Artists Reach Out: Brinda Guha

Dear friends,

Welcome to Artists Reach Out: reflections in a time of isolation. I dreamed this series of interviews out of grief for my work both as a documenting arts writer and curator of live performance. In this time of social distancing, we are called to responsibly do all we can to safeguard ourselves and our neighbors. It is, literally, a matter of life and death.

But there's no distancing around what we still can share with one another--our experiences, thoughts, wisdom, humor, hearts and spirit. In some ways, there are more opportunities to do so as we pull back from everyday busyness out in the world and have time to honor the call of our inner lives.

So, let me introduce you to some artists I find interesting. I'm glad they're part of our beautiful community, and I'm eager to engage with them again (or for the first time) in years to come.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Brinda Guha

Brinda Guha
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Brinda Guha is a trained Indian Classical Kathak dancer for over 20 years and has traveled throughout USA and to India, England, and Spain to perform. During training and performing for years in classical Indian dance, as well as Flamenco and Contemporary Fusion styles, she opened Kalamandir Dance Company in 2010 and founded the rich movement coined as #ContemporaryIndian. Since then, Brinda choreographed for the North American Bengali Conference at Madison Square Garden and self-produced and choreographed her original dance production entitled one to(o) many colors. Now, she is represented by CESD Talent Agency and is pursuing artistic direction and arts education. She spent most of 2015/16 collaborating with NYC-based interdisciplinary artists. Brinda also dances with dynamic percussive trio Soles of Duende, featuring Flamenco (Arielle Rosales), Tap (Amanda Castro), and Kathak (Guha). Her ultimate dream of having art meet activism was realized when she created a seasonal benefit in 2017 for Planned Parenthood & survivors of domestic violence called WISE FRUIT. Wise Fruit NYC has implemented nine NYC live art installations and is expanding to a Nashville edition ("Wise Fruit 1.0: Plant the Seed" in 2020). For her day job, she works as an arts administrator for a dance service organization based in the values of justice, equity & inclusion: Dance/NYC.

Brinda Guha
(photos: above, LVDF;
below, Corey Rives)

Do you have a current or planned project whose progress is affected by the pandemic?

I think about how this industry wasn't designed to take care of us, truly --because there wasn't a contingency plan in place for us to consider what we deserved before we needed it. We wake up one morning, and our two-year project plan is shot?

Thank goodness for institutions that still support the artists financially during this kind of cancellation, but sheesh, what about the work? Why does our industry settle with the uncertainty of it all?

Rise and shine, your income is on hold until further notice, and here's the link to go help yourself. If you get sick...good thing you're in shape--your chances are pretty good! WHAT?! No, thanks. I'm merely mortal: I'd like some more reassurance than that.

Briefly, tell me about how you got involved in the arts and in your particular practice.

I am a classical and contemporary Indian dancer rooted in the vocabulary and aesthetics of Kathak dance. I have training in various additional practices, including Manipuri, Flamenco, Contemporary, and Urban movement.

My practice has evolved with me over the years. I find myself returning “home” with time. As of now, I am more in a space of celebrating the #femininedivine in movement, art and activism. Understanding how and where we can return to the world led by women or the feminine spirit that exists in us all (because it is where we came from) is important to me. I began my professional practice in New York City fresh out of undergraduate studies at New York University, but I have discovered new spaces of artistic expression over the last nine years. During this time, I've worked consistently in arts administration, education, performance, collaboration, curation, and freelance practices.

In a more specific way, what are you practicing? And what are you envisioning?

In the arts, I envision a future of compassion and empathy fostered for communities unseen, unheard and misunderstood. I envision a resilience so deep that we are able to decolonize ourselves. It starts with self, and so movement is a beautiful way to try.

How does your practice and your visioning align with what you most care about?

Today, I only have the love of movement, the love of my partner, the love of food and cooking, the gratitude for a part-time job that serves, and my vivid memories and reflections of what I was told about me vs. my truths (overlap included). I only have time to fester about it because the type-A personality I was told I had can’t find any short-term and immediate solutions, so my anxiety goes into full-throttle mode while she waits for an answer. I think about all my regrets and all my hopes at the same time but in a weird cycle that makes no chronological sense. Rinse and repeat.

Nevertheless, the ultimate irony is that movement is how we return home to check in, to see what's working and what isn't. It is how we journal. We were called to this work, to this practice, to this riyaaz, to this kind of meditation and creativity, for better or worse. It's how we process this confusion. It's how we arrive at the ultimate conclusion that all we have to do is to give into this moment so that we can be born again.

In times of isolation, I feel fear, anxiety, compassion, and so much [abundant] love--love for what I already have, and love for what I so clearly want moving forward.

How does your practice function within the world we have now?

As far as Indian dance goes--what am I supposed to do?! I'm always conflicted these days. So much of India is in shambles. It has become a political space of division and violence under the guise of secular superiority. It feels almost silly to pursue “Indian” dance or dive deeper into the origins of Hindu mythology when Hinduism is being used to kill each and every day in my parents' motherland.

But then I return to the #femininedivine in this practice:

• Ma Kali had dark skin and a fearless tongue.

• Ma Durga held the weight of the world in ten arms.

• Hajar never forgot about what's best for her son.

• surat al Nisa, the chapter on Women--the Qur'an's largest chapter--weaves together vignettes of feminine resilience. 

When we return home to the #femininedivine, our practice makes sense again. It's important to me now, in context of our political sphere, to consider my practice a part of the broader South Asian experience, and not the "Indian" experience. At least not right now. The unity and understanding among my fellow brown-skinned folks is far more important to me now than any religious connotations or personal familial anecdotes or political justifications.

In times of isolation, I reflect on my roots, and my longing for effective communication. How many of us women of color have been told who we are already? Part of it is true, so it's all quite confusing. "Your brother was this type, you were more this type". Actually, I wish I said, I was a few different things and so was he. But maybe it didn't fit into the box that made sense for you. Maybe the scope was too large to grasp, so we simplified it. Maybe in a white world that keeps telling you that you’re a visitor, we held onto those labels to merely have something to hold onto: as women, as brown, as queer, as an artist, as a musician, as displaced, as "eclectic," as "exotic," as "cultural," as...uh oh, the labels are back....

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Dance as an Act of Resistance: Feminist Magazine interview

Valecia Phillips, host of Feminist Magazine (KPFK 90.7FM), interviews me and interdisciplinary dance artist, educator and Avest Award winner taisha paggett on the role of the body and dance in today's urgent activism and resistance.

Listen live today, November 7

2pm PST/5pm EST

or connect to Feminist Magazine

via iTunes

Feminist Magazine is a weekly radio show: Intersectional feminism, news, views & culture. Grassroots to Global, stories you hear nowhere else, from all kinds of kickass feminists making change.

More ways to listen to this episode:

On Stitcher Podcast

At KPFK Archives (available for 90 days)

On Feminist Magazine Homepage (The episode will be available until November 14. Look for the box on the far right called LISTEN TO THIS WEEK'S SHOW.)

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Dudley Williams, 76

Dance Legend Dudley Williams Has Passed
by Out and About NYC, June 2, 2015

After the fire: Puppet artist displaced by East Village explosion

A Puppet Master Loses Life's Work in East Village Fire
by Stephen Nessen, WNYC News, May 19, 2015

A season of celebration for dance artist Davalois Fearon

Davalois Fearon, left, with Gino Grenek and Nicholas Sciscione,
members of the Stephen Petronio Dance Company
(photo: Sarah Silver)

The 30th anniversary of the Stephen Petronio Dance Company happens to coincide with another notable anniversary for this renowned and stylish troupe. Dancer and Education Coordinator Davalois Fearon is marking ten years working with Petronio. She's excited to be part of the launch of the company's five-year Bloodlines project which will pair classics of postmodern dance with Petronio's repertory. This season, the troupe will present Merce Cunningham's RainForest (1968) alongside the world premiere of Petronio’s Locomotor/Non Locomotor at The Joyce Theater (April 7-12).

A native of Jamaica, Fearon was raised in the South Bronx from the age of four with her siblings. She remembers her immediate surroundings as "not the safest neighborhood."

"But my parents did a good job of sheltering us," she says. "I had no idea that I was in Crack Central. We would go to school and then come straight back. When I was at home, it was like going back to Jamaica. I had a very Jamaican upbringing."

She's been dancing, she says, "since I was out of the womb" and would force her older sister--"quiet and more like a bookworm but always supporting me"--to put on shows for the family gatherings.

"Jamaicans love to dance, and it would be rooted in reggae with a gymnastic influence. As I got older, I got exposed to pop, hip hop and salsa. I would always be performing for anyone who would look!"

In eighth grade, she took part in an eight-week Alvin Ailey outreach program where she had her first exposure to ballet, studying with Ron Alexander. Her parents, like many Caribbean immigrants, foresaw a secure career path--perhaps medicine or law--and did not support the idea that their daughter might choose dance instead.

"In their minds, they had the big American dream, and they wanted that for us."

Money was tight, too.

"I auditioned in socks, because I didn't have ballet shoes and didn't know where to get them," she recalls, marveling that she made it into the school anyway. In fact, Fearon had to sit out her first class at Ailey, lacking the proper attire for class--a school requirement. "My first pair of ballet shoes, tights and leotard were from the lost-and-found." But dance was, for her, "like a calling, something I had to do."

Today, in her role as a dance teacher, she looks for similar desire and focus in her young students.

"You have to want it so bad that you're looking for every little detail that the teacher is giving you. I have this one student, about five years old. In her first class, she didn't know anything--didn't know a plié, didn't know first position. Now she knows the whole class by heart--there, right in the front, in first position, ready to go before anyone else. 'I know what's coming!' It's beautiful, really beautiful."

With role models like Ailey, Denise Jefferson and Judith Jamison--"the pride they brought to the work"--Fearon made steady and accelerated progress up the levels of Ailey training.

"They saw something in me that I didn't know that I had, and that helped build my confidence."

She won a scholarship to Purchase College Conservatory of Dance, where she earned her BFA in 2005. In a way, even her parents' resistance helped strengthen her resolve even as she was forced to take numerous jobs to support her pursuit.

"Junior year, I thought about auditioning. I had to show my parents that I can do this. You don't have to worry about me."

She auditioned for Petronio and spent her senior year as an apprentice to the troupe.

Today, her parents could not be more proud, her mother remembering being able to buy Fearon at least one crucial item--a pair of pointe shoes.

Davalois Fearon
in Petronio's Beauty and the Brut
(photo: Sarah Silver)

So, what's most interesting, challenging and eye-opening about dancing for a maverick like Stephen Petronio?

"Stephen is an incredible mover," she says. "He started late as a dancer, and that speaks to me. I started with reggae and hip hop and salsa and then started training.

"We were in rehearsal, and Stephen was working with Joshua Tuason on a solo, and he did a syncopated move that reminded me of something African that I knew from my Ailey training. And here is Stephen, you know, tall, white, bald man doing that and doing figure eights a lot like salsa dancing. The freedom and choices that he comes up with I love because I have that wide background, too. I can do that, too. I can move into a moonwalk one minute and a so de chat the next. His range of movement is all over the place--a lot of fun!"

But, at first, the work was just different enough from what she'd seen of conventional ballet and modern dance training to be a challenge. Remembering, her initial efforts to enter Petronio's philosophy and approach to movement, Fearon took a proposal to him. She wanted to write a syllabus as a guide for other company members and future recruits.

"I would see new dancers come into the company and go through the same struggles. 'You know what? I don't get it.' It was a need I saw not only for our dancers but for our outside teaching work, decoding what he would do in a way that, say, a first-year Juilliard student could understand."

Interviewing students gave her insight into what they needed from the company, and she was able to convince Petronio to create an education department.

Besides performing and teaching, Fearon has been developing her own voice as a choreographer. One upcoming project--Consider Water, her first full-length piece--was inspired by a talk with a UN ambassador working on issues of water-related disasters and scarcity of safe drinking water in many regions of the world. He happened to read about Fearon in a New York Times article and reached out to her. She told him of water shortages in Jamaica and how her family paid to get water shipped to her grandmother's house. The ambassador simply challenged her, "Well, what are you going to do about it?"

"I was thinking, Wow, I don't have much money. I can't save the world. But I have dance."

Excerpts from Consider Water,

a work in progress choreographed by Davalois Fearon

with music by Mike McGinnis

Fearon began work on Consider Water as a way to raise awareness of water-related concerns. The project has taken off, connecting her to supporters and collaborators such as the Bronx Council on the Arts (BCA) and the Bronx River Alliance, a respected local environmental organization. Through the BCA, which awarded her a 2014 BRIO fellowship, she will present excerpts of Consider Water at the Andrew Freedman Home, an arts-related community center, on May 1, and at the Bronx River Alliance Fish Festival on June 6. She plans to preview the finished piece in September at BAAD! (Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance).

To learn more about Fearon and her Consider Water project, visit her Web site here. See the Stephen Petronio Dance Company at The Joyce Theater, April 7–12. For complete schedule and ticketing information, click here.

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Davalois Fearon is a dancer, teacher, and choreographer born in Jamaica and raised in The Bronx, New York. In 2005, Fearon received a BFA from the Purchase College Conservatory of Dance program and has since performed and taught around the world with Stephen Petronio Company, staged its repertory, assisted as rehearsal director, and is currently its Education Coordinator. As a choreographer, she is a recipient of the 2014 Bronx Council on the Arts BRIO fellowship and a member of The Joyce Theater’s Prestigious Young Leaders Circle Artists’ Committee. Her choreography has been presented throughout New York City, including at Bronx Academy of Art and Dance, Bronx Art Space, Roulette, The Vasquez, the Inception to Exhibition Dance Festival, The Warwick Summer Arts Festival, as well as at the Light Box, Portland OR and Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, Florida. Fearon has created work in collaboration with internationally renowned poet Patricia Smith, multi-reedist Mike McGinnis, and fashion photographer Nigel HoSang. In addition, she has performed with Daniel Ezralow, Forces of Nature, Ballet Noir, Darrell Robinson, and Ballet International Africans. She is proud to be celebrating her tenth year with the company.

Interview with Korean dancer-shaman Hi-ah Park

At the initiation ceremony, the minyong was placed leading onto the upstage portion of the house as a bridge between the heaven and the earth. To test my psychic ability and to determine if I could identify the deities who had descended on me, my Godmother and her assistant shaman, who serves as a messenger, sat at the end of the minyong, in a sense ending in heaven. A straw mat was placed downstage. Each question asked by the head shaman was repeated by her assistant. Instead of answering the questions directly, I began dancing. Then, kneeling down on the straw mat, I answered the questions orally. The dance seemed to heighten the trance state so that my answer came without thinking as if I know everything already.

The first question was, “If you become a shaman, through which gate will you enter?”

I started singing in an occult nature, previously unknown to me. Again I danced until possessed and knelt down to wait for the next question.

--Hi-ah Park as interviewed by Lauren W. Deutsch

Read more at:

Meeting With Sanshin:
An Interview with Hiah Park, Lover of the Mountain God
by Lauren W. Deutsch, Kyoto Journal, 1993

Carole Johnson: Journeys in dance and culture

Carole Johnson: Dance: A Legend's Journey

Published on Dec 22, 2014 by Dr. Tracie O'Keefe, DCH

Carole Johnson is a legend in the Australian Contemporary Dance history. The African-American Juilliard graduate is the founding director of the National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Council (NAISDA) Dance College and founder of the world-famous Bangarra Dance Theatre.

In this interview with Dr Tracie O’Keefe DCH, Carole Johnson, choreographer, dancer and dance administrator takes us on a journey from her beginnings in the 1950s where black dancers were not allowed to attend white ballet schools, through to her groundbreaking work in black dance history.

Carole was inducted into the Australian Dance Awards Hall of Fame in 1999 and in 2003 was awarded the Australian Government Centenary medal in recognition of the contribution she has made to the Australian Indigenous community.

Poet Claudia Rankine: Uncovering violence in the day-to-day

Poet Claudia Rankine on the violent deaths of black men
by Mary Jo Brooks, PBS NewsHour, December 4, 2014

Vernon Reid: Making music for transformation

Interview: Living Colour’s Vernon Reid
by S.H. Fernando Jr., Red Bull Music Academy, December 2, 2014

Carlos Santana finds a universal tone

Carlos Santana: 'I Am A Reflection Of Your Light'
Michel Martin, Morning Edition, NPR, November 4, 2014

This week, Cynthia Oliver goes BOOM!

R-l: Leslie Cuyjet and Cynthia Oliver in Boom!
(photos by Julieta Cervantes)

Acclaimed dancer, choreographer and educator Cynthia Oliver presents the world premiere of Boom!--a duet with Leslie Cuyjet--at New York Live Arts this Thursday evening. Yesterday, she put up with some of my "really provocative questions," as she called them.

EYA: Who are you? What elements make up who you are as a dancemaker?

CO: That's a question I've been asking myself since I was a teenager. For many years, I worked hard to think about it outside of what I do. In some ways, I am what I do in terms of how I move in the world. But first: a person, a woman, a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a friend, an artist. Not that the order of it shows any priority, but it's a humble mix.

EYA: What do you most value? What do you find non-negotiable?

CO: Being honest with myself, my relationships--my family, my friends--and being human and humane. Those guideposts in my work have never, ever led me wrong. They helped me steer the course of each piece clearly.

EYA: What challenges you?

CO: Fear. I feel like I push through fear every day. It's there. I acknowledge it. But I know that I'm not going to accomplish anything by buckling to it. I have to do what it is that's inspiring me anyway, and once I get on the other side of it, it's like a whole other world opens up.

I feel like fear has always been my biggest challenge. I'm not a very outward person, although I love people. I have some wonderful friends and enjoy social situations, but my husband is the real social butterfly. I am not at all. I push through that and see what happens. I feel that I have done okay with that.

EYA: Through what perceptual channels do you best perceive things?

CO: I think of my intuition as my strongest perceptual channel. I've learned how to trust it, listen to it and act on it. Because when I don't, I pay. I remember early on in my tenure [at University of Illinois], I created a piece with a large gospel group with the Black Chorus out there. I had never worked with more than five people in a piece. This was a chorus of forty-five. I was choreographing them and eight dancers.

The piece was called Whisper to Shout, and it addressed this very thing: I had started to realize that if I don't listen to the whisper, the shout was going to be a humdinger. The shout was going to kick my behind. So I had to attune my ear to the whisper and be much more sensitive and much more aware of the whisper. And that's just a matter of trust and not saying, Oh, no, I couldn't possibly be right with that feeling that I should act on. That's my strongest perceptual channel.

EYA: What audience would you most like to reach?

Honestly, I just want humans there. On so many different levels, I feel that the work can speak to a lot of different people. On the obvious level, yes, women audiences, Caribbean audiences, people of color. But at the same time, all of the concerns that I address--those that are both obvious and blatant and those that are layered and more subtle--are universal concerns that we all, as humans, negotiate. I want as many kinds of folks in the room as possible sitting right next to each other.

I think my audience is a reflection of my own life. I have always had a very diverse group of people around me. I grew up in an international community in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands. When I moved to the states to be a professional dancer, that is something I continued. When I went to college, I found that the African American community in the states tended to be more segregated than where I came from. Not that there is not segregation there. But it's one of those things where you'd still see a lot of mixing, especially in those heady days of the '70s, when I was in high school. Less so now. It's much more polarized now [due to economic disparity, changes wrought by disasters such as Hurricane Hugo and other factors.] But at that time, it was very different. That's how I got exposed to a certain kind of experimental dance there, that breadth of experience across communities.

EYA: Do you need an outside eye on your work? Or are you able to be objective about what you do?

CO: I do both. I trust my own eye and my own sensibilities about what needs to happen--what kinds of sequence, what kinds of material, what kinds of language. And because I do a lot of research in the work, I trust that. I also strongly believe that none of us can be objective, and it helps to have a trusted eye in the room. The key word there is trusted. I make sure that the person I ask to come and watch, while the work is in that delicate state, is someone who can put aside their own aesthetic, their own agenda, and look at what I'm trying to do and ask me questions that will help me clarify what I'm trying to do, not what they want. I find that that combination--knowing when to bring people in, going back and revising, and then bringing folks in again--that's been really helpful to me.

EYA: What do you consider to be the most important qualities of a serious or professional artist?

CO: Openness. Sensitivity. A willingness to see beyond where you are and what your work is, to see the broader relationship to your field, to the world, to folks around you. Mostly, openness.

EYA: Why is dance your focus?

CO: The full embodiment. I actually didn't start out as a dancer. My sisters danced and, I think since I was the last of six kids, my parents just said, Go on with your sisters!, to get me out of the house.

I was a visual artist. My parents let me try a lot of things. I tried music. I was terrible at music. But painting, drawing, was my arena. I thought I'd make my living as an architect. I took courses in physics and calculus in high school thinking I was going to go in that direction. Dance was really a hobby early on.

And then I had this mentor who fell in love with me and I with her. She was from Kurt Jooss [the German choreographer] and had been in the Caribbean for decades and had a dance school. I would go there and study Afro-Caribbean dance during the week, and she invited me to start taking ballet and improvisation with her. Then she kept putting me onstage, and she encouraged me to move in this direction. And I loved it! I loved the physicality of dance. I'm a swimmer. So, moving on land was really nice too! She would bring dance companies to the island to expose young people to these companies. So, I saw George Faison's Universal Dance Experience; that really blew my mind. I saw a lot of different companies from Europe, South America, the Caribbean.

Recruiters came at the end of high school, and I thought, I really should do this! This feels like something I could really sink my teeth into. A big concern for my dad was, "How're you going to afford to live?" My mom--a brilliant artist and a seamstress--was different. She was like, "Take your wings and fly, girl. Do that art."

See the world premiere of Cynthia Oliver's BOOM! 

at New York Live Arts, Oct 23-25. 

Click here for details and tickets.

Related events:

October 23 at 6:30pm: Come Early Conversation: Sequencing Non-Linear Narratives, choreographer and educator Nia Love discusses the creative practice of Cynthia Oliver

October 24: Stay Late Discussion: Her History - Her Present - Her Future, Cynthia Oliver and Leslie Cuyjet in conversation with Jaamil Olawale Kosoko

Cynthia Oliver’s work is the visceral evidence of an incongruous mixture of aesthetics. Steeped in the everyday sounds of black voices and bodies moving in time and space in the Caribbean of her youth, Ms. Oliver was encouraged to explore ballet, dance dramas and site specific improvisational experiments led by Atti van den Berg - a former Kurt Jooss dance drama company member/performer. All the while she absorbed both the informal and formal of the Afro-Caribbean dance canons in the US Virgin Islands and elsewhere in the region. These vastly differing experiences defined her childhood coming into art. Moving in this way led her to an eclectic career in New York City and abroad in the world of performance art and experimental dancing with folks as diverse as The Caribbean Dance Company, Theatre Dance Inc., the David Gordon/Pick Up Company, Ronald Kevin Brown/EVIDENCE and Bebe Miller. She currently performs in Tere O’Connor’s Sister and BLEED dance works. Oliver has studied and been a part of the black avant garde theatre world, performing in the works of numerous playwrights, most notably, Laurie Carlos’ White Chocolate for my Father, and Vanquished by Voodoo, and Ntozake Shange’s A Photograph Lover’s In Motion, also directed by Ms. Carlos; Greg Tate’s My Darling Gremlin; and choreographing for theatrical productions like The University of Illinois’ theatre company production of George C. Wolff’s Colored Museum directed by Lisa Gaye Dixon. Her choreography for theater has been performed at Minnesota’s Penumbra and Pillsbury House Theaters, New York’s La MaMa Etc., Syncronicity Space and Aaron Davis Hall.

Oliver has been creating dance works since 1991. A mélange of dance, theatre and the spoken word, her pieces reflect her background and interests, incorporating the textures of Caribbean performance with African and American sensibilities. Named “Outstanding Young Choreographer” by reviewer Frank Werner in German Magazine Ballet Tanz early in her career, Oliver has since received numerous grants and awards including most notably, a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award, two Illinois Arts Council Choreography Fellowships, a Creative Capital award, a Rockefeller Multi-Arts Production grant, NEFA Touring support, NPN Creation Funds, a CalArts Alpert Award nomination and a prestigious University Scholar Award from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she is a Professor of dance. In addition to her performance credits, Oliver holds a PhD in performance studies from New York University. She has published widely and is the author of Queen of the Virgins: Pageantry and Black Womanhood in the Caribbean (University Press of Mississippi. 2009).

Walter Rutledge talks with Joan Myers Brown and Brenda Dixon Gottschild

a video conversation (22:49) moderated by Walter Rutledge

with Joan Myers Brown, founder, Philadanco

author and dance historian, Brenda Dixon Gottschild, author of Joan Myers Brown and The Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina, a Biohistory of American

A. Nia Austin-Edwards explores the world of dance artist Nia Love

I'd like to welcome guest writer A. Nia Austin-Edwards who has contributed a fascinating profile of New York-based dance artist Nia Love. Both women demonstrate profound commitment to art in the context of culture and community. Their inspiring professionalism, generosity and creativity make it a pleasure and honor to share my space at InfiniteBody with them. Please enjoy.

Nia Love in Memory Withholdings at BAX (Brooklyn Arts Exchange)
(photo: Iquo Essien)

A. Nia Austin-Edwards
(photo: Gerry Eastman)

No Lines & No Coloring Books:

Nia Love’s Polyrhythmic Existence

by A. Nia Austin-Edwards

Polyrhythm, simultaneous sounds that create an elaborate musical composition, is commonplace in music of the African diaspora—spirituals, jazz, salsa, blues, hip hop, and beyond. As my sister-friend, mentor, and artistic inspiration, Adia Tamar Whitaker says, “Cooking dinner, watching babies, planning the weekend, and talking on the phone, that’s polyrhythm too.” Indeed, many of us negotiate a plethora of rhythms—art, life, parenting, race, gender, sexuality, nation building—all at the same cadence. Nia Love is one of those phenomenal beings, and she continues to be an inspiration to us all.

As the Skype call begins, I enter a room full of shadows. Nia Love is framed by plants, and her afternoon soundtrack is her husband’s jazz band in rehearsal. The internationally-renowned band also features her 10-year-old son, Kojo, on drums. This is her world–epitomizing life as art in a way I see so infrequently that I often wonder if it’s even real.

When Nia Love was young, she always wanted a coloring book. As she and her father waited in line at the grocery store, she would ask and ask and always be told no. She remembers being four- or five-years-old and complaining to her mother that her father kept refusing to buy her a coloring book. Her father overheard her and responded:

"I'm not going to get you coloring books because it's the first oppressor. It's the first thing you have as a child that makes you conform to a line that's not yours. It's not what you make. What you make is important. So you make the line and color it in if you want. And if you want to go out the line, go out the line. But I will not give you someone else's mark and consciously oppress you."

This message has informed her life, her art, her world, and anyone who has met Love would agree that she makes her own lines and colors where she pleases. I wholeheartedly admire this commitment to identity, ideas, and self—a steadfastness that is not often easy to maintain.

Nia Love is a choreographer, mother, performer, wife, educator, grandmother, artist, doula, scholar, jazz lover, collaborator. Her story is not linear. It is one that places family and humanity at the forefront, one that challenges perceptions of art and hierarchy, one that exists outside any frame I have ever known.

Beginning at the Beginning

Nia Love has performed across the world. She has lived in Ghana, Cuba, Sweden, Harlem, and beyond. She has raised children, helped these children birth grandchildren, held hands with grandparents as they transitioned, and when I ask her where her dance begins she offers her absolute beginning. She observes:

“As dancers, when we start talking about our physical careers we start talking about training. I think you come with everything, and then we start peeling that everything away. We start with infinite numbers of things, and as soon as you take that first breath you're that many breaths closer to death. Training becomes something that can confine us based on how we manifest it.”

She remembers a letter her mother sent her from her childhood home in California to where she was working in Japan. In the letter, her mother shares a memory of a New Year’s Eve party that she attended days before Love was born. At the party, her mother couldn’t stop dancing. Her friends told her “You better sit down! You’re about to have that baby right here on this floor.” The morning after the party, her mother woke up feeling the “most freedom she had felt in her life.” Love was not born that day, but in fact four days later. Still, she was dancing well before she entered the physical world.

Portraits of Nia Love
(photo below by Antoine Roney)

With this we begin to understand the integrated life Nia Love leads. Her father was a sculptor who taught at Florida State University, New World School of the Arts, and Howard University. In his Washington, D.C. backyard, he had a welding studio with images of Malcolm X, Sojourner Truth, and Toni Morrison on the walls and John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and Thelonius Monk as his creative soundtrack. The blending of art, identity, and academia is not a conscious choice for Nia Love. Rather, it is the foundation of her experience.

From California to Cuba

An avid young reader, Nia Love spent days sitting on the floor covered by books in the now-forgotten space known as the library. After seeing a movie that featured fairies whose costumes she liked, Love decided she wanted to study ballet. It was the only dance she saw that had similar costumes. Through her reading she came to understand that the Russians were the gatekeepers of ballet technique, so she searched California’s phone book for a Russian ballet teacher. Yes, the good old Yellow Pages directed her to her first ballet teacher, Olga Fricker. No YouTube videos or Facebook pages, just a name and a phone number.

After six years of study in California, Love asked to join her father in D.C. so she could be as close to New York as possible to further her dance career. She received a scholarship to train at the Washington School of Ballet (WSB) where she experienced struggles that I found all too familiar. No matter how good she felt about her technique, she was constantly challenged by a body type that was not “ideal” and racism that would always define her as “second best.”

Nia Love was about twelve years old when Ballet Nacional de Cuba was rehearsing in WSB’s studios. While watching a rehearsal, Love found herself enthralled by artists who looked like her, “from my skin to my hair to my body and my hips and they were KILLING IT!” Seeing herself reflected in these artists was life changing. They were not only technically sound, but “completely driven spiritually, completely present in their emotion and love and passion.”

Alicia Alonso, the company’s co-founder and one of the dancers she had studied in those library books, came to watch Love’s class one afternoon. As the other students left class, Nia Love sat with Alonso and her translator discussing her dance training and the experience of being the only Black body in the room. Alonso invited her to study with the company. The ecstatic teenager spent almost two years in Cuba before her mother made her return. She learned Spanish, developed global friendships, and was introduced to the world of Afro-Cuban rhythms that have become integral to her movement vocabulary. Danza Nacional de Cuba, the contemporary wing of the company at the time, taught Love about “being present, powerful, loving, caring, about putting it all on the line.” They understood that dance was her spiritual commitment, her “priesthood.”

Love returned to the States and continued her dance training at Duke Ellington School of the Arts with new tools in her toolbox. She broadened her international lifestyle as an exchange student, and went on to attend Howard University and Florida State University, beginning her family along the way. She then became a second generation Fulbright Scholar, following in the footsteps of her father who had spent two years in Sweden and took her all over Europe between the tender ages of four and six.

A Polyrhythmic Existence

In 2001, Nia Love’s Fulbright brought her and her family to Ghana. She was supposed to arrive on September 11 but instead departed two weeks later on her late father’s birthday. As Love says, “My daddy was with me that whole trip!”

She went to Ghana as a research lecturer, but did not get much written research done. Bringing her family shifted her focus. She spent her days teaching and her evenings mothering--cooking dinner, cleaning clothes, fighting malaria, and everything in between. “That trip was more an experience for my children than for me,” Love reflects.

This role of mother is one that Love cherishes and respects, not only as a doula who has helped birth at least 40 children, but also as a mother-artist herself. When pregnant women, mothers, or single parents come to take her class, she offers them the flexibility of paying what they can because she understands the priorities of parenting. Love observes, “As mother artists, we live in the world differently. We can’t follow the prescribed way of doing things.” And her journey to Ghana shifted her own lines of priorities and risk-taking.

Traveling with family, particularly with children, there is no space to indulge selfish desires or fears. “I had to exercise my ability to show them my liberating mind so they don't have inhibitions built up by seeing me have an inhibition,” she says. When the children asked where to go to the bathroom, Love had to show them how to squat and relieve themselves in the dirt. “I had to be really open and really careful at the same time.”

With her children’s lives in her hands, she had to make immediate decisions about what risks she would take based on whatever information was in front of her. This is what choreographer Adia Whitaker calls a polyrhythmic lifestyle, balancing the risk-taking with the openness. And this polyrhythmic existence has colored Nia Love’s art-making as well.

Each Process is A Process

As her son Kojo gets livelier on his drums in the background, Nia Love shares painful tales of her early struggles as a choreographer. However, Love’s lessons have allowed her to integrate her upbringing among “Garvey-ites” (followers of the teachings and philosophies of Marcus Garvey), who examined race at every intersection, into art that exists in a so-called “post-racial America.” She developed an artistic practice that mines movement through a constantly evolving choreographic voice, informed by whatever is in front of her. Her polyrhythmic existence manifests in her polyrhythmic creations. She acknowledges:

“I never stopped talking about race, but I started being really smart about how to look at the paradigm and intersections of race. And because I started looking deeper into those intersections I was also able to look deeper into the intersection of composition, the way in which I mine material. How I get in it, open it, shift the lens of it. It made me rethink my own intersections, about the way I deal with a pervasive, very oppressive system–mentally, physically, spiritually. How I deal with it with my children and how I prepare them for a system that targets them, particularly my Black boy, how it targets him and his life. It's not dance for me. It's life.”

Love visits Kara Walker's A Subtlety
(photo: Onye Ozuzu)

Love continues to investigate these intersections through a worldview in her newest work, a five-lens project called “The Agricultural Body for the Post-colonized Body.” She began by traveling Tanzania where she worked with farmers and dancers in the rural and urban areas of Dar es Salaam, the country’s largest and richest city. That exploration equipped her with gestures and movements based on the swinging, throwing, and shoveling of agricultural tools.

Love and students of Fordham-Ailey's New Directions Choreography Lab
prepare for their January showing (c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa
See InfiniteBody post.

Those movements informed her development of the second lens with Fordham-Ailey BFA students in the New Directions Choreographic Lab. She wanted to see how this agricultural movement filtered in a “technicalized body.” For five weeks she investigated who could color outside the lines and just how far they would go. She interviewed them about the communities they grew up in and looked at how their experiences aligned with their exploration and mining of the movement. And sometimes, she had return to “contemporary mode” to then break the lines:

“I would come into a phrase of African cultural movement, then I would swing it into another contemporary motif so they could edge it off. And then they could understand the intersection. Then they would bring to their mouth the question of how does that start, ‘because I got the swing out part, but what is that in between’?”

Then Love deepened the exploration by bringing soil into the studio. As they rolled around, ran their fingers through, and literally got down and dirty, she was able to further delve the lines and frames of every student in the studio.

As she approaches the third lens, she will return to Tanzania to learn to craft tools with farmers. And after that, well, she doesn’t know. Every process is a new experience. Love lets each process inform the next but also seeks to fully explore what’s in front of her. She describes:

“If I were to work with you, then you're bringing something else to my process. So now I have to meld my process into your process, because if I deny the process that's in front of me then I deny the information. So I can't think that it’s MY process, I have to think it’s A process, and each process is different.” 

And with that, Kojo offers a high-hitting, intricate drum solo. CRASH!

BIOS

Nia Love is an established choreographer who has taught at educational institutions, universities and festivals throughout the USA, Africa and Asia. An American Fulbright fellow, Nia has worked in England, West Africa, Japan, France, Colombia, Cuba, USA, and most recently Tanzania. Nia is the Artistic Advisor for Tanzania's prominent dance institution, MuDa Africa, and has recently created work for the nationally acclaimed Ailey|Fordham BFA program along with creating and presenting numerous dance works throughout the world. She was also awarded two consecutive Suitcase Fund grants, an initiative if New York Live Arts. Nia has been creating work over the past 2-½ decades with at least 20 works under her belt and continues to conducts annual research in Tanzania, East Africa on Agriculture and Dance. Nia Love has joined forces with Marjani Forté to form Love|Forté a collective. They have received their 2nd year AIR at BAX and are proud recipients of the Mertz Gilmore Grant 2014. Love|Forté will be presenting their premiere evening-length performance/installation, Memory Withholdings, at the Pillsbury House Theater in Minneapolis, MN, this fall. Most recently, Nia is the proud recipient of the CUNY-Hunter College Dance Initiative 2014-15, a selected adjunct position at Queens College Dance Department, and Texas Women's University’s 2014-15 winter Guest Choreographer.

A. Nia Austin-Edwards (ANAE) began her dance training in Atlanta, GA, at Total Dance / Dancical Productions, Inc. She went on to major in dance at Tri-Cities Visual and Performing Arts Magnet High School and received a B.F.A. in Dance from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Nia currently performs with Brooklyn-based ASE Dance Theatre Collective and remains an associate member of Atlanta's Total Dance Company and Axam Dance Theatre Experience. In 2013, she started PURPOSE Productions--a company that supports artists and activists in the manifestation of PURPOSE-full work that seeks to unify and develop our world community. She serves as an editor and correspondent to The Dance Enthusiast, and shares more personal thoughts on her blog, nocurtains.wordpress.com. Nia is enthusiastic about opportunities for movement to be a lens for viewing, redefining, questioning, challenging, living, loving, and anything else.

Performing artist and student Daniel Foner interviews...me!

Thank you, Daniel!

Eva Yaa Asantewaa
(c)2009, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Getting to Know Eva Yaa Asantewaa
by Daniel Foner, Monkeyhouse: Connect 2 Choreography, August 15, 2014

Katie Couric is catching up with Lil Buck!

Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric talks with Bessie Award-winning dancer Lil Buck about jookin (his "crazy obsession") and his success at bringing this Memphis-born dance form to mainstream audiences.

To watch Couric's World 3.0 interview on Yahoo! News (video 4:52), click here.

Art chooses you: Mary Anthony, 97 [UPDATE]

Friends, students and colleagues of the beloved modern dance choreographer-educator Mary Anthony have noted her passing on her Facebook page. She is said to have died peacefully in her sleep on Saturday at the age of 97.

Mary Anthony

(November 11, 1916 - May 31, 2014) 

Mary Anthony, a national treasure and legend of modern dance, died in her studio home in the East Village in New York City on May 31, 2014 at the age of 97.  Former company member, Daniel Maloney who is the Artistic Director of the Mary Anthony Dance Theater Foundation, was like a son to her and took care of her to the end.
 Mary Anthony is recognized as one of the leaders of the modern dance movement both as a choreographer and an exceptional teacher .  She was the 2004 recipient of the Bessie Award for lifetime contribution to the field of modern dance. In 2006 she received the Martha Hill Award. Other awards and honors include: Joy Ann Dewey Beinecke’s Balasaraswati Award from American Dance Festival, American Dance Guild Award of Artistry, American Dance Association Award, New York State Dance Education Award, and Channel One New Yorker of the week. In 2004 she was entered into the Dance Hall of Fame as part of an installation for the New Dance Group at the Saratoga Dance Museum and in 2011 she received a Citation from New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer at her 95th birthday, declaring November 11 as Mary Anthony Day.
 Mary Anthony, a native of Kentucky, began her career with a scholarship in dance with Hanya Holm in the early 40’s, eventually joining the Holm Company and becoming her assistant. She was an original member of the radical modern dance organization The New Dance Group in the 1940’s. Ms. Anthony danced in concerts with Joseph Gifford as well as appearing in many Broadway Shows. Her staging of the London production of Touch and Go, in which she danced one of the leading roles, resulted in a long association as choreographer for Italian Musical Theater.
 Ms. Anthony started the Mary Anthony Dance Theater in 1956. Following the premier of Ms. Anthony’s signature work Threnody - for which composer, Benjamin Britten gave his special permission to use his Sinfonia da Requiem - Louis Horst wrote, “Here is the most beautiful and complete dance composition this observer has seen.” Her company performed throughout the United States for over 40 years, including appearances at Jacob’s Pillow, The American Dance Festival, the Berkshire Music Festival at Tanglewood and toured as part of the Dance Touring Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, and for over 30 years presented home season performance in New York City. Jennifer Dunning of the New York Times described Ms. Anthony’s Songs as “hauntingly lyrical with the emphasis on simplicity and ageless craft.” In 1996, Mary Anthony Dance Theater celebrated its 40th Anniversary seasons at The Sylvia and Danny Kaye Playhouse in New York City. In 2004 Ms. Anthony reconstructed one of her oldest works, Women of Troy, on Dancefusion, which was presented in Philadelphia along with her legendary solos Lady Macbeth danced by Mary Ford Sussman. In 2009 her work The Devil in Massachusetts from 1952 was reconstructed by the 360º Dance Company.
 An internationally recognized choreographer, Ms. Anthony has had her works added to the repertory of Pennsylvania Ballet, Bat-Dor Company of Israel, the Dublin City Ballet, Dancefusion in Philadelphia and the National Institute for the Arts of Taiwan. Ms Anthony taught at the Herbert Berghof Studio for Actors in New York City for many years.  Shetaught at her own studio at 736 Broadway for over 50 years, retiring only last year.   In November 2013 a Tribute to Mary Anthony was presented as part of  Fridays At Noon at the 92nd Street Y, honoring her legacy in modern dance and her 97th Birthday.
 Mary Anthony has been an extraordinary presents in the dance community and the artistry and depth of her choreography is timeless. She will live on through the dancers she trained and the people who loved her. Andrea Pastorella, one of her long-time students stated the following, “Mary continued to teach, she never lost her "Eagle Eye" even when the right eye failed she never missed a blink. She would only give a compliment if she really meant it. Her honesty was relentless. One of the things that she loved most was teaching her choreography workshops which culminated twice a year at her studio with performances. She used to say: 'These shows are what I live for'!" 
Mary Anthony loved flowers and still has a bulb that has been coming back for 40 years. It was given to her by Ross Parkes, who was Associate Artistic Director and principal dancer with Mary’s Company for many years. She loved walking in nature, planting and growing her own tomatoes in the dance studio.  She loved cats, nature programs, travel, adventure, Ireland (her parents were from Ireland), hot coffee, a hot bath, taking a sauna, and good food. She spent summer weekends on Fire Island with her good friend of 60 years, Maya Helles with whom she loved watching the "Britcoms" and talk about dance.

Donations in Mary Anthony’s memory can be made to the Mary Anthony Dance Theater Foundation and sent to 736 Broadway, New York NY 10003. A memorial service will be scheduled in July please call the studio at 212-674-8191. 

*****

Here is an excerpt from Tonia Shimin's documentary, Mary Anthony: A Life in Modern Dance, and a CBS News interview from 2010.

Dance Legend Mary Anthony: Still Kicking at 93
by Jonathan M.D., CBS News, June 10, 2010

The music is playing me: the great Sonny Rollins explains

Sonny Rollins: 'You Can't Think And Play At The Same Time'
by NPR Staff, May 3, 2014

Kimberly Bartosik discusses her new work for New York Live Arts

Hunger And Rage, Heat And Glare
By Brian J. McCormick, Gay City News, February 19, 2014

Fred Benjamin, 69 [UPDATE]

Fred Benjamin
(photo courtesy of Clark Center NYC)

Fred Benjamin, an African American dancer, choreographer, was born on September 8, 1944 in Boston, and began dancing at age four at Elma Lewis' School of Fine Arts in Roxbury.

He danced with the Talley Beatty Company from 1963 until 1966, when the company folded. Two years later, he started his own New York-based Fred Benjamin Dance Company, which existed, largely without arts funding, for 20 years. Like most African-American choreographers of the time, his work was compared to that of Alvin Ailey, but Benjamin modeled himself primarily after his idol, Beatty. The group movement in his modern ballet "Parallel Lines," the emphasis on entrances in a work such as "Our Thing," and many other works all echoed Beatty's influence. Benjamin added more ballet to Beatty's modern, energized style and helped popularize the genre known as "ballet-jazz".

Mr. Benjamin also worked extensively in theatrical dance. He has taught in the Netherlands, worked in summer stock, and danced with the June Taylor Dancers. On Broadway he worked with Gower Champion and Michael Bennett and performed in such hits as "Hello, Dolly!" and "Promises, Promises."

He introduced many inner-city youth to dance via the Harlem Cultural Council's annual Dancemobile series, but his greatest gift may have been teaching at his own Fred Benjamin Dance Center; New York's Clark Center for the Performing Arts; Steps; Alvin Ailey American Dance Center and as an international guest lecturer at many colleges, universities and private dance studios."

by Julinda Lewis-Williams with Bruce Hawkins

Clark Center NYC

UPDATE FROM CLARK CENTER NYC

FINAL RESTING CEREMONY FOR FRED BENJAMIN

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 21

JENKINS FUNERAL AND CHAPEL
1893 AMSTERDAM AVENUE
BETWEEN 153RD AND 154TH STREET (ACROSS FROM TRINITY CEMETERY)

THE CEREMONY WILL BEGIN AT 1PM.

IF YOU'D LIKE TO SEND FLOWERS PLEASE FEEL FREE TO SEND THEM TO THE CHAPEL FOR A SATURDAY MORNING DELIVERY.

WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE SHORTNESS OF NOTICE.

THIS WILL BE A BRIEF MOMENT TO SAY OUR FAREWELL AND SEND FRED FORWARD WITH OUR LOVE AND RESPECT.

A MEMORIAL SERVICE IS BEING PLANNED FOR EARLY 2014.

Considerably more: two portraits of Carrie Mae Weems

Artist Carrie Mae Weems Talks Race, Gender, and Finally Getting the Recognition She Deserves
by Michael J. Agovino, ELLE, November 20, 2013

And here's more: