stake. The actions must be more than cosmetic. The subtext of the action—the stories we tell about it, the language we use to describe it, and the cultural fabric around the action within the organization itself—must also be value-aligned.

When white people take action to address inequities, what stories do we tell ourselves and others about our motivations? Do we position ourselves as saviors? As martyrs? How are these narratives complicit with the systems we claim to oppose? How do we twist them to support our self-image and self-interest? (Progressive impulses so quickly become funding proposals.) How do we engage what Julietta Singh calls “the humanitarian imaginary”—the belief that our politics can ever be separated from our privilege?

In his article, The Nonprofit Paradox, David La Piana writes, “Nonprofits tend to recreate within their own organizational cultures the problems they are trying to solve in society.” La Piana also writes, “When people hold a very strong belief, they usually hold, unconsciously, its shadow side.” I am a staunch public advocate for sharing and giving away cultural power. Where in my life and in the work itself does the shadow of this belief appear? 

I recently realized that in my zealous insistence on moving the organization to a model of distributed leadership, I had neglected to allow Cherie Hill and Karla Quintero—my colleagues and co-directors stepping up into power—to have their own time and space to vision a future for the organization. In pushing hard for what I tell myself is a progressive goal, I tend to replicate the very dynamics I want to change. Even writing these blog posts reveals my need to control the narrative. 

This blog post sets forth a host of concrete actions toward an equity-driven model of distributed leadership. But underneath all of these actions must be an over-arching commitment to examine—indeed, to seek out—how organizational and interpersonal issues interact.    

Taking Action

Before talking about concrete actions toward a model of distributed leadership, I want to emphasize that this work is slow, iterative, and emergent. It is not a checklist of discrete surgical tasks; it’s an unending unraveling. Changing a few job titles will not result in meaningful change for an organization. Changing how institutions work requires changing the way people relate, which requires trust, flexibility, and communication. The work is about loss and feelings and power. Messy stuff.

But taking action is essential. Especially now when it’s trendy to make statements of solidarity with people of color and “different” bodies. How far does solidarity really go? Organizations need to walk the talk. And you have to start somewhere.

In April 2020, with approval from the HMD Board, we made the public announcement that HMD was shifting to a model of distributed leadership.  Following that announcement, over the past several months, HMD has taken the following concrete steps toward an equity-driven model of distributed leadership.

In the effort not to make this a virtue signaling exercise, I am framing each action in terms of “What if?” Because this is not a retrospective success story. These are baby steps. Experiments. Aspirational gestures that will hopefully crack open space for possibility.

What if we begin a learning and listening campaign? We have had many, many meetings among staff to talk about this work. We have created a designated staff meeting each month just to talk about the work of distributed leadership because it’s too much to deal with in our regular staff meetings (where we’re trying to do the usual work of an arts organization e.g., implement programs and raise money). We’ve met with other non-profit leaders who have navigated similar shifts. We sent a survey out to artists, donors, and advisors to solicit their opinion about the organization and its future.

What if we move from a white-led hierarchy to a multi-racial and multi-ethnic co-directorship? Many arts organizations have multiple directors; this itself is not radical. I know several arts organizations that have shared leadership, but no meaningful institutional commitment to cultural and racial equity. But a co-directorship can be one element in an organization’s larger commitment to sharing and giving power to artists that historically have not had a seat at the table. Bringing multiple voices of difference into curatorial decisions is essential in order to trouble the singular aesthetic standard (Western European ideas of mastery and virtuosity) that has dominated arts programming for so long.

The Bridge Project, HMD’s curatorial platform, is now a co-directorship among myself, Cherie Hill, and Karla Quintero. That means that Cherie, Karla and I now jointly make all program decisions. Curatorial power is layered. It’s not sufficient for a founder merely to listen to input; the leadership team must equally share power to make final calls. Curatorial power includes not only the power to envision and propose ideas, but also to implement ideas. Implementation power requires knowledge about the organization’s financial capacity. This means all co-directors need equal access to organizational budgets and an equal say over allocation of resources. Implementation power also implicates the power to write contracts, cut checks, and call funders.

What if we implement pay equity among staff? You have to compensate people financially for stepping up into power. Pay equity is a necessary step in creating a culture of mutual respect, accountability, and trust. Historically, I was on salary and other staff were paid hourly. In order to move toward pay equity, I moved from salary to hourly. All three co-directors now are being paid the same hourly rate. In conjunction with this move, we raised HMD’s staff hourly rate to account for inflation, the cost of living in the Bay Area, and W.A.G.E. recommendations. Now I’m tracking my hours for the first time. Now all three co-directors are accountable for our time in the same way. Now I’m building a boundary between my personal life and the work, which is crucial when a white founder’s personality is entangled in the organization. Tracking my time also translates the work into discrete, tangible tasks (for example, I now know that I spend a certain number of hours a week on artist contracts), which makes it easier to delegate the work.

What if we disentangle public programs from founder personality? Too often, founder ego and aesthetics drive artist selection for residencies, mentorship programs, and performance opportunities. As the white founder, I’m stepping away from selecting artists for our Community Engagement Residency (CER). From now on, these decisions will be made by a panel of former CER artists, in dialogue with Cherie Hill, HMD’s Director of Art in Community. We’ve launched a separate website for The Bridge Project and are implementing a new logo for The Bridge Project that does not have “HMD” embedded in it. Further brand changes are under discussion. These moves are all part of a larger organizational culture shift away from the cult(ure) of founder personality.

What if we value-align the Board? Part of the vision for HMD’s model of distributed leadership involves moving the Board away from a traditional nonprofit Board composed of people with access to money and social networks and toward a Board composed of artists and activists. Change in Board membership is healthy, especially at turning points in organizational growth. In the wake of our announcement that we were moving to a model of distributed leadership, three Board members decided, in conversation with me, that it was time to step down. Now 100% of HMD’s Board is working artists. 50% are people of color.

Board transitions in arts nonprofits can feel tricky because often Board members become friends. More rigorous and formal practices around term limits are helpful in de-personalizing Board transitions.  It’s also helpful to let go of outdated ideas of what a nonprofit Board looks like (wealthy, well-connected people who can “give or get”). Building a value-aligned Board requires a different set of intentions. Rather than building a Board from a set of “shoulds,” (“We should recruit someone with marketing experience. We should recruit a lawyer.”) what if people from the community that we serve compose the organization’s governing body? A Board of artists and activists can still fulfill their legal duties of organizational oversight. Value-alignment creates a different kind of energy. The funding will come.

What if we bring artists into positions of power over aesthetics and money? For HMD, distributed leadership must go beyond a democratic workplace; beyond co-directorship among staff; beyond a diversity mindset. We must make space for artists, and in particular artists of color and other artists of “difference,” to have power over aesthetics and resources. In addition to bringing more working artists onto the Board and having former and current artist partners select future artist partners, we’re talking about a paid artist council to make curatorial and budget decisions (a council with actual power, not just an unacknowledged or unpaid focus group). We’re talking about internal artist affinity groups to hold the Board and staff accountable to cultural equity values.

What if we work with an equity-driven consultant? To help us navigate these power shifts mindfully, we’re working with LeaderSpring, an equity-driven consulting group. This partnership has helped to create neutral space, an outside eye, and benchmarks for the work. Our work with LeaderSpring, which will unfold over the course of a year, involves meetings among staff, Board, and artist partners to articulate our values behind the work and to determine what model of distributed leadership best reflects those values. The work includes revising job descriptions, the way decisions happen, organizational by-laws, policies, articles of incorporation, Board prospectus, and figuring out how to communicate the work to the outside world.

What if we empower staff? Rather than a founder handing over a pre-cooked position or program, it’s important to inventory staff interests and availability and then to respond by tailoring spheres of responsibility to the people who will be stepping up into the work. It’s also important to give staff who are stepping up into positions of power time to vision. In this way, staff can have ownership over the future of the organization. The shift to distributed leadership has to go slowly enough to allow for staff input and visioning time.  

What if white founders and artistic directors do anti-racist work? What if we engage with what we want to avoid? Feelings often sabotage aspirational values. (A later blog post in this series will look at barriers to organizational change). White founders need to clean their own house. I’ve found that the most effective anti-racist trainings focus on the emotional subtext of anti-racist work. Awareness of my own defensive habits invites me to notice when these habits appear; to choose a different way of showing up; to be more present for difficult conversations; to be more committed to the work of sharing and giving up power. This is lifelong practice.

What if we bring our community into the work? We convened a series of community meetings about the work with artists, Board members, and advisors. We paid working artists $100 for each meeting they attended. Participants included, in addition to HMD staff and LeaderSpring’s Safi Jiroh: Hannah Ayasse, Julian Carter, Gerald Casel, Tristan Ching, Chibueze Crouch, Zoe Donnellycolt, Tracy Taylor Grubbs, Belinda He, Jarell Phillips, Jen Norris, Bhumi B. Patel, randy reyes, Suzette Sagisi, Jane Selna, David Szlasa, Julie Tolentino, and Megan Wright.

These community meetings were both generative and challenging. We encouraged frankness. I often felt vulnerable and exposed. But more than anything, I felt grateful for the push and for the trust that people offered by participating.

People in these community meetings voiced vastly different ideas about what HMD should do, from dismantling to the organization altogether to various visions of evolution. At the close of the final community meeting, each participant was asked: What’s one recommendation you have for HMD in doing the work of distributed leadership? Here are those responses to that culminating prompt (listed anonymously):

·      Put money into the conversations versus the products—conversations with other organizations, other leaders, and the community. This work has the ability to iterate out for others.

·      Take the next 6 months to a year to focus only on internal and interorganizational change and sharing that. Do nothing else.

·      Make more time for conversations about this work. 

·      Get the word out, get more of the community involved. Hold regular meetings for the process. Consider going into other spaces to learn and listen.

·      Clarify the purpose of the artmaking piece and the community-facing and social practice. Critical thinking and community engagement don’t have to be mutually exclusive.  

·      Commit to an activist model of working with affinity groups so that there are multiple groups speaking into the organization and the Board. Instead of using the old model of inviting people into an existing model, recognize that bringing together different co-directors involves understanding how different people use time and learn. Instead of just “idea-making,” allow a new way of working to emerge that allows for different ways of relating to time. If HMD does this internal work, that understanding will be in place when the organization turns to working with artists. 

·      Whenever public facing action does happen, give people autonomy over their conversations and creative impulses. Don’t require a report back or a conversation with HMD.

·      Who is and who isn’t at the table? Whose table is it? With regards to alliances and partners, what tables are in the room? Who isn’t even in the room at all?

·      Staff should take six months to organize with each other and speak with and learn from each other separate from the concerns of working with HMD. Report out to the people who have been involved in these community meetings.

·      Take time for this work. Be transparent and share out structural decisions that HMD makes about this work.

·      Raise more money. 

·      Seek and share clarity about the separation and overlap between community organizing and artmaking/art production.

·      Give credit to ideas that have come up in these conversations. Serve communities of color. Budget in for healing. Budget for long-term commitments to artists. Advocate for artists. What is your actual capacity? What are your limitations? Don’t over-extend yourself as an organization. A white-led organizational coalition feels important.

·      Budget in for staff self-care. Don’t be afraid to rebuild from the ground up. Don’t be afraid to cede power to queer, trans, black, brown, and people of color. Decenter and dismantle whiteness as much as possible in every aspect of the organization.

·      In the process of wanting to decenter whiteness and cultural equity work, what shows up? Do the internal work so that when community gathers, the organization has the capacity to create space where all views are welcome and where people feel safe to express what they need. It’s slow-going. Take a lot of time to invest in this work.

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Upcoming post:

Beyond Restructuring: Shifting the Culture of Arts Organizations 

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HMD is partnering with LeaderSpring to move to an equity-driven model of distributed leadership. For more information go to https://www.leaderspring.org/.

Some Notes on “Stepping Back”

by Hope Mohr

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This post is the first in a series reflecting on HMD’s ongoing work of shifting the organization to an equity-driven model of distributed leadership.  These reflections come in the midst of the work, without a sense of where it will take us.

I’m writing in the first person. The writing therefore reflects my personal blindspots. It’s also only 1/3 of the picture: I’ve been moving through this work in collaboration with my co-directors, Karla Quintero and Cherie Hill, who have their own experiences of this work that they’ll share as they feel called to do so. (They have also reviewed this post). I want to thank Karla and Cherie for their partnership, vision, and generosity in doing this work. I want to thank consultant Safi Jiroh of LeaderSpring for holding space for us to do this work. And I want to thank the artists and advisors who have been our thought partners and open-hearted participants in this ongoing process (in no particular order): Bhumi B. Patel, Suzette Sagisi, Megan Wright, David Szlasa, Tracy Taylor Grubbs, Chibueze Crouch, Zoe Donnellycolt, Hannah Ayasse, Jarell Phillips, randy reyes, Daria Garina, Julie Tolentino, Gerald Casel, Jen Norris, Jane Selna, Belinda He, Tristan Ching, and Julian Carter.

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HMD’s process of moving to a model of distributed leadership began about a year ago. When HMD made the announcement that we were beginning this work (see this blog post), I received a host of questions and comments from donors, Board members, patrons, and artists that included:

“What does this actually mean?”

“Aren’t you afraid of alienating donors?” 

“What about you as an artist?”

From white people, I got this question: “I don’t know where I fit into this new vision of the organization.”

And, before the killing of George Floyd, also this question (also from a white person): “Why are you doing such political work right now?” 

Response from artists of color has been overwhelmingly positive.

I’m writing these posts so that this internal work is transparent and accessible to the public. The work of re-structuring arts organizations must be outward-facing so the learning doesn’t happen merely behind closed doors. Value-driven distributed cultural leadership, by its nature, is necessarily more than an internal affair among staff: it is about giving power to artists and in particular, artists who historically have not been in positions of power within cultural institutions. And so this work must happen in relationship and in dialogue with an organization’s community. (Part of the work of distributed leadership is clarifying who your community is).

Sharing and giving away power in an arts organization is messy and difficult. In today’s fraught call-out culture, it’s tempting to want to hide our shortcomings and vulnerabilities. I am writing from inside the imperfection and unknowing as a way to normalize the fallibility of anti-racist work.

Another reason I’m writing this series of blog posts is: white people need to talk to other white people about giving up power. For too long, people of color have been called upon to do this educational and emotional work. In the words of feminist writer Judit Moschkovich, “it is not the duty of the oppressed to educate the oppressor.”[i] There’s an insidious tendency, even in the work of de-centering whiteness, to center whiteness. I don’t want to focus on whiteness in the same way it’s centered in our culture, but rather, in the words of writer Claudia Rankine, with the awareness that “[w]hiteness is the problem, and whites are the ones who need to fix themselves. So you sort of need to center them.”[ii]

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There are a lot of calls right now for white cultural leaders to step back and step down in order to dismantle white supremacy. In some cases, this is entirely appropriate. In other cases, the abrupt disengagement of a white leader is not necessarily the ideal course of action. I want to unpack the complexity of stepping back.

Knowing when and how to “step back” can be confusing and difficult for many white people. After years of struggling to build their careers, many white artists feel wronged if they forego opportunity. For white women, cultural equity and feminism may feel at odds: stepping back may feel contrary to feminist teachings that tell women to take up space. These complexities can contribute to a failure of allyship even when intentions are good. [iii] 

I’m interested in de-centering whiteness not as a way to hide, but as a way of holding space for others while remaining engaged and accountable. Sometimes white people use “de-centering whiteness” to justify a retreat from difficult conversations. When faced with challenges to their power, white people can assume a variety of defensive postures, including: denial, defensiveness, perfectionism, retreat into intellectualism, self-absorption, silence, criticism, and numbness. [iv]  These defensive postures prevent white people from engaging fully in the work of confronting and changing existing power dynamics.

In my own experience of transitioning HMD from a historically hierarchical arts organization into a model of distributed leadership, I have discovered that inside stepping back, there is a choice. I can step back and withdraw emotionally. Or I can step aside and stay accountable and engaged. At times, a better image for the work might be “stepping to the side”: making space for other voices while staying in relationship.

It’s crucial that we not use de-centering whiteness as a way of bringing people of color into toxic structures. I don’t want to make, as Tomi Obaro writes, “a few token hires who are placed into the same system, forced to do all the hard work of undoing years of systemic harm, and eventually burn out and leave the [arts] altogether, thoroughly disillusioned.” Obaro continues: “What about a justice that is more radical, more forward-looking, one that does not perpetuate existing power structures with a slightly browner tinge?” Let’s de-center whiteness to make space for new models.

In making space for other voices, white people must be mindful not to dump the work on the shoulders of people of color without ensuring that capacities and support systems are in place. Also, when a white cultural leader steps back from socially engaged work, it also threatens to reify the assumption that socially engaged art is not white people’s work, but the domain of people of color. How can white people redistribute power without avoiding the structural work of anti-racism? In stepping back, how can white people not withdraw our resources, networks, and position, but connect people of color directly with these existing assets? When white leaders in the arts step back, it creates crucial opportunities for white donors to demonstrate more inclusive cultural philanthropy by investing in leaders of color, not only in historically white-led organizations undergoing leadership change, but also in organizations founded by and for people of color. (See the Helicon Collaborative’s Not Just Money: Equity Issues in Cultural Philanthropy for more insights into redistributing cultural funding).

In undertaking this work, I’ve faced resistance from white donors, many of whom are friends and family. Some don’t understand what this work has to do with me as an artist or with them as arts patrons. In response to a survey that HMD sent out regarding our shift to distributed leadership, one respondent said that they had always thought HMD’s purpose was to be a place for me to express my artistic vision; was it necessary for me to give up this vision to address inequities?

Let’s imagine a space where artistic excellence and politics are not mutually exclusive. Artists from historically marginalized communities often have no choice but to intertwine politics with their art. Their art is saturated with history by necessity because there is no possibility of living otherwise. In contrast, for many white artists, integrating artmaking and politics feels optional. In fact, there’s a long tradition of white artists believing that they need to isolate themselves from politics in order to create (this is what author Jess Row refers to as the “white autonomy of the imagination”). Let’s change this double standard. Let’s expect that repairing social and cultural inequities is a necessary part of my vision as a white artist.

HMD is well positioned to do this work because we have strong relationships both with people in positions of power (funders and wealthy white donors, for example) and with artists who identify as coming from historically marginalized communities. What an excellent opportunity to invest energy and resources where they are most needed. What an excellent opportunity for dialogue and learning. To HMD’s supporters, I want to say: this is our work. This is creative practice. 

Now is the time to expand the mission of the arts. An artist’s work right now is not to burrow inward, but to open outward. We need to find new terms on which to make art—new terms on which to exist. Some days this does not look like making art, but having conversations about white accountability. Other days it looks like exploring an idea of craft that does not come from the editorial impulse, but from a place of permission: welcoming in mess and that which does not “fit.” Other days it looks like questioning the aesthetic lineage that sits in my cells.

The point is, it’s all creative practice. And it’s all necessary.

The work of value-aligning arts organizations is not only about dismantling the walls that separate us, but also the walls inside of us.

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Stay tuned for the next post in this series: Actions toward Distributed Leadership

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[i] Judit Moschkovich, “--But I Know You, American Woman,” in Gloria Anzaldua and Cherie Moraga, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 2n ed., 1981), 79.

[ii] Salamishah Tillet, “Claudia Rankine Flies the Unfriendly Skies,” N.Y. Times, March 11, 2020, AR 18.

[iii] See Aruna D’Souza, Whitewalling: Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts, (Badlands, 2018) (setting forth case studies in how white allyship has failed in the visual arts world).

[iv] I take this from the wisdom, teachings, and resources of the anti-racism groups Courage of Care and Stronghold. For more information visit http://courageofcare.org/ and  https://www.wearestronghold.org/

HMD is partnering with LeaderSpring in our equity-driven work toward distributed leadership. More information about LeaderSpring is available at https://www.leaderspring.org/.

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A version of this content will appear in my book, Curating as Community Organizing, forthcoming from the National Center for Choreography and the University of Akron Press.

moving toward distributed leadership

Dear Friends, 

We, the staff of HMD—Cherie Hill, Hope Mohr, and Karla Quintero—write this as team.

For many months we have been imagining a different future for HMD. We share this news not as a form of virtue signaling, but to be transparent about how we're aligning our internal structures with the cultural and racial equity values that drive our public programs.

There is no such thing as a race-neutral arts organization; every arts organization is producing either racial inequity or equity. HMD was founded and has been led by a white woman since 2008. For white-led organizations, a commitment to institutional re-structuring is an essential step in becoming a fully inclusive, anti-racist, multicultural organization. As HMD’s programs have become increasingly driven by a commitment to cultural and racial equity, it has become clear that there is a pressing need for the organization to evolve toward distributed leadership and increase artist ownership over programmatic decisions. Only in this way will we align our internal structures with the values that drive our programs.

This is about more than perfunctory title changes. It's about going beyond the optics of diversity or handing out checks to artists of color. It's a sea change in organizational culture.

We're committed to questioning our relationships to time, efficiency, and control: an ensemble makes decisions more slowly than a soloist. We're committed to challenging logics of self-interest and scarcity. We're committed to greater transparency with artists about budgets and funding.

We are taking action toward distributed leadership through the following steps:

• The Bridge Project is now co-directed and co-curated by Cherie Hill, Hope Mohr, and Karla Quintero.

• We’ll be working with LeaderSpring, an equity-driven consulting group, to help us navigate these shifts mindfully.

• We're moving away from the traditional model of a non-profit Board and re-imagining a Board that builds bridges between artists, activists, and professionals in other sectors.

• We’re bringing artists into decisionmaking roles in our programs; for example, by bringing former Community Engagement Residency lead artists onto the selection panel for future CER lead artists.

• We're implementing pay equity among staff.

Organizations tend to calcify. Like skilled dancers, we must constantly re-awaken ourselves to respond to a changing world.

We do this work to re-align our intentions and our organization with collective liberation. We do this work to give power to artists and artists of color. We welcome dialogue about this work so we can grow together.  

In community,
Cherie Hill, Hope Mohr, and Karla Quintero

notes on a cancelled dance

text by Hope Mohr; video by Belinda He, Jane Selna, and Karla Quintero

a thing is not seen because it is visible, but conversely, visible because it is seen 

— Socrates

we stopped

three weeks

before opening

the days bleed

a now

without excursion

our sleeping

punctured

with one another

light slices

the musky shaft

of a downed flower

spotlight pinpoint

partial spacecraft

kitchen proscenium

distant ceremony

curtain flinch

what were we doing in rehearsal
before we knew about the show

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—-

From September to March, I was co-creating a performance called Ode (to forgotten bodies) with dancers Belinda He, Jane Selna, Nataya Shoaf, and Karla Quintero in collaboration with sculptor Danae Mattes and costume designer Dana Kawano. We cancelled the performances of Ode due to the coronavirus. I asked the dancers to make videos of themselves doing the material so we would have some sort of archive of the dance. Below are some of those videos. I find them so poignant.

—HM

Above: Dancer Karla Quintero.

Above: dancer Natalya Shoaf

Above: Dancer Jane Selna.

Above: Dancer Belinda He.

Letter to the Izzies

Choreographers Katie Faulkner and Hope Mohr sent the below letter to the Isadora Duncan Dance Awards Committee (“Izzies”) on March 21, 2020.

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Dear Izzies,

We hope this finds you holding up in these uncertain and challenging times.

Thank you for your recent response to our email.  

We have great respect for everyone on the Izzies committee and for all the work you do on behalf of dance in the Bay Area. Thank you so much. We are writing because, as you know, all of this year's nominees in the Izzie category for best choreography are white. As nominees, our careers and our lives have benefitted from white privilege. Recognizing the racial diversity of the Bay Area dance community and in solidarity with Bay Area choreographers of color, we respectfully decline our Izzie nominations.  We do so with the hope of catalyzing dialogue in the dance community around the issue of implicit racial bias and to stand up for racial equity.

We invite you to share this statement publicly and at the ceremony.

If you feel it would be healing and productive, we would still welcome the chance to be in dialogue with the Izzies Committee and to work with you in crafting further responses to these important issues.  

With gratitude and in community,

Katie Faulkner and Hope Mohr

Aesthetic Equity Workshop with Liz Lerman and Paloma McGregor

Photo Essay and Participant Response by Cherie Hill

The “Aesthetic Equity” workshop, led by Liz Lerman and Paloma McGregor on October 26, 2019 at the Joe Goode Annex in San Francisco, was presented by HMD’s The Bridge Project in partnership with Yayoi Kambara, a 2019-2020 Community Engagement Residency artist leading “Aesthetic Shift: A Dance Lab for Equitable Practices." The workshop, in the words of Lerman and McGregor, “allowed for examination of movement practices from company class to compacts for collaborative performance making to the work of being in the room together. The urgency of our times demands our fresh attentiveness to decision making, imagination, and building multiple frames for our work.”

Images are ephemera from the workshop and include notes taken from small group dialogues and prompts for dialogue that were offered to the group by Lerman and McGregor. Text is by artist and educator Cherie Hill, HMD’s Community Engagement Coordinator.



Gather around the circle    

Do you agree?

Move closer

Disagree?

We spread

Bodies vary in proximity to the axis

Back and forth, back and forth

What’s your name?    

Your preferred pronouns?

Where do you come from?

half-way

access check

Aesthetic equity is ___?

Aesthetic equity is not __?

When I negotiate a contract I get nervous, put on my “professional stance,” try to not be overrun. I try to hold my own. But I wish to play.

When I write a program note/bibliography I try to be honest and sound deep. I want to be profound.

My scribe flows & curves with words. Some diagonals.

How do you depict laughing on paper? Head nods? Hand motions?

Dialogue requires understanding each other’s values.

She said shadow & light; I think spirit and soul.

Did she disagree?

In geographical mapping, sometimes we are close
and other times distant

I thought I was listening, 

but maybe I wasn’t.

An inner knowing takes over

I wonder why creating choreography is not enough?

Is this workshop about advice? Are we listening?

New partner. Oh, they’re literally talking about aesthetic equity. Ha! The beginning meets the end. No, I have not asked my dancers if they think the piece has aesthetic equity. Nope, I’m not sure if my dancers feel included in aesthetic decision-making. I don’t know if I want to ask.

Gesture, movement, gesture. I see you. My first partner is back. Gesture, movement, gesture.

Say it - “what’s equitable for me?”

Conversation continues…

——

Cherie Hill is HMD’s Community Engagement Coordinator and the Director of Community and Culture and a teaching artist at Luna Dance Institute. Hill is the artistic director of Cherie Hill IrieDance, where she researches dance, transcendence, and how the body is a vessel for metaphysical presence. Cherie has published dance research in Gender Forum and the Sacred Dance Journal and has presented at conferences such as the International Association of Black Dance Conference and the International Conference on Arts and Humanities. Cherie’s dance teaching project, “Creative Movement and the African Aesthetic” has been presented at the National Dance Education Organization and Dance TAG conferences. She has presented work on embedding dance, race, and equity into practice at NDEO, National Guild, and ACOE conferences. She is President-elect of the CA Dance Education Association, chair of Berkeley Cultural Trust’s equity and inclusion committee, and an alumna of the National Guild for Community Arts Education Leadership Institute. Cherie received her BA in Dance & Performance Studies and African American Studies from U.C. Berkeley and her MFA in Dance Choreography and Performance from the University of Colorado-Boulder.

Liz Lerman (workshop co-facilitator) is a choreographer, performer, writer, educator and speaker, and the recipient of honors including a 2002 MacArthur “Genius Grant” and a 2017 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award. Key to her artistry is opening her process to various publics, resulting in research and outcomes that are participatory, urgent, and usable. She founded Dance Exchange in 1976 and led it until 2011. Her recent work Healing Wars toured the US. Liz teaches Critical Response Process, creative research, the intersection of art and science, and the building of narrative within dance at institutions such as Harvard, Yale School of Drama, and Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Her third book is Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer. As of 2016 she is an Institute Professor at Arizona State University.

Paloma McGregor (workshop co-facilitator), originally from St. Croix, is an award-winning artist and organizer living in Harlem. Paloma’s work centers Black voices through collaborative, process-based art-making and organizing. A lover of intersections and alchemy, she develops projects in which communities of geography, practice, and values come together to laugh, make magic and transform. She has created a wide range of work, including a dance through a makeshift fishnet on a Brooklyn rooftop, a structured improvisation for a floating platform in the Bronx River and a devised multidisciplinary performance work about food justice with three dozen community members and students at U.C. Berkeley. Paloma was a 2013‐14 Artist In Residence at NYU’s Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics, a 2014-16 Artist In Residence at BAX | Brooklyn Arts Exchange, a 2016-18 New York Live Arts Live Feed Artist, and is currently a Movement Research Artist in Residence and an Urban Bush Women Choreographic Fellow. Paloma facilitates technique, creative process and community engagement workshops around the world. She toured internationally for six years with Urban Bush Women and two years with Liz Lerman/Dance Exchange, and continues to perform in project‐based work, including Skeleton Architecture, with whom she received a 2017 New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award for performance.

Race, Aesthetics, and Working in Community: From "Dancing Around Race" to "LatinXtensions"

A Conversation between David Herrera, Lead Artist in HMD’s 2019-2020 Community Engagement Residency, and HMD Artistic Director Hope Mohr

(edited and condensed from the original interview in August 2019)

David Herrera was a member of the “Dancing Around Race” artist cohort, led by Gerald Casel, HMD’s 2018-2019 Community Engagement Residency. Herrera is now one of three lead artists in HMD’s 2019-2020 Community Engagement Residency. As part of his current residency, Herrera is developing LatinXtensions, a mentorship program for Latinx choreographers. Hope Mohr is the Artistic Director of HMD’s The Bridge Project, which approaches curating as a form of community organizing. 

Photo from “Resurrection of Everyday People” by David Herrera (2019). Photo by Natalia Perez.

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David Herrera (DH):   One of the biggest things that people have been asking me is, “How are you feeling about being involved with HMD’s Community Engagement Residency when you're not comfortable with white saviors?” I want to pose this question to you, Hope. How do you see yourself in relationship to this work?  I know you've supported multiple artists. What I've enjoyed is that you stay away. And that you are purposely working with artists that either may not be represented as often or people who are not white male, cisgendered or white female, cisgendered.  

Hope Mohr (HM):  It has been a conscious decision on my part to de-center myself in the programming. As someone who is privileged and has access to resources, I see it as my responsibility to provide other artists with resources and opportunities. 

 DH: What instigated that sense of responsibility originally for you?

HM: I've been an activist ever since college, when I was super involved in the domestic violence movement. I was a Latin American studies major and I did all my fieldwork in Central America in the women's movement. After college, I was an AmeriCorps team leader of a Community Gardens team in South Central LA. For most of both experiences, I was the only white person in the situation most of the time. Working in those contexts taught me about the value of de-centering myself--making space for other people.

DH: Being here in the San Francisco dance ecosystem, when was it that you thought, "I want to help change this?"

HM: I grew up here. But I didn't live here from the mid 90s to 2005. I don't like what San Francisco has become. It's, as you know, way more white, much more privileged, richer. It's a less diverse culture in every way. That's everyone's loss. I'm very concerned about the future of San Francisco. Difference fosters creativity. What creates a healthy ecosystem for the arts is opportunity for lots of different kinds of people. So I feel like this work is a matter of life or death for the health of the artistic community here. What's the saying? Nobody's free until everybody's free.

DH: Yes.

HM: I went to law school with the idea that I was going to be a public interest lawyer. For a long time I've been trying to integrate social justice and art making. For awhile,  I tried to make work that was explicitly political, but it wasn't good art. So I switched my approach to pour my politics into curating. I’m interested in redefining curating as a form of community organizing.  

DH: When you say that the curating work is not about you, that feels different than when somebody says, “I’d like to give you $1000,” but then they use my work to secure a much larger grant. It can start to feel like, wait, did I just get used by this organization to get a much bigger grant for themselves? And I’m getting a tiny fraction of that? In the end, an organization claiming to help artists of color ends up helping themselves more than they are helping the people that they're claiming to help. It’s different when an organization is actually interested in pushing somebody upward with little interest in making it about their organization. I'm used to questioning someone's motives when there's money involved.

HM: Sure.

DH: Because there's so much tokenism.

HM: Everyone's in a hurry to program artists of color. People have good intentions. But also, it’s where the funding is. I think a lot of organizations that weren't social justice-oriented pre-Trump are trying to pivot. It's usually obvious how authentic that commitment is. An important issue is the length of the relationship between the artist and the organization. It takes time to build relationships. It doesn't happen from sharing a program on a weekend.  This work continues to be a learning curve for me. For example, the language that curators use is important. When the Community Engagement Residency program began, Julie Tolentino, the first Community Engagement Residency lead artist, wanted to use the language that her residency was for artists who “self-identified as marginalized. “ That worked for her, but it doesn’t work for everyone. I don’t want to reify marginalization. So I don’t use that word anymore in conjunction with this work. Another issue is, how can white-led organizations truly shift access to power? If white-led organizations simply become re-granting organizations—raising money and passing it on to other artists—that doesn’t shift who has direct access to the money. We need to build artist capacity, not just hand out checks.

DH: My idea for LatinXtensions was already being built when you asked me about joining the residency.  I liked that our ideas overlapped because for me, LatinXtensions is also about building a genuine community. We're hoping that the relationships are ongoing even past the 12 month mark of the Community Engagement Residency. I've told the people that are joining LatinXtensions that the work is not about me, it’s about them, and about all of us building relationships. Within that, we've spoken about voice: how do we actually build relationships that thrive?  So it's not just like, "Oh, we’re meeting just for an hour." Part of the project includes going to go into each other's processes and giving feedback, watching shows as a group at least once a month, and writing about it, creating opportunities for other Latinx, POC, and LGBTQUIA artists. The idea is to develop a multi-tiered project, so bringing in a whole new set of people next year, while keeping this year’s class.  It's a pay it forward situation.

DH: I've definitely become close to most of the Dancing Around Race cohort [the 2018-2019 Community Engagement Residency]. We speak on the phone, we see each other at performances, we invite each other to performances. Everyone in that cohort came from very different backgrounds, but it was cool to see the overlaps and also where maybe we didn't understand something about each other. I'm looking forward to that in LatinXtensions as well, because even though they're all Latinx artists, they all have different backgrounds and they all have different ideas of what being Latinx means.

DH: What I find problematic is organizations that present you or invite you to perform, but then nothing carries over after that. We help them out, by diversifying their audience, and then that's it. I like that the Community Engagement Residency is not production or performance- based.  

HM: Being in dialogue with other artists is an essential part of art practice. I'm really curious about how Dancing Around Race, as an ongoing conversation, informed the studio practices of the artists involved.  Can you talk about that?

Final public gathering as part of "the “Dancing Around Race” Community Engagement Residency (2018-2019), led by Gerald Casel.

DH: Being in the Dancing Around Race cohort definitely infiltrated my work.  A lot of times when we are making work, we don't have an intellectual process going on where we're talking or researching or confronting one another with thoughts and theories and ideas about our experiences--who we are as artists.  

HM: Although part of the value of making art is being able to go into the studio saying to myself or in a grant, “This is a dance about equity,” but then allowing the dance to become about something else. There needs to be critical thinking, but there also still has to be room for the unconscious to guide the process.  Also, I can say I want to make a work that has political integrity, but then maybe what I'm making doesn't. Sometimes there’s a disconnect between our theory and our practice. Maybe what I'm doing is not what I say I'm doing. I’m thinking of all the aspects of white supremacy culture: perfectionism, a sense of urgency, a worship of the written word, power hoarding, either/or thinking…. I'm guilty of all of them. For me to have a creative process unmarked by any of the aspects of white supremacy culture requires me to rewire my whole being. That’s overwhelming.

DH: It's scary.

HM: What does it look like in practice? I don't know. What does authorship mean if it's not flowing from white supremacy culture? That's interesting.

DH: I'm going to switch gears a little bit. Can you tell me how you see me and my organization being a part of the Community Engagement Residency?

HM: I felt like Dancing Around Race was just a beginning. What I heard from people was that it only scratched the surface.  

DH: I have to say that's true.  

HM: The project ended, but the work is not over. How can we all build on that work? It made sense to me to extend an invitation to the people who were in Gerald's cohort as a natural next step. So that's why I reached out to all of you and said, "Does anyone want to partner next year?"

DH: That’s similar to what I'm talking about doing with the LatinXtensions program.

HM: You know when you make a dance and then the show's over, and you ask yourself, what should I make next? And there's one thing from that dance that you want to carry forward. The same thing happens in community organizing. Where is the juice? Where's the energy? Let's build on that. That's the beauty of not being beholden to a static institutional agenda. We can say, "What do we want to do now? What makes sense?"

DH: It’s tough when organizations tie you down to pre-existing structures.

HM: An interesting thing is that your residency is a full year, so things can change.  

DH: It's nice to have the ability to be responsive and not think, "Whoa, Hope really wants me to do this, so we have to continue on this route."

HM: Julie Tolentino was the first CER artist and she started out by saying, "I want to work with a cohort of artists." Which she did. And then after about nine months, she was like, "You know what? I need to be in the studio by myself." That's great. Group practice informs solo practice, informs performance, informs conversation.  

DH: I wish other artists, particularly more Latinx artists, had an opportunity to be able to try something out for 12 months without feeling like they have to produce something for somebody else.  

HM: What I hope the year-long residency format offers is the space to ask: what does the work need? What does the group need? What do you need as an artist? How does the community work feed into your art practice? 

DH: What were your considerations when you choose artists for the Community Engagement Residency?

HM: Next year we're going to go to an application process, but so far, because it’s just been the beginning, it's been an organic process of being in conversation with people.  

DH: What influences do you feel the residency program has on the field of dance and performance in the Bay Area?

HM: The program is so new. It's hard to know. I do love the fact that you're still in relationship with the other Dancing Around Race artists. Maybe that is the biggest impact: building allies, relationships, collaborations. Also, I think the discomfort in the room at the last Dancing Around Race event was one measure of the program's success. Discomfort is part of the learning curve. On the other hand, you have to create a safe space. I think it's interesting to balance the need for safe internal space and interfacing with the public.

DH: Dancing Around Race showed me the power of working in a closed door format, where we were able to have no filter before we took the conversation to a more public space. That allowed me to feel like, “okay, I don't have to filter myself, even when we're in a bigger space.” I think that can go either way, from the perspective of a person of color. It made me feel comfortable speaking about race out loud with a much larger intended audience. That's something I've been grappling with for years--this came up over and over--the idea that we are tired of keeping ourselves censored. That we are constantly censoring our voices because we don't want to upset somebody.

HM: Code switching.

DH: Yes, exactly. But to my own detriment. It was nice to finally be like, “I'm just going to say this,” and if somebody's uncomfortable with it, that's okay. Because this is the kind of conversation we actually need to have.

HM: This brings up for me the question that I don't have the answer for: who is this work for? Obviously it's for the artists who are being supported. But if we have a public-facing, community-wide conversation about race, who is that event for? For white people? For artists of color? For everybody? Can it be for everybody? I don't know if that's possible.

DH: Right.

HM: How you answer that question might determine how you structure an event.  I honestly don't know what the impact of Dancing Around Race was. I know a lot of white people who came to the public events were very unsettled.  I think there remains a lot of confusion among white people about do I step up? Do I step back? How do I do that? What does that look like? I've done a lot of questioning. Does stepping back mean that I quit? Because I'm just another white curator. Does stepping back mean I don't apply for a grant so that an artist of color might get the funding? Dismantling racism requires that white people don’t take things personally. But those kind of questions feel personal. They are systemic choices, but also personal choices.

DH: I am letting the LatinXtensions participants know that this is not just about them. It's one of those things that they don't teach us in school, especially if you are an artist working on cultural equity. They don't teach us how to build something that keeps giving. It always felt very focused on the sell.

HM: When you say you're making work about cultural equity, can you articulate how that commitment manifests for you in choreographic form?

DH: That's a really hard question. It's shifted over the years.

HM: How about in your most recent show at Z Space?

DH: That show, Resurrection of Everyday People, started as a political piece and slowly became something else. What I realized was that I can't really tell the dancers to feel something just because I felt it. So the work became more about: have you ever felt this sense of inequity within yourself or within your group or within your family? It became a practice where almost all the choreography came out of them.

HM: How did that manifest in form?

DH: Can you tell me specifically what you mean by form?

HM: I could say aesthetics. How did the subject matter affect your choreographic choices, in terms of shaping the material in time and space? Or did it not? Do you feel like that ideas around equity occupied a separate track in your brain?

Photo of “The Least of Them” (2016) by David Herrera. Photo by Marisa Aragona.

DH: I feel like politics in that work was more of a separate track. But my previous piece was different (The Least of Them, 2016). It was about the racist thoughts and misunderstandings we have about each other. In that process,  I realized that I had a lot of physical anger embedded in my body. I had the dancers look at their own racist habits, which surprised many.  We talked about what does racism feel like in the body. What does your body actually do? I'm pretty composed as a person, but there was so much anger that if I were to unleash it, I would be a little scared to see what that would look like. As we were creating movement, I allowed myself to let some of that come out. The anger took over the form. It was less about creating choreography. It was more about letting the body release the stuff that we have been holding  inside us. One of the dancers talked about her body having trauma she had not visited in a while. I thought to myself, “this is great because we are going to create stuff out of that,” as opposed to looking for lines or shapes that were taught in a studio or class setting. That piece is one of my most honest because we didn't follow formulas. We allowed the body and the mind and body memory to do what they wanted to do. That was very exciting to me. I remember walking out of every one of those rehearsals thinking, “Whoa!” Eventually, we shaped everything into more of a narrative, something more concrete, as opposed to chaos. 

DH: There were moments in that process when one of the dancers said, “I don't want to do this, I don’t want to fight. I don't feel comfortable saying this and doing this.” This was a reaction to me asking the cast to label the audience “White”, “Black”, “Brown”, and “Other,” according to the race we thought they were. 

DH: As a person of color, I'm so used to wanting to “shhhhh” everything, but it was really exciting to not do that. In this past season, the choreography came about by me allowing the dancers to tell me what they were thinking and feeling and also asking them to move to describe it. Even though the work was less political in nature, it was still rooted in letting the body speak in relationship to political ideas. I couldn't be the authoritative, sole choreographer for the cast. I just molded the evening. I would say about 75%  of the choreography was something that the dancers personally wanted to explore and release from their own bodies.

Being a part of the dialogue and experience of  “Dancing Around Race,” combined with the process of my last production--in which I discovered that our bodies can articulate movement ideas not found in forced or taught “choreography”--has liberated me in ways I didn’t know were possible. 

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For more information on the David Herrera Performance Company, visit https://www.dhperformance.org/

Dancing Around Race Community Reader

This informal collection of sources and resources was assembled over the past year by the artists and thinkers involved in Dancing Around Race. Suggestions, additions and edits are welcome at hopemohr@gmail.com. 

LAST UPDATE: 8/2/2019

AESTHETICS AND ARTIVISM/SOCIAL PRACTICE

Manuel Arturo Abreu, We Need to Talk About Social Practice, Art Practical, March 6, 2019

Wesley Morris, Morality Wars, N. Y. Times Magazine, Oct. 3, 2018

Frock, Christian L. “Hello No, We Won’t Go: Outstanding Radical Art and Global Movements in 2014.” KQED Arts, December 29, 2014. Christine Frocks makes a case for 2014 as a significant year in the creation of “radical art,” broadening the lens of art and performance and offering many examples of Arts for Change, all the while maintaining the position that we must look beyond cultural institutions to see the work as well as its makers.

Geer, Richard Owen. “Out of Control in Colquitt: Swamp Gravy Makes Stone Soup.” TDR vol. 40, No. 2 (Summer 1996). A first person account of creating a community performance in and with the residence of Colquitt, GA, which demonstrates how the various aesthetic attributes play out and are evidenced in real world projects. The story highlights a variety of aesthetic questions and tensions and chronicles their resolution.

Korza, Pam, Barbara Schaffer Bacon, and Andrea Assaf. Civic Dialogue, Arts & Culture: Findings from Animating Democracy. Americans for the Arts, 2005. The chapter on Artistic Practices examines various elements of art and artistic practice to set the conditions for meaningful dialogue, including: metaphor, abstraction, humor, story, nonverbal modes, traditional forms, “community dramaturgy,” among others.

Korza, Pam and Barbara Schaffer Bacon, eds. Dialogue in Artistic Practice: Case Studies from Animating Democracy. Americans for the Arts, 2005. Three case studies about arts-based civic dialogue projects implemented by Cornerstone Theater

Company, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, and Urban Bush Women analyze artistic concepts and practices in relation to qualities of effective dialogue.

McGregor, Paloma. “Dance and Civic Engagement.” Working Guide Papers on Arts for Change. Americans for the Arts, 2013. Choreographer and organizer Paloma McGregor highlights exemplary contemporary community-based dance practice and concert dance that is intentional in connecting to community members and issues.

Orr, Niela. “Chats About Change: Ethics and Aesthetics.” KCET: February 5, 2015. A summary of highlights from the panel “Pivoting: Ethics and Aesthetics,” as part of the social practice conference Chats About Change: Critical Conversations on Art and Politics in Los Angeles. Conversation focused on the question: How can one mediate the social accountability connoted by ethics and the merits of self-derived aesthetics?

FUNDING

Raja Feather Kelly, The Grant Cycle Is A Biased, Oppressive Lottery—But I'm Still Playing To Win
Maria Cherry Galette Rangel, Making Room for the Unnameable: Notes on the 2017 MAP Fund Grants Review Panel
Helen Sidford, Not Just Money: Equity Issues in Cultural Philanthropy, Helicon Collaborative, 2017
New England Foundation for the Arts, Equitable Grantmaking Toolkit
Animating Democracy, Aesthetic Perspectives Framework: Attributes of Excellence in Arts for Change
Justice Funders, Grantmaking Practices Self-Assessment
 

APPROPRIATION

Manuel Arturo Abreu, We Need to Talk About Social Practice, Art Practical, March 6, 2019
Zadie Smith, Getting In and Getting Out, Harper’s Magazine, July 2017
Saidiya Hartman, Lose your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts, 1996.
E. Patrick Johnson, "Snap! Culture: A different kind of 'reading'," Text and Performance Quarterly, 1995.
Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, 1993.
Jacqueline Shea Murphy, The People Have Never Stopped Dancing: Native American Modern Dance Histories, 2007.

DIASPORAS/MIGRATIONS

Karma R. Chavez, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities
Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, 2005.
Kareem Khubchandani, Snakes on the Dance Floor: Bollywood, Gesture, and Gender, The Velvet Light Trap, 2016.
Eng-Beng Lim, Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias, 2014
Martin F. Manalansan IV, Global Divas: Filiipino Gay Men in the Diaspora, 2003.

ART AND INTERSECTIONAL IDENTITY

David Eng and Alice Hom, ed., Q&A: Queer in Asian America, 1998.
E. Patrick Johnson, Quare' Studies, or (almost) everything I know about queer studies I learned from my grandmother, Callaloo, 2000.
Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Joy Mariama Smith, Sara Smith and Tara Aisha Willis; moderated by Cassie Peterson, RIFF TALK-ing on Identity and Performance
Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics
Maria Lugones, Toward a Decolonial Feminism
Miguel Gutierrez, Does Abstraction Belong to White People?, BOMB Magazine, November 7, 2018
Susan Manning, Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion, 2004.
Wesley Morris, Morality Wars, New York Times Magazine, October 3, 2018
José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifiations: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, 1999.
Jasbir K. Puar, Queer Times, Queer Assemblages, Social Text, 2005.
Ramón Rivera-Servera, Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics, 2012.

WHITENESS
On Whiteness and Abstraction: Anh Vo with Juliana F. May, Critical Correspondence, March 21, 2019
Benedict Nguyen, The Work is Never Done, Brooklyn Rail, December 11, 2018
White Supremacy Culture, From Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups, by Kenneth Jones & Tema Okun, ChangeWork
Racial Imaginary Institute, The Whiteness Issue
Aruna D'Souza, Whitewalling: Art, Race and Protest in 3 Acts
Laila Lalami, The Identity Politics of Whiteness
Peggy McIntosh, White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
Thomas DeFrantz, i am black (you have to be willing to not know)
Morgan Jerkins, Why Do You Say You’re Black?
Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race
Sara Ahmed, "A Phenomenology of Whiteness," Feminist Theory, 2007.
Faedra Carpenter, Coloring Whiteness: Acts of Critique in Black Performance, 2014.
Richard Dyer, White, 1997.
Susan Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance, 2011 ("Introduction" & "Chapter 1: Choreography")
Ruth Frankenberg, "The Mirage of Unmarked Whiteness," in Klinenberg, Nexica, Rasmussen, and Wray, ed. The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, 2001.
Cheryl Harris, "Whiteness as Property," Harvard Law Review, 1993.
Anthea Kraut, Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance, 2015.
Julian Carter, "The Dance that Will Not Die: Refracting Imperial Whiteness through The Dying Swan," TDR 62:3, 2018.

FOUNDATIONAL TEXTS

Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, eds., This Bridge Called My Back
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity
Fred Moten, Consent Not to Be a Single Being  
Jose Munoz, Cruising Utopia
Tuck and Yang, The Decolonization of Metaphor

RESOURCES

Aesthetic Perspectives
http://www.animatingdemocracy.org/companion-guides
Government Alliance on Race and Equity
Intergroup Resources, Talking About Race Resource Notebook
Racial Imaginary Institute
Center for Social Inclusion’s Talking About Race Toolkit
People’s Institute of Survival and Beyond
Related Tactics

Dancing Around Race Zine

This zine was distributed at the final Dancing Around Race gathering on February 28, 2019.

“If whitespace is the common space, safe space is other. Thinking in line with disturbance ecologies, safe space has developed out of a landscape of ruin.”

-Nikima Jagudajev

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Dancing Around Race – Interrogating Whiteness in Dance (excerpted from a longer paper)
by Gerald Casel

Dancing Around Race explores the socio-cultural dimensions of race within the interconnected fields of choreography, dance presentation, dance training, funding, curatorial practices, and dance criticism in U.S. contemporary and postmodern dance. Looking closely at the Bay Area dance ecology and working with a systems thinking approach, this inquiry examines how various elements contribute to or inhibit equitable distributions of power, access, and representation with regard to race. Specifically, I examine how the invisibility of Whiteness preserves segregation through the legacies of ethno-racial hierarchies produced by the racialized history of contemporary and postmodern dance in the U.S. Addressing themes that highlight issues of race and identity in my choreographic research and extending that to my engagement with the community is the focus of this work. One of the aims is to build critical consciousness that transforms institutions so that they are more equitable and also, so that artists are valued, supported, and are able to create work that cultivates emancipatory practices despite their ethno-racial identity.

When describing Whiteness, I am not referring to White people, but the systemic structures that privilege individuals who self-identify as White, are identified as White by others, or White-passing.

Throughout this past year we have been interested in unveiling Whiteness and how, more specifically, its invisibility affects the dance communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. We have been interested in interrogating and undoing systems that promote hegemonic power structures that reify racist ideologies; it is useful to untangle them to examine how common personal struggles can intersect and affect larger narratives that have shared goals of equity and inclusion. Since many individuals and institutions claim to be inclusionary, it is important to principally acknowledge inequity by looking within while also critiquing the external effects of institutional regulations. This way of collectively zooming the lens in and out to see the micro and macro levels of systemic structures assists in applying more flexible, adaptable, and nuanced modes of conceiving and interpreting these complex issues of race and identity and how to find solutions through coalitional efforts that foster counter-hegemonic practices. I ask, “What does equity look like in public? What does equity look like in practice?”

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what it do brown body

by SAMMAY

what does the brown body mean to you?

        eyes wide towards an imagined horizon

                 limbs outstretched reaching only for what’s true

what does this brown body do for you?

a forgotten shade of the spectrum

unacknowledged in the rainbow

                     of dreams unspoken

discernment flowing in streams

in her mother’s cry

in the mind’s eye

                           of her ancestors

what does this brown body mean to you?

righteous veins of resilience

cultivated through war

                                  loss

                                  death

                                  miscarriage

                                  mismarriage

                                  buried secrets

and

                                  “it was an accident”

                                  unraveling

                                  (we are unraveling)

unearthing the meaning deep beneath her skin

she is finding what it means

        what it feels like

like supple mangoes

        early fallen from the tree

like heaven manifestations

        in the everyday mundane

what does this body mean to them?

have they forgotten she was cut from her stem?

a blossom unripened in her bosom

her colors struggling to maintain

v i r a c i o u s  l i l  m a m i

their vibrancy

her breath

be her lifeline

and without (her roots) she is running on Empty

trekking carefully

not to misstep/mis-rep

and fall down into the abyss

        of amnesia

        a.k.a triggermania

the epigenetics not in her favor

        but theirs

//

what does this body do for you?

you really wanna know what it do?

        what life be like

you can’t fit this shoe

so she dance barefoot

until she splinters and finds

memory

      tragedy

                unexpress-said despair

her grandmother’s dementia

her great grand lolo’s long hair

she don’t dance for the applause

could care less about the game

she plant seeds each time her toes

meet mama earth’s great mane

this be her bidding from the Great Ones

a lifelong song of nostalgic cadence

where beauty lives in darkness

and the only way to get there is to

        scrape.

                scratch.

                        slice

                                slice

                                        slice.

some wounds are meant to be left alone

others pray we

return and return and return to them til we

turn turn turn turn turn turn turn turn

what this body do for you?

show you the infinite.

nothing more

nothing less.

 

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“To argue that the imagination is or can be somehow free of race—that it’s the one region of self or experience that is free of race—and that I have a right to imagine whoever I want, and that it damages and deforms my art to set limits on my imagination—acts as if the imagination is not part of me, is not created by the same web and matrix of history and culture that made ‘me.’”  

--Claudia Rankine

 

NOT UP FOR DEBATE

That White Supremacy exists as a system that hurts
us all and disproportionately hurts people of color.

That White people have a responsibility to dismantle
White Supremacy

That Racism + Colonialism are linked and so Racial
Justice + Decolonization are also linked

It’s not IF Racism, Colonialism and White Supremacy
exist in our community and nation it’s HOW we intend
to address and fix it

That systems of oppression exists as one overarching
matrix of domination. Oppressions intersect and are
interlocking.

People experience and resist oppression on a personal,
communal and institutional level

NORMS FOR SPEAKING
AND SHARING SPACE

Use “I” statements
Respectful communication
Assume best intention
What’s your exit strategy? / Self-care
Ouch/Oops
Take space, create space (for others)
“Yes, and” instead of Yes, But”
Engage person-first language

Indian History

They lived in teepees and wigwams, she said,

reading from the coloring page. (I was in first-grade

learning history.) They used primitive

weapons, and lived here, before they left.

I colored feathers and stalks of corn. It was

October; we had to dress up as characters from

books. When she handed me Indian in the Cupboard

I didn’t say a word – This would be perfect for you, she said.

Brown, dark-haired, I must have looked

just like that little figurine standing proudly

on the cover of the hard-backed book. At home, my mother

stuck feathers in my hair, and helped me decorate a brown

paper grocery bag with finger paint, to wear as a

costume, marching through the school, on Halloween.

Animated with smiles and march, I held the text in

my hands in front of my stomach. I vivified the tale

my teacher spun, pushed into the cupboard to become

something I was not. It was a tale rewritten out of

convenience. I couldn’t question it.

̶  Bhumi B. Patel

“Art institutions will continue to protect whiteness because they are designed to protect whiteness.”

--Aruna D’Souza

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Finding Queer Family Among Ghosts
By Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

Ghosts have been ever present in my life.  I grew up in a family that stressed the importance of memory as an act of resistance, a word that has been appropriated by American liberals; it has become a catch phrase, limp in the age of Trump, so I will add to it the word resilience.  Memory is an act of both resistance and resilience and remembering slain heroes was especially important.

I was born in Damascus, Syria and grew up in Karachi, Pakistan to a Lebanese mother and Pakistani Iranian father. My mother had grown up in civil war Beirut, my father, in an intensely political family, he had seen both his father executed and his younger brother assassinated by the time he was my age now, 28.  When I was 18 years old and left Pakistan to study and eventually live abroad, my father and aunt had also both been assassinated.  In the absence of my father’s entire generation I learned how to find family in ghosts, how to say ‘Good night, I love you’ to imaginary translucent smiling spirits, my grandfather, my uncle and my father in particular. Today, I call the Bay Area home and continue to build queer family among the living.  They are my friends, people I can never hide anything from, people I trust and love.  Yet, the morbid child that still lives in me cannot help but look for that kind of love beyond the grave. As an artist my practice is concerned with reviving histories of collective resistance (and resilience) and queering them through a futurist re-telling.  In my research I chanced upon Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’amour, a film made in 1950, as well as Shaheed Sana’a Mhaidli, a martyr of Lebanon's civil war.  Mhaidli and the characters in Un Chant d’amour became a part of my queer family, a necessary extension into both imagination and resurrection. 

In Un Chant d’Amour, Genet recreates a French prison with a substantial population of queer male Algerians. Given the time the film was made – at the height of the Algerian resistance to the French – and the anti-imperialist writings of its creator, one can assume that these folks are in prison for being uncooperative with the French government.  Sexual frustration is rife but so is a deep yearning for love.  There is no dialogue in the film, only music.  Buried deep among the heat of men masturbating alone in their prison cells are two inmates who strive for a relationship despite the walls between them.  They communicate as best they can; blowing their cigarette smoke into straws they delicately slide into the tiny hole in the wall they share passing smoke from one mouth to the other without ever touching.

Watching the two men is the French prison guard who peeks through an opening in the door, moving from one cell to the other. The guard is enraged, anger builds up inside of him and you realize it is jealousy that drives his resentment.  He desires one of the two lovers but knows it is a love he can never obtain and so it turns into a destructive energy, consuming him. Imagining them outside of the walls of this prison, together, in love, free and being able to actually touch one another infuriates the prison guard even more.  He charges into one of the cells and begins beating the older more Algerian looking lover, whipping him with his belt as the prisoner laughs in defiance. 

The struggle here is not simply one of nationalism but also of sensual love, of the revolution that lives inside pleasure and joy despite the all the barriers.  The fact that two brown Algerian men can love each other even through the walls of their solitary confinement angers the white French warden, it encapsulates the very essence of resistance against the patriarchy.  In my mind, the unnamed Algerians in this film become my queer elders, they are teachers, instructing by example and providing precedent to the possibilities of queer liberation outside of the Anglo-Saxon world.

While the figures in Un Chant d’amour are queerly presented, Shaheed Sana’a Mhaidly died before the world could have been aware of any of kind of sexuality.  I ask the reader to join me in seeing queerness in a broad sense, a social and political word that is less about who you fuck and more the systems you are willing to fuck up.

Mhaidly was from the southern Lebanese city of Tyre, an ancient port that came under Israeli occupation in 1982 at the height of the Lebanese civil war.  The Israeli occupation was brutal and reared its ugly head to the world after the twin massacres of Sabra and Shatila, two Palestinian refugee camps on the outskirts of southern Beirut.  The Israeli army and its local allies – Lebanese ultra-right wing militia – sealed off the camps and killed 3,500 civilians.  They kept the genocide a secret until the stench of the rotting bodies wafted into the surrounding neighborhoods.   

This of course wasn’t the only horror of the Zionist occupation but it was likely one of many that convinced the teenage Mhaidly to join the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party, a secular and irreligious party that was among many groups fighting the Israeli occupation.  She gave up a life of familial and religious expectations to join a movement she saw as bigger than that.  In 1985 she was sent on a mission: to drive a car filled with explosives into an Israeli convoy carrying weapons to strategic Israeli outposts in Southern Lebanon.  She succeeded in her mission, killing herself and destroying the convoy.  She has been called the world’s first ever suicide bomber.

What makers her queer? Everything. In a video she recorded before her death she sits casually, her voice unbroken and lucid.  She implores her family not to be sad as the day that she dies should not be mourned as a death anniversary but her wedding day, she is marrying the soil of her home.  In 2008, during a prisoner exchange between Hezbollah and the Israeli government her remains were returned to her family.  Instead of a funeral, her family held a wedding procession, both Christians and Muslims took part, churches rang their wedding bells and imams symbolically read her rights as if she were getting married.

Mhaidli chose not to marry a man, she chose not to be absorbed into a society that would have defined her through who her husband or who her father was but instead she chose the earth, Mother Earth.  The soil is her bride and her groom and in so doing she rejects expectation and mainstream society, intentionally placing herself on the margins of what it means to be a woman, she becomes politically queer.  In the eyes of much of the West, even to liberals and progressives, her actions may be dismissed as unnecessary agitation again placing her on the margins of resistance.  

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Car-Boot

We mourn old things, dented steel cups

engraved with A.K. Patel, the first-wedding

silver, the India-Pakistan partition.

We work, trying to fill

the space and yet empty it. We save

what we can, in the garage-turned-museum,

filling the newly installed shelves, creaking

under the weight, and making a pile

called “Car-boot sale” in a translucent,

pink, plastic bin. Shaking faded bath

mats outside the house, each of us

sneezes in turn, as dust swirls up

and into the sunlight, escaping from

this place. Early evening, we lock

each window and draw the net

curtains, then the thick curtains,

preparing to take our leave. My bhabhi

sweeps up the bits of peeling dried

wallpaper, and more dust from

boxes, squatting on her knees

with a short broom and dust pan.

All day we worked, unable to make this

place anymore full, or empty

than it had been before.

̶  Bhumi B. Patel

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Spatial Politics
By Raissa Simpson

Black bodies are in crisis in San Francisco. Despite its reputation as a bastion for diversity and technology innovation, only a dwindling population of 3%-6%, or approximately 40,000 African Americans, remain among 800,000 residents. That is to say, Black dancers are rarely able to afford rent in a city where a salary of $100,000 per year is considered low-income. While the economic needs of San Francisco serve corporations like Twitter, Uber, and Airbnb through developers, infrastructure and resources, I came to understand a great digital divide while working in the historically Black neighborhoods of the Bayview/Hunters Point, Tenderloin and Western Addition districts.  

Place, in itself, is a metaphorical false notion of security. Spaces have blood memories. As African American residents are moved out of the area, it sums up a type of traumatic by-product generated by rich white tech workers who want to move into these areas for its culture, but instead, end up pricing out the people that make up that culture.

Herein lies the dilemma for Black Choreographers:  how to explore a new type of modern-day colonization? I tackle this issue in Codelining (coding plus redlining), a multi-year work exploring the digital divide and access to technology. Codelining presents and represents the authenticity of movement through Black embodiment to explore the out-migration of African Americans from San Francisco due to the very coding tech industry that hopes to provide technological access to those same Black bodies. Through this work, I want to understand the future through Black embodiment.

Gathering a group of Black bodies on stage has been an exercise in aptly compensating the Artists. Some Black dancers have traveled 50-75 miles to take part in the work. They did not want to miss out on one of the few opportunities available to tell their stories through movement. In addition to the Black cast, there have been dancers of other racial backgrounds participating, listening, and supporting the creation of the work, which has led to the topical nature of Codelining, the intersectional discussions among the cast played out with a type of carefulness.

Though much of Codelining is set in an Afro-dystopia in the future - some of which is generated through historical slave narratives - the process sources my own experience combined with personal stories from San Francisco’s Black residents. I gather these present-day stories to provide an emotional arc for the work and to foreshadow ominous events to come. Imagine having an experience with a particular issue involving how technology reshapes neighborhoods only to find out a large portion of residents in the area share the same sentiment. These personal stories add up to a shared memory and a collective link to the past and present. They also create an entry point with some forbearance into the future. Creating this living and breathing body of work with respondents happens in four stages: forming a relationship; building a level of trust and chaos; disorienting current meanings and definitions; building a space for the future.

The creative process includes a cultural strategy to interview, dialogue, and re-imagine fiercely held narratives around liberal rich residents, most of whom are White, moving into Black neighborhoods, thereby pushing out some of the poorest residents outside the City. Then capturing these stories from these displaced poor residents before they disappear. In some instances, the project has has engaged with White tech workers. However, these interactions oftentimes play out as a public relations stunt of great performativity; tech workers fear being seen being seen as the catalyst for ethnic cleansing in the areas they inhabit. All of these stories, taken together, form a figure that addresses larger themes of race and spatial politics.  

Black respondents are members of the public, ages ranging from 12 to Adult, whose neighborhoods face hyper-gentrification from the tech boom. These varied perspectives are divided into age groups and occupations like student, tech worker, and so on to engage the public in Codelining’s thematic storytelling. In the dance, members of the cast are also asked to contribute their conscious decisions to live or leave San Francisco. We take time to learn how respondents engage with tech on a daily basis. We explore how each individual body navigates social interaction with technology. We also examine how those same bodies suffer the perils of gentrification’s ethnic cleansing as a result of the economic power of that same technology.

Gathering the stories of these young participants gestures towards predicating an ideal vision for the Bayview neighborhood. Young people in the Bayview navigate these issues like cosmic observers throughout the dance, as if to forebode a dystopian society where the very humanity of its residents are at stake. As the artist, it's a refreshing break from searching the historical record. Codelining looks beyond human timelines to find the very essence of the bodily spirit in Black bodies. I feel like my abstract choreography can be a catastrophic closure for the real and lived experiences of the neighboring residents. Perhaps these stories offer a sort of confluence of the truth and reality. Or maybe they illuminate how the young residents know not what the future may bring and in this, need to design their own future. I deal with these disparities on a daily basis. As the artist, I am asking the performers in the work to manipulate this lack of resources as a type of escapism. An escapism bound by imagining a future filled with abundant possibilities.

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Unedited, Unfiltered Musings:
Ramblings from the heart, body, & mind
of a Latinx Choreographer

I’m not sure how to even begin writing about this subject except that in the field of

modern/contemporary dance, a field in which bodies are the medium from which we create, use, manipulate, express from, and live off from, mine often feels to be invisible to mainstream producers, grantors, curators, presenters, corporate donors, directors, and other choreographers and dancers.

I often wonder what diversity means for many of my white choreographer & dance colleagues. Why is it that for many of them the extent of diversity representation takes the shape of white women or gay white males? And why am I supposed to be satisfied by that as a brown, gay, Latinx person.

I created a modern dance company after years of starving for non-white experiences in dance. This has been labeled a “niche.”

As I watch dance performances with my brown-colored existence, I often wonder if the 2 non-white bodies (usually 1 Black person, 1 Pan-Asian person; tokenism?) on stage were asked by their choreographer/director how their experience as POCs differed from those of their white counterparts regarding the concept being presented……. Can I see that show please?

I was once told, by a white man, not everything is about race.

Is a brown or black body on a modern dance stage an act of resistance?

Is a brown or black body on a modern dance stage an accommodation to political correctness? Does a brown or black body on a modern dance stage have agency or do we become a mere extension of white experience via the “white gaze”?

I have been told that I sound bitter.

Just another way of saying “Angry (POC - fill in blank) person”.

If you refuse to acknowledge my cultural existence in this field then why do you keep inviting me to come watch your productions? Is your positionality that much more interesting?

I once heard someone explain that most modern dance can be categorically called white dance….I have not forgotten that statement.

I crave to engage in uncomfortable but real conversations about race, equity, casting choices, production support, and your role, as well my own in this field.

This isn’t a pity party or a need for white validation. It’s a battle cry and rallying call!

--David Herrera

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Notes & Questions from Gerald Casel
excerpted from conversations throughout the year

Race informs all aspects of artmaking, but we don’t talk about it. 

One approach is to look at statistics. I’m starting that process.
So that I can say: I’m not making this up.

How do we create an atmosphere of openness through shared practice?

I made up the term “co-interrogators” for the members of the Dancing Around Race artist cohort as a way to dispel or dismantle hierarchy.

What does allyship mean? 

“What do you expect?” is something I keep being asked about this project. I don’t know what to expect and I don’t know what I want. I don’t want to impose anything upon it. 

There’s an assumption that the Bay Area is so woke and diverse, but the reality is otherwise. 

As the Bay Area’s demographics shift, how are cultural centers dealing with that?

What is the responsibility of presenters to local artists? How do you de-centralize curatorial practice?  You turn it over to other folks, other voices. Why doesn’t this happen much in the Bay Area

Whiteness is a socially constructed term. You can identify as white or you can dis-identify as white. You have a choice.

How can I lead with subtlety and precision? How can I do it without yelling?

How does institutional code-switching work? How does the language of equity change depending on who is speaking and who the audience is?

If an organization wants to be an ally or accomplice for equity, how can this work be artist-driven?

When there is a white guest speaker in the room, how can we de-center whiteness?

The dance you think you are making is being read by someone who is reading it through a racial lens. We don’t have a choice to unmark ourselves. 

I’m not interested in educating people.

Why is this issue so hard to talk about?

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White Supremacy Culture

Excerpted from Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups,
by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun, ChangeWork, 2001

This is a list of characteristics of white supremacy culture which show up in our organizations. Culture is powerful precisely because it is so present and at the same time so very difficult to name or identify. The characteristics listed below are damaging because they are used as norms and standards without being pro-actively named or chosen by the group. They are damaging because they promote white supremacy thinking. They are damaging to both people of color and to white people. Organizations that are people of color led or a majority people of color can also demonstrate many damaging characteristics of white supremacy culture:

Perfectionism

Sense of Urgency

Defensiveness

Quantity Over Quality

Worship of the Written Word

Paternalism

Either/Or Thinking

Power Hoarding

Fear of Open Conflict

Individualism

Progress is Bigger, More

Objectivity (the belief that there is such a thing as being objective)

Right to Comfort (the belief that those with power have a right to emotional and psychological comfort)

One of the purposes of listing characteristics of white supremacy culture is to point out how organizations which unconsciously use these characteristics as their norms and standards make it difficult, if not impossible, to open the door to other cultural norms and standards. As a result, many of our organizations, while saying we want to be multicultural, really only allow other people and cultures to come in if they adapt or conform to already existing cultural norms. Being able to identify and name the cultural norms and standards you want is a first step to making room for a truly multi-cultural organization.”

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Dancing Around Race is HMD's Bridge Project 2018-19 Community Engagement Residency. The Dancing Around Race artist cohort is: Gerald Casel (Lead Artist), with Raissa Simpson, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Sammay Dizon, Yayoi Kambara, and David Herrera. Dancing Around Race’s Program Coordinator is Bhumi B. Patel.  HMD’s Artistic Director is Hope Mohr.

HMD's Bridge Project approaches curating as community organizing to convene equity-driven cultural conversations. HMD’s Community Engagement Residency provides sanctuary and opportunity for artists who identify as coming from the margins.  For more information visit hopemohr.org

Funding for Dancing Around Race comes from San Francisco Arts Commission, San Francisco Grants for the Arts, Center for Cultural Innovation, California Arts Council, the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, and individual donors.

Building Accountability in the Dance Field: An Interview with Michèle Steinwald

This interview took place on September 29, 2018.

Hope Mohr: I’m interested in the work and thinking you’ve been doing about decolonizing curatorial practice.

Michèle Steinwald: A big need for me right now is accountability.  If you’re changing the playing field and using new rules, what about those people who are perpetuating colonial, white methods of engagement where they don’t have the language yet? How do you build accountability into a field that is at different places? 

I’ll be facilitating a talk at the upcoming 2019 APAP conference in New York called Artists Building A Code of Ethics in the Era of #MeToo. There are examples of artists-- predominantly women-- in different communities in reaction to the #MeToo movement who are building an explicit code of ethics. I want that to be a bigger conversation. Accountability is critical.

HM: What would that look like? Are you talking about accountability on the part of funders, curators?

MS: All of it. In dance, partnering can be very gendered. Costuming can be very gendered. Gesture can be very gendered. If you have a mixed race cast, power dynamics will read differently depending on the backgrounds of the performers. But dance is greyer than in theater or music. In music, female composers are underrepresented, period. In theater, it is much clearer when prejudice is part of the dominant logic within a play.

What sparked it all for me was seeing an original production of West Side Story done locally here [in Minneapolis].  Nowhere in their materials do they talk about the racism and the sexism, but also the homophobia and the transphobia [in the musical]. They cast Rosalia, the woman who is more nostalgic for Puerto Rico, as being overweight. She carried a cupcake the whole time she was on stage during the America number. The whole idea was that if you are not slender then you are simple. There was a body-shaming aspect of the production.  But none of that was addressed in the program notes.  I was appalled to see a work without any accountability in an opera house-size theater. If you’re going to do a work of a certain time period, what is your responsibility? Everybody thinks they are being responsible by presenting art and making sure that it gets to an audience, but I don’t think that’s enough.

HM: What would accountability look like? What would be the mechanisms for that?

MS:  Artists and presenters need to state their values and goals within a work so that there can be something tangible you can point to and say if your goal was, for example, to show a historic period that was full of misogyny, then you have succeeded. But if your goal was to preserve an art form in today’s context, then you have not.

HM:  That would make space to evaluate a work on its own terms or check an artist or curator by asking: does your work do what you think it does?

MS: Right. There’s this nostalgic sense in dance that you go into a studio, you feel inspired, your body moves a certain way, you translate it to a cast and then you manipulate it into choreography—that it’s an instinctual process that happens through inspiration, so it transcends language and one’s ability to explain their motives. I don’t ascribe to that. It’s just an exercise we haven’t done.

HM: Maybe part of decolonizing dance is about examining why an artist’s work might not do what they set out to do. How can that kind of critical thinking come earlier in the creative process? In the studio?

MS: MAP fund is now using the “Animating Democracy” project’s Aesthetic Perspectives Framework as their sole criteria and that has changed who gets awarded.  It’s no longer these ambiguous “artistic excellence” and “innovation” criteria within the western white canon. Where organizations have changed their criteria based on Art for Change, that’s where I’m seeing traction. Where there is new language being used and new values being promoted and applied in systems that are still flawed, it has changed the narrative within an oppressive system.  

To me, decolonizing is about two things. One, if you’re going to pull inspiration from another person, you give credit to them. And if you are inspired by someone else’s practice and art form, you need to understand the context and honor their values when you bring it into your context.

The other aspect is owning your whiteness and asking, what is that heritage of appropriation, erasure and binaries? I work within oppressive systems so I can represent them in conversation to be able to effect change. I can’t say that I’m not part of those systems. I am. I’m not to blame for those systems. I’m to blame for what I perpetuate. And being conscious of what I perpetuate is my responsibility.

I rarely see somebody within an institution say, “Enough is enough.” People in institutions trade in expertise and hierarchy. By dismantling that, they have to reposition their place in the system. Not everybody’s willing to do that. The people who have inspired me have been artists who have spoken up.  Artists who have taught me, directly or indirectly, lessons I have applied in my work in addressing racism in my practice. These artists include:

Kevin Iega Jeff of Deeply Rooted Dance Theater
Cristobal Martinez of Postcommodity
Rosy Simas of Rosy Simas Danse  
Dr Ananya Chatterjea of Ananya Dance Theatre
Pramila Vasudevan of Aniccha Arts
Deneane Richburg of Brownbody

The last four are artists I’ve collaborated with, and to do that work, I’ve had to understand my biases and name them so I can be accountable. Biases are also my leanings, what my taste is.  If I understand that I’m more likely to root for the experimental, the feminist, the embodied, then I understand what I’m not so interested in. 

I’ve been trained as a dancer and a choreographer and a lot of my processing ability is through listening to my body. To honor that goes against the patriarchy.  As dancers, when we’re training and we start to do somatic work, you don’t just tell your body to stop doing something that isn’t helpful, you have to replace it with a new pattern. I can’t name all of the oppressive patterns that I’m perpetuating, but I can actively replace or center practices that I know are healthy. That is the decolonizing: the replacing of patterns that I may not have full control over and cognizance of with patterns that are aligned with my values and my goals.

I go back to “This doesn’t feel good. What is going on here?” I keep the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond’s chart of the attributes of white organizational culture in my notebook as a touchstone. I also refer to the article on White Supremacy Culture by Tema Okun.

Looking at these two lists, I can say, ok, that is why this doesn’t feel good. That is why I get disoriented in my body. That is why body is no longer available to me as part of my intelligence. When I can’t access my body, I’m in a white patriarchal system that denies that my body is valuable.  

There is a colonial sensibility that is used in extracting resources from others. What if I’m not extracting, but I’m honoring?  There is a brutality that comes from a society wanting to extract resources from others. For me the decolonizing has gotten to a place where I’m checking myself for unconscious patterns that are reinforcing binaries, hierarchy, and I’m replacing them with intentional patterns around inclusiveness and respect. Now there is no relationship I enter unless it is reciprocal. If I have those as goals as fundamentals, the outcomes will be different.

Tema Okun’s article about White Supremacy Culture lists different aspects of white supremacy culture and ways of counteracting it. It’s practical. I don’t have to reinvent anything. I just have to apply it. My training with Deborah Hay has always been, “Notice the feedback.” I go back to my dance training and have the feedback come through my body. As an artist, when you are creating a structure based on values, your outcome is different.

HM: What you are describing sounds like a mindful, process-based approach. Would it demand artists be less product-oriented?

MS: I think you still get to an outcome. 

HM: But if you’re in the studio, if your attention is on outcome…

MS: It’s a different sense of time and relationship.

I feel cellularly different when I’m in relation to some artists’ work: luciana achugar, BodyCartography Project, Deborah Hay, Miguel Gutierrez… When luciana first started making group work, she wanted full transparency. If she got $5000 to do a project, she told her artists: this is what we’ve got. They divided it up equally.  The money was part of her transparency. They figured the work out together. That creates a different process and outcome. Whereas more recently, she has wanted to mold the experience and direct more deliberately. So she had to change her language. She became the director and the dancers were “guest artists.” So then that power dynamic allowed her a more direct form of authorship, but with full transparency.

We’ve had such a narrow vision. That is what the binary does. Once you undo binaries in your thinking, there is never a right or a wrong, a good or a bad. Once you undo those binaries, you see more possibilities. It’s not either a big improvisational process where clothes come off in ecstasy by the end of the performance or a work that is dry, linear, calculated and directive. There’s so much more.

HM: When I read Tema Okun’s list of attributes about White Supremacy Culture (e.g., perfectionism, either/or thinking, only one right way, worship of the written word) I realized that almost every single one is at work inside of me.  To unravel every one of these attributes, I’d have to take sabbatical and dismantle my entire practice. It’s profound.

MS: I started to read your blog post on liberating craft. How do you pull specificity away from perfectionism? Perfectionism is a control mechanism. Specificity is an intention and a value. I don’t have to throw away all of my craft and skill to avoid perfectionism.

HM: It’s also about cultivating agency within a group of artists or collaborators. Having an intention has to come from inside. It can’t be externally imposed.

MS: And to have intention, there has to be relationship. There has to be trust. There has to be reciprocity.

I can’t become unracist because I live in a racist system and I’ve been brought up in it. But I can start to unravel how I interact inside the system. I did the two-and-a-half-day People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond’s training on undoing racism. I came to the training fully understanding that I was racist. Their definition of racism however uncouples “racist” from “bigot,” so I can be an unbigoted racist. I understand that I am benefitting from a system—my whiteness is benefitting, not my female self.  I’m trying to be an unracist racist.  That was an important training for me. They are really centering black men to illustrate their points. They don’t bring in indigeneity. They don’t bring in feminist theory.  I understand why they keep their focus limited, but I’m trying to add in indigeneity and feminist principles into my practice. I’m trying to get to a place where I am upholding First Nations peoples as the expert stewards of our world, and providing more opportunities for my sisters’ narratives, whether they be trans or cis or femme-identified stories.

——————-

Marked by four major influences, Michèle Steinwald is a feminist, DIY, artist-centered, pseudo-forensic, embodied, community-driven, cultural organizer:

• At age 14, she saw Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker in Rosas’ Bartok and fell in love with contemporary dance (1986).

• At age 15, she produced her friend’s postpunk band Pestilence at the all-ages music venue One Step Beyond in Ottawa, Canada (1987). Seven people came. She knew all but one.

• At age 21, she studied with choreographer Deborah Hay and was forever changed (1994). 

• Since her teen years, she has deliberately watched the TV series Law & Order, noting human behavior and gut instincts through problem solving.

RESOURCES

Aesthetic Perspectives Framework  

White Supremacy Culture, From Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups, by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun, ChangeWork, 2001

Artist Talk and Op-Ed Launch: Postcommodity

Christopher Emdin SxSW Keynote Speech
Dr. Emdin offers insight into the structures of contemporary schools, and highlights major issues like the absence of diversity among teachers, the ways educators of color are silenced in schools, the absence of student voice in designing teaching and learning, and a way forward in addressing these issues.

Talking About Race Toolkit

People’s Institute of Survival and Beyond

Freeing Craft

by Hope Mohr

Craft: Skill in planning, making, or executing

Formalism: Concern with form and technique rather than content in artistic creation

Interrogating Aesthetics

Once after a dance show, I turned to a colleague next to me and said, “That was really well-crafted.” “Yes,” she said. “But all you could see was the craft.” 

Craft is not enough.

Many people advocate that in order to move the dance field toward equity, we should abandon criteria like “artistic excellence,” “mastery” and “virtuosity” in choosing what art to make and support, arguing that these words have been codes for art that conforms to Western European, patriarchal, heterosexist norms. Yvonne Rainer refused mastery and virtuosity in her influential “No Manifesto.” But however much these post-modern refusals and their progeny have democratized dance vocabulary, they have not done so for the dance field as a whole.

If we accept that the frame of mastery is steeped in patriarchy and control, what questions might we ask instead to evaluate art? Some possibilities, gleaned from recent conversations with colleagues, most recently at the Rainin/Hewlett Foundation’s New Pathways for Artists convening (small group discussion on decolonizing the field) and HMD’s recent Dancing Around Race public gathering:

Is the work authentic?
Does it promote freedom?
Is it necessary or urgent?
Does it positively impact the community?
Does it promote joy and pleasure?
Is it relevant or contemporary?
Does it make me feel something?
What does the work risk?

Aruna D’Souza, at the recent Dancing Around Race gathering, noted that the issue is not whether or not we should abandon standards of artistic excellence, but whether we can adopt different standards. For example, hip hop has its own standards of excellence that differ from those used to evaluate ballet.

I undertake this inquiry to, in the words of Claudia Rankine’s Racial Imaginary Institute, “question, mark, and check” my whiteness, to challenge white dominance as it operates through default positions in my cultural behavior. This reckoning demands that I examine my aesthetics. When I say aesthetics, I mean my ingrained sense of what is good art and who is a good artist. I also mean what I put out into the world as an artist.

This reckoning can begin by asking ourselves, in Rankine’s words: is my imagination my own? When I was a very young girl, even before my first dance class, I liked to walk up and down the hallway of our apartment touching the walls on either side with my fingertips, crafting pattern. Those patterns came from inside of me, not from some internalized system of oppression. I’m not a fascist because I like craft. That doesn't mean I shouldn't be interrogating the roots of my preferences. This inquiry can begin by recognizing my cultural and artistic lineages. White supremacy pervades my aesthetic evaluations because it is at the foundation of this country and I can't get away from it. When I watch and make dance, I see patterns in time and space. Those patterns are a function of my whiteness.

I want to argue that dance, as a form, can be liberated and liberating through committed and thoughtful practice. I want to argue that when form is liberated, it then can also be liberatory by demonstrating the kind of thorough application of ethics that might make all of us better citizens. A thorough application of ethics in relationship to our craft must examine the integrity of the relationship between our form and our content. I want to ask myself—to ask ourselves—if we are borrowing heat from politically trending subject matter and then skating by with forms we know will be palatable to a Western concert dance audience?

Craft can and should be a function of research and inquiry. I want to anchor this inquiry in the work of Adrienne Rich, a lesbian feminist who wrote extensively about the possibilities that sit at the intersection of politics and poetry. Adrienne Rich writes, in her essay Rotted Names:

“[W]hiteness—as a mindset—is bent only on distinguishing discrete bands of color from itself. That is its obsession—to distinguish, discriminate, categorize, exclude on the basis of clearly defined color. What else is the function of being white?...[P]eople have defined themselves as white, over and against darkness, with disastrous results for human community.”

Similarly, Adriano Pedrosa writes: "Straight society is based on the necessity of the different/other...But what is the different other if not the dominated?" (Adriano Pedrosa, What is the Process," in Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating.) As an artist, how can I develop forms and structures that do not depend on dualisms, binaries, hierarchies? How can I "discover other models and theories beyond the Euro-American toolbox of abstraction, pop, minimalism, conceptualism, the grid." Pedrosa answers: "To learn new tools we might need to unlearn old ones."

How do we unlearn our approach to craft? Visual thinking is often rooted in difference. But embodied thinking—sensation-based thinking—is less tethered to difference. Dance’s unique power sits at the intersection of seeing and feeling. The craft of choreography has the potential to subvert dominant modes of thinking by infusing the visual with embodied knowledge.

Rich writes, in her essay “What Does a Woman Need to Know?”:

“It was only when I could finally affirm the outsider’s eye as the source of a legitimate and coherent vision, that I began to be able to do the work I truly wanted to do, live the kind of life I truly wanted to live, instead of carrying out the assignments I had been given as a privileged woman.” (emphasis mine)

What does an outsider formalism look like? Or as dancemakers, let’s ask: what does an outsider formalism feel like?

Case Study: Hinterlands

On August 17, 2018, I went to see the premiere of John Jasperse’s new work Hinterland at Hudson Hall in upstate New York. The cast of five featured DeAngelo Blanchard, Eleanor Hullihan, Mina Nishimura, Antonio Ramos and Jasperse. The description of the work on Jasperse’s website reads: “A varied group of dancers, including Jasperse, comes together with a commissioned score by Hahn Rowe, to build a micro-community, where dance is both a celebration and a refuge from the wreckage of culture and history.”

The work was performed in the round. The dance space was marked off with a large square of hot pink gaff tape containing many intersecting lines. At times during the work, the dancers traveled along these lines. At other times, the lines appeared irrelevant.

The performance began with a body (Hullihan) hidden under a beautiful piece of fabric. Hullihan manipulated the fabric into shapes and images, blurring the line between body and object. After this extended opening sequence, a processional entered the space: Blanchard, Jasperse and Ramos clad in flamboyantly colorful costumes that obscured the head, face and body. They were cosmonauts, Teletubbies, circus creatures, drag queens.

The work bled into the margins of the room. Entrances and exits unfurled long before and after the performers entered or exited the official performance space. About halfway through the work, two performers pulled up quite a bit of the hot pink floor tape and stuck it on their faces. The pink tape also demarcated a smaller box off to the side of the playing space. In this visible, marginal space, the dancers changed looks and states, rested and played with pieces of fabric.

Throughout the work, the dancing was minimal and formal. I recalled Barbara Dilley’s term “elegant pedestrian.” Post-modern (lack of) affect. There was one exuberant aerobic ensemble section of patterns and high energy, but a stripped down vocabulary prevailed.

The heart of the work was a series of duets that juxtaposed the different bodies in the cast. There was a duet between Blanchard (African-American) and Jasperse (white). Another duet between Blanchard (African-American) and Nishimura (Asian). Another duet between Hullihan (white) and Nishimura (Asian). Even the ensemble section was a high-energy reshuffling of pairs.

I can’t write about the work without noting the racial identities of the performers because the content in the work was not choreography per se, but difference. Difference in the performing bodies. If the cast had been all white, the choreography would have been boring. The choreographic content of the duets was extremely minimal—mirroring of basic shapes and simple weight shares. The duet vocabulary was not technical, ornate, complicated, or fast.

In its restrained sensibility, Hinterlands still felt like a John Jasperse work—he did not shirk authorship. But compared to work I’ve seen of Jasperse in the past (I’ve seen his California, Prone, Within Between, and just two dancers), Hinterlands was a bit simplistic. Jasperse, a skilled craftsman, had surrendered his craft to difference itself.  Perhaps Jasperse was consciously choosing to take up less space as an author? Perhaps he was making a statement about identity being the only politically viable choreographic content right now? Perhaps he was trying to situate or mark his whiteness by foregrounding difference? In any case, identity and craft blurred.

Aesthetic Unities

Many white people don’t need to think of identity on a regular basis. The term “identity” is rarely applied to whiteness:

“Racial identity is taken to be exclusive to people of color: When we speak about race, it is in connection with African-Americans or Latinos or Asians or Native People or some other group that has been designated a minority. ‘White’ is seen as the default, the absence of race.’" 

--Laila Lalami, Group Think, New York Times Magazine, November 27, 2016.

The aesthetic corollary of the whiteness-as-neutral fallacy is that white artists working in abstraction tend to take unity of form and content for granted. In contrast, artists of color often must fight to legitimize their abstractions. Zadie Smith writes, of African-American painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye:

“Yiadom-Boakye is as committed to her kaleidoscope of browns as Lucian Freud was to the veiny blues and the bruised, sickly yellows that it was his life’s work to reveal, lurking under all that pink flesh. In his case, no one thought to separate form from content, and Yiadom-Boakye’s work is, among other things, an attempt to insist on the same aesthetic unities that white artists take for granted.” (emphasis mine)

Similarly, Hilarie M. Sheets writes:

"‘[White visual artist] Donald Judd didn’t have to explain himself. Why do I have to?” asks Jennie C. Jones, an African American abstract painter who has grappled with the issue of how her work can or should reflect her race. ‘[White visual artist] Fred Sandback can make this beautiful line and not have to have it literally be a metaphor for his cultural identity.’"

--The Changing Complex Profile of Black Abstract Painters, ArtNews, June 4, 2014. 

Kara Walker, in a recent artist statement for her 2017 show at Sikkema Jenkins, expressed her fatigue from having to explain her work in terms of her racial identity as she acknowledges the inescapable weight of American racial injustice:

“I don’t really feel the need to write a statement about a painting show. I know what you all expect from me and I have complied up to a point. But frankly I am tired, tired of standing up, being counted, tired of ‘having a voice’ or worse ‘being a role model.’ Tired, true, of being a featured member of my racial group and/or my gender niche. It’s too much, and I write this knowing full well that my right, my capacity to live in this Godforsaken country as a (proudly) raced and (urgently) gendered person is under threat by random groups of white (male) supremacist goons who flaunt a kind of patched together notion of race purity with flags and torches and impressive displays of perpetrator-as-victim sociopathy. I roll my eyes, fold my arms and wait. How many ways can a person say racism is the real bread and butter of our American mythology, and in how many ways will the racists among our countrymen act out their Turner Diaries race war fantasy combination Nazi Germany and Antebellum South – states which, incidentally, lost the wars they started, and always will, precisely because there is no way those white racisms can survive the earth without the rest of us types upholding humanity’s best, keeping the motor running on civilization, being good, and preserving nature and all the stuff worth working and living for?

Anyway, this is a show of works on paper and on linen, drawn and collaged using ink, blade, glue and oil stick. These works were created over the course of the Summer of 2017 (not including the title, which was crafted in May). It’s not exhaustive, activist or comprehensive in any way.”

Perhaps liberated craft looks and feels different depending on the identity of the artist. But regardless of whether or not identity is the subject of a dance, ultimately that dance will not be fully realized—whether you want to call this finished ideal “excellent” or “impactful” —unless form is indissoluble from content. Again, Adrienne Rich:

“The power and significance of an emerging consciousness, of form discovering its meaning, form indissoluble from meaning, is the process art (as creative change) depends on—and embodies.

‘What are your poems about? a stranger will sometimes ask. I don’t say, ‘About finding form,’ since that would imply that form is my only concern. But without intuition and mutation, in each poem yet again, of what its form will be, I have no poem, no subject, no meaning.”

           ---Six Meditations in Place of a Lecture

Similarly, Zadie Smith writes, “Everyone is born with a subject, but it is fully expressed only through a commitment to form.”  (Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Imaginary Portraits, The New Yorker, June 19, 2017) Smith quotes the African-American painter Lynette Yiadon-Boakye, talking about her artistic process:

“Over time I realised I needed to think less about the subject and more about the painting. So I began to think very seriously about colour, light and composition. The more I worked, the more I came to realise that the power was in the painting itself.” (emphasis mine)

The power is in the painting itself.

A big part of craft is committing to the material. Listening to the material. Letting it speak. A thorough application of ethics in relationship to our craft demands a dialogic process. Not a solipsistic process. Not a process of appropriation. But a process in which we go within, and then out beyond ourselves, and then back within again, and then again out past ourselves, and so on, in a constant conversation between our form and the world. I think that kind of process make sense if my liberation is bound up with yours.

Rich urges poets to examine their form “for ignorance, solipsism, laziness, dishonesty, automatic writing.” (Tourism and Promised Lands)  This reminds me of Hilton Als’ recent critique of Young Jean Lee’s new play, “White Men”: “By trying to lampoon whiteness, she’s made a “white” play: shallow, soporific, and all about itself.” (Hilton Als, The Soullessness of “Straight White Men”, The New Yorker, August 6 & 13, 2018 (emphasis mine)). A liberated craft must find, in Rich's words, the “dynamic between poetry as language and poetry as kind of action, probing, burning, stripping, placing itself in dialogue with others out beyond the individual self.” (Blood, Bread and Poetry) (emphasis mine).

On the flip side, if we anchor our artmaking exclusively outside ourselves—in the desire to make the world a better place, for example—we risk disconnection from our own poetics:

“We do not trouble the waters with a language that exceeds the prescribed common vocabulary, we try to ‘communicate,’ to ‘dialogue,’ to ‘share,’ to ‘heal,’ in the holding patterns of capitalistic self-help—we pull further and further away from poetry.”

--Adrienne Rich, Tourism and Promised Lands

An arabesque has nothing to do with poverty. Our forms should exceed the prescribed common vocabulary. Dances that claim to be “about” social justice issue X (sex trafficking, poverty, global warming) and claim to accomplish this by putting a voiceover about issue X underneath their abstract dance fail as art because there is no connection between content and form. Many dances “full of liberal or radical hope and outrage fail to lift off the ground, for which ‘politics’ is blamed rather than a failure of poetic nerve.” (Adrienne Rich, in Tourism and Promised Lands).

It’s moving in the right direction to source movement from, or through dialogue with, an impacted community (or melting glacier). But the power must be in the dance itself, not borrowed heat from the subject matter.  White artists cannot take unity of form and subject matter for granted. We need to summon the poetic nerve to insist on a deep dialogue between our craft and our content. Only then might our dances pulse with “an engaged poetics that endures the weight of the unknown, the untracked, the unrealized.” (Adrienne Rich, Poetry and The Forgotten Future)

——————

In this writing, I have focused on the finished work of art, not the choreographic process. The two could be related. But you can have a diverse cast and an equitable creative process and still not produce a finished work of art that contributes to societal equity. Likewise, you can make a work through autocratic methods that nonetheless promotes equity through its message.

——————

Special thanks to Megan Wright for significant contributions, Tracy Taylor Grubbs and the Dancing Around Race artist cohort.

The next Dancing Around Race public gathering is Friday, October 26th at 10:30 AM at the Joe Goode Annex. Featuring Barbara Bryan, Executive Director of Movement Research in New York City in conversation with Gerald Casel about institutional thinking and models of advancing equity in the arts.

AND

There’s a Dancemaker Clinic coming to town. A new opportunity for artistic growth and career coaching with choreographer and director Hope Mohr in ODC’s beautiful Studio B (50 feet x 61 feet). A full hour of individualized, private mentorship tailored around your needs and questions. Mentorship includes artistic feedback, production coaching, career strategy and a variety of tools to support your process. Artists can use the hour to show and document work in progress. Performance makers from all disciplines welcome. Appropriate for artists at any career stage. Monday nights at 7 and 8 PM (one slot per artist). October 22 -December 10.
SIGN UP HERE: http://odc.dance/DancemakerClinic.

References

Hilton Als, The Soullessness of “Straight White Men”, The New Yorker, August 6 & 13, 2018.

Casel, Gerald. Responding to Trisha Brown's Locus, the body is the brain, November 1, 2016

Charlton, Lauretta. Claudia Rankine’s Home for the Racial Imaginary, The New Yorker, January 19, 2017.

hooks, bell. "Postmodern Blackness,” Postmodern Culture, vol. 1, no. 1 (Sep. 1990).

Kao, Peiling. "On Per[mute]ing," the body is the brain, October 27, 2016

Lalami, Laila. “Group Think: The Identity Politics of Whiteness,” New York Times Magazine, November 27, 2016.

Menand, Louis. "What Identity Demands,” The New Yorker, September 3, 2018.

Mohr, Hope. "Choreographic Transmission in an Expanded Field: Ten Artists Respond to Locus,” TDR: The Drama Review 62:2 (T238) Summer 2018.

Pedrosa, Adriano. "What is the Process," in Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating. Ed. by Jens Hoffman, Mousse Publishing, 2013. 

Profeta, Katherine. Dramaturgy in Motion: At Work on Dance and Movement Performance, University of Wisconsin Press, 2015.

Racial Imaginary Institute

Rankine, Claudia “Teju Cole’s Essays Build Connections between African and Western Art.” New York Times Book Review, 9 August:12, 2016.

Rich, Adrienne. Essential Essays: Culture, Politics and the Art of Poetry.  W.W. Norton & Co. 2018.  

RIFF TALKing on Identity and Performance, with Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Joy Mariama Smith, Sara Smith and Tara Aisha Willis; moderated by Cassie Peterson. Originally printed in Contact Quarterly, Vol. 42 No. 2, Summer/Fall 2017.

Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2016.

Sheets, Hilarie M. The Changing Complex Profile of Black Abstract Painters, ArtNews, June 4, 2014. 

Smith, Zadie. “A Bird of Few Words: Narrative Mysteries in the paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.” The New Yorker, June 19, 2017.