# Video: We Dance: An Exploration of Movement, Foodways, and Environments ## [Transcript](/video-we-dance-exploration-movement-foodways-and-environments/#transcript) From the world-renowned [Wideman Davis Dance Company](http://widemandavisdance.org/) and award-winning filmmakers Ethan Payne and Brian Foster, We Dance is a love story, deconstructed and distilled into its most elemental ingredients. Dreams. Memories. Family. Environments. In this 12-minute film, Tanya Wideman-Davis and Thaddeus Davis take us from Chicago, Montgomery, and New York to the point where their lives meet and become one. Along the way, they honor and signify on Black American art, poetry, and literature. In this conversation with Sarah Clunis, they will discuss the film and delve into the importance of movement and migration to Black American identity, lived experience, and consciousness. And show how all of our stories are kept—in the places we’ve been, in the food we eat, and in the dreams that we so steadfastly chase. Presented in collaboration with the [Theater, Dance & Media Program, Harvard University](https://tdm.fas.harvard.edu/welcome-tdm) Thaddeus Davis, Codirector, Wideman Davis Dance; Associate Professor, Departments of Theatre and Dance and of African American Studies, University of South Carolina Tanya Wideman-Davis, Codirector, Wideman Davis Dance; Associate Professor, Departments of Theatre and Dance and of African American Studies, University of South Carolina In conversation with Sarah Clunis, Director of Academic Partnerships and Curator of African Collections, Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology ### **About the Speakers** **Tanya Wideman-Davis** is the codirector of Wideman Davis Dance and is on faculty as an associate professor at the University of South Carolina in the Department of Theatre and Dance and of African American Studies. With an extensive career as a dancer, choreographer, and teacher, she completed her Master of Fine Arts from Hollins University/ADF (2012). Tanya has danced with many world-renowned companies, including Dance Theatre of Harlem, The Joffrey Ballet, Chicago, Complexions Contemporary Ballet, Alonzo King Lines Ballet, Spectrum Dance Theater, Ballet NY, and as guest artist with Ballet Memphis, Cleveland San Jose Ballet, and Quorum Ballet Amadora, Portugal. Wideman-Davis has received multiple honors and grants for her work including: 2021 South Carolina Arts Commission Fellow, 2021 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Grant, 2019 South Arts Momentum Grant, 2019 Alternate Roots Artistic Assistance: Project Development Grant, 2018 NEFA National Dance Project Grant, 2017 University of South Carolina Provost Grant, 2013 Map Fund Grant, and Jerome Robbins New Essential Works Grant (2011). She has received international acclaim as Best Female Dancer of 2001–2002 by Dance Europe magazine. Tanya’s academic, choreographic research and lectures examine race, gender, femininity, identity, and location. She has recently contributed a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet titled “Dance Theatre of Harlem: Radical Black Female Bodies in Ballet.” **Thaddeus Davis** is the coartistic director of Wideman/Davis Dance and associate professor in the Departments of Theatre and Dance and of African American Studies at the University of South Carolina. Through the lens of the African American Experience, he questions notions of spaces and environments that affect the interaction of gender, class, race, technology, and media’s ability to shape our perceptions. His research findings are exhibited in the creation of original dance works, films and essays. Davis has received multiple honors and grants for his work including: 2018 National Dance Project Grant, 2017 Provost Grant to support the creations of a research team for the development of Migratuse Ataraxia, 2013 Map Fund Grant to support the research and development of Ruptured Silence: Racist Signs and Symbol, Jerome Robbins New Essential Works Grant (2011), University of South Carolina Arts Institute, Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Reading/Dance Collaboration. Balance: Homelessness Project (2009), Canvas: The Master Class (2010), Cultural Envoy to Portugal, U.S. Department of State. As a Fellow of the 2016 South Carolina Collaboration on Race and Reconciliation, Davis is committed to being an active participant in South Carolina’s efforts to improve community relations and support conversations on race and reconciliation. **Sarah Clunis** is originally from Kingston, Jamaica and received her PhD in art history in 2006 from the University of Iowa. She is Director of Academic Partnerships and Curator of African Collections at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology. Prior to this role, she was director of the Xavier University Art Gallery, where she supervised the Art Collection team, and was also assistant professor of art history. Dr. Clunis has taught art history for over twenty years at public universities and historically Black colleges and universities. Her research and classes have focused on the history of African art and the display of African objects in Western museum settings. She also studies the influence of African aesthetics and philosophy on the arts and religious rituals and cultural identities of the African diaspora. Her work examines gender, race, and migration in multiple contexts. She has published in both national and international magazines and journals. ## Transcript **We Dance: An Exploration of Movement, Foodways, and Environments** \[00:00:08.57\] Good afternoon my name is Brenda Tindle. I am the Executive Director of the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture where our mission is to foster curiosity and a spirit of discovery in visitors of all ages, enhancing public understanding of and an appreciation for the natural world, science, and human cultures. \[00:00:31.67\] This mission in mind, I am absolutely delighted to welcome you to tonight's program, We Dance, an exploration of movement, foodways, and environments, co-sponsored by the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology and Harvard's Theater Dance and Media Program. We are delighted to have Tanya Wideman-Davis and Thaddeus Davis, Co-Directors of the Wideman Dance-- Davis Dance Company with us this evening to discuss their work at the intersections of movement, foodways, place-making, and constructions with Black identity and racial consciousness. \[00:01:12.89\] Tanya Wideman-Davis is the Co-director of Wideman Davis Dance and is on faculty as an Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina and the Department of Theater and Dance and African-American studies. Tanya has danced with many renowned, world renowned companies, in fact, including Dance Theater of Harlem, the Joffrey Ballet, Chicago Complexions Contemporary Ballet, Alonzo King Lines Ballet, Spectrum Dance Theater, Ballet New York, and others. Wideman-Davis has received multiple honors and grants for her work. And her academic choreographic research and lectures examine race, gender, femininity, identity, and location. She has recently contributed a chapter in Oxford handbook of contemporary ballet entitled, Dance Theater of Harlem, Radical Black Female Bodies in Ballet. \[00:02:14.00\] Thaddeus Davis is the Co-Artistic Director of Wideman Davis Dance, an Associate Professor in the departments of Theater and Dance and African-American studies at the University of South Carolina. Through the lens of the African-American experience, he questions notions of spaces and environments that affect the intersection of gender, class, race, technology, and media's ability to shape our perceptions. His research findings are exhibited in the creations of original dance works, films, and essays. Davis has received multiple honors and grants for his work as well. \[00:02:55.91\] We will begin our program with the film We Dance. This 12 minute piece from award winning filmmakers Ethan Payne and Brian Foster tells the story of how Tanya and Thaddeus came together as a couple and as artistic partners. After the film, Tanya and Thaddeus will engage in a conversation with Sarah Clunis, Director of Academic Partnerships and Curator of African collections at the Peabody Museum. \[00:03:26.75\] In many ways, We Dance is more than a film. It truly is an experience. It is a polyvocal rendering of Black interiority and the virtues of multi-generational family, community, and togetherness. It is a love letter to soulful traditions, foodways, culinary ingenuity, connections, and place-making. It is a monument to the complexity, nuances, and iconicity of Black life and culture. And frankly, it is love and movement personified. \[00:04:06.23\] Without further ado, I present to you We Dance. \[00:04:21.72\] My memory is an environment too. My name is Sarah Clunis. I am representing the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology tonight. And I'm so pleased to welcome Tanya Wideman-Davis and Thaddeus Davis. \[00:04:39.46\] Hello \[00:04:40.39\] Hello, it's so great to see you. \[00:04:44.51\] Great to see you too. \[00:04:45.63\] It's wonderful to be here. \[00:04:46.30\] Yeah, welcome, welcome. \[00:04:47.74\] Thank you. \[00:04:48.58\] You know, it's hard to follow the film-- it really is-- with the conversation. But I do want to talk about how the film grabs us immediately and propels us along with poetry. I want to talk about the movement that we see in the film, the dance, the walking, the cooking. And also through the camera, nothing is still. It is like a dance in a world. \[00:05:12.20\] And I think for a minute we get to see what you see for a moment. It's got to be different to be a dancer. And I feel like I had a moment of that with your film. So I would love to focus our conversation tonight on-- around ideas about cultural knowledge and how your work expresses, not only personal narrative, but also provides a document of sorts, a way of recording cultural knowledge. \[00:05:43.49\] So when we spoke to each other last about the film, you had mentioned that We Dance is not only about your relationship with food, and culture, and childhood, and home, and family but also about your experience as dancers and how you've found yourself in this contested relationship with both food and your body. So can you tell us a little bit about how you negotiate those things, these complex racialised and gendered discourses? How did it change your relationship to food and to dance? \[00:06:18.93\] Yeah, I'll start. I think, when we were asked to create this film by the Southern Foodways Alliance, I think I had to come to terms with how to do a film around foodways, and movement, and my family, and migrational patterns, and the relationships that I've had to all three. Dance and food have a very contested relationship. \[00:06:49.27\] Throughout my professional career, I was told that I needed to lose weight. There was a section in the film that talks about ten raisins. When I first got to New York and I started dancing with Dance Theater of Harlem and I was in the second company, I had to hand in a food journal. I had to write down what I ate every week. \[00:07:09.98\] And then at the end of the week, someone would look at that journal and tell me feedback. And so one of the feedbacks, comments was, you're eating too many raisins. You ate a small box of raisins. You should only eat ten. \[00:07:25.12\] Wow \[00:07:27.25\] Yeah, so thinking about bringing back that past, and thinking about my relationships to foodways with my grandmother and how she was the entry point into so many international foods that I was able to experience when I lived in Chicago, because she was a factory worker. \[00:07:47.22\] Yeah-- \[00:07:47.61\] Thaddeus, you-- sometimes you think of food as gendered, these body issues as gendered. But you too experience this. \[00:07:54.96\] Yeah, I think that having been-- being from the South, being a Black male with an interest, at some point at 14 or 15, in ballet as a result of football exclusively, initially, and then your body is your body. And you never think of your body as being something that you do, as a young male, anything other than getting bigger, more muscles, more, bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger. And so you think about that as relate to being in the South, and sports, and athletics. \[00:08:28.95\] And then, going through college, and studying dance, and training in dance and weight being, I guess, in the air but never really directly told to me until I got to New York. And was like, oh no, you're too big. You have to be smaller. And you figure that out. \[00:08:45.82\] And so it is a very contested space that's openly talked about for women. But it's not so openly-- men are not confronted with it. But there's a certain-- where in my experiences, from time to time, they would be just like a dressing room kind of hovering that men would police themselves in this kind of overbearing way. \[00:09:07.38\] But yeah, the idea of what your body is was not particularly a part of my existence growing up in the South. You had your body. It was your body. It was just a body. It wasn't like it needed to look a certain way to do this art form. \[00:09:23.64\] And did you find that there was an aspect of race that was somehow enfolded in this? \[00:09:33.74\] Absolutely. \[00:09:34.82\] Yeah. \[00:09:35.24\] Absolutely, you just think about the medium that we were performing. We were performing in the ballet medium, which means that our Black bodies were in comparison to the white bodies that were performing ballet. And so the aesthetic is to look like a prepubescent female. \[00:09:53.45\] And that's what we were trying to live up to but also the body politics of, if your thighs were too big, if your butt was too big. So taking on these very Africanist perspectives on the body and layering that Europeanist lens onto the Africanist body, it was a whole nother thing that we had to contend with. \[00:10:21.70\] But only really to learn-- for me at least, once I got to New York, and I was at Dance Theater of Harlem and I began to tour around a lot with dancing all around the world-- that all the bodies looked the same. There were white bodies that had butts. And there were Black bodies that had butts. There were white thighs. There were Black thighs. There were thin white thighs and thin Black thighs. \[00:10:43.90\] There were flexed white feet and-- so that the bodies were-- but there was these ideas of what the Black body was that the Black ballet dancer couldn't escape, these stereotypes. There was no way of escaping it, because that's who you are, regardless of what I see. As I'm looking at you, if I see the skin tone comes with the stereotype, so therefore, I cannot discuss any other options for you. \[00:11:08.95\] And also being at Dance Theater of Harlem, the Black bodies were international. They were from all over the world. So you got to see this mixing of just Africanist culture throughout the world and the beauty of those bodies, the skin tones, just the lusciousness of these beautiful Black bodies who were doing this form and doing it at a very high level. \[00:11:35.37\] So there's a moment in the film when one of you says, we gather together here all of our environments on us, around us, and in us here. And the film really shows us, both visually and orally, how the past comes together to create a present. Can you tell us a little bit about yourselves? \[00:11:57.14\] We do get so much of your story in the film. But it's hinted at. Where are you from? Who are your cultural ancestors? Describe the landscape where you grew up. And how does We Dance trace your individual and collective narratives? \[00:12:16.49\] Go ahead. \[00:12:16.85\] So I'm from Montgomery, Alabama. And so the film says, I'm from the place had the Civil War, been successful. And the South has succeeded from the union. Montgomery was the capital, the first capital of the Confederacy. And so I'm from that place that also is the home of the Civil Rights movement. \[00:12:38.54\] So there's this place of enslavement, being supported, and the struggle for Black liberation. So all of that lives in the air in Montgomery, Alabama. And then I'm on the West side of town. I'm on the Black side of town. \[00:12:54.50\] And I'm on the side that's near the military base. Which I come to find out later in life, where my grandparents bought a house. It was what they could afford, because now we would call that the space for air pollution, because there's aircrafts flying over constantly. \[00:13:09.57\] And so with that in mind, I'm also in a very protected space. I'm in church all day Sunday. I'm living a really protected life. But yet, I still know where the color line is. When you go down Fairview Avenue and you cross a certain street, you're in the white neighborhood. And you have to go that way to get to Alabama state, which is the HBCU that's in town that my mother and her sisters went to school, went to and graduated from. \[00:13:40.02\] And so all of that shapes these ideas of who I am as a person. And coming from a space where my grandfather, grandmother, great-great-grandmother, and mother raised me and said, you can be whatever you want to be. And so having aspirations to dance was no different. \[00:14:00.49\] So I didn't really grow up-- because there was dancing in my home, I didn't grow up with the stereotypes that I learned when I got into this notion of professional dance, that dance has a sexuality attached to it. It is a femme thing. \[00:14:14.37\] In my intellectual educational space, I've learned that dance is of the body. And that means that it is of the feminine space. And intellectual thoughts of the mind, and that's of the masculine space. \[00:14:24.93\] Well, my whole family was of the feminine space then. And my grandfather included, because we all danced. We danced in church. So all of those things are part of where I'm from. \[00:14:37.08\] It seems like that's a very-- another very racialized narrative too, though, because as an Africanist and coming from Jamaica, dance is an integral part of masculinity. In most African communities, the traditional masquerades are danced by men. So men are the dancers. So it's just an interesting thing how that really did become racialized as well. \[00:14:59.98\] So Tanya, tell me about yourself. \[00:15:02.49\] So I am originally from Chicago. My mom is from Shuqualak, Mississippi. And my grandmother, who's in the video, is from Shuqualak, Mississippi. So they were a part of the great migration. \[00:15:15.09\] My father is from Chicago. And his family is from McCormick County, South Carolina and Birmingham, Alabama. So I have Southern roots. But internally, my dad and I were actually born in Chicago. \[00:15:32.04\] And I grew up in just an environment that was so-called liberal. I grew up in Oak Park, Illinois. And I just had all sorts of foods around me all the time. My next door neighbors were Thai, and they babysat me. So I was always over to their house eating dinner, eating lunch, eating something. \[00:15:58.20\] And so it flipped my palate differently from my mom, and my grandmother, and my father's palates who were more connected to the southern roots, Southern United States. And so it was just this mixing of my grandmother working in the-- Stewart Warner was the place where they made car parts. And she worked on the assembly line making car parts. \[00:16:26.37\] But in that environment, there were just immigrants from all over the world. So they would come at lunchtime and then bring all these different dishes. And then she would try them. And she would say, let's go to this restaurant. Or let me try and make this, that my coworker made. \[00:16:42.78\] And so it was always this space of experimentation with food, as she was a great cook and loved to experiment. She was always making something. And even the bad stuff was good, I ate it. \[00:16:55.54\] And so once I got to New York, it was like I had to flip how I was thinking about food, because I was in this industry that was saying that your body needs to look a certain way. And I had to come to terms with what do I need to do in a healthy way to actually get my body to look like I want it to look and then continue this profession and be successful at it? \[00:17:26.24\] I have a question. I'm curious, I know that y'all are your own bosses, right? You don't have to keep your food journal anymore, I'm assuming, and things like that. So now y'all are your own boss. What-- things must have shifted and changed, then, for you. And you must feel freer in terms of your body and the foods you eat. \[00:17:51.18\] Yeah, we have totally changed our diet. When we were dancing in the company together and up until probably our late 30s, we were pretty much just loving everything that was being made in New York and experimenting in different restaurants. And then, we got to a point where we were like, OK, in order to have the energy right now, with our bodies right now to dance all day long, we need to shift the way we eat. \[00:18:20.67\] And so we have changed our diets. We're pescatarian, we only eat fish. And we try to be gluten free as much as possible, because for us now at, from maybe-- for me it was 35, I started to feel what I was actually putting in my body \[00:18:42.96\] It's funny how that happens \[00:18:43.17\] And it was-- right? And it wasn't-- \[00:18:46.44\] My kids can eat anything. \[00:18:47.97\] Exactly, it wasn't giving me the energy and sustainability that I needed to maintain throughout the day at the level in which I needed to be physical all day long. \[00:19:00.21\] And also, the idea of not wanting to feel not good, to able to sit down and eat something and go, oh, I don't feel good. \[00:19:12.99\] Yeah, you want to feel lighter. \[00:19:14.85\] Yeah, you know that it was about-- I just sat there and ate a whole bag of cookies. It was good going down. But right now-- \[00:19:24.27\] But not so good anymore. \[00:19:25.29\] I don't feel so good. But I'm just going to go to bed \[00:19:28.53\] Well, it's good to know that dancers also eat whole bags of cookies sometimes. \[00:19:32.43\] Yes, up until about seven years ago. You sat down-- you sit down and open a bag, you got to finish it. You can't just open it and just eat two or three and put it in the cabinet. No, you keep it close to you as well, on the couch with you. \[00:19:46.56\] Food can be so comforting, as we see in your video. And so I think we see a lot the way that you have connected foodways and environment to your stories. So it seems also to me that in the film, you are really connecting, not only to ancestors, but the ancestors of the lands and all the lands where you reside. \[00:20:12.27\] You're residing in so many different places and even the different street signs that we see. There's just a lot of geography in the film, which I think very much makes sense to the historical African diaspora experience, this crossing of borders and oceans. And so for me, I think I see a connection very deeply to woman, and to place, and to elders, and their work in terms of the care and the nurturing through food that they provided for you. \[00:20:46.50\] And one of my colleagues-- Brenda, I believe-- said that, really, she felt that We Dance was really a meditation on food and culinary traditions that shape Black families and communities. So can you elaborate on how you were able to translate that history, because I really see this, in some ways, as a historical document, an environment that, like you said, a memory can be an environment too. \[00:21:10.05\] How did you make the artistic and visual choices that you made, locations, scenes, ways in which you cropped certain scenes. Even that scene that keeps coming back to me over and over again, Thaddeus, of you, the many youths in the cafeteria, tell us a little bit about that creative process. \[00:21:29.58\] Yeah, so I think that the thing about the film, when we first started-- so we first started writing-- Ethan Payne and Brian Foster, so Ethan's an independent filmmaker. And Brian Foster is a Sociology Professor at the University of Virginia. At the time he was at University of Mississippi in Oxford. \[00:21:49.96\] And so we started to have conversations with Brian who gave us, in essence, a kind of sociological study of ourselves. He sent us a series of questions. And we wrote extensively on those questions. \[00:22:03.55\] He read it. He sent us back more questions. We wrote more extensively. He kept digging, and digging, and digging. So as we think about the film, we don't particularly say we wrote it. But we wrote on it. \[00:22:16.65\] And then Ethan-- I mean, Brian shaped it and molded it into this narrative that we hear. So the big thing that he kept lifting up is, wow, you guys moved so much. So East, and West, and North, and South was about the dancers migration just to work. \[00:22:35.28\] Though we lived in New York, we were in touring companies. So we spent a limited amount of time actually in the city that we had a place to live, that we paid rent. So and then, at certain times, Tanya to move to the West Coast. \[00:22:49.08\] And so it was always about, I've done this that I want to do here. But I want to do that thing that they're doing in that place. I got to go and do that. Oh, I have a gig go choreograph in Tennessee or something. \[00:23:01.33\] So there were these periods that we were living around the country and based in New York but still working around the country. And so that helped shaped the many kinds of ways we began to see food as well, because even inside of the country, beyond our own personal narrative with food and history with food, we were going to Austin, Texas. And we lived there for like a year and a half, working. \[00:23:26.35\] And there was this taco place that we would go. And we would-- it would stay open to midnight. And it was always getting out of rehearsal. And that was the place we'd go. We'd go there, and it was like agua fresca was more important to me, the sweet part was more important than the burrito. \[00:23:42.67\] But I think that as referencing that specific many people-- there was this scene that I-- and one of the things that I had written about, the first time I remember dance changing me. And it happened in a cafetorium in fifth or sixth grade after school party. \[00:24:02.85\] And you're having these kids that go to the party at 3:30 after school. And I remember the song coming on and me dancing in a way that it didn't matter who was around me. It didn't matter who saw me. \[00:24:18.48\] Catching the spirit. \[00:24:20.06\] Yes, yes. \[00:24:20.52\] Absolutely, catching the spirit, right. And so people laughed, but it didn't matter. So the line is, why are they laughing? But it doesn't matter, because something about this movement thing that, for whatever reason, I just discovered doing it in front of people that I hadn't ever danced in front of. And it didn't matter. \[00:24:39.03\] So that was what that little, that scene was about, the multiplicity of yourself looking down and going, I wonder. do they see what I see? \[00:24:48.87\] You know what's funny too, is you called it the catching the spirit. Well, we have a term in the concert dance world when we were growing up. And it was called getting your life. \[00:24:59.87\] Oh wow. \[00:25:00.69\] Yes \[00:25:00.98\] So it's that same feeling, right? \[00:25:01.26\] So you can be on stage. And you could be in something and just in a whole other world. And you come off. And you were like, I was getting my life. \[00:25:10.44\] In Jamaica, you hear-- if you hear drummings and then all of a sudden you start dancing. And you just let go. And it was like this-- and of course, you can see that in the South as well, right? \[00:25:19.95\] Yes \[00:25:21.82\] It's a true transcendent kind of experience that, maybe, you're going into this space. And you don't remember what happened before, during. Only after you look back and say, well, I don't know what happened. \[00:25:35.47\] I don't know what happened. \[00:25:35.84\] I was in my life. I got my life out. So that's really what it's about. \[00:25:42.07\] Well, that leads me into our next question, because John Coltrane always said, the music doesn't come from me. It comes through me. And this always inspires me when I'm creating. And not only because it's words from a cultural maker that came before me but also the idea that things can come through me. And I can be a receptacle for the expression of things that are more than me. \[00:26:09.61\] So at the end of the film, you have all these credits where you're referencing works by Gwendolyn Brooks and Ralph Ellison. Tell me a little bit about-- even Nicki Minaj, right? Nicki Minaj, Beyonce, so tell me a little bit about how you chose these works, why you chose them, and how they came through you. \[00:26:35.49\] Some of the visual aesthetics, actually, were taken from those references. The Invisible Man, so there's a section in the video where it's the lights. And then he's-- Thaddeus is in this dark honey-colored space-- \[00:26:51.40\] The underground \[00:26:51.93\] --the underground component of The Invisible Man and the lights, and Brian was really pulling from these narratives to sculpt the ways that our writings were actually going to merge with the content that we created. So most of those references were really his references that he was pulling from. \[00:27:18.54\] And I think, also, that the idea was making a work that's referencing Black existence, prior to our own existence. As you say, it's like an archival piece. And so, though we weren't intending to make a work to be able to sit down with those other classic African-American contributions to art making. But that's what we really do in general. \[00:27:44.72\] You dance with them. \[00:27:45.12\] We want to make works that reflect the existence that Black people have had, both the great things and the things that are not so great. We want to be able to make works that reflect our existence so that we have something to pass on to our future generations, both family and those that are not. So that big collection, to me, feels like a way of-- this is the space that we're trying to live inside. \[00:28:14.85\] With Beyonce, she's referencing Daughters of the Dust. And so that is the white dress, Daughters of the Dust onto Beyonce's-- what? I forget what film that was. It wasn't Lemonade. Maybe it was Lemonade. \[00:28:26.72\] It was Lemonade. \[00:28:27.32\] And so-- right. \[00:28:28.32\] Maybe a little bit of-- yeah, yeah, yeah, Formation too. \[00:28:31.82\] Yeah, so Daughters of the Dust, Beyonce, Tanya, so there's these references that keeps streaming through the history of Black art-making that we see that we're not the first to do it. Some other person is doing it now. But it keeps rolling back, and back, and back, and say the time keeps flipping. But we keep repeating certain cultural aspects that grounds us. \[00:28:56.22\] But I think that there's also a throughline, too, that we can look at this film and look at those artists too. And there's this experiential layering that happens, in order to actually make the text, in order to make the dance, in order to make the music. And it's lived experience. It's what feeds all of these processes that we're in. \[00:29:20.04\] I think one of the things, also, is that, as we're older artists working in dance and dance having a very juvenile-- \[00:29:34.14\] Identity \[00:29:34.83\] --identity. And so as we're older artists working and even wanting to use the language moreso movement. Though we're still calling it dance. But we're working in dance, and movement, and of the body. How do we continue that practice, aside from saying we want to get us a group of younger dancers who we can manipulate their bodies, and stretch them, and kick them, and drop them, and throw them, and-- we want to have that. \[00:30:02.11\] But then there's this other thing that we have to have maturity. You have to have people that have lived life enough to be able to enter into some of those ideas that are just mapped on their bodies and not pushing it, trying to project things that you have no earthly idea what you're trying to project. So I think that's also a part of the kinds of those historic pieces as a way of framing what we're trying to do as well. \[00:30:32.32\] And I think we're at the point in our careers, too, where we're interested in a multigenerational narrative, because our bodies hold very different spaces. So when we are on the frame or when we're performing, we hold space differently than a 20-year-old. We hold space differently than my 92-year-old grandmother who's in that video, who can just look up and, with her cake, and just melt you. So we're open to all of those different perspectives and embodiments. \[00:31:03.87\] I think I see it in the way the film marks rites of passage too, right? There's definitely these rites of passage that are marked throughout the film. And they also are connected to geography. And it's so tied to ancestry, which is why I love all of the referencing and then, also the inclusion of the actual lineage, the elders in your family and their influence. And then I think, too, of the movement that-- of y'all going back and forth all the time and thinking of how really historically our ancestors emancipated themselves through movement, through radical, radical movement, right? Communicated things through body, and dance, and drums across plantations, through mapping of hairstyles, it's really, really intense how your film enfolds all of that history into this moment. \[00:32:05.94\] So you have another project, which is really fascinating to me. And I think it would be great to share with the audience tonight. And I just would love to know a little bit about how it's, maybe-- do you see links with We Dance. It's Migratuse Ataraxia am I pronouncing it right? \[00:32:25.29\] Correct. \[00:32:25.53\] Absolutely \[00:32:26.26\] Migratuse Ataraxia. OK, so I'm going to share some images. And then maybe you could talk to me a little bit about the project, what it was, and then maybe think about what some of the links, really, if there are links, if you see links between this project and We Dance. So give me a minute to share. Here we are. \[00:32:54.52\] So Migratuse Ataraxia is an opportunity for us to take a look in vision, imagine, Black imagination but really to lift up the notion of enslaved Africans' existence in antebellum plantations, despite their bondage. So mostly, when we think of enslaved individuals, we wouldn't use the verb enslaved. We just say slaves. \[00:33:25.06\] And we want to consider that a misnomer. That every day they woke up, they were re-enslaved. When they were born, they were not enslaved. They were humans. And so this work was about trying to find ways of expressing the humanity, the love that they experienced when they interacted with each other. \[00:33:48.02\] And so-- yeah, go ahead. Tanya, I would love to know a little bit about the images as well. But go ahead. \[00:33:53.83\] Yes, so Migratuse Ataraxia is a site specific work that we do in antebellum plantations, either urban plantations or rural plantations, depending on the site. And the audience filters through the homes to see different experiences in each of the rooms. So antebellum homes are set up in a four by four architectural structure. \[00:34:21.16\] So there are events happening in each of the rooms. And we guide the audience through, so they can meander through the house and see all of the different experiences in each of the rooms. When the performance is over, they're filtered out from the upstairs, downstairs into a curated dinner. \[00:34:45.39\] So have you done this in different sites? Or is it one site in particular? Where have-- where has this taken place? \[00:34:54.39\] So the previous image that you saw was at-- \[00:34:57.00\] I'll go back to that. \[00:34:57.39\] --Hampton-Preston mansion. That's a image in Hampton-Preston mansion in Columbia, South Carolina, which is what's considered a museum home. So in this process, we asked that Hampton-Preston, that's managed by historic Columbia, remove all the furniture. \[00:35:15.30\] So we were fortunate to be able to work with an executive director of historic Columbia, Robin Waites, who was like, absolutely. We'll do it. And we know that in museum homes, that's not something that they want to do. \[00:35:29.62\] Which is also why we haven't performed in certain houses. \[00:35:33.39\] Yeah, and so this house is very different than in the next image, which is-- \[00:35:42.36\] This one. \[00:35:43.02\] --a rural plantation home. \[00:35:45.36\] Yes, that had been abandoned for 50 years. \[00:35:49.01\] Yes \[00:35:49.35\] Where is this? Which-- where is this? \[00:35:50.88\] Harpersville, Alabama \[00:35:53.34\] So the idea is that this work travels much like an enslaved individual would, that has been sold off. So the work starts in Columbia, South Carolina. And the next date for it was in Alabama. And then the next date up for it, which we're going to go back to-- it got cut short because of COVID-- was in Wilmington, North Carolina. \[00:36:15.15\] So very much like an enslaved person would be sold off, this work moves around. And as it moved, it uses the state slave codes for that state to build the narrative, as well as the slave narrative, WPA slave narratives to help build the script that we work with. So each state has a different script and narrative that we're working with. \[00:36:39.97\] I also have a question about improvisation, though. Which is so interesting, because you're talking about the script. And then I'm like, Oh, but what does-- do different things happen in different places, things that are unplanned when you're in the spaces sometimes? \[00:36:54.14\] Yes, we have set choreography for each of the rooms. But depending on the audience, there are things that might be improvisational, because in this particular section right here, these two dancers take audience members and set them-- seat them at the table. And so, one particular evening in this site, the Klein-Wallace home, the woman in the back in the Black coat, she is the owner of the home. So the home was willed to her. And she is a descendant of the enslavers. In this particular performance, those two dancers didn't know that they sat across from each other, a white descendant and a Black descendant in the context of that performance. \[00:37:41.75\] Oh my gosh, that's so deep. \[00:37:43.34\] Yes \[00:37:44.24\] You can't say that was-- that's something else, right? That's just-- that's so deep. But I see-- \[00:37:51.08\] And then-- \[00:37:51.83\] Go ahead, go ahead. \[00:37:52.64\] And then there's the part-- so there's a visual artist, that visual and performing artist Michaela Pilar Brown, who has been-- who's a part of this original production. \[00:38:00.46\] Yes \[00:38:00.83\] Yes, right, and so-- \[00:38:01.73\] I was going to ask about this next. \[00:38:03.32\] Yeah, so she reflects-- \[00:38:04.74\] \[INTERPOSING VOICES\] \[00:38:05.18\] She collected artifacts from the community and brought those artifacts into her section of the work to create an installation so that it truly reflects the memories of the community that want to share different aspects of their family. And so again, we're circling back to community, very similar-- and history, and the legacy, and elders, very similar to We Dance does. \[00:38:34.66\] And trying to really, again-- we say that there were interrupted narratives there were narratives that we kind of know. And then there were narratives that we just get an opportunity to make up in our imaginative space. And this happened as a result of having toured some five to ten different plantations across the South during our research process and being in one house and asking, well, what is that? \[00:39:03.18\] And they go, oh. They give us a really bizarre. Answer and I go, well, is that the original? No, well, none of this is original furniture. We just make it up as if it would be. \[00:39:13.80\] I said, oh, like Disneyland. So then that means if you can imagine it being this way, we can imagine it being another way. And so there's this space of, we want to imagine a different existence. But we have some concrete things. But then we have to free ourselves up so we can be in an imaginative space as well. \[00:39:33.85\] So how do y'all see yourselves as, maybe, transforming art and history. How do you see yourselves as agents of social change? \[00:39:47.43\] I don't think we see ourselves as agents of social change. But what we do see ourselves is pushing back on the systems of presenting dance. And so in order to do this kind of work, you have to have buy in from a presenter who will go to bat for you, who will say, I will go to these plantation homes and get these people to remove all of the furniture to give you access to these homes, because that's huge. \[00:40:16.26\] That's the first step. That's so many meetings, and so many conversations, and so many dinners, and so many lunches of telling people what we're going to do in the homes, building trust. And so, building trust with presenters in order to give you the capacity to do a different kind of work that is not the templated, just perform on a proscenium stage where a certain group of people gets to come in and see it. And everyone else doesn't, because these are elite spaces. \[00:40:49.23\] Proscenium theater spaces are elite spaces. They cost a lot of money. So these kind of interventions we think of these performances as actually give access to people who may not be interested in going to the proscenium, who may be interested in a more nuanced story about African-American history, African-American imagination, African-American creativity that lives outside of the strictures of that narrow space. \[00:41:22.11\] I also think that it's-- so maybe the social justice aspect of it is that you're taking Black life in its mundane existence and realizing how fabulous it is. And you're trying to enliven that memory that we all have. \[00:41:44.48\] And we're trying to not-- we're trying to push away from the notion of respectability politics. So that's-- big parts of the Civil Rights movement was about-- we've just talked a lot about recently that the people that were in the March from Selma to Montgomery, the women had on heels, because they had to be dressed a certain way, in a March from Montgomery to-- Selma to Montgomery. \[00:42:10.67\] And so we're thinking about this sense of efforts towards humanity. And so we're trying to lift up, I think, at this time in history for us, this kind of art-making that this one moment in time, there's a lot of African-American artists making work and being acknowledged for the work they've been doing for a long time. And so we're just really excited to be able to make this kind of work and being able to have our own experiences be referenced in the work that we're making as well. \[00:42:42.65\] Tanya, Thaddeus, thank you so much. I really have to say that, especially with both of these works but especially the work of entering a space that was originally a very oppressive space for people of African descent, clearing that space of its furniture, you having control of that, when possibly in the past, ancestors had to clean up furniture or dust that furniture and then moving bodies through that space freely. \[00:43:17.90\] Yep \[00:43:19.10\] That is here. That is here. And so, you may not see yourself as agents of social change. But I certainly do. You are bringing healing. So thank you so much. \[00:43:33.45\] I would love to open up our conversation to accept questions from the audience. So people can ask questions in the chat. \[00:43:46.52\] OK, so here we have one. It says, could you tell us more about the WPA slave narratives? I have never heard of that. I would love to hear how they became dances, please. \[00:43:59.55\] Great, so the WPA slave narratives were a part of Roosevelt's New Deal in getting America back to work. And so, they took writers and sent them out into the country to collect American stories. And the American stories that certain writers in the South chose to address where the formerly enslaved people living in the South still. \[00:44:24.08\] And so most of these people are in their late 70s or 80s, during this time right after the Great Depression. And so each state, we have a collection of books from South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, all the southern states-- \[00:44:38.53\] Southeast \[00:44:39.44\] Yeah, the Southeast southern states-- that it's an entire collection of these narratives. And so, the thing for us was-- and the image where you saw the men in that, sitting around as if they were in a barbershop, the barber is the voice of the enslaved people. And the men in the barbershop and the young boy that's in the barbershop are asking him questions. \[00:45:02.64\] So the voice of the elder comes out of the barber's mouth. And the other men in the barbershop are asking questions and keeping barbershop, sort of riffraff going-- \[00:45:13.61\] And they're in contemporary time. But the barber is in historic. So they're having this narrative together. \[00:45:20.60\] So we're asking him. And again, in South Carolina, there's one set of narratives that shapes a certain-- South Carolina's was a state before Alabama. So in South Carolina, they were trying to figure out how to manage their slaves. \[00:45:34.07\] We learned later that in Alabama, slaves, that was a later state it was established. So that in Alabama, it wasn't about managing them. It was like, we're going to control them. We're going to keep them in their place. So the conversations and the narratives of those pieces were different. And so-- \[00:45:49.81\] And the slave codes are different. \[00:45:52.26\] And so having that WPA slave narratives, along with the slave codes, helped us ground the way we were thinking about what we were going to do in those different rooms. \[00:46:04.52\] Well, really as a historical document, really. Yeah, so I have a question about working with your family and your-- and what that was like working with your grandparents and your mother. And can you tell us a little bit about how they-- I mean, I can only imagine saying to my mom, OK, we're going to do this now. Are you going to bake a cake? Or are you-- tell us a little bit about that. \[00:46:31.79\] Yes, so when I told my grandmother about it, she was super excited. And then it came time for her to make the cakes. And she got really nervous. She made like five cakes. \[00:46:41.63\] She was like, oh, this one's not right. Oh, this one's not right. I'm going to make another one. Oh, I need your mother to go get me some more butter, because I'm going to make another one. That one's not right. \[00:46:49.91\] So at the end, she just had all of these cakes that she had made. And she was threatening us. She was like, you guys are going to take these cakes home. I'm not going to keep them here. \[00:46:59.54\] But it was really interesting to just see her almost turn back into a kid again, because all focus was on her. All of her focus was on her practice of cooking. All focus was on what we planned out what she was going to wear. \[00:47:18.32\] And we planned the scenes and just her in that red chair. And we were kind of moving her body so that she could be angled and have certain angles that she would be shot from. And she just came to life like I knew her when she was in her 40s. \[00:47:38.00\] And she's 92 years old. \[00:47:39.89\] Yes \[00:47:40.85\] What a way to honor her, to just center her. \[00:47:44.66\] Yeah \[00:47:46.01\] Yeah \[00:47:47.12\] What about your family? \[00:47:48.65\] Yeah, I think that going to work with my mother, it wasn't like-- I was surprised. I wasn't surprised. But then I was I was reminded, as Tanya said, how much of a performer my mother was. And you tell her to look up and she-- \[00:48:06.29\] Yes, I saw her. \[00:48:07.58\] \[LAUGHTER\] \[00:48:08.81\] She'd do something like that. \[00:48:09.95\] No, it was so lovely and regal, yes. \[00:48:10.73\] It's just-- OK, I'm-- \[00:48:12.14\] Maybe that's where you get it from, though? You start to see. \[00:48:16.31\] Yeah, so it's just that part of it was just really a reminder. And then thinking about my-- those are my mother's parents. So thinking about the performance of going to church. And there was always-- you get dressed up. You put your best on to go present it. \[00:48:35.96\] And I never thought about all of the nuanced performances that we do in life, particularly in the South. And everything you go-- you dress up to do everything, because it is a performance, even if you're just going to sit-in the congregation. You're performing this thing. So I think that was really exciting to really see my mother-- who recently retired-- just as Tanya said, come to life differently than I've seen in a long time. \[00:49:04.38\] Yeah, in Jamaica it's called style and fashion. Its style and fashion and you're posing off. And on Sunday, it's the hats. Oh my gosh, \[00:49:13.79\] Oh yes. \[00:49:14.60\] Drive all over the country. And it just makes me-- coiffure to cover the head, to adorn the head, to add to the head, this is so Africa. You know what I mean? It's like we really never forgot how important that was. \[00:49:28.74\] So I have a question about the working with the filmmakers to create the scenes and the things. And I know you've answered that a little bit before. But this seems to be a question coming from someone who does film themselves. So if you could reflect a little bit on that, what that process was like. \[00:49:51.20\] So we shot two days in Chicago. And did we do two days in Montgomery? \[00:49:56.63\] Two days in Montgomery. \[00:49:57.44\] And we had to pick out specific locations that we were interested in. We did that, actually, before we even started shooting. We made a list of spaces. But we took so much film footage. We have so much that didn't even end up in the film that we actually use in a performative component, because we have a performative-- \[00:50:24.65\] Great \[00:50:24.92\] --component to this work as well. But Yeah, it was long days. It was waking up at 5 o'clock in the morning so that we could be at Lake Michigan, so we could get the sun doing a certain thing. And it was just going from site to site, looking at and thinking about the narrative in which we had written, and then trying to think about, visually, what would connect with those narratives that we wrote. \[00:50:51.64\] \[INTERPOSING VOICES\] \[00:50:53.48\] Were you part of the editing process? \[00:50:55.97\] No \[00:50:56.29\] No \[00:50:56.72\] No? \[00:50:57.77\] And this was-- we usually edit ourselves. \[00:51:00.43\] Yeah, we usually-- \[00:51:00.77\] So we had to step back and let someone else do it. We were actually really scared of what was going to come out. But we saw it, and we were like, amazing. \[00:51:09.27\] Yeah, we had seen a film that they had done before. And so we knew the kind of depth that they could bring to a subject. But really, about the locations literally followed the script. \[00:51:27.20\] When we talked about the dance that I did in the cafeteria, we went and found a cafeteria. We talked about me being a sports football player. We went to the football field. We talked about Tanya at the area crown. We went to that building. And we shot. \[00:51:43.40\] And so, the locations were specific to the lives that we lived. And so it made it easy in that regard. We didn't have to try to-- the one thing we did slip in and try to slip past was the notion of Broadway, because it's Broadway in Chicago and not Broadway in New York. \[00:52:04.25\] Right, right. \[00:52:04.94\] And we didn't shoot in New York. \[00:52:06.14\] Because we didn't-- we couldn't take everybody to New York. We had a limited budget. So it was like, Chicago. And so-- \[00:52:11.69\] Funny how that happens, huh? Decide everybody goes to New York. And all of a sudden, it's astronomical. \[00:52:16.07\] Right \[00:52:16.40\] \[LAUGHTER\] \[00:52:18.68\] But in general, I think that the shot selection was really driven-- the visuals were driven-- location was driven by the narrative. But the cinematography, the cinematic perspective, Ethan brought that to the film. \[00:52:36.80\] Wow, so we have one last question. Do you have any plans to perform in the Cambridge, Boston area? We would love to see your company, is what they're asking. And maybe you could talk a little bit about the fact that you are coming here in a couple of weeks. \[00:52:54.08\] Yes, we are. What are the dates that wer'e coming? Its March-- \[00:52:59.75\] It's a week of March 7th, March 6. \[00:53:02.88\] It's during our spring break. I have my phone out. And I'm going to you the exact date. \[00:53:06.41\] Elrod said, March 7 through 12. So we'll be on campus. And we'll be doing panel discussions. We'll be teaching classes. We'll be having conversations. \[00:53:15.87\] So excited. \[00:53:16.25\] And we're really, really excited to come. \[00:53:19.97\] But we're working on-- we're in conversation with Lisa Barbash-- whose name I can say her last name over here-- at the Peabody, about the potential of a longer residency. Nothing's promised, but we're just in really good conversations to start working towards a residency that would allow us to do performance and multiple things at the Peabody Museum. \[00:53:47.06\] It would be really-- \[00:53:47.51\] And also do something new. \[00:53:49.31\] Yeah I agree. \[00:53:50.00\] Yeah, I think we really need it too, to tell you the truth. I think that Harvard's campus and the Peabody-- as I said before, your work is healing work. And you really make contact. And you really catch the spirit. And I think that's part of what needs to happen in many places on this, in this country. \[00:54:13.50\] But I feel very special to have you here with us. So thank you so much for joining us tonight. I know Brenda is going to come on and say her last goodbyes. But this has been special and magical. And I really, really appreciate spending time with you \[00:54:29.04\] Oh, likewise. \[00:54:29.55\] Thank you so much, likewise. \[00:54:31.38\] Indeed, indeed, I echo Sarah's comments. Tanya, Thaddeus, thank you so much for giving the world We Dance, for, really, the interventions in your work, for sharing your spirit, your stories, and your genius with us tonight. I feel full and fuller for being able to sit at your feet this evening. \[00:54:55.44\] Also special gratitude to Sarah, the Peabody Museum, Harvard's Theater Dance and Media Program for partnering on this event. And my deepest gratitude, really, to our captive audience for joining us this evening. To learn more about HMSE and our programs this season, please visit us at [www.hmscharvard.edu](http://www.hmscharvard.edu). Take good care.