He was serious and demanding in that way that American Idol contestants would have seen as bullying. There was a saying about his studio: “You don’t just sweat. You are sweat.” But you knew if you 1/2 stepped with the drum, with your movement, you were not giving the ancestors or the culture the respect, honor, and gratitude they deserved.
To be honest, I rarely attend performances by The Washington Ballet for the dancing. I show up for the theme — a favorite musician, novels and stories, or band. It was no different with the company’s recent and last performance under Septime Webre‘s artistic direction yesterday at the Kennedy Center titled “Bowie & Queen” (the late great David Bowie and Freddie Mercury tracks). One of the challenges I’ve noted with Washington Ballet is the company’s ability to connect on a soulful level with the choreography and music during a performance. Bowie & Queen is the exception. The company has found its groove and soul. And choreographers Edward Liang and Trey McIntyre have given me a reason to show up for more than my favorite rock and roll music.
The program was organized into two 50 minute segments separated by an intermission. Liang’s “Dancing in the Street” features David Bowie’s early music “Good Morning Girl” and “I’m Not Losing Sleep” in addition to original music by Gabriel Gaffney Smith commissioned by the Washington Ballet and performed live by violinist Machiko Ozawa and cellist Suzanne Orban. This was an uplifting ensemble piece on all levels from the music to the dancing, to costuming by Erin E. Rollins.
The second half, “Mercury Half-Life” evokes the spirit of Freddie Mercury from the first tap dancing steps on the stage by a male soloist. I was half joking before the show when I said I hope they include “Bicycle Race.” Yet there it was. Less experienced choreographers can go for the literal, but Trey McIntyre went for the rhythmic not only in the instrumental but the vocal. Dancing to the words may not look cool in the club, but it works for ballet. Or perhaps the genius is in the musical abilities of Freddie Mercury and the band Queen in making vocal music both melodic and rhythmic.
Ballet is reaching new audiences thanks to the vision of persons like Septime Webre. He and others are breaking with with the pink tights and toe shoes aesthetic for brown, black, beige, dancers of different hues, trainings, even body mass. Before the performance I talked with the mom of a ballet school student. She voiced her concern about the direction of the Washington Ballet school and company after Septime (who’s stepping down in June after 17 years to focus on choreography).
She told me her daughter wanted to take a break. The mother says she’s trying to assess her daughter’s reason for pressing the pause button. From this mother’s perspective the direction for the new artistic director is signaling a return to classic ballet for the school and company. American Ballet Theatre’s (ABT) Julie Kent will be the new artistic director. In a Washington Post interview, Kent talks about “setting the bar higher” for the company: “There’s no reason why it can’t be the absolute, quintessential chamber ballet company. There are so many artistic institutions in D.C. who reflect the artistic excellence of the city, and I would really like to build the Washington Ballet so that it is respected in that way.”
For some parents and students this can be interpreted as code for a purely European body and artistic aesthetic. The mention of Balanchine can send chills down some dancers’ spines.
Founded by Mary Day 40 years ago when DC was “chocolate city”, Washington Ballet stayed inside its bubble with not as much as a glance at the city’s resident majority. [Black and brown girls went to Jones-Haywood.] That seemed to change after Septime Webre took the helm following a soul-searching trip for him and the company to Cuba in 2000. [Septime is part Cuban.] I got wind of this trip from a filmmaker who documented the experience.
When the company returned and presented some of the footage and stories about their visit to Cuba, one of the highlights Septime shared was an observation that Ballet Nacional de Cuba’s optics reflected a European preference and did not reflect the country’s people, i.e. no Afro-Cuban dancers. After raising my hand, I politely commented, “the same can be said for Washington Ballet.” Either the then new artistic director Septime and the institution had already set the wheels in motion, or a light went on at that moment in the Corcoran School of Art’s auditorium. Washington Ballet wasn’t the same since.
For the sake of students inspired by ABT’s Misty Copeland and the dancers I saw on the stage for Bowie & Queen, I hope Washington Ballet will continue with their “both/and” approach. The dancers are connecting. And based on the nearly sold-out attendance Sunday, so is the audience.
E. Ethelbert Miller likes to “conversate” with people who have ideas not just jobs. He’s pulled together two women who’ve never shared ideas in the same room before: Vera J. Katz and Liz Lerman. Many people may not know them up front and personal, but have experienced their work and its results. Just tune into network television/feature film, Broadway (Katz), see intergenerational arts, communities growing in motion, science (Lerman).
Read more below.
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Saturday, October 24 at 3:30 PM Vera J. Katz and Liz Lerman come together for the first time in conversation about method, techniques, and journeys as master teachers, artists, and mentors in their disciplines – theater and dance. The conversation will be moderated by E. Ethelbert Miller writer and literary activist. The public conversation takes place at The Potter’s House (1658 Columbia Road, NW, Washington, DC). The event is hosted by E. Ethelbert Miller presented in partnership with Mosaic Theater Company of DC, and Michon Boston Group LTD engagement strategists. There is no admission fee. RSVP Requested. http://katz-lerman-inconversation.eventbrite.com
Both Vera J. Katz and Liz Lerman have their unique approaches to philosophies about the theater and dance mediums. They have empowered students and artists who often come from communities outside their own culture and experiences. Their work with artists explore the depths of identity, culture, and social justice.
“Katz and Lerman continue to touch lives and shape history. There is much to learn from these women. They are teachers whose contributions extend beyond the classroom, workshop and stage. An afternoon of reflections and memories might just be the beginning of a new cultural blueprint,” says Miller who is also board chair at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Shortly after the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the riots that followed in 1968, Katz arrived on the Howard University campus to teach drama. It was a turbulent time of public grief, outrage, and protest on and off campus; not the time when Howard’s theater students could eagerly embrace a Jewish American woman professor.
Nearly 10 years later Lerman was completing her Master of Arts degree at George Washington University. She was also putting together a unique modern dance company and named it Dance Exchange. For Lerman, the MA degree was a way to get a stipend. The company was, in her words, “holding commitment to concert and community.”
Today Katz is professor emeritus of Howard, gives private coaching, and teaches drama part time at the Ellington School of the Arts to a new generation of thespians. Katz has been called by former students Debbie Allen and Phylicia Rashad for dramaturgy and creative counsel. She is also putting the finishing touches on her memoir to include her unique techniques that have brought success to many African American actors appearing on stage, television, and film today: Taraji P. Henson (“Empire”), Anthony Anderson (“Blackish”), Chadwick Boseman (“42,” “Get On Up”), Wendy Raquel Robinson (“Steve Harvey Show”), just to name a few.
Lerman’s vision broadened the reach of dance beyond the studio and stage. Her dancers toured nationally and internationally. They were multi-generational tapestry engaging the public in shipyards, synagogues, playgrounds, street corners in motion with geneticists and physicists, as well as health care workers and patients.
Washington, DC is no longer the city Vera J. Katz found in 1968 or the DC of 1976 when Liz Lerman launched her dance company. In 2002 Lerman received a genius award from the MacArthur Foundation, and published a collection of essays, Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer in 2011. Harvard University invited her to be an artist in residence, initiating new projects including the National Civil War Project, and the Healing Wars. Both projects explore the impact of war on humanity through arts and science. After 34 years Dance Exchange has been turned over to a new generation and Lerman has moved her life to Baltimore, Maryland.
The conversation is a time for Katz and Lerman to assess the changes in art, culture, identity, and the city of Washington, DC. It is a master class in the meaning of art in life and the life theater and dance has brought to so many.
I was ready to go. My first trip to Argentina and to the Latin American continent. My purpose was to do research for a documentary project that was never finished (read more in my article published in The Root). It was just before the start of the Iraq war in 2003. I was already on pins and needles. Before taking off I had a phone conversation with filmmaker St. Claire Bourne who was an informal and jovial mentor to the project at that time. “You’re brave,” he said.
Bourne’s words gave me another anxious pause. I was already concerned about being an American citizen abroad at this time. Added to that, we were both wary of the reception a woman of color would get in a country that aside from tango (which I was learning at the time), was also the land of the “disappeared” and the Dirty War. A harbinger for Nazi war criminals and their more recent offspring. The “Europe of South America.” A country with no Black people. Dr. Sheila S. Walker, who edited a collection of essays on Afro-Latino culture, debunked that last item when she gave me contact information for an Afro-Argentine cultural group. There would be at least 100 or so members still around I thought.
What was left of the African presence in Argentina? Would I recognize it? It was a twist of fate that gave me the clue. At the end of our first full day in Buenos Aires my guide and interpreter, filmmaker Ana Zanotti, took a bus back to our hostel. I got off the bus sooner than we planned leaving Ana to ring frantically to stop the bus and find me. I stayed and waited for her and we decided to walk instead. En route we heard drumming and found ourselves on a back street where young drummers and dancers – more than likely the descendants of European immigrations — were performing. It was the end of vacation and the new school year was starting the next day. The rhythm of the drums and dancers were familiar. African. Some Caribbean. Joyful. I knew I was safe.
TANGO NEGRO, a documentary by Angolan Don Pedro brought back memories of my serendipitous moments during my visit to Argentina. TANGO NEGRO reveals tango’s “African-ness” the roots of the music and the dance that has become the heart of traditional Argentine culture.
For much of the film, we follow composer and musician Juan Carlos Caceres a master performer, musicologist, and enthusiastic citizen of the world who has spent his career embracing the African roots of tango for years. Caceres was born in Buenos Aires and has been living in Paris, France since 1968. Through a combination of interviews with Caceres, musicians, musicologists, journalists, scholars with performances in the concert hall and on the streets of Argentina and Uruguay TANGO NEGRO traces the dance’s early cultural significance as a depiction of the social life of captured African slaves.
The film can be seen on screen at the DC African Diaspora International Film Festival (ADIFF) which opens in Washington, DC on Friday, August 22 at the Goethe-Institut. The festival is now in its 8th year and this year’s screening leans Afro-Latino with films (documentary and narrative) and subjects from Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Brazil. TANGO NEGRO is also screening in New York presented by ADIFF.
TANGO NEGRO isn’t a concert film, though afterwards, you may want to find a tango compilation and listen to it more intently than before to identify the rhythms that go back to Sub-Saharan Africa. The film will appeal to anyone looking for the African presence in what was assumed an unlikely place. It definitely will appeal to the musicologist and anthropologist mindset in arts and culture. Fortunately TANGO NEGRO takes a break from the talk to go back to the music and dance, just to prove the point.
Speaking of unlikely places, at the time I was in Argentina, in addition to Buenos Aires I visited two cities mentioned in the film: Rosario near the river; and Cordoba near the mountains. Both cities were significant hubs for the trans-Atlantic slave trade bringing Africans into the South American continent. Our guide was historian and scholar Maria del Carmen Ferrer. Some would know her as “Chichina” who was the girl friend of the young Ernesto Guevara (aka “Che”) before he took off on his motorcycle journey that he documented as The Motorcycle Diaries.
Dr. Ferrer took us inside the great Nuestra Señora de la Asunción cathedral, a central part of the Jesuit stronghold and college town (to this day). The cathedral had three chapels: on the right was the chapel for Europeans or whites, the large center chapel was for Indians; and the small chapel to the left was for Africans. Later I learned Ernesto Guevara’s sister was doing research on African influences in Argentina’s architecture. African-ness was becoming big among scholars in Argentina.
TANGO NEGRO provides evidence that the subject hasn’t died. Though carnival was banned and cultural expressions of Africa-ness were more or less illegal and diluted with the immigration of mass numbers of Europeans to Argentina, tango still carried the DNA.
So what were the drums really saying that night? TANGO NEGRO may be a sign that it’s time to see Argentina again with a different purpose.
TANGO NEGRO, a film by Don Pedro (France) 2013, 93 min.
DC African Diaspora International Film Festival
Festival starts Friday, August 22 in Washington, DC nyadiff.org/adiff-dc-2014
GOETHE-INSTITUT- 812 Seventh Street, NW, Washington D.C., 20001
“Dancing in Jaffa” opens in theaters in the U.S. today (April 25). Do your best quick step over to a theater near you.
I was thrilled to connect Pierre Dulaine with the Washington Jewish Film Festival for their screening of “Dancing in Jaffa” in March. The documentary won the festival’s Audience Award. “Dancing in Jaffa” is Pierre’s second documentary featuring his highly praised Dancing Classrooms method for children as seen in his first film “Mad Hot Ballroom.”
Jaffa (also called Jopho) is an ancient port city in Israel where Pierre (son of a Palestinian/French Catholic mother and Irish Protestant father), was born in 1944. The family left in 1948. Jaffa has a population of both Jewish and Arab Israeli citizens. In this atmosphere the children are asked to “dance with the enemy” as Pierre describes the challenge he takes upon himself.
If you’re looking for a pick-me-up after the winter blahs, “Dancing in Jaffa” will put a “spring” back in your step. Find a theatre near you.