ataraxia: a state of freedom from emotional disturbance or anxiety, especially as a condition of soul-fulfilling attainment.
Me with Jenelle Figgins exploring black love from a time. Photo by our colleague Petra Morgan.
“What happens if you think of opening up and laying back across her?” Thaddeus says.
I push myself up to give Jenelle space to adjust and then collapse across her thigh. It feels incredibly vulnerable, my organs and chakras opened up, my neck exposed to more than her. The safety of the space makes it delicious.
“Yes, like that. And can you kind of pull yourself up Jamal, to sitting?”
I do and though less exposed, I’m even more at peace.
This safety is about not just the physical space, a chunk of third floor of an old building near the downtown Montgomery fountain. It is also about the artistic safety co-directors Tanya and Thaddeus are trying to create as they reconsider daily what dance company life and process can be. They have curated every aspect of this, down to the collective energy of the four people in the room dancing with them.
The safety is necessary. Disenchanted with the erasure of black people from entire plantation tours - “They were talking about the drapes and the stairs and not the people who built the house and worked in it,” Tanya recalled - the couple created an interactive, multimedia production that centers black presence, joy, anguish and strength in different rooms of an antebellum mansion (or other site) so that audience members can experience the “monument” while contemplating it as a black space.
Since it is one.
There is a dinner and talkback involved to air all this out after seeing the work, whose title Migratuse Ataraxia describes the habitual pattern of moving over there (migrating) to a space of calmness, peace of mind, emotional tranquility.
The Mellon Foundation Monuments Project Grant, which put Wideman Davis Dance operations squarely in Montgomery this second of three six-week phases, means cozying up with all that juju from painful Civil Right Movement midwifery and hundreds of years of slaves disembarking only five blocks from the studio.
Thaddeus Davis sculpting a supported promenade with Michael McManus and Petra Morgan
On a break, I pull out a journal Tanya gave me, a document that will be part of the aggregate archive for this project. I jot down a few ideas on the throwback Marvin Gaye tracks that Thaddeus is auditioning. I watch the other two dancers negotiate Tanya’s exploration of recognized social dance structures and how they can be amplified (and ignored) to fetch even more swag possibilities for Michael and Petra, both former students and alums of the University of South Carolina Columbia where Thaddeus and Tanya teach. A few integrated steps come from the local line dance we learned off Tik Tok and got verified later at a skating rink one night. These two youngest of us are fun to watch.
Shortly after, I am on my knees negotiating Jenelle’s body from upright to down a level. She helps, years of acute, proficient discipline in her body and several ballet company contracts in her past. I have worked with her, her twin and their older sister, all champions. So I rejoice in the familiarity assisting this current stunt.
“Did I sell it?” I ask.
“Wait, maybe I can help sell it too, hold on,” Jenelle says.
“That’s the next picture?” Thaddeus asks.
He is referencing one of the 50 mostly candid Jim Peppler mid and late century photographs of black people in Montgomery and neighboring communities like Newtown. Nik, co-author of the grant and our director of research and communication, gave us each ten shots to enliven; now Thaddeus had us working the ones with two folks in them.
“The two ladies.”
“Yeah, I think there’s something else that can happen better there.”
I am open to anybody’s suggestion. Having danced with Thaddeus and Tanya in New York companies around Y2K, I am familiar with the unhealthiest conventions of concert dance that they are willing to undo or revise in an effort to get to better work.
I am here for it.
Tanya Wideman tweaking this moment for Jenelle and me.
They get that artists are professionals and need to be properly considered: Every morning I open my eyes to 11-ft ceilings of an apartment in a renovated, early 20th-century Kress department store building preserved enough that I can see which entrance was for coloreds. From my wrap-around boardwalk balcony, I could throw flowers at the bronze Rosa Parks on the corner. My friends/bosses may be unfinished in their pursuit of what model companies should employ, but their refusal to forsake their dancer identities even as artistic directors makes these married folk difficult to resist.
Their only mistake was perhaps extending me such a long community engagement leash. I have permission to talk to anyone who will listen about why I’m here and suffer my fully QT Gayle Kinging. A few just don’t know any better, buying my question marks about their city and offering me business cards (poor things). A lawyer has already been emailed. The shift one team at the Waffle House (I guarantee whatever you think I should have had instead isn’t here) don’t realize they will be coming to see legs and hips go for it at a library.
And I haven't even started with this Italian restaurant.
“Do you all need to do it again?” Thad asks.
I look at Jenelle, defer.
It’s whatever works for them. I am so full, I only have surrender.
Jim Peppler Southern Courier Photograph Collection
Alabama Department of Archives and History
Wideman Davis Dance will have a FREE showing In Montgomery
December 10
6:00 p.m. Reception / 6:30 Showing
Juliette Hampton Morgan Memorial Library
245 High Street
2nd Floor