2015 Thomas DeFrantz Interview

Wow, was, was, was, was.

All right, sound is rolling, camera is rolling. Have fun.

Yay. You know, actually I was reading with Anita, who I'm not familiar with-

Oh you don't know Anita, I'm surprised, I thought you might've run paths with her. Anita was in the original company of The [Earmish 00:00:28] Woman. She's one of the six or seven folks working with Jalawe way back in the day. Anita Gonzalez.

I wonder if I do know her.

I think you probably might. You've certainly have crossed paths. Then she after that moved more into theater, and she's been directing theater in New York for years. Then she was working at a SUNY that was close enough, I can't remember which one. She could get in and out. Kingston, whichever one's near Kingston. She was living there for a number of years, but then she took a job in Michigan two years ago. She seems very happy now.

University of?

Mm-hmm (affirmative), University of Michigan. She had been in Florida for a few years as well after her PhD, and that was not a happy circumstance. Anyway, I was really glad to work with her on that project. Really glad.

Good. I was really excited, I was like, "Oh, oh, oh," and before you came I shared some things with the students. I shared this intro because in reading the intro, I was like, "And I know you all are busy, but just read the first paragraph of," and there was something, there were a few things that stood out to me.

One is this idea of illuminating the capacity of black performance and black sensibilities to enable critical discussions of performance histories, theories, and practices. Authors here are less concerned with errors of omission in a historical genealogy of performance studies than a project of revelation, one in which the capacity of black performance is revealed as a part of its own deployment, without deference to overlapping historical trajectories or perceived differences in cultural capital from an elusive European norm.

I think about this project and feel like that's part of what is interesting to me about this, and what I also feel like I brought up again sometimes in trying to have this conversation like the conversation we had about black dance and always feeling like, "Oh, it's in opposition to white dance," which doesn't need to get talked about because it is sort of the norm, but still knowing that there is something really important about black subjectivity and black performance and what it does and why it does what it does.

I was wondering, even in reference to your own work or this project, I wanted to talk a little more about this idea of the importance of this is not about correcting an omission. This is about talking about what it is, in and of itself.

Yeah, that's great. Thanks for that. Let me try to do it through history, historiography. John Hope Franklin, who's the first really great historian of African American lives and cultures and social structures, he writes From Slavery to Freedom, I think 1946 it gets produced, and opens up the space for the possibility of the idea of a Black Studies or a black historiography.

Then we get to the '70s and the 1980s and deconstruction becomes very popular. This is when we have the characterization of race as a figment, as a construction, and we have Derrida helping us understand deconstruction of language, and the phallocentrism of language. Then we have amazing researchers like Henry Louis Grates, Jr., or Houston Baker talking about how there's ontologies of black language that are distinct but related to other kinds of structures of language.

Then in this era, in the '80s, we're learning how to unpack and deconstruct conceptions around race and blackness, and let them be much more complicated and variegated and have their own kind of qualities. I think what happened after the millennium, and this is where I feel like I'm most interested, is the qualities that black performance or black lives have that are in and of themselves, they matter.

It's like when we say Black Lives Matter, we're also saying ontologically, black lives aren't ghosts or copies or reflections of white lives in black face. That's not what it is. There's an essence and a core in terms of what's possible through performance, what's possible through language, how life experiences multiply into group experiences. There's a core there that's really important and that hasn't necessarily been historized and theorized all that successfully yet, and so we'll get to the place where that's happening.

At the same time, we're in the 21st Century so we also can imagine forward. As we're capturing pasts and ren-narrating past events in terms of their gender dysfunction maybe or the patriarchy but also in terms of the possibilities for feminine presence and empowerment or queer presence, we're also imagining forward to well what else could there be? That's where I think it gets really interesting.

The what else could there be is maybe black performance that's omni-sexual, that's transgressive and transgendered, that's concerned with a certain kind of class identity, that's also concerned with a kind of swagger that's related to popular culture, that's classical in its imagination.

Again, this kind of flowering of variety that maybe is like what happened in the Harlem Renaissance, but these possibilities maybe are in front of us again now in this moment. That's the thing about the project. The Unwrapped project I think matters in a certain kind of way.

We're allowed to bear witness to a flowering of diversity, of voices and approaches and different constellations of black performance or black lives or black humanity within these works and how they tell different kinds of stories that are related through a kind of shared experience or shared vision of a global black presence.

I also appreciate that you are also an artist, and a dancer and a scholar and all of this. I'm interested in how perhaps dance, you mentioned this I think when we were talking with the grads, the exceptionalism of dance and then at the same time, "Well of course you are in conversation," you know.

Sometimes when I'm whole, I'm about the body. I'm not about that. I'm interested in what is so important about taking the body into consideration, taking dance into consideration in a conversation like that and how scholarship is not so separate? It's a part of the theory. It is theory.

Figure out where to start. Where do I start? Okay, okay. Dance offers these really amazing challenges to the every day of many people on the planet, but dance within Africana structures on the continent and then in diaspora, so in the Caribbean, in Brazil, obviously in Latin America and in the U.S., but also in directions towards Australia or New Zealand, black dance is ubiquitous and present. It's very much a part of social identity and individual identity formation, and it's religious and spiritual practice, it's expression of sexual identity, it's intellectual capacity, it's wit, it's all of these things.

We have this tension between the ways that dance operates for black people in different settings of black culture, you know Afro-German, Afro-Nordic maybe, Afro-Scandinavian, but dance is operating in certain kinds of ways in those contexts, and then dance is operating in really different ways in other contexts on the planet, so Europeanist contexts and white western context, maybe context in China or other parts of Asia, Southeast Asia and India.

Dance is operating in different kinds of ways, but dance has capacities, black dance structures as we understand them in the United States, have these capacities to make connections between intergenerational politics and class affinities and location. We learn so much through dance. It's just always been this very important and ever present form of expression.

Dance has always had challenges, even among the black intelligentsia. If we go back to W.B. Du Bois or Booker T. Washington and then Alan Locke, so the architects of Alain Locke and Du Bois, in a certain way, architects of the Harlem Renaissance. Locke famously says, "We're going to help define the new Negro and make this flowering of African American artistry that will help the world understand the humanity of black people in the U.S."

I think that those researchers and intellectuals also knew that they were talking about black people on the planet. The U.S. has always had this special place in terms of how we've navigated race relations and making something from nothing in the context of the U.S. it's very different than what happened in the Caribbean or Latin America or on the continent. The planet has looked to African Americans for guidance and inspiration and also as cautionary tales in some ways, like what's happened in the U.S. is really particular.

Locke, when he's helping to be an architect to the Harlem Renaissance says, " Well dance is the minor form of the arts that we won't endorse. It's sweaty, it's common, we all dance, and it's outside of language, so we don't really have ways to write about it and validate its importance." You have sculpture, you have literature, you have playwriting, you have poetry, you have fiction, you have visual arts, you have music.

All of these forms of expression are central to the Harlem Renaissance, but you don't have dance. There's actually very few representations of dance from the Harlem Renaissance. In the planning of this movement, there was a sense that well dance, it's every day and it's hard to wrangle. Those two things together mean let's push it to the curb, let's just wait on that.

Then we get to the Black Power movement in the '60s and dance becomes important in the U.S. How does it do that? Through West African dance. It becomes really important when artists start learning dances from Ghana and Senegal and Mali. Then we have this thing that's called just West African Dance, that becomes really important in the U.S., and it's a way to claim Power to the People, black identities. It becomes a very nationalistic sort of way to identify through dance that's crucial and important.

This is also the moment when experimental choreography is really taking hold and starting to shoot out into the world. That's happening among African American artists, artists on the continent to a smaller degree, white European American artists. It's happening. Latino, Latina artists, this experimental choreography is coming out of the '60s and into the '70s.

Already we see there are just really divergent traditions that get us to the place where this project begins, where you have choreographers who are experimental artists, who are working in essentially queer and non-normative ways to develop dance practices that are maybe as Dianne McIntyre's practice is based in music and jazz music and improvisational structures combined with folklore and storytelling.

Or someone like David [Rusev 00:13:37] who is so committed to text and interested in how literature and text-based expression can enliven the body, even if the body is not necessarily in motion, or someone like Reggie Wilson, whose Fist & Heel group is so committed to folklore, old-timey back tales, rhythm and expression that's connected to traditions of spiritual practice, that are maybe just not every day, non-normative, yet again.

This experimental tradition in African American performance and black dance is resistant and related to the 1960s black power, black arts movement, but distinguishing itself. I think it's also related to what happened during the Harlem Renaissance where dancers had to really fight for a place at the table among the intelligentsia, who were then suspicious of dance and its capacity to operate outside of language, through the body. That hasn't changed much.

In the Academy we still have people in scholarly settings or academic settings, we still have people who work in literature who are very suspicious of the body, and how the body can do so much without necessarily resorting to words. The other thing we learned in the '80s through Derrida and other theorists, other theorists of language, Frances Manon, of course, who's very helpful here, was that language is very violent. It tries to fix things and make them stable. We know from dance and from our experience every day on the planet that it's all unstable.

There's very little that's actually stable about our lives and our existence. Dance actually gives expression and body to that instability. It's one of the things that makes it so incredibly provocative and important. Dance demonstrates instability, it demonstrates the need to be flexibly engaged in social operations. You have to be flexible to dance, and that's what we actually have to do in our daily life. We have to figure out how to be flexible, how to make choices. Dance demonstrates choice-making, and it also demonstrates limitations that can be surpassed.

You can do a turn that's amazing, and you didn't know you could do it that well or that fast or whatever it might be, but also there are things that you can't do. Suddenly your leg doesn't go where you thought you wanted it to go. Limitation, maybe exceeding limitation, but being bound my limitation, these are parts of dance, as well. Dance is an amazing container for human condition.

That was bizarre.

It's so funny because it's always like, "Yes, of course, how does nobody see," like this idea that yeah. You have to be flexibly engaged. That's, you know, the violence of language, of trying to fix things and if it's not fixed, then somehow it's not real or valid.

Even this comment on how every day gets dismissed, so social dances get dismissed and [Renee 00:17:03] Harris talks about, I know a lot of your work is centered also around social dance. He's like, well hip-hop, lindy-hop, these are the social dances of black people, that is black dance, how could it not be? Then these become markers in American culture, society, dances, and stuff like that. Yet, how it was, in a lot of ways dismissed, because oh, well we all do it, is really interesting. I'm wondering actually if something that came up in our conversations and maybe this intersects with the social dances or not, but this idea of interrupting and rupture and disrupting what performance can be, and where, maybe both how social dance and theatrical dance have been a part of that.

Sometimes we think about theatrical dance and don't think about how social dances are also interrupting spaces and how we see and think about performance. Maybe just to, and this will be another one where it's like, "Where shall I start," and then you just go on for 30 minutes. I'm thinking about interruption and rupture and disrupting what performance can be and where social dance, and also what we miss when we may see as concert dance?

Yeah, yeah, let's see, let's see, let's try there for a minute. For black audiences, if we're going to allow that to be a thing and I think why the hell not, yes, there are black audiences, hooray. Okay. For black audiences, we have a way that we understand dance to operate within our everyday lives. It's how you celebrate your little nephew's birthday, it's how your little niece is, her high school dance, that's where it's going to be.

Maybe it's praise dance as part of a church service. It might be a liturgical dance, it might be a dance at a wedding. Dance is always going to be present, and we're going to be in relationship to it, even if we're terrible dancers. The thing we say is, "Well I just can't dance." We all have a cousin or an uncle or an auntie or someone who's like, "Well I don't dance," or, "I'm not a good dancer," but the dance is present in the social identity, so it's really dug in, in terms of understanding black lives.

In the context of the United States, at least, dance is there, so we have this kind of every day dance, but then we also have an abiding interest as a people, if you will, an abiding interest in the arts. We're heavily committed and invested in the arts. We're interested in expression, we're interested in creative flexible improvisation.

We've had to make something from nothing in terms of our great-grandparents and grandparents, or however we got to the United States when we were enslaved. We had to figure out how to survive and navigate, and this kind of flexibility makes again dance and creativity really important.

We also make space for theatrical dance and we believe in it, we're invested in it. It was true back in minstrelsy times, there was a huge black audience for blackface performance, so blackface performance was patently racist. At the same time, black audiences make special space for performance. Race as performance is still performance, and you have to pick out the parts that are helpful and useful and run with those. Enjoy those. Bracket out the stuff that's entirely racist and denigrating and figure out how to not see that section.

I think we have a long history of figuring out how to do that. Seeing productions that are really interesting and amazing, but then bracketing out sections that somehow get racist. I just think there's a Broadway show this year that won the Tony Award. I enjoyed the show but towards the second act, the middle of the second act, there was this African number where they wore ooga booga masks.

I'm watching the show and I'm just thinking, "Really, you have to do that in 2015, and shame on the authors, just shame. There's no reason for it." That two minutes or four minutes could've been cut easily. It just made many of us in the audience uncomfortable for that little bit of time, and then we had to find our way back into enjoying the show, because it really had nothing to do with the show. It was dropped in. That still happens around black performance. Let's bracket that off.

Theatrical dance, we have a special place for it or we have a place for it. We're really committed to enjoying seeing a kind of focused attention on dance. There is a black audience for theatrical dance, and then there's a black public for social dance. These two mix and match and they overlap, and they are mostly the same people, but then they also can be separated.

You can have large publics of people who have never been to theatrical dance and are great dancers, maybe they're ['git 00:22:19] dancers in Detroit or they're footwork dancers in California, or they're hip-hop heads and B-boys and B-girls in Philadelphia and they've never seen a dance in a theater.

Then there are people who've seen many dances in theaters and maybe love Misty Copeland or love Alvin Ailey and love Philadanco, but have never seen or never participated in a kind of cipher, a house cipher or something like that. They're separate audiences, but they do overlap either way.

One thing about black performing arts is that they tie together individual expression and creativity to social circumstance and social possibility. The political is foundational to black expressive arts. That's something that's been very confusing for academics interested in white western structures of aesthetics. In those structures, there's this sense that the political can somehow be separated out.

Black political expression never had that sense that you could separate it out, a political from the performative, always goes together. This is why black expressive arts are always concerned with sexuality, disability, location, class, always, always, and we experience it in rap music, obviously, DJs mixing things together in unexpected ways. This sense of protest is core to black expressive arts, and you see it in social dance, but also in theatrical dance.

The theatrical dances of this project each offer interventions into whatever was understood as being a kind of normal way to perform. The political is important to each of these choreographers and their relationship to the performing artist. That relationship is politicized, I would say in each of these encounters that you have with these artists. Then we get to experience that from the audience, thinking through it, experiencing it, sitting in the audience, reading about it, watching the films about it. We get the sense of how that political is operating.

Maybe it's about gender politics, when you're working with a female-identified choreographer, or a male-identified choreographer who needs you to be a certain kind of woman in these pieces. Or maybe they need you to be a certain kind of energy that's not masculine or feminine, it's androgynous. These are interventions into the political that help the performance do more than simply stand as kind of aesthetic action, as though there could be an aesthetic without a political basis.

Black performance can't actually recognize an aesthetic that's not politicized, and political in the sense of every day interaction between people and the possibilities of that interaction being transgressive, dynamic, unusual, and charged.

I think you said the other day too, even the choice not to, you know, people are like, "I'm not political, that's not me, I don't," you know like when I started this, it's like, "Oh, I don't do a lot of dance," you know. I knew there was a thing that I was talking about. I wonder about the next generation coming, [crosstalk 00:25:43]-

I have an idea after that last question.

Go for it.

If taking that structure and everything you just spoke about and the six choreographers you're thinking of, including David [Russet, [inaudible 00:25:56], Donald McKayle, Hal Aberham and David [inaudible 00:26:07] Miller. Is there anyone you could maybe just pick one of those you could speak to [crosstalk 00:26:12] in relationship to [crosstalk 00:26:14].

Yeah, we can do that. Do you want to just, why don't you just mention them and I'll just riff on each of them, or however you want to do it.

[crosstalk 00:26:21]

Renny Harris, Philadelphia genius, amazing, but Renny's work bring B-boy and B-girling, by now it's called hip-hop, so if you don't like that, hip-hop choreographer who wants to be that kind of thing. Renny's work intervenes by bringing social dances into the concert stage. He knows that, he says this.

Like the black arts movement, it feels like black power back in the theater again. That had been, under Reagan, that had kind of disappeared. When B-boying and B-girling showed up in the '80s on national stages, a little bit, there was definitely pushback, like, "Well we don't know that, that's art and that it belongs here."

Renny was able to go, "Well yeah it belongs here, and we can use this vocabulary to tell all kinds of stories." I think about his early solos that he made for himself about life in Philadelphia, black life, black humanities, relationship to his sister, so these dances, endangered species that he was making, they were intervening by introducing every day young, black dance vocabularies into the concert arena.

The thing that's interesting for Renny is that then he had to train dancers to do this work. Dancers who didn't live in those spaces but were amazing physical artists, had to learn how to be girl, a little bit, or be boy, some, or house dance, in order to do the work. He had to train dancers, so that's a huge intervention.

He's made space for these forms to be taught at college campuses, to be appreciated in international dance festivals. His intervention is about bringing something that's really every day for the people who did it, into context where it could be recognized and valued, where it really hadn't been. It hadn't been thought of as art, and it hadn't been thought of as creative expression that was inherently urgent for telling stories about black lives.

Then on the other side of that spectrum, BB Miller.

Yeah. BB Miller, so an early post-modernist, identifies as black, she's a black woman, you know that's clear, she's never said she's not a black woman, but BB, like Ralph Lemmon, has at times had a company of all white dancers. She's lived in these spaces where race matters and doesn't matter in certain kinds of ways, and she's been exploring physical strategies of dance making. She's a consummate dance maker.

Now what's really interesting about BB Miller's work though if you look at it, and sometimes she'll say, "Oh I didn't know I was doing that," and I believe that, that's true. We do things intuitively. At the same time, she is truly committed to articulating a kind of behind the scenes, ever present, very powerful black femininity. It's in the work.

Even a piece like Rain, which one could narrate as a figure on a patch of land doing some movement to find her way through a moment in time, one could narrate it that way, she's reminded us that when she first performed the piece with her red costume and the green ground and her black skin, that there she was in red, black, and green, in the black liberation flag. That's, palette-wise, what the piece offered to its audience. There was a way that she was claiming her blackness as part of her social identity as a post-modern artist in the scheme, the creative color scheme of the work.

When I think of BB Miller's work, I think of the way that there's a sort of powerful secrecy or quietness about blackness and the way she's exploring it. Again, this is work from an artist who understands her identity that she claims and that other people put on her, she knows she's a black woman, and she makes choices in relation to that knowing.

If you see a piece that seems to have no reference to black life, it's a reminder that black life isn't always theatricalized to a place where it has to demonstrate its references, because we are black people on the planet, our lives have different kinds of emotional strains, different kinds of rhythms. We have days hopefully that are every day where the micro-aggressions aren't experienced.

Her work, I find, really reminds us of that possibility of a certain normalcy that's about relationship and intimacy, that's not always about black in big letters. I say that again, acknowledging that the work is always about black in little letters. This is work from a black woman that acknowledges her experience as a black post-modern artist. That's who she is.

Sometimes that's quiet and tiny thoughts that come into the foreground of importance. I think with BB, the black is never not there, and I think the way it can get very, very quiet, that's the intervention. That's the rupture. It's always about being a black person on the planet. I think for BB it's often about being a black woman, but that can be a very quiet, private, intimate and understated thing. That does not have to be Beyonce and Oprah. It can be just this moment.

It doesn't have to be Aunt Bee and her recipes or Uncle Sid and his stories. It doesn't have to be oddly stereotypical or folksy. It can be quiet. That's a revelation. It can be quiet. When I think of BB's work, I think about the power of this black feminine quiet that can be created in the theatrical space that she's sometimes concerned with.

I love that, black women quiet. How are we doing? [crosstalk 00:32:50]

We're fine.

Okay.

Is this helpful, I sit-

Yes, [crosstalk 00:32:59]. It's really fantastic. Well you know, and some of these things you've been saying, a lot of this is intuitive. She actually says that. It's not in this video, you won't see it, but when I asked them all to talk about their work, she's like, "I'm more of an intuitive choreographer than not."

I got to learn Rain, that's the piece that I learned-

Okay, good-

She talked about that moment, how when somebody saw the work, they were like, "Black, red, and green. That is what this is about." She's like, "Can't it be about," you know. This way of, I think that was one of the things that I was interested in. Did I always have to first be marked seen as black.

My friend, my partner at the time, who was a 6'3" black man from Texas, was like, "You will always be black. I know you want to identify first as a dancer and an artists, but you will always be black." It was like, "Okay, yeah," but I wondered about how to be in this world that doesn't, like Andrea Woods says, yes, of course, as a woman ... This is also got cut from the ...

She says, " If I want to make a work about sunflowers, well of course it has my experience of a black woman in it, but I don't have to call it black woman sunflowers," you know? You know, have the Oprah, you know. At the same time, recognizing also that, that became a push-against for me and realizing that oh, you don't actually all of these things can co-exist.

On the other side, you have BB Miller this way, and then you have Jawole, who started asking questions like, "Well why do I need to point my foot?" Her expression of black femininity and black womanhood. I think in some ways it feels like the interventions are more obvious, but I'm curious too in the other ways, in the ways that she also continues to push within her work and within the company and the kind of work she does with community.

Yeah, there's kind of like two things, there. Let's see if we can get at both of them, because one is about Jawole, but another is about black identity. I don't know, let's go to Jawole first, I guess.

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, obviously the founding director of the Urban Bush Women, really took as a mantra thinking about black women's sociability and the possibility of black women working together to create a space that would demonstrate alternative structures of social life.

The company is mostly working for audiences that aren't exclusively black women, so you're already going to be in this funky tension with who's watching and who's doing. Jawole is incredibly, incredible gifted artist and intellectual, thinker and move, and also community organizer. She thinks of her artwork or she executes her artwork as community organizing and offering strategies for social survival, and that's so crucial.

I think that, and she'll narrate this better than anyone else could, but when I think of her work, I think of her as being committed to the possibilities of the group, which means that while she'll have things that she wants to do in a certain way, and she's the choreographer and the director, but in witnessing her work, we always feel the presence of everyone's participation. That's a model.

That's a model for social society, for social civil society that you could have essentially a leader-less community of women doing things with each other to help express a common theme, but with the variety that's in that theme. You always have this sense in the work of the possibility of the group being much more than the individuals who are in it.

An amazing thing to see in this project is solo work, because that's not been something that's been the hallmark of her company, The Urban Bush Women. Early in her career she made lots of solos for herself and is an early solo, or is there a new piece, or-

It's something she was working on in different pieces, but it's original to me.

Oh beautiful, okay. To revisit that space where there was a possibility of dancing solo, or it being the only moving body on the stage. I think with Jawole, we were invited to see one person representing a possibility of a group, still. You still had the sense of the group being present. Then there's that.

There's dance as community activism or community organizing, and there's also the technical aspects that Jawole wanted to explore. She's a modern dancer, trained in ballet, but also looking at West African forms and Caribbean dance forms, looking at these forms and allowing them to infiltrate in very much children's games, folklore, letting all of those kinds of embodied reactions to the every day, become part of what's on the stage.

Dances that explore shaking the hips, shaking the shoulders, the shimmy, the leg lift and the kick. Not interested in extremities and kind of the finish of a physical kind of perfection in some way, but interested in the impulse that produces the movement. Again, it's dance as social communication and social activism and artistry within the technique of this dance, these dances that she's making, as well.

She makes these amazing interventions. I think of her pieces that were about, that she makes that are about black women's sexuality, that are about lesbian presence in black communities, that are about spirituality, the works that she's done on beauty parlors and hair salons, that she's taking dance into other kinds of spaces to let it speak to people's lives in different kind of ways.

She modeled for us how to make theatrical dances, but then deploy them in other kinds of circumstances. In the senior citizen home, in the high school, in the junior high, in the beauty shop, so that the dance is moving and meeting people where they are, and not just waiting for the people to come to the theater to see it. I think her intervention has been to really open up the space of community involvement in this kind of art making. She's really helped us all imagine what that could be.

Then you were talking a little bit about black identity [crosstalk 00:40:21]-

Oh yeah, let's see if we can do a little on that, see if it's helpful. We all understand how identity politics are fleeting, and they're intersectional. We have different kind of identities. We have a racial identity, but also an identity through sexuality, through class, through disability, through age, through location, and through gender. These are the seven we usually work with.

Then some people add religion as an identity, religious identity, is an eighth identity to think about. Then we could add something like, so we talk about place already, but we could talk about first generation, second generation, how long have you been in the national circumstance where you find yourself now.

These identities are not fixed, they're always shifting, but we also flow through them. We have cycles where our black identity maybe is the most important thing. Then our sexual identity might be really important, too. I need to be a queer man of color. Other times I need to be a black man who's queer. It depends on the circumstance, it depends on how my energy is cycling, it depends on who we're talking to and what we're talking about.

These identities, they overlap but they also disentangle sometimes. Maybe my disability is the most important thing, and we might meet each other at the level of talking about tour disability, how we're both disabled in some way.

Black identity is vexed because it's entirely visible. The other identities we were talking about, needn't be. Even disability doesn't have to be visible. Sexuality, gender can be but we can play with gender, but class and age and location, we can disguise those in a way that race tends to hit right there. We see someone, we think we know they're black or they're not. The U.S. has the one drop or two drop or three-drop rule. Any black at all, I means black, that's all there is. You're just black, or get back. If you're black, get back.

These identities are vexed and they're complicated, and then I think that we all, as we're maturing, figuring out our kind of social place in life, have to figure out how to negotiate them and navigate them. It happens early for some people, it happens in the middle of their lives for other people, or late in their lives. How to navigate claiming black identity in a way that feels healthy, productive, and useful.

Some folks be as black-skinned as they might want to be or seem to be, but not claim black identity. We can feel the political wages of that with someone like Clarence Thomas who is visibly very black, but asks as though black humanity would be the last thing that he would want to defend as a Supreme Court Justice. That's a problem. There's a real disconnect between how race operates for him in his every day life, and then what he does as a political figure in the world. They're disconnected. That's awkward. It's also a telling behavior, because black identity is so vexed. This kind of disavowal, the U.S. disavowed black people when the Constitution's written, black people aren't even mentioned except as property. There's no black humanity in the Constitution, and that disavow continues. You have lots of young people and some older people trying to distance themselves from black identity.

What we all figure out is that black identity really matters. It's urgent, it's actually really productive and useful and when we get to black expressive forms, it's all the things we're talking about in this project. Now you can tie your aesthetic interest to your political identity. You can work on your social circumstance through your art-making, like black expressive culture is hugely powerful, so important, it's so dynamic.

Those places where black identity can really help create unexpected and urgent artwork. It's fantastic. We do cycle through our relationship to black identity as we do our sexual relationships, sexual identities, our gender identities are fluid and they shift. I think I would want to encourage us all to allow that to happen and not feel fixed in one identity forever in a certain single kind of way.

I'm always reminded of Ntozake Shange, one of her love-song poems from For Colored Girls, there's a moment when one of the women says, "Sometimes I get tired and I have to come off the floor, and you hurt me." It goes on in other directions, but those lines, they resound in my head because I feel that way about race, and we all do. Sometime I get tired and I have to come off the floor, and you, race, you hurt me, deeper than I've ever been hurt.

Identity matters, we shimmer through it. Sometimes we choose to be in it, sometimes it's put on us, sometimes we have to leave it alone, but it does something powerful and provocative. Claiming this project as a black dance project is powerful and provocative. I think it's urgent. That might not be what happens with the project, it might go in another direction, which is fine.

To me, claiming black identity means claiming black expressive possibility, and that matters. It matters in the world now. I think it'll matter in the world in 50 years. What our history tells us is that a hundred years from now it'll still matter that sometimes we claim black identity and we claim black expressive possibility because we know there's something there that matters.

You hurt me deeper than I've ever been hurt, and then I was in the bottom of your shoe when you walked back from her ... You ever know Colored Girls?

Yeah.

Oh yeah.

I didn't [crosstalk 00:46:32]-

Sometimes I get tired, I have to come off the floor.

Wow.

You hurt me. [crosstalk 00:46:41] Is that enough? I feel like that's probably enough.

Let me see if there was anything else [crosstalk 00:46:49]-

Go for it. We're here, we're here in the room, let's do it.

One of the things that was brought up during the brainstorm was some of the people that are invisible on this project. I don't know [inaudible 00:47:09]. Talk about dystopian-

I was curious as we have this conversation, and we talk about the boundary, well what is the boundaries of [inaudible 00:47:27] or whatever, certain establishment. I'm curious about, we also started talking about the future.

Yeah, let's see.

Even this idea of how heavy black dance can take up so much space because we're trying to-

That conversation-

[crosstalk 00:47:50] bridges, then we end up here, and does that give us, how are young people, younger people, trans people, people with other identities or are experiencing their identities in a different way, how are they also in conversation with this?

I guess I wonder one, if there are people, because I haven't, if there's people that you've come across already that are having some of, artists already who are having some of these conversations and in different ways, maybe not even with dance. Maybe we can touch a little bit on how we get from that [inaudible 00:48:39], how we get from that conversation about yes, black dance and keep moving on beyond that. Then who and how are some of the ways that, that is happening? Maybe do some of the ... In the way that people are just choosing to live their lives and create their art.

Yeah, that was good, I got lost, I'm not sure. Yeah, I don't know.

Maybe let's start with the simple question, then-

Maybe the concept of invisibility and sort of layers of this identity, of identity [crosstalk 00:49:29]-

Maybe I can just go a little bit. Can I just give it a go?

Yeah.

One of the things that's exciting to me about this project is how you've made choices to work with a particular group of artists. Now in that choice-making, there's always going to be people who aren't chosen. Making choices means there's going to be exclusion. That's the truth of experience, or that's just how things are.

By choosing the seven or 15 or 25 artists you work with, well then there's 25 or 50 other artists who you're not working with. Then that could be considered exponentially. There are amazing artists of color all over the planet. There are amazing artists, there are amazing black artists. However we're figuring identity, there's just going to be this incredibly pool.

The project makes choices about who is included, and then explores what's inside that choice. That's a great thing. That doesn't mean there aren't other really amazing and interesting artists and there couldn't be other choices that are made in the future.

The project also models for younger artists, well here's a way to get at this. What if you curated for yourself a group of people to work with you, and developed different kinds of creative voices or expressive voices? What would that feel like?

What is it to work on a project for 15 or 18 years, to really marinate and linger inside the questions that each of these artists are asking of you as a performer, but then also your responses to those inquiries, so how you're responding to the material and reconfiguring it as our day-to-day life changes, as challenges today in Syria and migration patterns from East Africa are having such an influence on the planet, your performance is transformed.

When we might be talking about water supplies in five years or thinking about electricity in 10, we can't necessarily know what'll happen next, but we can be attendant to the variety of responses we have to the world situation, even as we're working through particular choreographies.

The project model is lingering in a question, an artistic and research question for a number of years. That's the promise of an artist's path, is to linger in these ideas, not vine them, six seconds, 15 seconds, 30 seconds, but to linger in them and explore what happens in that lingering. Slow-cooked, if you will. That's a trendy thing right now, but the lingering, the finding, marinating, I was using food words, we had a great lunch.

The staying inside of questions to see what gets produced over time. The project really models that through particular choices of collaborators. I think it would be fantastic to get someone who doesn't even work in the concert dance world. That would be a suggestion. Jameel has all of these ideas and people he's working with, to have a drag queen.

You know there used to be a way a drag queen met somebody who didn't know anything about theater. That's not true anymore, so to have someone who really exists only in the burlesque and drag world work with you and make a piece. Somebody who's 23. You know what I mean? To really go in a different direction and see what that could produce for your questioning, but also for the project, was even more intergenerational.

Right now, it's Donald McKayle, but what about that next? What's in the next room? I'm really curious about that next room, and I would trust you. I'd be really curious to see what you'd find out in that next room. I'd love to be present for that. That's an idea.

[crosstalk 00:53:30]

Even if it's just five minute, a five-minute piece it ends up being, or whatever it's going to end up being, but whoo.

It's interesting because where I'm headed with my other work with sexuality, I'm asking, it's like I want erotic dancers in the room, burlesque dancers, strippers, so what does that mean to like yeah, no, you set a piece on me.

I just said drag queen, too. That's so old-fashioned, it's like gender illusionist, quick, write that in, take out drag queen. [crosstalk 00:53:59] Gender illusionist, gender illusionist. When I say drag queen, gender illusionist. Anyway, sorry.

The last thing that [crosstalk 00:54:15].

I think so.

Th conversation you were having about how sometimes a discussion about black dance can end up being this, take the energy out of the room. We get stuck. [crosstalk 00:54:34]-

Subjugation. Okay. Okay, so race matters. Race still operates in complicated ways. At the same time, 2015 is different from 2005, Obama's presidency is really different from Bush II or Reagan. Things do change, even as they stay the same. Sometimes we get really invested in old conversations because they're the conversations that our parents and mentors are having with us, and that's what they are telling us, so we get stuck in that, in repeating that cycle.

I think the challenge is to see if there's other questions to ask. This question about whether black dance exists, I don't know, I'm not interested in that question anymore. People dance, people are black, or claim black identity sometimes. Those things go together and something gets produced. Call it black dance, call it post-black, call it whatever you want, but let's talk about that thing that's getting produced and what it's doing in the world.

If it helps to think about genealogy and go, "Well this is like the black arts movement, this is like what happened in Harlem Renaissance," then great. That's terrific. If it's making us feel like we can't move or breathe anymore, we can't breathe, then I want to say let's find that. Let's find another way to have the conversation.

Post-black, Afro-future-queer, the new names or the new models help us reimagine the questions. Maybe that's it. It's just let's keep finding new questions. Yeah, I got a little bit lost in there, but there's something about that, like the black dance thing, it just, I think done and done. I think our students just don't care, honestly.

I think sometimes we stop caring about something because it's actually healthier. I don't think everything's about loss. Sometimes I think it's okay to move on. That's me, too. Do you know what I mean? Oh my God, I think maybe we might move on from that conversation and see what happens if we did.

We were talking about the idea, there's this thing that you do, something that was sort of exciting was this, for me, in having these conversations, sometimes you realize that you get into this thing of explaining yourself to someone else. What happens when you're in the room for black folk, and who actually [crosstalk 00:57:06] the audience?

When you have that conversation and then you know that oh okay, I'm writing this for a grant, or this is the thing that they might get excited about, or it's that old conversation because yes, your mentor is saying, "Well what about the legacy?"

At the same time it's like I know I'm not really interested in that, but how do we talk about this thing that is actually super complex and super interesting, and it is dance, and it is black people dancing, but I don't want to make that documentary, what did you say, dance better? What was it? Free to dance better.

Oh yeah, free to dance better.

What happens if you take that question out and then you sort of interface with what it is versus this, but that becomes part of that, I think happens because of the explaining and the [crosstalk 00:58:05]-

I agree-

We're doing, and then yeah, you start to-

[crosstalk 00:58:10] I think for this project too, you'll figure out how to narrate it, and that narration will change from day to day. To me, it seems that the more you feel constrained to talk about it as black artists making this ... I think that's going to bore you really quickly.

These are really amazing artists, and it's not that they happen to be black. I'm not a fan of that, either. These are really amazing artists and they've made this work that tells stories about black humanity. I'm done. I'm done that these are really amazing artists and you're, you and your collaborators, this is an amazing piece of performance. I'm done.

You know what I mean? The other stuff helps me deepen my understanding of the experience, and as I'm thinking about reflecting on it and I want to know more and I go to the website or I look at the Blue-ray disc or, and then I start to understand the genealogies and Donald McKayle dance with so and so, and so and so studied with him, and there was this resistance movement that Jawole worked in to create this space for black women. Then I start understanding all that.

I start with the experience of the performance. I start there and then it all builds out and deepens. I think the challenge is to not start there, and there already being constrained, as being about black artists of a certain generation, making solo. There I think that diminishes the project somehow.

I think the choice-making is really smart. I don't know, I just think that maybe it's that thing you're saying about intuitive. Maybe some things can be left a little bit unsaid, to be discovered about the choice-making or, is there a reason Liz isn't in it really, or was it, you know what I mean? If it really is about you wanted to work with these folks, is it about race for you? It doesn't feel that way, but maybe it is.

It doesn't. It feels like you were attracted to these energies because they're speaking to black humanity a certain way. If that's what Liz's project had been, you might've worked with her. You know what I mean? She might've been fine for this project, but that hasn't been her project, so you know.

Are there white artists or Asian artists or a Latina artist who work on black humanity? Some. Could they become part of this project? Sure, why not? Do you see what I mean? It feels to me like it's about the connection to the artist and the artistry and this creative expression around black humanity in a certain way. That's my sense of it.

I would say that's true.

That's great.

In terms of what you're connected with, and even, and also, and being realistic about what I think I can do about within this work, how it continues to round out. That's why it is interesting, this idea of here, here, here.

Nice.

[crosstalk 01:01:16] That thing.

I love that thing.

It's because it's like when I was like oh, I need to add Diane, oh I want to add Blondell. [crosstalk 01:01:32]

Did you talk to her about the project before she passed?

She ended up, it wasn't about this project. We ended up talking, she came and was the person who led the post-show discussion about my woman and sexuality-

Beautiful-

Work [crosstalk 01:01:51]-

You interfaced with her in that way, great.

I did. I did. I think, you know when I think about that, that's also why it's important. We're in a shifting time when we're thinking about legacies and some of these dance companies and talking about that, too. We're shifting. We always are shifting, but-

Dance is a living art. It exists body to body. We learn dance body to body. We can learn things off the internet or off television, but it's not the same. The intimacy of dance in relationship is what makes it, it gives it some of its special quality.

These dances stay as long as they can, and they do go. They go away. They change, they change so much that they're nothing like what they were. That's time. That's what time does, but paying attention to the possibility of that intimacy, this project models that too, and that's important.

It's really important to gather ideas, embodied ideas from these artists that you're working with and explore them so that for another bit of time, and then you can share these ideas with other people. It really, really matters. Dance is body to body, it's intimate, it's personal.

These are experimental artists as well, so it's even more intimate and more personal than it might be for someone making ballets on a big Alvin Ailey company. These are smaller, more hand-crafted, intimate ideas that you're expressing in the project, and that's important. Yeah.