On his first day in office, President Trump issued a series of executive orders limiting the rights of transgender and nonbinary Americans, from stating that the U.S. government would recognize only male and female genders to removing gender options from passports. His orders targeted rights and protections attained through years of courageous advocacy. And award-winning San Francisco choreographer Sean Dorsey has been at the forefront of those efforts for more than two decades, as an activist, an educator, and the artistic director of Sean Dorsey Dance. On the eve of the company’s 20th-anniversary home season, Dorsey spoke about living as a transgender person in the U.S. today, and how dance can meet this sociopolitical moment.
Sean Dorsey. Photo by Lydia Daniller, courtesy Dorsey.
How is the current political climate affecting you personally? This is a moment of total dire emergency for trans communities. Our bodily autonomy, our freedom of movement across borders or states, our freedom of expression, and our most basic civil liberties have been stripped. Myself and the transpeople I know are experiencing off-the-charts daily anxiety, fear, depression, and rage.
As an artistic leader, how are you responding? My work is about creating sanctuary. In the creative and rehearsal process with my dancers, I work really hard to build trust and safety, and bring in lots of humor and play. And audiences still rarely have the experience of seeing work that centers trans and queer bodies and experiences. My life calling has been about creating that kind of sanctuary. There’s no way I’m backing away from that work. I’m digging in deeper.
This season, Sean Dorsey Dance will be performing works that highlight trans history: Lou, The Missing Generation, and The Secret History of Love. What does that mean to the community right now? At the very moment when so many forces are working systematically to erase our history and our existence—we’re seeing the word “transgender” being removed from the Stonewall Monument’s website, for example—it feels more important than ever, and excruciatingly timely, to be performing works that embody our history. All the works assert the worth, beauty, wisdom, and value of trans and queer bodies and lives. To be doing these works feels incredibly important.
How can dance help us right now? Artists have always been at the forefront of resisting tyranny and forwarding justice and creating magic and joy. And this time is no different. The beauty of art is that it is truly uncontainable—it’s unstoppable. Artists are storytellers, and we’re truthtellers. And truth cannot be extinguished, no matter how hard tyrants try. Truth will always be victorious. Love will always be victorious over hate.
But the victories will not happen automatically—they will only happen if we all step up and take action. To those who are feeling discouraged, look for the heroes and she-roes and they-roes in history, when artists and activists created so many roadmaps for us, so many tools. This will be a marathon, so we must take care of each other and ourselves.
How does creating and performing dance make you feel hopeful? Dance is a physical art form; its instrument is embodiment. Whether we are in the audience or onstage, dance locates us and reconnects us to our body and our breath. I truly believe in the enormous healing potential of dance. I’ve seen it, I’ve lived it, I know it.
A sharp wind was blowing in Washington, DC, on the morning of Monday, February 17, as 36 dancers processed single file around the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Threading in front of the modernist white marble edifice, then across a plaza with views of the Potomac River, they danced the spare but meaningful gestures of the late choreographer Pina Bausch’s “The Nelken Line,” from her 1982 work Nelken (“carnations”). One participant pulled a portable speaker playing Louis Armstrong’s bright “West End Blues,” Bausch’s choice of music. It was both a performance and a protest, a reaction to the orchestrated takeover of the nation’s performing arts center by recently inaugurated President Donald Trump.
When Kelly King, who directs DC’s Contradiction Dance, heard earlier this month that Trump had been made chairman of the Center’s board, she felt compelled to act. “Why aren’t we in the streets yet? When are we getting in the streets to march?” she remembers asking herself. On Friday, February 14, she put out a call on social media, inviting dancers in the area to a protest at the Kennedy Center the following Monday.
“As dancers,” King says, “we know how to quickly, effectively pull our community together. Sometimes we just confidently make decisions and move.”
Fellow choreographer Keira Hart-Mendoza reached out to King. In 2020, during the height of the pandemic, her Bethesda, MD-based UpRooted Dance Company had used the simple repetitive gestures of “The Nelken Line” for a socially distanced outdoor dance event. “I feel like it’s such a calm, delicate, and useful way to make a statement,” says Hart-Mendoza. Prior to the protest, King and Hart-Mendoza convened two weekend Zoom meetings to teach the choreography to the group of volunteer dancers.
While King and Hart-Mendoza were in communication with Kennedy Center staff, King noted they didn’t ask permission. On the morning of the 17th, with no shows in the building due to the Presidents’ Day holiday, security outside was high, King reports—but by the end, those sent to monitor the dancers were chatting and sharing videos of the protest dance.
Dancers performing Pina Bausch’s “The Nelken Line” in front of the Kennedy Center. Photo by David Dowling/Dancing in the District.
The 30-minute performance was meant to foster solidarity among dance artists, and to demonstrate their visceral response to President Trump’s recent firing of all Biden-appointed Kennedy Center board members and subsequent takeover of the board. Dance artist, director, and educator Jessica Martiné Denson says her choice to protest was personal. “Having lived in the DC area for almost my entire life, the Kennedy Center holds a lifetime of memories for me and so many of my friends and colleagues,” she says. “I cannot idly stand by as it is under siege—not participating was not an option.”
Longtime Washington choreographer and dancer Deborah Riley, director emerita of Dance Place, received an email invitation from King to participate. “It really sparked something for me,” Riley says. “Whatever statement we could make collectively about this corner of the world—the Kennedy Center and the arts—I felt was important.”
Kelly is planning another dance protest for Saturday, March 15, this time at the Lincoln Memorial, one of Washington’s grandest monuments. She hopes this second round will go national. “We invite dancers around the country and around the world to meet in their communities, choose a culturally significant landmark in their city, and learn ‘The Nelken Line,’ ” she says. “Let’s do this as a simultaneous eruption of dance as protest.” Tutorials on the Bausch choreography can be found on YouTube.
After seeing the Kennedy Center protest video on social media, Chicago dancer and choreographer Ramón Muñoz made his own version, recording himself dancing the Bausch choreography in front of Chicago’s Trump Tower. “I have to see the Trump Tower every day when I go downtown,” he says, “so I knew in my heart that someone had to be in front of that building echoing the message of the DC dancers.” He plans to convene a group of Chicago dancers March 15.
“I want dancers to feel very empowered to take this into their communities and to get in practice with protest,” King says. “Who better to peacefully protest than the dance community?” She adds: “We may need to do this for the next four years.”
The UK’s The Spectator recently published a piece by the Japan specialist Lesley Downer, historical consultant for the Northern Ballet’s 2020 production Geisha. In her essay, Downer wonders why claims of cultural appropriation so dramatically affected the reception of the work, which has not been remounted since its premiere. You can hear her frustration as she questions the validity of negative responses from those of Asian descent—including from people like me, founder of Final Bow for Yellowface, which since 2017 has worked to improve Asian representation in ballet.
Geisha is an original fantasy created by an almost exclusively White creative team that follows two geishas who both get raped during the course of the ballet. It is the latest in a long tradition of ballets with “Oriental” characters and settings, often with the women dying tragically, but beautifully. (For examples and discussion, see Banishing Orientalism: Dancing between Exotic and Familiar.)
Phil Chan. Photo by Eli Schmidt, courtesy Chan.
I don’t find it helpful to impugn the intentions of the creators of works like Geisha. However, it is essential to consider the impacts of such works on audience members, performers, and our larger society. Kudos to Downer for collaborating with Japanese experts on the story she wanted to tell. What was missing was consideration of the consequences of telling this kind of story—yet again—for today’s diverse audiences.
The Final Bow for Yellowface movement has been having such an impact partly because we’re living in a time of cultural sea change. Representations of Asians on the ballet stage have historically been defined by non-Asians. But today’s audiences are ready to move beyond Orientalism and its worn-out tropes, created by artists of European descent for audiences of European descent. We’ve begun to insist that if we want to set stories and operas in particular cultures, members of those cultures—as well as those who will be affected by its telling—should be collaborators. Someone from Asia used to living in the majority and an Asian living in the minority will likely experience Orientalist works differently. Where someone from Japan might see a funny clown (what’s the harm in that?), a British Japanese person might see a generic “Asian” caricature, made the butt of many Christmas pantos.
When living in the minority, a Japanese Brit and a mixed-race Chinese American like me can both be seen as generic Asians. And storylines that reinforce certain tropes about Asian people—the submissive and highly sexualized geisha, the geeky and effeminate sidekick with thick glasses—have real consequences for us. They range in seriousness from taunts in the schoolyard to being scapegoated and blamed for a pandemic, spat upon, and attacked. The fetishism of Asian women has resulted in actual rapes and horrific killings.
I hope that we would think twice about presenting works that feature even the most sublime choreography, the most beautiful sets and costumes, the most poignant and authentic librettos, once we understand their power to reinforce a long pattern of “othering.” Some of us do not have the luxury of enjoying a fantasy onstage without being affected in everyday life.
My recent focus has been exploring ways to layer new stories over the choreography and music of classical works—Madama Butterfly, La Bayadère—that feature cultural caricatures created by European creatives of the past (who didn’t know better!). These works are so much a part of our history. The goal is to preserve the best of our traditions without the baggage, and without harming the Asians among us.
Boston Lyric Opera’s production of Madama Butterfly, which Chan directed. Photo by Ken Yotsukura, courtesy Boston Lyric Opera.
If there is a company interested in revisiting Geisha, why not rework the libretto alongside Japanese collaborators who are aware of its possible impacts? Aren’t there stories we could tell about Japan that aren’t tragic fantasies about beautiful and sexually submissive Japanese women? In the case of Geisha, a skilled and thoughtful reworking probably wouldn’t even have to change too much of the choreography, sets, or costumes. As someone who directed an award-winning production of Madama Butterfly last year for Boston Lyric Opera, I know firsthand that it is possible for a non-Japanese person to tell an authentic geisha story that both reflects artistic intentions and meets the times.
For 22 years, dance artist Brianna Mims and her family have believed that her uncle Ronald Coleman Jr. was wrongfully convicted of involvement in a murder. Coleman has been serving two life sentences plus 65 years and is currently in Calhoun State Prison in Morgan, Georgia. During this time the family has worked tirelessly on his behalf, soliciting lawyers and criminal-justice–reform nonprofits to take his case. So far, though, they have struggled to get the help they need to challenge Coleman’s conviction.
But Mims refused to give up. Drawing on her years of experience creating work at the intersection of art, abolition and social justice, she decided to advocate for her uncle in a new way: through dance.
As part of a 2022 multidisciplinary installation called Uncle Ronnie’s Room, Mims mined her family history to transform an old cell in Los Angeles’ Chuco’s Justice Center—a former juvenile detention center turned community space—into a re-creation of her uncle’s childhood bedroom, with the space between the cells becoming the site-specific stage for the dance portion of the work. Her goal was to inspire audiences to get involved by showing them who Coleman is as a person, the impact incarceration has had on his family and—had he not been imprisoned for the last two decades—the alternate possibilities for his life.
Mims, a 2019 graduate of the University of Southern California Glorya Kaufman School of Dance and a Dance Magazine 2022 “25 to Watch” pick, joins a growing array of artists using dance to shed light on issues surrounding incarceration, the school-to-prison pipeline and the justice system as a whole. Some are teaching dance and choreography directly to inmates. Others are using their personal experience as the foundation for concert works addressing these complex, and sometimes controversial, themes. And others still are channeling their frustration towards the justice system into something more hopeful: a dance-based imagining of a different, more just future.
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in Kyle Abraham’s Untitled America: Second Movement. Paul Kolnik, Courtesy AAADT.
Movement as Liberation
“When you think about imprisonment or the justice system, you think about the ways our bodies are under attack,” says Ana Maria Alvarez, founder and artistic director of CONTRA-TIEMPO Activist Dance Theater in Los Angeles. “Our access to liberation and our access to power is through our bodies.”
Alvarez’s work joyUS justUS takes on the justice system’s disproportionate impact on communities of color and, instead of dwelling on hardship and deficit, focuses on the joy emanating from these communities as the root of freedom. The dancers don’t move only to music, but they also dance to the cadences of spoken text that incorporates elements of the U.S. justice system, like poetry derived from the Miranda rights and courtroom discourse.
For Alvarez, combining strong, full-bodied movements with these emotionally and politically charged words underscores why embodied performance is such an apt medium for this kind of work. “Dance is such a powerful tool because it’s rooted in our bodies, in our movement, in our connection with one another and in the ancestral wisdom of continuing to move in the face of incredible struggle and violence,” she says.
Choreographer and prison abolition activist Suchi Branfman, who works with incarcerated men in the California Rehabilitation Center (CRC), a medium-security facility in Norco, California, explains that the same idea applies to her work. Plus, she says, dance is just a whole lot of fun. “To witness and be with people who are dancing while living in a cage is a direct antithesis to confinement,” she explains. “We laugh a lot. There’s deep joy and community-building in dance, which is amplified when you’re dancing with folks inside prison.”
Native Hawaiian Religious Spiritual Group in San Quentin State Prison. Courtesy San Quentin State Prison.
Going Beyond the Personal
Choreographer Kyle Abraham’s 2016 work for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Untitled America, dives into the ripple effect imprisonment has on the families of the incarcerated. Abraham has an uncle who served time in prison, and the family’s lived experience informed the work. But he looked beyond those connections during the creative process. “I wanted to focus primarily on the humanity of the situation,” says Abraham, whose interviews with previously incarcerated individuals played a large role in the development of the work and the stories that were told onstage.
Mims, too, drew from her own experiences, family memories and the stories of her ancestors when creating Uncle Ronnie’s Room. At the beginning of her choreographic process, she looked to her great-grandparents’ legacy as organizers in the South during the Civil Rights Movement. For the score, Mims asked her grandmother for suggestions from her great-grandparents’ music library. “I just sat with the songs for a long time and really let them get into my body and my spirit,” she says. “After doing that for a bit, I went into the studio and started moving to them.”
Brianna Mims in Uncle Ronnie’s Room, a site-specific work in Chuco’s Justice Center that advocates for her uncle, Ronald Coleman Jr. Photo by Mykaila Williams and Tiana Alexandria Williams, Courtesy Mims.
Community Behind Walls
While some dance artists are using the stage as a platform for change, others are going inside to create it. Patrick Makuakāne, an innovative hula artist and the director of Nā Lei Hulu i ka Wēkiu in San Francisco, has been the spiritual advisor at San Quentin State Prison since 2016. In this position, Makuakāne now leads the Native Hawaiian Religious Spiritual Group, which, before the pandemic, was a gathering of San Quentin men from Hawaiian and Polynesian cultures—as well as several Vietnamese, Filipino and white members—that met once a week to learn about Hawaiian culture and dance.
“ ‘Spiritual advisor’ is the term that prison officials use, but I think of myself as a community builder,” Makuakāne says. “And that’s what the men really responded to. They learned that hula is more than a dance, it’s about taking care of one another in community.”
Branfman made a similar discovery through her choreography project at CRC, which, prior to the pandemic, had been meeting weekly since late 2016. “When you make a big circle in a gym in a prison and turn on good music, everybody dances,” she says. “The root of the work that we do is understanding that dance is a way of being together in community and thriving and sustaining ourselves.”
After COVID-19 restrictions made in-person gathering impossible, Branfman pivoted in an effort to maintain the community she and the CRC prisoners had created. Using written packets, she invited the dancers to continue choreographing. What they wrote and sent out became Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic, a series of works directed by Branfman which continues to be performed in person, virtually and via other forms of media by dance artists on the outside.
Los Angeles–based CONTRA-TIEMPO Activist Dance Theater. Photo by Steve Wylie, Courtesy CONTRA-TIEMPO.
Reclaiming the Ripple Effect
Branfman’s and Makuakāne’s work reverberates beyond prison walls too. Makuakāne says that it’s not uncommon for members of his group to reach out to him after they’ve been released to thank him for the skills they learned through hula. Branfman’s work presents a great deal of food for thought for audiences, as they witness stories told from the inside.
Abraham, too, kept the lessons Untitled America could teach his audiences in mind, specifically those viewers who haven’t directly experienced the impacts of incarceration. “Something that I was really drawing on in a lot of ways was my mother being in the hospital and knowing that she wasn’t able to leave,” he explains. “People who may not have someone in prison can connect with being in a space they don’t want to be in or thinking about how hard it might be when they can’t see a loved one.”
And, in addition to using the visceral nature of dance to convey the difficult emotions surrounding incarceration, artists like Alvarez are using movement to put a new future on the table, showing by example what a reimagined justice system could look like. “How do we use joy, community, dance, music and power to build a system that is thinking about our health and well-being?” she asks. “It’s going to take rethinking the entire model of how the justice system works. JoyUS justUS is a proposal on how we can imagine a future that’s full of more love and more justice.”
Recent ballets by choreographer Jennifer Archibald explore how dancing creates a distinct kind of remembrance, homage and hopefulness. This week, her unique combination of choreography and documentary brings together political history, a cinematic classic and Richmond Ballet. Entitled Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, her new ballet was inspired by the 1967 film of the same title that starred Sidney Poitier. The film plot features a white woman bringing Poitier, her fiancé, home to meet her supposedly liberal white parents.
It wasn’t until June 12, 1967, six months before the film was released, that interracial marriage was legalized. That court case, Loving v. Virginia, took place in the state where Archibald was commissioned to make a ballet.
“It started with Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” says Archibald. “I wanted to pay homage to this historic film through a ballet, as a step toward changing the narratives seen on stages. The spine of the story is about love, and the music for the ballet binds together themes of compassion, love and civil rights history. Singers’ voices inspire dancers to respond physically and to explore vulnerability as part of loving relationships. The ballet’s duets reflect the highs and lows that are part of unconventional relationships, historically and today.”
The score includes music by Sam Cooke, a central figure in the civil rights movement, who imbues the ballet with a soulful and poignant acoustic landscape.
Eri Nishihara and Zacchaeus Page in Jennifer Archibald’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Photo by Sarah Ferguson, courtesy Richmond Ballet.
Archibald has distinguished herself as a courageous choreographer who can uncover difficult histories and make strides towards greater understanding and connections among people. In 2021, her commission for Tulsa Ballet, called Breakin’ Bricks, examined the city’s past and future, acknowledging the horrific massacre of 1921 while making space for a city that can “build together, and create a community that can listen to and support one another,” says Archibald in a video about the process of making Breakin’ Bricks that is subtitled “Finding Spirit Through Ashes.”
The ballet was selected as one of the best events of 2021, with Tulsa World critic James D. Watts Jr. writing, “Jennifer Archibald’s Breakin’ Bricks … is a work that left the audience with an unspoken but inescapable question: Now that you’ve seen how racism both subtle and gross has permeated our past and present, what will you do to remove it from our collective future?”
In Richmond, a city that was the capital of the Confederacy from 1861 to 1865, and, in 2020, home to protests about Confederate monuments, Archibald was inspired by the dancers. “Richmond Ballet is made up of a group of artists who are diverse, thoughtful, and reflective,” she says. “While making this ballet, we had many conversations about the city’s history, and its future. I talked about my own parents and what life was like for them as an interracial couple who got married in 1969 in Canada. I am hopeful that it’s the current generation of dancers and choreographers who are making ballet a place to share stories that are relevant to everyone.”
Richmond Ballet dancers in Jennifer Archibald’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Photo by Sarah Ferguson., courtesy Richmond Ballet.
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner premieres on November 1 and will be performed in Richmond until November 6, as part of the company’s Studio 2 program. The ballet will also be included in Richmond Ballet’s January 27 performance at the Virginia Wesleyan University Susan S. Goode Fine and Performing Arts Center in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
Tina Bararian, an Iranian dancer and choreographer living in New York City, founded Dancers of Iran in April 2021. The organization has a website, Instagram page, and YouTube channel that feature Iranian artists and also provide information about classes, workshops, and auditions, all of which is scarce for dancers who live in a country where dance is forbidden. Dance Magazine caught up with Bararian to find out why she created the site, what she’s hoping to achieve with it and how she’s supporting Iranian artists.
DM: Could you talk about your beginnings as a dancer?
Bararian: I was born in Iran, in a small city called Babol, in the north. I was born after the 1979 revolution, which completely changed everything in the country. The Iranian National Ballet was closed down; all the dance schools were closed down. Dance, for the government, is seen as a cheap art, as seductive. Growing up, people from my generation did not have the chance to have a dance class.
My dance journey started when we first immigrated to Australia, when I was 11. I was given a free platform for the first time, and at the end of our year at the school, we were told we could perform whatever we wanted. At that time, I was obsessed with Michael Jackson. I mean, the resources we had [in Iran] were so limited, but we did have an international cable TV. Now, if the government knew that we had these international TV sets, they would come into your house, imprison you, take away the TV, you might have gotten lashes, I don’t know. When I was three, they walked into our house and my dad had to go on the roof: He fell off and broke his leg trying to dismantle the cable.
In Australia, my dad was working on his degree in physiotherapy, my mom was working all the time, so I was alone a lot of the day. One of the things that got me through the day was dancing, and I liked dancing to Michael Jackson. I decided to perform it for the school show and I got so much great positive feedback and I was like, ‘I never knew that this was something I could do!’ When I was 14, we immigrated to Canada and my mom said, ‘why don’t you take ballet classes?’ I really owe my dance journey to my parents, because they were my main supporters, and they were the ones who pushed me to continue and to not give up.
Tina Bararian. Photo by Rojin Shafiei, Courtesy Bararian.
Why did you start Dancers of Iran?
I used to travel to Iran, and I really wanted to do something for the dance world. Now, compared to when I was growing up, there are classes, there are dance schools, they do have performances. It’s just that it could get canceled at any time, if the government officials want to come and cancel it. It is not a free platform. While I was travelling, I wanted to do something for the dancers there, but a lot of them were scared, which I understand, because if they publicly show a dance video of themselves, they might get imprisoned.
When the pandemic hit, [at first] I didn’t feel like I was capable of doing anything. This site was so they could feel like they can be seen. So that’s how it started. Dance performances have been illegal in Iran for the past 40 years, but people are still dancing—you can’t suppress it.
What do you hope to accomplish with Dancers of Iran?
In Iran, we really don’t have a dance community. I wanted to create a community. I want this platform to say, ‘you’re all being supported; you all have talent.’ I think that’s what kept it going, and dancers feel more comfortable now to share their videos. Basically, it’s like a free marketing platform. I also have a YouTube channel for Dancers of Iran where I started to offer more information about what I know about the dance world. I use my own portfolio—my resume, my reference letters—as examples. I have done workshops [via Zoom] for them as well.
How do you feel with Iran and Iranian women being at the forefront of global news? What role do you feel dancers play in this struggle?
What happened to Mahsa Amini, every person, especially every woman, could relate to. She was an ordinary woman, walking down the street, who got killed for nothing.
We are dancing for, hopefully, the next revolution. I feel very proud of Iranians and Iranian women right now. I’m trying to support them in any way I can. I can use my platform to be a voice, so now the page is more focused on what’s going on right now and responding to that. When I started Dancers of Iran, I really tried not to be political because I was mindful of the dancers who are inside Iran. I wanted the dancers to feel safe. But now, it’s not a time for that. Now you have to pick a side, and we’re going to pick the right side.
Eight mandatory rehearsals. One nondisclosure agreement. Zero pay. These were a few of the specifications laid out in a casting call for dancers to be a part of the 2022 Super Bowl halftime show. After news got out that some dancers would be working as volunteers, and receiving no real benefits besides the exposure opportunity of a lifetime, Taja Riley was one of many who decided to speak up about how off-putting and disrespectful this offer felt, as well as how accepting jobs like this keeps dancers underpaid and underappreciated.
Just in time for the most-watched sporting event in the country, Riley successfully spearheaded a movement (on behalf of as many as 400 performers) to ensure that all dancers for the halftime show got fully compensated for their time and energy. For dancers in the community and supporters of the movement who helped spread the issue far and wide, this news felt like a game-winning touchdown—the type that calls for a celebratory dance! But the work doesn’t end there. It’s just one part of a continuous conversation.
Speaking up about the mistreatment of professional dancers is nothing new for Riley, a self-proclaimed dancer artist-athlete who, since the early quarantine days, has sparked some important conversations about the realities of the industry on social media. “We need to start educating people on the state of our community, in addition to being clearer with dance jobs about how our time, energy and influence should be valued,” says Riley, who uses she/he/they pronouns.
Along the way, Riley shared their own experiences in a way that pretty much every dancer can relate to. Now they’re building an entertainment company, TKO Quarantainment Inc., and developing a multitude of creative projects. Riley has put their own career dancing with some of the world’s top music artists to the side to “leap into the unknown” in pursuit of a better future, where dancers are valued and the dance community as a whole is elevated.
Riley recently spoke to Dance Magazine about some of the inequities that dancers have faced on set, from unreasonably low wages to questionable contracts and the absence of credit. “Yes, some of these production companies may be trying to undermine us, but I’m starting to discover that most of them just don’t know, or are following previous patterns,” they say.
The message is now en route to millions of people worldwide as Riley continues to use their voice and platform to heal, inspire and empower the dance community to see the worth of its members, so that the rest of the world can too.
What Sparked the Action:
Having worked with a long list of prominent names like Janet Jackson, SZA, Beyoncé and Jennifer Lopez, Riley has experience to pull from when addressing industry issues. Despite the great experiences that they’ve had throughout their career, it was the few bad experiences—and the normalized fear of speaking up about them—that inspired the action Riley is taking today.
Feeling the need to walk out on a dream job in 2011, due to their moral standards being tested, helped Riley to understand the deeper implications of how dancers were viewed in the industry and led them to focus on redefining those standards. “I expressed my concerns with some of the other dancers on set, and there were multiple that felt the same way,” they say. “I was in a state of shock,” but eventually Riley pulled the choreographer aside to express appreciation, and kindly let him know that they weren’t willing to compromise who they were. “In this moment, when I was asked to do choreography that I felt went against my faith, the way that I viewed the dance industry completely shifted, and it actually latched onto my love for dance,” they add.
As a second-generation entertainer, Riley had always viewed themself as a business, and that’s part of the reason they’re fighting so hard for dancers to understand the importance of honoring the craft while honoring personal boundaries.
On Dancers Viewing Themselves as a Business:
“Do you have a mission statement? When you’re working, do you have a vision or a purpose for why you’re there? As a dance professional, that’s what you stand on. That’s your foundation. Who you are can then be broken down into concepts and statements, which can help you organize your value and the definition of your product, which is your likeness.”
These are crucial factors to take into consideration so that dance artists can stand firmly on what they believe in while on the job, and easily discern what they’re willing to stand for, fall for or sacrifice when it comes to certain dance jobs.
Tuning In to “TAJTV”
Taja Riley. Photo by Lee Gumbs, Courtesy Riley. Design by The Circle & The Square
Riley plans for TKO Quarantainment’s debut television program series, “TAJTV,” to serve as a resource to help uplift the dance community. It’s a unique talk show that’ll feature a number of special segments featuring an elite cast of mainstream entertainers, and tap into topics of concern within the industry, while discussing how to build solutions. “I want to be able to show the great parts of the dance industry, as well as touch on some of the things that need more awareness.”
“We’ve already shot some of the pilot, and I’m so thankful to all of the donors to the GoFundMe! We would love to finish it so that we can pitch it for up-fronts.” You can find updates on Riley’s GoFundMe page as they inch toward the $15,000 goal to get the show off the ground and onto television screens.
The Day-to-Day of a Dance Activist:
As someone who’s working to improve the reality of dance artists, daily life is “unpredictable,” Riley says. “Some days are very empowering, productive and triumphant, and other days feel very sad and draining.”
“There’s also the physical work and outreach, like contacting media, and a long to-do list for projects in progress: The continual development, executive producing, going out to get people on board, contracting, developing, templating, creating, reading, amending and delegating to the team. Then, of course, there’s leaving space for my emotional work, which I find in my dance training, and even horse training! Awakening myself dance-wise has been crucial for grounding myself during this process. ”
Riley feels the busy schedule is worth it because they’ve focused on the bigger picture: impacting the dance community—and beyond. Inspired by the openness of Oprah Winfrey, Riley is hoping that this movement can have the same impact for dance as major media figures and publications of that level have had on other fields.
On Memes and Bringing Humor Into the Mix:
Many of the memes on Riley’s Instagram page use humor to shine a light on some seriously shady issues that dancers face. “I think that the best way to heal is to laugh and cry,” they say. “Being a part of meme culture is being able to captivate the subconscious of the alter egos inside of you in a way that feels relatable.”
“We must unify! We have so much power, and we’re so much stronger together,” Riley says. “When you read this article, go talk to someone about it. Bring it to your parents, your dance teacher, your dance peers, and have a discussion about it.”
Making Dance History:
The bottom line is that despite the popularity that dance artists have helped make possible for so many brands and music artists over the years, they are often still grossly underappreciated. Riley believes that professional dancers should be treated and paid equally to professional athletes and musicians. For a lot of folks, such drastic change just isn’t fathomable, but Riley continues to push the vision forward and unapologetically highlight the mistreatment of dancers, so that positive change can be applied within the industry little by little.
Riley is inspiring dancers to move past unethical traditions just because “that’s the way things have always been.” Questioning is the new cool. Respect is a must. Dancers are artists and athletes, and should be treated as such. And Riley reminds us of the need to continue the fight for progress: “This whole movement is just beginning.”
2016: I was asked to create a duet for RAWdance (Ryan T. Smith and Wendy Rein) in San Francisco at a time when my heart was caught in a perpetual state of reeling from the constant murders of African Americans by law enforcement, most recently the murder of Walter Scott, who was shot in the back in South Carolina after being stopped for a nonfunctioning brake light. I knew I had to address the killings, but I didn’t know how. I felt incompetent, my work felt inadequate. So after a career dedicated to the intersection of choreography and social activism, I created Enough?, a piece that asks whether dance can meaningfully address social movements like Black Lives Matter.
1991: I was finishing Urban Scenes/Creole Dreams, my first commission for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a work juxtaposing the early 1900s stories of my sharecropper Creole grandmother in the swamps of Louisiana with my own stories as a gay African American in New York City’s East Village at the apex of the AIDS pandemic. The work called out the sexism, racism and homophobia that extended from my grandmother’s era into my own. One night after rehearsal I participated in ACT UP’s (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) takeover of Grand Central Terminal at rush hour in order to bring that evening’s commute to its knees and force attention to America’s anemic response to the AIDS pandemic.
And take over we did. Being part of hundreds of screaming protesters taking up space in Grand Central turned an act of desperation into an act of empowerment. AIDS received the attention we demanded. What AIDS did not receive was empathy. We were hated by the understandably livid commuters; they spat at protesters, shouted AIDS-phobic slurs, and the event was one step from erupting into violence. Our protest was necessary and I was honored to be there. But I wondered what the impact might be if the commuters could deeply feel the enormity of the grief that propelled us into this takeover?
Creating this empathy was not the purpose of our takeover. But it became the purpose of my art-making. Without losing the political urgency of my work, I now wanted to create those bridges of empathy that would better transcend the boundaries of difference and allow the disenfranchised to shout tales of their personal and political histories while also allowing viewers to see themselves in the lives of these very disenfranchised. As a politics major at Princeton, I understood that a necessary first step in oppression of any kind is to dehumanize the oppressed. At that protest, my mission consciously became to “re-humanize.” Urban Scenes remained an urgent calling out of racism, sexism and homophobia, but the piece became less about those “isms” and more about the eternality of devastating loss due to those “isms.”
David Roussève performing in Stardust. Yi-Chun Yu, Courtesy Roussève.
1991–2016: I created a body of work with this new mission at its expressive core. These works often contained text that told the nonlinear narratives of marginalized BIPOC and LGBTQ people. But it was dance’s ability to speak deeply through an abstract metaphoric language that gave these works their emotional wallop and potential to jump the boundaries between us. I knew how to speak most accessibly through text, but I knew how to speak most deeply through dance. If the goal was to create bridges, then abstract kinetic languages were the stepping-stones to those bridges. And making work in this way was enough.
Until it was not.
2022: With the advantage of time, I look back at the creation of Enough?. I had entered the studio filled with both the despair of watching the slaughter of Black bodies and the hope of watching the response by millions that became BLM, as if life were a roller coaster plummeting between heaven and hell. That roller coaster became the core of Enough?.
The piece begins with the first in a series of projected tweet-like text passages: “I have been thinking a lot about what a dance can ‘do’.” We see the performers, Ryan and Wendy, in stillness as Aretha Franklin’s rendition of “A Change Is Gonna Come” begins, a recording that is lushly beautiful even as it calls for deep change. The dancers begin one long single phrase of sumptuous movement that matches the lushness of the music. As Aretha hits a gospel-inflected high note and bends it as only Aretha can, the text passages read “YUUUUUUMMM!!” “Did your heart jump like your toes were skipping ’cross the clouds?” The intersection of words, music and dance feels sublime. The dancers repeat the same exact phrase over and over, all the while dancing faster and faster; the swirling curves of lushness slowly transform into a jagged thrashing frenzy. At the apex of this superhuman speed the intersection of words, music and dance feels like a whirlwind of despair. Media coverage of Walter Scott being shot by law enforcement is projected into the work as the core of Enough? is revealed to be a searing indictment of the murder of African Americans. The text reads “A dance can show you how my heart feels when I see that video.” “Because that video makes my heart feel like Ryan and Wendy are dancing.” “Right now.” “A dance can tell you how quickly life moves from toes touching clouds to hearts mired in hell.” Aretha’s voice ends. The only sound is the dancer’s gasping breath as Ryan and Wendy fall to the ground exhausted. The final passages of text read, “Yep, dance can do all that.” “But when I see that video, I am left to wonder…is it enough?”
Enough? altered again my choreographic tactics towards creating socially engaged choreography. The text asks whether we can act while its deeper undercurrents—the movement—insists that we must act. The “narrator” (assumedly the choreographer) is less someone to identify with than a neutral voice to propel the conversation forward. Questioning the adequacy of my own response invites you to question the adequacy of your response; our viewing the news footage “together” asks whether your heart also feels like Ryan and Wendy are dancing when you view an assault on Black bodies. Enough? does not seek empathy towards a character. It seeks empathy towards a political movement; it seeks to spur you into action not because you care about the narrator, but because you care about Walter Scott, because you care about humanity.
I went to protests. I made donations. But when I was truly lost I did the one thing I could rely on: I made a dance. Was that Enough? That is for the viewer to decide. But tapping into the immense power of performance to provoke, to prod, to move, to have heartfelt conversations in a seemingly heartless time—that felt like the most important thing I could do.
Choreographer/writer/director/filmmaker David Roussève has created 14 full evening works for his company David Roussève/REALITY.
I’m a white choreographer based on the ancestral lands of the Ramaytush Ohlone people, otherwise known as San Francisco. My recent book, Shifting Cultural Power: Questions and Case Studies in Performance, imagines equity-based models in dance that decenter whiteness.
Writing about anti-racism work is a fraught endeavor because, as a white person, I’ll always have blind spots. For example, the book includes a list of “25 Practices for Decolonizing Dance (and finding your Poetic Nerve).” In retrospect, I should have used different language.
“Decolonize” has become a ubiquitous term because colonialism is everywhere. Colonial legacies exist not only outside of us, in sociopolitical power dynamics, but also in our bodies. Colonial legacies pervade dominant cultural notions of time, value, space and language.
But Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s article “Decolonization is not a metaphor” criticizes use of the term in contexts other than the repatriation of Indigenous land, saying that decolonization “is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies.” Holding Tuck and Yang’s article in mind, I want to be more specific with my language when I talk about reorganizing the field to resist complicity with legacies of oppression. We can ask many questions that interrogate power and privilege in the field: How can we compose bodies in space and time without asserting power over those bodies? How can we resist monolithic meaning in dance? How do we disentangle authority from authorship? How can dancemaking be liberatory for everyone involved? How can we anchor dancemaking in authentic community and in trust? How can we dismantle white supremacy in the field? These questions are related to the important economic and political work of decolonization, but not synonymous with it.
“There’s value in putting ourselves in a destabilized space and listening for what comes next.”
Hope Mohr
Courtesy Mohr.
I want to talk about aligning choreographic practice with commitments to mutual liberation. This is necessarily both structural and personal work. We must reorganize the underpinnings of art practice: our organizations, agreements with collaborators and relationships in the studio. We must democratize arts leadership, demand equitable contracting, train arts workers in cultural competency, add Indigenous representation to boards and staff, center BIPOC artists in programming, honor Indigenous protocol by acknowledging Native land, and advocate for reparations for the displacement of Indigenous peoples.
And politics don’t stop at the studio door. How can we integrate political commitments into our dances, our bodies?
With this context in mind, I offer this revised list of prompts from Shifting Cultural Power: “25 Practices for Aligning Choreographic Practice with a Commitment to Mutual Liberation.”
The space should not be white-dominated. Indigenous people and people of color should be fully integrated, engaged, empowered, acknowledged and respected in the cast, crew and artistic staff.
Practice sustained listening.
Encourage imperfection and doubt (yours and others).
Slow down. Value pause. Waste time. Wander.
Value pleasure.
Invite excess, kitsch, camp, sentimentality and overmuchness.
Orient the dance and its systems outward. Make in relationship. Make dance in the mess of the world.
Allow the dancing to be invisible, ambiguous and illegible.
There is no original, truest version of movement. Movement material is collectively owned and authored.
Allow edges to be a part of the landscape of the dance. Refuse a fixed front.
Be transparent about your needs and your fallibility as an artist. Be clear about the terms of the work with yourself and your collaborators. Name collaborative periods of work. Name when you need to author or edit.
Acknowledge and credit sources of movement, both in the studio (“This is a phrase that Jane made.” “I pulled this idea off of YouTube.”) and in promotional materials (“This dance was co-created by…”).
Allow for multiplicity: multiple voices, multiple variables, multiple vocabularies. Develop a vocabulary of inclusion sourced from multiple bodies. What does it mean to express authorship amidst multiplicity?
Acknowledge and pay attention to how everyone in the room works at different processing speeds. Orient the process to different people’s sense of time.
Explore what it might mean for the dance to be porous. What can you let into the space of the dance?
Practice making without a show in mind. Hold the creative process lightly while still staying engaged, accountable and supportive of others in the space.
Allow improvisation to take over the process. Maintain a state of radical uncertainty about what the dance might become.
Allow for sustained movement research outside of the task of making. Find creative modes beyond composition and mimicry.
Collaborate with people and places that destabilize and challenge authorship.
Question your choices. Question instinctual preferences. Work with a palette you despise. Stay with an idea much longer than you think is appropriate.
Invite other people’s emotional lives into the work.
Invite other people to hijack the process.
Practice financial transparency about artist pay, project budget and funding sources.
Show up with no agenda. Work with what and who is in the room.
Be vulnerable.
If I were to implement all of the above prompts, I might not end up making a dance at all. But there’s value in putting ourselves in a destabilized space and listening for what comes next. These are prompts for locating your political and poetic nerve. Poetic nerve does not necessarily mean surrendering authorship. It means going beyond yourself, and then back within again, and then again out past yourself, and so on, in a constant conversation between the dance and the world.
Doing the Work
These ideas are not mine. Throughout the vast and violent span of colonial history, dance artists, especially Native artists and artists of color, have been doing and continue to do this work. There’s Sydnie L. Mosley, advocating for liberation of dance pedagogy through practices such as acknowledging that “all dance forms are specific cultural practice and should be acknowledged and specifically named as such”; Mar Parrilla’s cultural exchange projects with Puerto Rico–based artists and members of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe to explore colonial legacies; Emily Johnson, whose decolonization rider calls on presenter partners to commit to the “living process” of decolonization, including compliance with Indigenous Protocol, acknowledgment of host Nations in all press, and engagement with the Indigenous community. There are countless other examples.
Why am I, as a white person, even trying to talk about decolonization? Because for too long, Indigenous people and people of color have shouldered this work. In the words of feminist writer Judit Moschkovich, “it is not the duty of the oppressed to educate the oppressor.” White people must do this work too.
Q&A: What tools or tactics are you using in the studio to liberate your choreographic practice?
Randy Basso, Courtesy Herrera.
David Herrera, artistic director and choreographer for David Herrera Performance Company:
“I channel movement through emotional recall and muscle memory to return to a time when studio teachings did not dictate how I performed or danced. I swayed, gyrated, stomped, shook my hips, pranced and spun before I ever stepped into a modern dance class. Through this approach, I am actively shedding the heavily calloused, conditioned layers of white modern dance technique. It’s a slow and arduous process; a relearning of feeling, instinct and physicality. I aim to liberate myself from the burden of aesthetics that were not inherent to my cultural upbringing or my brown body.”
Deeksha Prakash, Courtesy Kambara.
Yayoi Kambara, dancer, choreographer, teacher and director of KAMBARA+: “I dismantle systems of oppression, colonization and power by creating space to liberate our imaginations. I build artistic teams that value curiosity and mistakes. I confront my intentions behind each movement. Ballet is associated with whiteness, but it’s part of my training. When I’m making movement that twists, curves, quirks and springs, something from ballet often appears. I love a good à la seconde. But à la seconde has no inherent value. When à la seconde shows up in my choreography, it can be anything: honest, strong, vulnerable. No two bodies do it identically. Often I pause inside a ballet position and then fall out of it. Just as I consider the values behind my movement, my dances invite audiences to consider their own values.” —As told to Hope Mohr
You caught us. We’re undeniably hooked on Austin Goodwin’s flair for hilarious honesty about the dance industry. In one of his wittiest Instagram videos, he asks his landlord if he can pay rent with “exposure,” since that’s the form of payment he often accepts from freelance jobs. “How many times have we heard ‘Look, there’s no money in this, but it’s going to be great exposure,’” he told Dance Magazine in a recent interview. “I mean, come on, no one’s going to watch this muffin commercial and want to book me for a Broadway show or a European tour. I need to pay my bills.”
We’ve all had those same hushed thoughts before, but this past year, Goodwin has brought them out into the open. Through short videos on his Instagram account—usually a close-up of him acting out two sides of an awkward conversation—he riffs on real-life dance situations and uses humor to offer relatable takes on auditions, creative processes and more. With a career spanning from Sleep No More to Broadway’s Fiddler on the Roof and Netflix’s Tick, Tick… Boom!, the Juilliard-trained dancer certainly knows the ins and outs of the industry. And thousands of likes, shares and comments later, the laughs he provides have sparked important conversations and united the community in a much deeper purpose.
What was your personal inspiration to make these videos?
I think we’re in such a strange, wonderful and sometimes kind of awful industry that people don’t really understand. And I thought a way to help people understand, and also to help other dancers connect about the personal things we hold on to, was to make everyone laugh at it.
But there’s a larger conversation happening too, and I think the pandemic has allowed dancers to sit back and really look at their experiences and see the way we’re often treated. A lot of us have had our jobs literally ripped away from us, and if we’re freelancers, we’re left with no protection. I don’t always want to be hypercritical of the dance industry because I’m obviously a part of that community and it’s a community I love and have great respect for. But I think we’ve had an opportunity to look at the systems that are not working. And to look at our experiences with choreographers, with schools, with bodies…to see the way we fit ourselves into this mold that really is not healthy in some ways. It can be a relief to feel like “Oh, my god. I’ve done that. I’ve been there. That’s happened to me or that’s happened to someone that I know.”
In your ideal world, what changes do you hope these videos could bring about?
I hope people can start asking for things that would allow someone who pursues dance as a career to really have a livelihood without holding multiple jobs at the same time. We want to be able to start families and buy homes and pay off our student loans. I hope to have more support from the government, from each other. I want dancers to not be afraid to ask for what they deserve. What they really deserve. I think we so often dismiss it all because we really want the job. But you can want the job and also ask for the things you deserve as a human being.
For example, I hope to have a dialogue about dancers generating material and recognizing the creative contributions that they’re not given credit for. How can companies look at that process and pay their dancers accordingly? And if those pieces are then remounted elsewhere, how can royalties be implemented? Even if it’s just a small royalty. It’s still the act of doing it that shows care and respect.
Whenever I watch your videos, I can’t help but wonder what else is going on in the room around you at that moment.
It’s usually just my partner, Paul, sitting in the kitchen, watching me go off on a tangent.
But sometimes he’s the cameraman, and we often have to start over because he’ll just laugh hysterically to the point where we both end up in fits, unable to move on.
But that must be so therapeutic for you!
Oh, that’s a huge part of why I do it. Some of the videos are based on things I’ve really been through, and being able to find humor in them has been fun but also incredibly healing.
So how can humor help us stay grounded during difficult times?
Right now it’s scary. It’s emotional. Everyone is carrying around a lot of anxiety. There’s political turmoil, environmental distress. And everyone is having their own personal awakening, whether they’re talking about it or not. In this pandemic, we’ve been forced to look at ourselves straight on, and I think humor allows us to do that and to unite with other people in the process. Everything is funny in some way. It helps. It keeps us in check. Humor brings empathy. And at the end of the day, if you can find a way to laugh at it, you can get through it.
