In Dance

Photo by Rosetta Hicks
[ID: Ellen Sebastian Chang (age 14) with shoulder-length pressed hair, wearing glasses and a sleeveless orange sundress. She is smiling while holding a brown and white chihuahua dog while standing in front of the cinder block house built by her grandfather. There is a low row of flowers in front of the house.]

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Architecture is the ancient global art of the structures of a place revealing the functional and beautiful needs of the people of the earth. Joanna Haigood’s Zaccho Dance Theatre is also an ancient art that portrays the living bodies of a place in motion, flight, and proximity to the stories that become enshrined built and unbuilt places upon the earth.

Joanna Haigood describes her collaboration for The People’s Palace as “an artistic intervention and dialogue with the architectural iconography with the intention to insert the communities and the narratives that are excluded from representation, and to provide a more accurate picture of who and what defines San Francisco.” I recall the architectural ideas of Christopher Alexander and his colleagues who crafted a Zen like approach towards the built world noting the beauty and soul of architecture is born from the people as a “living pattern language…A quality in buildings and in towns cannot be made, but only generated, indirectly, by the ordinary actions of the people, just as a flower cannot be made, but only generated from the seed.” Zaccho Dance Theatre is also a pattern language soulfully seeding for decades: dancing, singing, speaking within the natural world of trees, butterflies, and bees as an expression of the interdependent unity of all things; and a researched choreography interacting with site specific structures to reveal forgotten enforced labor or cultural contributions of enslaved Africans, silos of urban renewal and gentrification, sites of love and sustenance and the “ghost architecture” that inhabits our memories.  Zaccho Dance Theatre’s visions are spiritually engineered within the divine site of the body as an ongoing reminder that we, the culturally diverse peoples, have always been here as sacred stewardship, valuable knowledge, and creative contributions.

 

Place. People. Progress. Palace.

Now as acknowledgement of Then.

Before all of us, this Place was soil, sand, river, bay, live oak, buckeye, poppy, elderberry, swallowtail, sea turtle, otter, mule deer, badger

and more.

This Place birthed its People as Muekma, Ramaytush, Rumsen, Miwok, Mutsen, Awaswas

and more.

In the quest for more,

a People birthed of another Place came sailing, marching, and charging, as

Spanish, Colonizers, Settlers, Prospectors, or Westward Ho’s.

With an intention to occupy Place and reimagine People birthed in Place as

savages, slaves, chattel, coolies, wetbacks, or sweetly as salt of the Earth,

in need of control and management.

This was now a Place in the process of Progress.

Called it New World, Yerba Buena, Gold Mountain, Barbary Coast, The Paris of the West, First World, Fog City, The City but never call it Frisco or San Fran.

The Palace^[1] is built and rebuilt as reflection of the beauty and aesthetics of occupying people who came sailing, marching, and charging in the quest for more.

Here we are on the steps of the Palace….

In this “now” can we rematriate ourselves within and without Palace?

 

Architecture. Public. Private.

“Neoclassicism in the US is directly related to the construction of whiteness. It was whiteness that was sought after in the many plantation houses that chose the style, justifying it as an emulation of ancient Greek ‘culture’ to separate themselves from the Indigenous peoples whose land was stolen, and the enslaved African people forced to build and work in them. Thomas Jefferson’s excitement with the work of the Beaux Arts school in Paris was motivated by a desire to make America ‘European,’ and white.”^[2]

Everyone and all bodies, in all cultures and societies, engages with the built world of architecture and interior design. Those high-minded ideas and concepts are simply a built place made functional or useful, beautiful, or becoming, sacred, or cherished. A place fashioned from human imaginations designed in an alchemical collaboration with the divine materials of the world, be it mud, be it clay, be it straw, bamboo, or redwood, be it stone or steel, be it glittering glass or reinforced concrete. Let us, also, humbly remember that all creatures design and build; perhaps this is the heart of our shared planet, a garden palace, where we all began before we invented cities and city halls.

Here we are in 2024 in the San Francisco Bay Area, within this modern urban city landscape where our relationships to land, architecture, interior design and built structures are strictly legislated and monitored by the bureaucratic bodies controlling and managing the status quo. What avenue is open to us people, citizens, and the public, who still have dreams (plans) for how we want our lives to be dignified and respected in this place we call home? Do all avenues and roads lead to City Hall, aka “The People’s Palace?”^[3] This Beaux Arts structure is the symbolic locus for the paperwork for legitimacy of our dreamed (planned) lives: marriage, birth, and death certificates, permits for buildings or inspections, starting and closing a business, public health, animal welfare and more.

Zaccho Dance Theatre is inviting us into the Palace as a site of recognition, reflection, and creative civic responses. The People’s Palace is the location we reimagine our relationship to public and civic spaces: How we love us. How we belong and make beautiful public^[4] space together, as an act so compelling that fear of difference dissolves within our embraced wonders, curiosities, and possibilities. We are the original architects, interior designers, landscapers, and gardeners. We, also, have an aesthetic rooted in our patterns of the language of beauty and morality. There is an Indigenous wisdom and skills that lies dormant in all of us together.

“…we have to understand that imagination shapes the world and so those of us who have been oppressed by how others imagine the world, the supremacists the patriarchs, the war mongers, the capitalists, we have to imagine something so compelling that it moves us beyond and out of the compliance with our own entrapment in these systems that do not love us.”  adrienne maree brown

What is the design of public and private spaces?  What is the “pattern language” of these codified systems which represent our diverse cultures?

Public remains the politized language that represents all of us in a democracy, taxpayers’ dollars generated for the public good that elects our public servants and yet…On closer inspection it feels like code for a kind of people struggling for access to a permissible life that has a value publicly and privately.  Public becomes code for the masses as others, poor, poorly educated, poorly fed, poorly housed, lacking in health care, lacking in important work, lacking access, black, brown, yellow, queer, disabled, immigrant, on the streets and corners and benches of built space – you know them as those people in public schools, transportation, libraries, needy for public welfare and public defenders. We are a jumble amassed in a Jenga-like structure where the invisible hand pulls a piece that can crash our worlds. Which creates the feeling of private^[5] as so very aspirational, as in private property, private corporations, private equity funds, private sector, private reserve, private island, schools, universities, rooms, parties, exclusive access to that good life that is steeped in the leg room of first class. And if that is the case then why would we invite the public into our private realms?

And this is why art and architecture are so very important and very dangerous. “We are not simply receivers of aesthetics … we are makers of aesthetics. Art has a social purpose [and] art belongs to the people. It’s not something that is hanging out there that has no connection with the needs of man. And art is unashamedly, unembarrassingly, if there is such a word, social. It is political; it is economic. The total life of man is reflected in his art.” Chinua Achebe

 

The Unfinished House: a personal memory of my childhood home.

My Gran Daddy, Willie Hicks from Selma, Alabama, and his nephew John built a cinder block house for us on a small, purchased lot on the high desert dusty sage-brushed lands of the Umatilla, Palouse, and Cayuse of Eastern Washington. Cinder blocks at that time in the early 60’s were humble, cheap materials accessible to the working class in pursuit of the American hopeful dreams of a place to belong via ownership. We moved into the house before it was finished. My Gran Mama, Rosetta Rankin from Forest, Mississippi, wept, “Lawd have mercy on us. I was raised to never move into an unfinished house. It’s a bad sign. This house will never get finished.” The house was livable, just unfinished. Our unfinished house welcomed all to our table as Mama believed that she “cooked like Jesus;” there would always be enough for us and whomever knocked on the door. In 1970, I moved to California to live with my biological mother in Berkeley. I would visit my unfinished house every year. Daddy Hicks’ intention was to finish the house, but his nephew over time succumbed to alcoholism and became unreliable. Daddy died in 1975. And Mama never wanted “another man up in my house.” Financially there was no money or skilled bodies to complete what was started. When my Mama died in 1996, I walked down the old stairs to the basement with its dirt floor, the open studs that represented two guest bedrooms, a den, a bathroom, the narrow, low sliding glass windows encrusted with cobwebs, dust, and outdoor splatters, an old couch with piles of unfolded clothes, a clothesline strung to dry clothes in winter from the old washing machine balanced on unused cinder blocks and I cried a sorrowful, pitiful woe-is-me sobbing. As I have grown into the moral aesthetics of my homeplace the house feels magical to me now – it had everything living and useful inside and outside including dirt.

We are the public, the private, individual and the collective. None of us are unique in our longing for a homeplace and a public space where we are able, as bell hooks says, “to recover our wholeness” and “be affirmed in our minds and hearts.” Yes, the settler empire’s extractive wars continue to amass mounds of rubble and slash wounds upon the lands where we struggle to live the lives we are born into as diverse creatures of the earth. It represents a lack of architectural imagination within bankruptcy of the embodied hungry ghosts of progress.

 

Hope is also a design:

Once upon a time the World Honored One was walking with gods and devas and humans, when he paused. He pointed to the ground and said, “This is a suitable site to build a temple.” The god Indra then plucked a blade of grass from nearby and stuck it into the ground at the spot where the Buddha had pointed. Indra declared, “The temple is built!” The World Honored One smiled.

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[1] Middle English: from Old French paleis, from Latin Palatium, the name of the Palatine hill in Rome, where the house of the emperor was situated.

[2] The Members of the Architecture Lobby. (2020, February 7). The Architecture Lobby Statement on Trump’s Executive Order Affecting Federal Architecture. https://architecture-lobby.org/news/t-a-l-statement-on-trumps-executive-order-affecting-federal-architecture/

[3] “The People’s Palace,” named after Mayor “Sunny Jim” Rolph’s vision to provide a spectacular City Hall  for San Franciscans.

[4] late Middle English: from Old French, from Latin publicus, blend of poplicus ‘of the people’ (from populus ‘people’ and pubes ‘adult’).

[5] late Middle English (originally denoting a person not acting in an official capacity): from Latin privatus ‘withdrawn from public life,’ a use of the past participle of privare ‘bereave, deprive,’ from privus ‘single, individual.’

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This article appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of In Dance.

Photo by Suzanne Kreiter
[ID: Black & white photo of an elderly man waist deep in the Atlantic Ocean. It’s a sunny day. His back is to the camera with his arms lifting slightly away from his body.]

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At 96, my father swims 4 times a week. He doesn’t just walk through the pool, feet on the ground, like the other elders. He gives his full weight to the water. Moves like a slow fish, breast stroking and head under. Before swimming there was tennis, almost daily, till he was in his 80s and he could no longer see the ball.

People describe swimming and tennis as lifelong sports. I think of contact improvisation this way as well. Maybe not so much the sports part, as CI lives in my body as an artistic practice. But its physicality will, I hope, ease me down the elders’ road in my next few decades.

It’s been 38 years of practice for me, with significant comings and goings from the form, but also consistent and delightful returns. The covid pandemic took us all out for a while of course.  The current, post-pandemic reboot has brought new thoughts to my practice, for how contact improv matters.

CI matters as a carnival ride, inlaid into deep human connection. CI matters because of the warrior efforts that have been brought to the form by people like Ronja Ver, Jun Akiyama, Mayfield Brooks and Kathleen Rea, to transform contact culture into 21^st century equity. CI matters because of the commitments by dancers who show up to the jams week after week after week to practice joy, connection, and to deepen their skills.  CI matters because of the organizers who labor for no compensation, to create community cohesion. CI matters as a strange and weird phenomenon, when measured against mainstream social norms for touch. But it’s worth the trouble, as its oddities enliven, and expand how we can activate touch.

Recently, in my day job as a teaching artist, I worked with Joanna Haigood/ ZACCHO on a project educating Black youth in San Francisco’s Bayview about the origins of hip-hop in the Bronx. Students learned how housing scarcity, the building of a road, widespread landlord arson and infrastructure disinvestments led Black teenagers to scratching, b-boying and b-girling, graffiti on the trains, and political messaging inside rhymes.

It’s always been striking to me that the rise of hip-hop and the creation of contact improvisation happened at roughly the same time. They’ve both become international movement languages that live on nearly every continent. The two forms could not be more different in origin, if one looks through the prisms of privilege, race, and resource access. 50 years in, hip-hop has become commercialized. CI has not. Hip-hop has permeated into almost every culture. CI has not. But I appreciate that their origin stories sit side by side in the American history of the 1970s.

Last week I was at a contact Jam at the Finnish Hall in Berkeley, deeply immersed in a dimensional dance with one of my favorite dance partners. In our travels around the dance floor, we ended up next to a young dancer grooving out with popping and house moves busting from his body with exquisite clarity. This was a full circle moment for me. That a hip-hop mover chose to bring his practice inside Finn Hall’s CI jam space, proximate to touch, integrating with touch. I’m excited to imagine where this can go, if and as dancers blend their body knowledge into potential new form.

2024 has brought me back to teaching CI more consistently. My son is 19 now and has left for college, giving me access to more open space and time. As I return to the work of teaching CI, I am thinking about new ways to integrate the technical demands of the form, the socio-emotional aspects of working body to body, and the puzzles the form gives us.

I’ve been privileged to study Steve Paxton’s puzzles, rolling on down the dance floor in spirals and 360-degree circling. Steve passed on recently, and left his legacy in bodies around the globe. When I think about his puzzles now, I’m contemplating the constant fitting together of weight, consent, motion and the unknown. I’m thinking about how to travel in the dance; how to breathe; how to acknowledge harm done in the practice of the form around gender and power; how to advance communication while still leading with unpredictable pathways, and with mystery. I’m thinking about how to value both care and risk. How to invite racial difference into the room without tokenizing it. How to embed gender expansion into how we see and celebrate another body.

In my return to teaching, I am gravitating toward simplicity. Last week I led a room full of dancers standing back-to-back, connecting top of skull down to the coccyx. Then sliding the point of contact, one dancer slipping one center of gravity under another, so someone could leave the ground and enter exquisite suspension. There was a radical moment of commitment and elation in the room, in real time, as feet dangled. It was an essential moment that carried us forward and led to inversions and falling in the next part of class.

It’s an intriguing time to be a dancer. It’s a compelling time to gather with other dancers. It’s my honor to teach what I can. It’s the swimming pool and the tennis court, as my body ages and still has wisdom in it, and unsullied will.

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This article appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of In Dance.

Art installation by Courtney Desiree Morris
[ID: Altered video art installation by BAN 9 Artist, Courtney Desiree Morris. The face of a woman of African descent is covered in honey. Words on paper over it read “What is your dream for Palestine?” Written answers include “Self determination,” “End the Occupation.” and “Freedom.”]

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As the horrors of the ongoing U.S. funded Israeli genocide in Palestine pour into our social media feeds from Gaza over the last six months, it has become more clear to me how FLACC’s seemingly small, yet, public “platform” has more influence and power on a political and cultural stage than I realized. Not because we have a million followers, but because you don’t have to be that big in order for the algorithms to stifle you on Facebook and Instagram. The recent congressional efforts to ban TikTok, the Twitter files report by Matt Taibbi last year, the removals and demonetizing of people-funded YouTube accounts, the ongoing silencing and firing of scholars and journalists across the country is evidence that our knowledge challenges the political narrative of which they are no longer in control. Our government and its donors are worried about dissenting voices of artists, educators and regular people exercising our 1st Amendment rights to freedom of speech—which includes sharing the raw footage of the bloody crimes against humanity in Gaza.

 

FLACC Censored by Meta

Festival of Latin American Contemporary Choreographers (FLACC) had under 2,000 followers on Instagram when the Meta Corporation permanently deleted the @flaccdanza Instagram page and by extension disabled access to all three of my Facebook pages connected to my name. It happened on my birthday, October 19, days after I attended a pro-Palestine march in San Francisco which I posted about on my personal IG account on October 14, 2023. It also happened when I was getting the most social media traffic during the 10th Anniversary celebrations of FLACC when we were purchasing a bunch of ads, boosting posts and following a lot of new accounts, including Palestinian accounts, to get the word out about our Latinx dance festival while simultaneously staying engaged and in solidarity with the people suffering in Palestine.

Between October and November 2023, Human Rights Watch documented over 1,050 takedowns and other suppression of content on Instagram and Facebook that had been posted by Palestinians and their supporters. After giving FLACC’s dance festival ads three totally different warnings for violating “community guidelines,” we concluded that Meta’s politically manipulated algorithms had targeted us. Note to all: Make sure you have back up admins on Facebook! I still have a personal IG and we did make a new @flaccdanza_ account, but only FLACC’s Marketing manager, Marivel Mendoza, has access to FLACC on Facebook as an administrator. We both also had our WhatsApp accounts suspended on the same day during our festival in late October, but gained them back several months later, without an explanation from Meta.

To continue leveraging our public platform, one of FLACC’s solidarity efforts as a Latinx and Indigenous arts organization has included sending monthly newsletters to our subscribers promoting the Palestinian Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). The campaign, created in 2004, was inspired by tactics for successfully ending the South African apartheid regime through the power of boycott, divestment and sanction (BDS) efforts. Similarly, the liberation of Palestine will require the rest of the world to stop supporting any entity (including art and entertainment) that is funded by, aligned with or supportive of Israel’s terrorism. The boycott is aimed against the state of Israel, not against individual Israeli artists, or against Jewish artists, but against any artist or academic who supports the apartheid state of Israel and its imperialist policies against Palestine.

 

Solidarity

I wanted to write this article for In Dance to encourage more dance readers to use their own platforms to take a stand and to highlight a few local dance artists in the SF Bay Area who are tirelessly working against oppression by using their personal and professional resources in solidarity with Palestine. I gathered statements and material from local dancers Leila Mire, Cookie Harrist, Tessa Nebrida, José Navarrete and Leyya Tawil. They are among hundreds of artists in the bay area who are uncompromising towards Israel’s displacing, starving and bombing over half the Gazan population for the last six months with U.S. weaponry.  Our efforts, and yours, ultimately gain strength when we are principled and united for a cause against the illegal occupation of Palestine which forces every U.S. taxpayer into sharing responsibility for this genocide in Gaza.

To build a coalition implies that we are all connected to the suffering in Palestine—as we are all connected to the western capitalist agendas in Cuba, Chile, Venezuela, Haiti, Syria, Yemen, Congo, Sudan, Ethiopia and many other countries both historically and currently. Solidarity can range from simple awareness-building by raising the algorithms through reposting, liking or following Palestinian journalism, to signing petitions and calling elected officials, encouraging faith leaders to get involved, donating relief funds for Gazans, creating public art interventions, engaging in direct action protests, risking arrest and much more.

In early December 2023, I attended a teach-in at Bandaloop studios in Oakland by Lebanese-American researcher, dancer, scholar, writer and activist, Leila Mire. Leila is a UC Berkeley PhD Performance Studies candidate who has been speaking out about how Israel and the U.S. use dance as a form of “soft power” in an attempt to normalize the Israeli occupation of Palestine and to artwash the cultural image of Israel. In an article she wrote for thINKingDANCE in 2021, Leila writes: “As artists, our priority should be shifting narratives to resist oppressive regimes. Art is incomplete when the voices and embodied knowledge of indigenous voices are silenced. The world is listening to Palestinians, and it is time the dance community does the same.” If arts organizations and funders are aligned with indigenous rights movements and decolonization efforts, this principle should extend to Palestine.

 

Normalization

In a world where the corporate media headlines continue to mislabel the current onslaught a “war” as if there are two equal sides responsible for the indiscriminate carpet bombings, imprisonments and starvation of Gazans, it is important that we understand the colonial settler interest of the west and the history of the asymmetric power dynamic via the state of Israel and the people of Palestine. With the two pro-Israel talking points on repeat: “Israel has a right to defend itself” and “Hamas is a terrorist organization” it is also important as artists that we don’t engage in activities of normalization that emphasize “co-existence” rather than “co-resistance,” or worse, conflate more dangerous messaging that being against this genocide is equal to being antisemitic. Whether there is a two state or a one state solution, Palestinians of all faiths must have the right to self determination and sovereignty over their land and lives. I recommend watching the documentary “Israelism” to get a clear perspective on the colonial indoctrination of a nationalist Jewish identity.

The soft power tactics of “Normalization” in the Palestinian context is particularly relevant to artists, academics and cultural workers as it refers to any activity that creates the impression of false equivalency that Palestinians, the oppressed, and Israel, the oppressor, are both equally responsible for “the conflict.” As defined by the PACBI website, an example of a boycottable normalization project is “a joint event that is designed explicitly to bring together Palestinians/Arabs and Israelis so they can present their respective narratives or perspectives, or to work toward reconciliation without addressing the root causes of injustice. However, a joint project is not boycottable if: (a) the Israeli party in the project recognizes the comprehensive Palestinian rights under international law (corresponding to the 3 rights in the BDS call); and (b) the project/activity is one of ‘co-resistance’ to oppression rather than ‘co-existence’ under oppression.”

The co-resistance teach-in at Bandaloop was organized by dancer, ally and activist Cookie Harrist, who started the “Dance Action Group” to mobilize dancers from all backgrounds, and strengthen our community’s presence at protests and direct actions. The group currently has about 50 Bay Area dancers directly involved on signal and is open to vetted artivists interested in staying informed and taking direct action for Palestine now and for other causes in the future.

“The Dance Action Group serves to inform dancers of upcoming actions (via signal and in person) so we can use a buddy system for safety, deepen our relationships to each other as we take action together, and strengthen our organizing capacity as a community.

While artists making work addressing the genocide of Palestinians is of course an important tactic in resistance efforts, I am personally investing in the tactic of taking existing community networks and repurposing them to increase the organizing capacity of a broader collective.

But I do believe if we decide art-making is our primary tactic, we must take our work out of the theater and into the streets, to the doorsteps of complicit representatives, lobbyists, and weapons manufacturers that live right here in the Bay Area.”  -Cookie Harrist

 

Bay Area Now 9 Artists at YBCA

On February 15, I was invited by dancer Tessa Nebrida to join about 50 other activists and co-resistant organizations to help the Bay Area Now 9 artists at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts intervene on their own artwork in their renamed exhibit “Love Letters for Gaza” after being censored by the YBCA program, “Love Letters for Soma.” We assisted 8 of the artists in altering their work with pro-Palestinian symbolism and messaging as an interventionist response targeting staff, funders and board members of YBCA.  Following the protest, YBCA chose to further silence the artists by closing the exhibit for four weeks. The action precipitated a public hearing called by Supervisor Hillary Ronan of District 9 who strongly supported the BAN 9 artists, all of whom are people of color. A petition created by 15 YBCA employees rallied for the BAN 9 exhibit to reopen and was finally successful after four weeks of pressure from over 500 artists and community members. I asked Tessa, a Filipina dance artist who engages in decolonial art practices and has supported the Palestinian solidarity struggle for years, to lend her thoughts about the role of the artist during this time.

“I’m reminded of something Chicago-based filmmaker Merawi Gerima said: ‘In the face of genocide, when civilians are being massacred by the most powerful white supremacists on the planet, the role of the artist is like everybody else. The role is to get involved because genocide is literally a global priority, and it requires the full attention of all of humanity using all of its abilities to the maximum including art.’ It’s such a critical time of collectivizing our efforts and also doing the necessary inner work as individuals to examine the parts of ourselves with the most proximity to power. The fact that many Bay Area dance institutions, organizations, companies and artists continue to remain silent and disengaged speaks volumes to the ways in which our art form is still rooted and dependent on Zionist funding in order to survive.”

– Tessa Nebrida

In solidarity with the BAN 9 artists who now call themselves Bay Area Artists Against Genocide (B.A.A.A.G), the artists and curators of the Fresh Festival also took collective action and canceled their events at YBCA, rather than finding another location to perform. After they canceled, I reached out to José Navarrete (aka José Ome Mazatl) Mexican-American FLACC contributor, co-director of NAKA Dance Theater and co-curator of the Fresh Festival. In his letter to the artists and staff at YBCA he stated:

 “An artist’s responsibility is to reflect on the political and social conditions in which we live, and it is our responsibility as human beings to take action when we see innocent people being exterminated by colonialism, western imperialism and white supremacy. YBCA claims to be ‘a catalyst of creative exploration, expression and innovation that empowers artists, inspires community and drives lasting social change,’ but unfortunately, YBCA’s actions are in direct contradiction to these values.” – José Ome Mazatl

José not only wrote a letter of solidarity but he also asked Arnoldo Garcia to curate RAZA CON GAZA at the Eastside Arts Alliance in Oakland. The event included Latinx poets, musicians and dancers who came together for two days of art-in-solidarity, including: AntiFaSon, Camellia Boutros, Diana Gameros, Leticia García, Lubna Morrar, Madeleine Zayas, Mabel Valdevizio, Cristina Lopez Suarez, Agustina Amiconi and more.

 

Palestinian Resilience

Finally, I reached out to Leyya Tawil, a Syrian, Palestinian, American who is an artist, a curator, and a cultural activist working in sound and dance. Leyya has been steeped in the San Francisco and Detroit dance and music scenes since 1997 while touring her work in the U.S., Europe, Russia and the Arab world. Her futurist aesthetic holds a profound sense of resilience in the unimaginable dystopia of our present world. Check out Leyya’s public art intervention four years ago, Turku Future Folk Dance.  Leyya is the founding director of Arab.AMP, a platform for futurist live art and ideas from the SWANA diaspora and their allied communities. Her curatorial practices can be seen at Southern Exposure (SF), Arab American National Museum (Dearborn, MI), and she is also the co-founder of TAC Temescal Art Center (Oakland).

Leyya Tawil:  “There is an ethnic cleansing over 100 years in rollout. Solidarity actions and interventions are a crucial part of strengthening our global majority. I am grateful and emboldened by the “Dancers for Palestine” and related coalitions – they have mobilized throughout the US in order to call artistic, cultural, and academic institutions to account for their complicity – and to turn towards justice, and make PACBI and BDS commitments a loud and real priority. In this, we are together.”

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This article appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of In Dance.

Photo ©Labverde by Laryssa Machada
[ID: In the Amazon forest, Rulan Tangen wears a brown dress and gracefully connects with a branch, symbolizing nature’s strength and rootedness.]

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Rulan Tangen was on death’s door as she dreamed of Dancing Earth. She could barely recognize her own body as she battled stage-four cancer, hardly able to move, let alone dance. Yet in that liminal space between realms, Rulan was grateful to still be breathing, and in this dream-space she visioned Dancing Earth – an offering borne as a thank you to life. This year, Dancing Earth celebrates their 20-year anniversary, as Rulan honors the strength and empowerment that this moment represents.

Dancing Earth creates elemental ritual and dance performances grounded in the ancestral, land-based wisdom of contemporary global people. With hubs in the Bay Area and Santa Fe, and a widening international cultural exchange in the Amazon, Colombia, Mexico and other countries worldwide, Dancing Earth prioritizes equitable exchange between local cultures and artists. Working with grassroots communities, Rulan says they have created an “inclusive belonging space for the people who are dancing for the Earth, with the Earth and as the Earth.” As director, Rulan is passionate about cultivating “real living relationships that honor the special unique qualities that each individual brings, culturally and creatively.”

I recently attended one of Dancing Earth’s offerings – The Source, 4-Day Festival in the Bay Area co-curated by Elaine Talamaivo and Gabriel Carrion-Gonzales. At this immersive community ritual and performance experience, I received an embodied transmission of the world that is possible – one of deep reciprocity with the Earth and with one another. I’ve been grateful to talk with members of the Dancing Earth team and their collaborators, to learn more about the seeds they’ve been planting over two decades. One theme stands out: this is much more than a dance company.

Alex Meraz was an original founding dancer with the company in 2004, and is now a celebrated actor and director, known for his roles in the Twilight Saga, Suicide Squad, and more. At 19, Alex was bagging groceries at Whole Foods after having recently moved to San Francisco. He’d grown up break dancing near the Reservation in Mesa, Arizona. He’d never auditioned for anything, and was a bit nervous. “I think Rulan saw I was this rough kind of urban kid, tore up jeans and a hoodie. So she played an old school hip hop song. And I just started break dancing.” Alex was welcomed into the company, and the next day actor and Dancing Earth collaborator Raoul Trujillo invited him to dance in the movie The New World. Alex says, “When I think about Rulan, when I think about Dancing Earth, it doesn’t feel like a dance company to me. It feels like in many ways they saved my life. They came at the perfect time, and told me beautiful, encouraging words at a time that I needed it. They gave me my career.”

Alex says this foundation as a dancer has been integral to his acting. “Rulan was getting us into our bodies, to find an element, and really express the element through our bodies. ‘Cause you know, we are the earth. So it was really just connecting us back to traditional views. It was figuring out a way to honor that same expression.”

Since its inception, Dancing Earth has always welcomed the wisdom of each dancer’s ancestral knowledge, rather than emphasizing specific body types or ways of moving that originate in the dominant culture.

Sarah Hogland-Gurulé has been with the company for three years, and is the director of UNBOUND, a performance ritual that honors the cast’s ancestors. Together with dancers Lupita Salazar and Gabriel Carrion-Gonzales, and producer Angel Guanajuato, their performance educates communities about the suppressed history of the Genízaros – Native people who were enslaved by Spanish colonizers. Sarah says, “I feel deeply encouraged by Dancing Earth to be guided by my intuition and to work with the ways of knowing and creating that were a normal part of culture for many of my ancestors but are often diminished, not taken seriously or even laughed at by the dominating culture of today.”

For Dancing Earth, celebrating diverse lineages is an act of honoring biodiversity: when humans dance, we are the earth dancing. This principle is central to all choreography. Ronice (“Ro”) Stratton is a dancer in the emergent Bay Area company. During the development of their production of Eco-Elegies, Ro researched the Bay Area’s watershed, created movement based on that, and shared her embodied learning with fellow dancers, which was incorporated into the performance ritual. Ro says, “Dancing Earth has been a beautiful place for me to feel agency in my dance and my expression.”

“This is a reflection of the natural world,” says Taraneh Sarrafzadeh, “that not everyone is expected to fill the same niche or express themselves in the same way. That’s embracing biodiversity.”

Taraneh is a dancer with the Bay Area company, and joins the artist-leadership cooperative team with focus on grant writing, as well as producing Eco-Elegies. At the first Dancing Earth Summer Institute she attended in 2022, she spent time in the desert, learning directly from chosen kin, and integrating that into her performance. She says, “it opened up a lot for me to have a dedicated time and space to be with a juniper tree for an hour and then see what my body absorbed from that relationship.”

After 20 years, and thanks to community, in-kind support, and grants, Dancing Earth has been able to expand. The practice of shared visioning that has been foundational to choreography is now expanding into the organizational realm. The past three years have marked a shift in Dancing Earth’s work, as they’ve been able to have consistent, part time staff, rather than working on a project basis. This enables broadening leadership in creative visioning and management of the company which they hope to continue with sustainable funding sources.

As Dancing Earth enters its third decade, Rulan intends to continue exploring the emerging theme of “mixed-icism,” which is the basis for their new Eco-Elegies performance. “Mixed-icism” inhabits the liminal space of “in between,” exploring the confluence of mixedness in lineage, citizenship, gender, sexuality, skin color, artistic discipline and more. An expansion on the long-standing themes of Dancing Earth, at the core, mixed-icism is about “acknowledging yourself as a person who’s carrying mixedness.” Rulan says, “For myself as a dream visioner, I personally want to delve into being more than a box check.”

Rulan holds this work as a way of standing for life, for what we want to see in this world. Many of her mentors have taught her that the “particular power of dance, embodiment and movement is to show not only what you’re fighting against, but what you’re standing for, what you’re dreaming into being. It’s about embodying a future of balance by showing it on stage, and then actually making it the present reality.”

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This article appears in the Winter 2024 issue of In Dance.

Photo by Hector Zavala
[ID: A diverse cast of seven college student performers wearing white jumpsuits crouch or stand on a lavender-lit stage with a torn paper backdrop. They examine large scraps of white paper, torn from the backdrop. Smaller torn up bits of paper are sprinkled on stage.]

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Erika Chong Shuch interviewed by Rowena Richie

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Editor’s Note:

I’ve collaborated with choreographer and director Erika Chong Shuch on and off since 2001. Erika, Ryan Tacata and I have a social practice and performance group called For You. Through ‘deep hanging out’ we’ve gotten to know specific people, and then enrolled them as audience-participants in tailored performative responses. Whether performing in Erika’s choreographic work, or collaborating alongside her with For You, I feel challenged and inspired to channel my wildness. I call it “taking a strangeness pill.”

I recently revisited an In Dance SPEAK piece that Erika wrote in 2008. I discovered that her version of a “strangeness pill” is “funny little monsters.” I invited Erika to reflect on how her creative process and funny little monsters have changed since then. Here are a couple excerpts from her SPEAK essay:

When I was a kid, I had a dollhouse. I didn’t want dolls because I knew that there were REAL little people (that happened to be invisible), and that dolls would scare them away. I put food out for the little people on mini dollhouse plates. Every morning, I noticed that the mounds of food were smaller. This was for certain. [These days,] I need to start leaving food out for my little people; to feed the dark night where my funny little monsters can live without the pressure of defending their existence.

Frida Kahlo said in an interview once: ‘They thought I was a surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.’ What would it be like (and I’m not saying Kahlo’s life was like this) to have no filtration system between the things we imagine, and the work we create?

 

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Rowena: I recently reread your SPEAK piece from 15 years ago and it read as so current. Can you summarize what you were trying to say?

Erika: Yeah, I can summarize what I was trying to say because I still feel the same way! I was trying to say I get scared that I can talk a talk but not walk a walk. Because so much of our livelihood as freelance artists is connected to how we talk or write about our work, there is the potential that words twist the raw intent of our work into something else. I feel the potential for that disconnect.

 

Rowena: Where does that fear originate?

Erika: We all develop our own rubrics for how to measure our successes and failures. My internal compass brings me back to questions of authenticity: does this creative choice, or grant, or article feel aligned with who I am, what I care about, what I’m thinking about? I try to consider grant writing, outreach and marketing as an extension of the creative process — it’s all part of building broader communities and conversations around the art. I have strong alarms that go off when I say something that feels off, and then I’m like, “Oh, fuck, that thing that I said actually doesn’t quite feel true.”

 

Rowena: Is there pressure to say something that doesn’t feel authentic to you?

Erika: I wonder if over the decades we’re just being asked different questions? These days we’re being asked, “How is the work relevant? How is it contributing towards the betterment of society?” I’m trying to remember if 15 years ago those questions were up as hard as they are now. I try not to get bitter about needing to “justify” why art is relevant. I try not to get sarcastic about being asked hard questions. I try to say, “How awesome is it that as the world changes, the needs change, and as the needs change, the art changes and so the questions change.” I guess the question is: as the questions change, does the work change to accommodate them?

Rowena: When I first met you you said performance making helped you process your own experiences with love, death and grief. Which feels like it dovetails with what you wrote about Frida Kahlo ‘painting her own reality.’ Fifteen years later, you started For You — originally a series of projects, and now our collective — that creates work in response to other people’s experiences. Why the flip?

Erika: I think that our work through For You still functions to process my own experiences with love and grief. But the things that I grieve have changed. My longings have changed. Even though this whole body of work that For You has been making is created in response to other people’s lives, it still feels like it’s driven by my own need—my need to connect, my need to fold into the life of a stranger, my need get weird with you and Ryan by making weird art. Because For You’s work is so intimate and personal, it’s been amazing to understand more immediately how our work moves and touches and inspires.

 

Rowena: Have your “funny little monsters” changed over the years?

Erika: I was awake in the middle of the night thinking that now my funny little monsters are in the form of a backache. A stiff elbow. Various ailments. I guess my funny little monsters have gotten more aggressive because I really like to sleep. But when I get a flash in the middle of the night, I grab my little pen beside my bed because things just come in. Strong hits of an image, or an idea, a song, a structure. I try not to get frustrated that they’re coming at me in the middle of the night. I try to say, “How cool is it that there’s something that I care so much about that it’s gonna keep me up. How cool that my subconscious is starting to fire and work out all of those problems that can’t be worked out through the logical mind during the day!” I try to meet the funny little monsters with open arms.

 

Rowena: What are your favorite kinds of spaces to create in?

Erika: I find myself grateful that there are a lot of opportunities in rehearsal rooms these days for a more transparent, less hierarchical process. There are so many structures in place to create a sense of safety and harmony. It makes me reflect on how I am holding space for performers now versus how I held space for performers 20 years ago.

Rowena: Are there elements you want to preserve from those earlier times?

Erika: I’m thinking about me and my friend, Evie. When we went to college together everybody around us was doing contact improv. But we decided that we wanted to do this thing called impact improv. Stand on opposite ends of the dance studio at UC Santa Cruz, and just run towards each other as fast as we could and crash into each other. Just see what happened. And, we got hurt. But that felt safe for us. We felt that we had the kind of relationship that could support that. And I think those are my favorite kinds of processes, where you’re like, “I feel safe enough to be unsafe.” And what do I mean by unsafe? I mean to just risk doing the wrong thing or being an asshole. And I think that’s why I love working in this collective with you and Ryan. We can say the wrong thing and move on. When people talk about safe spaces these days, I wonder, for what purpose? I would like to think that we create a safe space so we can be a little bit dangerous together.

 

Rowena: Has something been lost in creative spaces and processes?

Erika: It would be easy for me to make a claim that it used to be better when we didn’t have to talk so much about our feelings, or do so much checking in! I don’t always love being super process-y in that way. Sometimes I miss being in top-down, pugnacious processes! I appreciate the energy and heat in these heightened creative pressure cookers. I worked for a choreographer in Berlin who was so opinionated, so rigorous, so mean, so chain-smoking. It was fucking hard submitting to somebody else’s impulse that I didn’t always understand. But I believed in their vision. I’m happy to be dommed by somebody who I trust in that way. And so I think it’s really easy to say, “Things were better when….”  But I don’t think it’s that simple.

 

Rowena: Can you say more about the complexity?

Erika: I think when we were younger, there was a sense that the older people were the masters. That’s really being challenged. When I work with younger people right now I try to put myself in the mindset of ‘younger person as master.’ I try to understand the specific wisdom and insight and rawness…When I reread that SPEAK article, I was like, “Oh, my writing was just so raw.” As a younger artist there was a rawness to my work and it was more impulsive. I’m just now getting to the point where I can appreciate that younger self of mine, as opposed to judging her. I can appreciate that rawness. I hope that within these rehearsal spaces and creative spaces, where there is so much communication and care, that there is also room for the impulsive and the raw. Yeah, room to be careful and communicative, but also messy and raw and dangerous.

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This article appears in the Winter 2024 issue of In Dance.

Photo by Robbie Sweeny
[ID: In black and white: Zackary Forcum, a nonbinary performer, lays on a wooden floor, their bare legs are splayed to the left (bent at the knee), their arms push their torso away from the floor. The performer has a light complexion, is bald and wears tattered/ripped dark clothing. Their expression is contemplative.]

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It was Agent Betty that I saw first. I was traveling home on BART, listening to some 1980’s rock music when they stepped into my mind and stood in front of a well-armed police station. Cops surrounded the lone fighter but within seconds of engaging one another, Betty bested all of them in hand-to-hand combat.

“Why is Betty here?” I thought.

Silence for a moment and then.. “They are orchestrating a jailbreak” a voice answered.

“Ok… so why orchestrate a jailbreak at all?”

More momentary silence. “Perhaps… The people being held inside are innocent of the crime they are being accused of. Perhaps if they aren’t rescued, terrible things will happen to them.”

“So… what is the crime?”

“It would have to be BIG.”

Another voice, one with a flair for the dramatic, answered, “The Great Commander… Is DEAD!”

It actually wasn’t that moment that I knew I had something. Just spare thoughts singing to me, helping me wander through the monotony that accompanies public transit.

But as often the case in circumstances like this… This scene replayed in my mind over and over, often as I walked the dog or picked up morning coffee or rushed away to work. So… I keep asking questions. Questions seemed to help calm my mind, to help me think on other things.

“Who is the Commander and why is he dead? NO.. why was he murdered?”

“Who was the murderer?”

“Who are the suspects?” “Why are they the suspects?”

And so, the story began to develop of a world, which on the surface was filled with good gods and evil devils, but when considered closer, we find out that everyone is a villain.

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I felt like I was done with the Bay Area’s dance scene. I had learned from an early age that when love is no longer being served, it’s time to go. As we reemerged from the pandemic, with so many friends and leaders who had left the region (and so many of the ones who remained struggling to simply function in this wild world), and experiencing so much finger pointing and infighting within the community, you could say I was disillusioned. That the veneer that surrounded our field, one I once wanted to embrace and be a part of, had not only lost its shine and allure but also, any practical use.

Before the pandemic fatally struck and collapsed so much of our industry, I also knew it was time for a change. I had been creating and performing new dance theater works as a solo artist under my company OOMPH Dance Theater, and while I was getting constructive attention, I knew it was time to think bigger. I didn’t necessarily know what that meant at the time, and all the while the pandemic held us all hostage (along with losing all career-momentum that I built up), I still didn’t discover what that meant.

I also had spent so much time from 2017-2019 creating work around the intricacies of trauma and examining it onstage, but a shift had occurred within me. I had realized that I held onto anger as a means of survival and an attempt at controlling the last bits that remained in the wake of all that had been taken from me from bigots and abusers. That the tactics that had saved me for so much of my life had started to become a detriment. I began to wonder… if I keep holding onto all of this anger to maintain the remaining fragments of what was lost… is there room for anything else? What else could there be space for—where else might I go? What would happen if I consented to something I had always put out of reach?

As it got safer to be in the world once more, and not necessarily knowing how to step forward, I told myself it was time to try new things. So I joined a rugby team and god I was terrible (I got better, but boy-howdy, I was magnificently bad in the beginning). I also consented to work with a close friend on a movement-poetry performance piece focusing on “softness” (an always worthy pursuit). And of course, Agent Betty and the constantly evolving story that silently traveled with me wherever I went was only satisfied if I actively kept dreaming it—developing it—giving form to what was speaking to me.

It seemed to me that the best way to tell the story was by writing a dance theater play. Not necessarily a musical, but a narrative and text-based production that utilized dance (outlined as choreographic scores within the work). I came to call the piece, “Villains.” I sat down and outlined the production to provide a structure to work from—it would be a play in two acts. The first act would function as a “who done it” murder mystery, introducing all major characters and setting the stage for act two, which would showcase all parties banding together to defeat a “big bad” enemy. All movement would be based in a sense of magical realism, and would be utilized to not only further the plot and tell the story, but also to showcase the extraordinary abilities of the super-villains themselves. Dance to me has always been somewhat magical and mysterious, so why not have these characters’ otherworldly powers be experienced through the medium? A voice told me to think big and unencumbered and as I began writing I knew I needed to build a world in which to properly tell the story—that the setting itself was its own character, and that in addition to the piece’s leading figures I would need a Greek-like chorus, an ensemble that would shapeshift repeatedly to tell the stories of the people living within a troubled city.

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When I create, I often think of playwright Suzan-Lori Parks who once shared, “Why do I write? Sometimes I feel like I’m a haunted house. And writing helps me deal with the spirits that reside in the house.” Our culture places so much importance on the sole “leaders,” the CEO geniuses of the world who have such great ideas that often do not come from them at all. I don’t really function like that, but like Parks, and many great companies in the Bay Area that value collective leadership, I feel like a vessel.

The only time I feel like I am at a loss or am fighting my creative process is when I do not write/dance. Because when I sit down and hold space for the voices that want to speak, they flow out of me. And it is these moments where I feel most powerful and alive. So logical are their responses, shaping their form with characters, situations, lives that have been lived in and have a depth of meaning/experience.

Of course it is not only inspiration that shapes my work, but also my years working in the craft. I often think of Jim Berman from UC Santa Cruz who encouraged his playwriting students that everytime a character spoke there was a reason for it and that realism on stage was never 100% real, that it was either 90% or 110%–we are manufacturing the moment being witnessed onstage, and that because of this, we can make these moments progress better than they are experienced in everyday reality. The influence of my great dance mentor Jacqueline Burgess is always with me–who encouraged me to utilize movement in the process of abstraction, to tell deeper narratives through dance when words are inadequate/take too long/fail all together.

The results that have come through in this process have been… surprising.

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In this process, I’ve often cried when I write. The voices and scenes that flash through my mind do not demand much, but space to be heard and I find the stories they tell a bit heartbreaking at moments. As I began to finish the work at the end of summer 2023 my father became deadly ill. As I helped him recover throughout the fall, I needed to save my tears for a different kind of work with him (much to the voices’ discontent). At the time of writing this article I have three scenes left to complete…

I look forward to welcoming the Bay Area’s dance community into a staged reading of “Villains” in spring 2024. I find… people love villains. Not only since they are often fabulous and unapologetically outwardly-delight in their lives and purpose (which is a joy to witness), but because at the end of the day, we are all painted as the villain at some point (or many points) in our lives. That it is in the villain, not the hero, that we truly see ourselves. That the internal conflict which so many struggle with is central to our humanity. As so many know but easily forget when push-comes-to-shove, the complexity of the world cannot be affixed to the binary of black and white, good or evil, right and wrong–that sometimes… the wrong is right, the bad guy is good, and that when we label someone as the villain, we become one too. I look forward to sharing this work with you. Until then, please be kind with yourselves and with others. And give the voices space to speak.

 

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This article appears in the Winter 2024 issue of In Dance.