Harriet

I have some reservations about going to see Harriet.

Mind you, I love her story. I have danced more than one ballet about her, the first of which involved me chained at the ankles and wrists struggling to cross the stage in a dancebelt during the auction. I cried every time. But even at 17, I could see the value in the extremeness of this measure to help contextualize Tubman’s story, to give it a world.

The big criticism I’ve heard of the movie is that it sanitizes slavery, Windexes the horror of it by neglecting to represent the day-to-day brutality of it plainly. Perhaps the effort—and I’m making assumptions toward the benefit of the doubt here—was to create a movie that people outside of the Amen corner might be able to stomach a bit better so that the history of a miraculous black paragon might have more reach. Of course, this is a noble cause.

That said, we are also in the era of revisionist history. Only a handful of years ago, the state of Texas was in the process of proactively removing slavery from history texts,

re-imagining it as some kind of indentured servitude with good experiences for some of the plantation employees. The next year, 12 Years a Slave won the Oscar for Best Picture, canceling any notions that the institutionalized violation of human rights with chattel slavery might be removed from America’s historical legacy.

Nice try though, Texas.  

https://qz.com/1273998/for-10-years-students-from-texas-have-been-using-a-history-textbook-that-says-not-all-slaves-were-unhappy/

But even as recently as last year, students in a Texas high school were given an assignment to identify pros and cons of being a slave, this based on a text that contextualizes slavery as complicated and nuanced, and—get ready for it—balanced.   In 2015, a McGraw-Hill textbook noted that millions of “workers” were brought over to man plantations.  Despite that it sat next to a map showing immigration trends in America, it was dismissed as a copy editing error.

Maybe Texas, which contains 1/10th of the nations high school students, is motivated by politics. Maybe this is just good old fashioned white guilt assuagement.  Either way, I bristle at the idea of any presentation of slavery that lacks the (violent) authenticity it deserves.   Because thoughts that human value increases in proportion to ones genetic proximity to whiteness are pervasive even outside of a state trying to legislate them. And with unpunished cop shootings of unarmed black folks happening neck and neck with black voter suppression efforts, it is clear that America is still struggling to see black folks as human.  I’m as uninterested in a return to covert racism and tidy respectability politics as I am in the progression of loud white supremacy agendas.

Every reminder helps.

In fact, I think in AHS Coven, Queenie (Gabourey Sidibe) had it right with racist Delphine LaLaurie (Kathy Bates): watch ALL of Roots in one sitting, until you get this.

So I’m worried that I will be angry if Harriet does the opposite, if it stays on trend with Nutribullet approaches to storytelling. I’m worried I will throw my popcorn at the screen and yell at undeserving youngsters in the theater that it was much worse than this, my assumptions about them more copious than ones I’m daring to make by writing this pre-viewing blog.

I have no answers here, and I doubt seeing Harriet, which I plan to at some point, will provide any. But the question is clear for me if I’m right about the premise:  Does the danger of diminishing the ugliness of our history, American history, in an effort to bring people to it outweigh or balance the benefit of these stories being told?

I’m open to answers…

FOLLOW-UP - Harriet Part 2

I finally saw Harriet.

My cousin Rosalyn, a career violinist who moonlights as a published author and is also a baby boomer, warned me that it’s a great movie for young people unfamiliar with the life and legacy of Harriet Tubman.   

She is right.  For that reason, Harriet is a great candidate for required viewing in junior high schools all across America.

However, if you happen to have grown up as a black Generation X’er whose family heads made sure you understood Harriet Tubman, Benjamin Banneker, George Washington Carver and Frederick Douglass in the other 11 months as well, Harriet comes across as a mild, made-for-TV movie.   It is cursory at best.  It sets us up to understand, for example, how she succeeded at freeing slaves solo before her inauguration as a conductor of the Underground Railroad, but gives us not even a montage on how sophisticated this pipeline was, and how drastically it helped her.

Several friends argued my last blog, insisting that we did not need to see violence at the level of 12 Years a Slave to understand the world of chattel slavery in America.  They are not wrong. But there is some ideal space between that depiction and Harriet and we’ve seen it most recently with Underground, the WGN series produced by John Legend and canceled after two seasons.  Mostly fictive but extremely realistic, the narrative gives us a palatable and responsible look at the stakes - for all parties involved - of escaping slavery.

What isn’t lost on me is that the public framing of Harriet as a superhero movie of sorts implies a de facto villain – slaveowners, Southern economic prosperity, white Dixie xenophobic hatred.   I hardly disagree with casting the slot with any of the above, but what raises the eyebrow is that this “superhero” context, even in 2020 hashtag culture ready with optimized Google search, did not seem to take us as far as the discussion of the villain involved and the implications today.  We stopped at Erivo’s performance, the Oscars, her history-making double nomination in both actor and songwriter categories.   Is it that yeah, yeah, everyone already understands slavery is evil and the perpetrators were villainous?  Or is it that the movie wasn’t substantive enough to warrant the bigger conversations, that it was too light to deserve all the arguments over family pot roast and passed potatoes?

If the latter is true, it is also where my general issue with Harriet still sits.  After all, Lupita was hardly the only conversation had behind 12 Years a Slave.

Christ, these paintings...

On the day off, I decide to wander through Brussels, too fatigued to plan anything or prioritize tourist pursuits.  I happen upon a museum in walking distance.  The rain, along with my love for galleries and 17th and 18th Century paintings, is incentive to detour in.

I eventually make it to the paintings upstairs and run across a terrifying capture:  Prometheus, having been strewn across and chained to some rocks, is being attacked by a vulture. Prometheus’ face is expectedly grotesque.  I stare at this for at least five minutes, so breathtaking and realistic is it.

There are other moments borrowed from Greek mythology. Apollo chasing Daphne, Pan trying to rape Syrinx—both feature harsh stories too, but they captivate me less.  I cannot figure out why until I study Jordane’s Pan et Syrinx a bit more.

Then it hits it me.

No matter how perfect the stroke, and accurate the lighting and detail, Syrinx’s face is lovely.  Here she is, all chaste and virtuous, being attacked by a horny hooved satyr who wants to do it her, and all we get from her face is ovular perfection, innocent eyes, supple lips, no expression. 

Same thing with Apollo and Daphne.  She’s not even looking where she’s going as she flees. And even if we go with the idea that she’s glancing back in panic to see how close he is on her tail, her face should still show signs of stress, fright, fear, something.  Instead, Daphne gives you parted lips, naturally blushed cheeks, and a hint of worry as it would look on a Botoxed face centuries later.

It is astonishing.  No matter how hard these artists worked to give us the detail, angst and completeness of a story in what might be months or even years with a canvas, they refused to show us women looking as real as they would in their circumstances.  No, they had to be fetching.

Fuckable.

Desirable.

No matter what.

If there was ever some bigger 17th Century artistic indication of how present The Handmaid’s Tale was back then, I will fold my arms until I see it. Because this clairty on the misogynistic role of women as objects becomes plain to me. Also clear was that I stared too long at the women; when I make it back to Prometheus, he now appears more deranged with anguish.

Around the Northeast side of the gallery is a staggering painting of Heliodorus being driven from the temple where he was trying to steal its sacred treasure.  There is a horse rearing a hoof over his throat, a rider aiming a forked weapon, a messenger with fist raised, and another with jagged tree branches for flogging. They are strategically placed around all sides of the subject, except in the place where you’re sitting watching it.  Straight from the Bible, Heliodorus’s face looks as if the fright decayed it in advance.  

Now, were this a woman in the same rendering, she would look like Scarlet Johansson.

Apollon a la Poursuite de Daphne by Carlo Maratta

Pan et Syrinx by Jacques Jordane

Seriously, if you recast the Biblical thief as Debbie (who did Dallas), the Biblical protectors of the realm would would be armed only with their penises. They would have to be, because what other reason in this time period would artists want to make her the center of the painting? Unless she’s Mary Mother of Jesus?

Prometheus by Theodor Rombout

No wonder women have been pissed for so long.

And I’m sure this status quo of art is not news.  Surely, papers and books have been written on this trend in various centuries of oil on canvas. In fact, my good friend from college who has an art history degree and a Degas could probably tell me the pieces of this that I am missing, pieces that I am too art history ignorant to write about.

But the overwhelming sensibility was restated over and over again in every museum I visited.

By the time I reach Birmingham’s museum and gallery, I thought my mind has been blown enough.  Leave it to the sleepy UK city to thwart my low expectations and gag me hardcore.  There is an exhibit on gender and the objectification of women through the ages:

In the ‘Male Gaze,’ a woman is visually positioned as an “object” of heterosexual male desire. Her feelings, thoughts, and her own sexual drives are less important than her being “framed” by male desire.  The imagined male is notionally a heterosexual white man considered the intended audience for many films and other visual media. If things are absent from media it is often because it is seen as being unappealing to this intended audience…

 You mean they have this together already in Birmingham? And this is hardly the meat and potatoes of the exhibit; it’s just the status quo panel for anybody who missed the memo.  It’s nothing a lot of us don’t know, but I’ve often had to argue this white patriarchy point before I can get into the bigger discussion about, well about virtually anything in entertainment really. But this relatively small city with a population of just over a million has it on a placard with no citations or footnotes.

Then I go through a series of rooms separated by periods of art, one for 19th-20th centuries, the next for 18th-17th and so on.  When I get to the 16th, I see a painting of a naked man with a sort of perfect wound, his pose a bit supermodel-esque. His face looks caught in the middle of a casual sentence about how he had been stabbed right here in the stomach at the market because he bumped into someone with tea. Or maybe spilled some tea that someone found too shady to share.  But whatever, it’s just a minor gouge.

I think to myself, imagine if the subject were Jesus. Wouldn’t that be hilarious.

Christ as the Man of Sorrows by Jan Van Hemessen

I look at the description next to the painting and find out that alas, it is Jesus. And he is showing wounds from the crucifixion:

His direct gaze challenges the on-looker to respond to his suffering...

Surprised to say it, but I have not been properly flabbergasted in a long time. It takes as many syllables as that word to describe the full feeling I felt as I read and understood that Jan Sanders van Hemessen envisioned Jesus sharing pain in the same way that supermodels and snatched drag queens of today exaggerate their lack of waistline by pulling the elbow as far forward as possible while the hand squeezes the ribcage. I know this is not actually what Hemessen’s Jesus is trying to mean. But still, I wonder if the artist was ahead of his time, if perhaps he had found the flex capacitor and the Delorean and worked out the jump [if you are too young to know that reference, please pretend for now that you do].

Of course, in this 21st Century time, there is no way that the heteronormative man—white or otherwise—described in the objectification exhibit in the other room would ever pose like this outside of a comedic moment, or a denigrating one designed to make fun of a woman or drag queen.  The effort it takes to show the wound in this way is also extraordinary if the body is suffering from it. It brings to mind RuPaul’s astute pearl, also featured in the one of these museums I visited this tour, that “We’re all born naked and the rest is drag.” The men of Hemessen’s era wore tights, expensive jewelry and ruffles.  They also wore helmets, chain mail and pauldrons as well. Yet even with the chauvinism that left women reduced to ethereal sex toys, men were not restricted from displaying their softness, or sporting those huge collars called ruffs.

Back then, men had the privilege of being both tender and aggressive, pretty and ferocious. At what point did we swap out the privilege of these dichotomies for some restrictive, 300 warrior version of masculinity? How is it that patriarchy became so simple, asinine and boring?

If women decide one day to just start pummeling men in a general rage against this kind of silly chauvinism, I’ll get it.

And if Jesus returns via runway, I will not be surprised.

Benny Jr.

When I was a senior in high school, I won the dance category of a local, prestigious competition called Spotlight sponsored by the LA Music Center.  An article featured me in the LA Times, covering the achievement and my college plans. Within a week of publication, I got a call from the writer explaining that a sweet, older gentleman contacted the Times insisting that we might be relatives, as we share a surname.

I okayed the release of my info and within days I was invited to his house to meet and talk to him.

It turned out that the man, my cousin Benny Jr., was amidst gifting me in life-changing ways.  He educated me on an entire branch of my family I did not know existed and then availed this family to me. Very much alive, he cosigned my access to his wife and their beautiful three sons and daughter, punctuating my younger-sibling glee with reminders that they, too, are my family (they have suffered me ever since).   He showed me pictures of ancestors. He gave insight and history and reasons in our bloodline.

And then he became a spiritual resource, the ultimate example of how to siphon goodness as a choice.  I use the word choice because though his longevity dealt him everything from Jim Crow race hatred to the current White House administration, his eyes were never absent kindness.  

Always Umoja in his goals.

Always joy in his comings.

Always mercy in his lessons.

Always depth in his stories.

And despite any of our efforts to assuage his discomforts, he doubled-down on our stories, pun intended.

He reminded me that this kind of living is possible, that anchoring the soul in the residence of positivity makes  complaining a form of asbestos.  So it is with irony that I struggle with guilt about fervently regretting Benny’s departure from the planet (while being on the other side of it); in fact, it has taken me days to come clean with myself about this.  I know that I am hardly alone.

But if he were here, with grace to spare folded on his shoulder and a joke or two tucked under wing, he would forgive me. He would forgive us all for having the nerve to wish he’d hung around 30 more years.

Or even ten.  

I can hardly be mad at him.  I watched in awe as he danced a brisk two-step at his 90th birthday party, his eyes shining; he could go few places from there other than up.   

And he will be an absolute joy to our Aunt Margaret, Jessye Norman and Diahann Carol at the Gates.

Dirty



I could not be this close and not visit.

The last time I set foot in Amsterdam was 2005, and it was too early in the day trip to see any action.  The time before in 2001 on Madonna’s Drowned World Tour, I was intrigued by the amount of agency the sex workers had about whom they would service.  Then I heard that the area was in danger of being shut down, but survived the peril.

So I could not be this close to the Red Light District and not visit. 

In the interest of full transparency, I’ll admit that my heightened “red light” sentimentality has to do in part with having recently worked with the dancer who soundtracked my first time with the eponymous TLC song, this along with my best friend’s recent choreographic experience with it.   But I was in Amsterdam, so I had to go.

Marlon comes with, which is to say that he leads the way so that I can relax into the joint we smoke en route.   Public alcohol consumption is illegal, but smoking a joint is totally fine.  

We make it to the District and it is overrun with folks.  Mostly tourists. I am irritated, as if my passport indicates Belgian citizenship.  We note that the girls are remarkably commercialized.  There is nothing extraordinary looking about them by Western standards. They are mostly over-made, very glamourized and silicon-chested—none of which discourages the guys overpacking the streets.

There are only a few seconds to consider the potential of a career in the world of prostitution as a second act; taxes and booth fees notwithstanding, these ladies still make enough to be picky.  But onlya  few seconds. Thereafter Marlon and I simply fight through the crowd to window shop.

We stop at a burger joint so that Marlon can buy the taste of a happier cow than any we have back home.  While we wait, we use his hotspot and my phone to locate gay bars nearby.

“I see a few,” I say.  “Amstel’s 45, The Queen’s Head, Dirty Dicks…”
“Which one do you want to go try?”

“Well, that last one, Dirty Dicks, it’s the closest.”

“Sounds good, right?”

We make it to the bar, clear on our accuracy only because there was a flag outside the dark, unlit door.  We had seen a few places like this, sketchy entrances that opened up into cavernous places of colorful, bright festivity. Except this is not that.  We pass through a small foyer, an intermediary space between the actual door and the building façade that is pitch.

The bar is not too much different.   A different kind of red light, less Carmen hot and more Lucifer rich, borders the bar area and the coat check that takes up what seems to be a healthy percentage of the real estate of this small bar.

“Oh maybe we can go upstairs?” Marlon says, after sharing a few sighs and sounds of realization.

“It is very dark upstairs,” the bartender promises, “You cannot see in front of you. Can I get you drinks?”

Inside we are still shook. The shake comes out in tentative, slow orders.

“I have to stick with tequila…”

“I’ll drink tequila with you.  Tequila soda.”

“Tequila sunrise.”

“I cannot make this,” the bartender/coat check/doorman/Charon says.

“You don’t have grenadine?”

“No. This is not a fancy place, we don’t make cocktails.  You buy the orange juice separate.”

Wow.

We take our drinks and back away to the seats against the wall, which is to say five feet from who had to be Lucifer’s assistant Mazikeen.  We are shook, understand please, not because we are prudish or disdainful, or because we are even conservative.  It is because we realize how utterly American we have been, assuming that Dirty Dick’s was surely a play on words, a bar belonging perhaps to someone named Richard who liked the alliteration, or perhaps a joke of the proprietors who conceptualized the place to begin with.  

No, they actually mean it. Dirty dicks. As in, not-clean dicks.  Dirty.  Made so in real time upstairs or on this level beyond the flatscreen hung above the entrance of the downstairs semi-darkness ahead. The clean part is the efficiency, the lack of equivocation or cleverness, the naming so that purpose, products and goals are represented at once. What’s clean is how strongly we believed we were sophisticated travelers and not insipid tourists who ridiculously (and subconsciously) misapplied our American expectations to a Belgian gay bar.

Because of course the gay sex bar would never be lumped into a search with respectable social bars. Of course every culture is as puritanical as ours and would find this horrifying. And since we’re in the Red Light District, there is every reason to assume that houses of ill repute will be glaring and obvious from the street.

I sip my tequila. 

On the screen, a man is writing Fuck Me with a sharpee across an expansive, muscular back. He follows up with an arrow down the spine pointing to a behind that has seen no sun ever.  For some reason (my PornMD favorites be damned), the specificity of the video, the spelling out of it all, is unsettling.   

I turn my head from the screen and it lands on a guy walking toward one of the barstools we ignored.  He has on a sweater, a jock strap and shoes and nothing else. He sits, unbothered. 

We are clearly not ready.  And nobody in Dirty Dicks looks like the guys cast in the video.  It’s more like Castle Black, the men of the Kightswatch who never made it into the scenes.

Marlon and I look at each other, cues to drink faster to get out.

We make our way to The Queen’s Head and gag at the number of folks old enough to be my father. After we order proper cocktails, I reflect on how actually very sanitary and pristine the red lights of the District seem.  Completely regulated, the area does exactly what it is supposed to on the up and up:  provide a specific product involving merchants, goods and exchanges.  Should things go wrong, there are cops all over to intervene.  The women rent their booths that someone cleans, stand pressed against Windexed windows, lie on beds with laundered sheets (so I hear), and pay taxes after. It’s actually rather clean.

When it thought about it, even while Dirty Dicks is not clean, it provides a pleasure service with no tariff and it is all on the up and up.

This is not a fancy place.

Of course it’s not. Neither are the sex clubs and sex parties in the States. But those are so unregulated and so underground you have to be on a listserve, or get a text, or ask someone who’s been for the address.  “We’re going to run to freshen up at the hotel, run to Dirty Dicks for a while and then we’ll meet you up for drinks and dessert after…” or the equivalent says no one in the states about their dirty dicking ever.

Perhaps the Dutch don’t go this far into the realm of casual about it either.  But when the bartender says this is not a fancy place, it is his way of distinguishing the brand from those of other gay bars listed in my quick Google search.  It brought to mind some of the bathhouses around the world that have pools, gyms, spas, mini-cafes where you can have a quick coffee with someone before getting naked with them in a room.  Those are fancy, but they even they aren’t off brand.

Sobered by the awareness that I was not as clear at the beginning of the night as I was at its end, I take my clean crotch home, careful not to judge it—or any other crotches—en route.  No assumptions. 

Although maybe there is some branding possibility there. Clean Crotch is also alliterative…

Met Gala

I love a good surprise.   

I’m usually on the giving versus receiving end, so helping surprise a room full of celebrities by showing up on stage with Cher was a delight.

But this time, I got got.

First of all, being in New York on tour in rehearsals for the Met Gala and keeping it a secret from everyone in my world was challenging, especially since the majority of my NY family are in the business. The NDA we signed just to rehearse in the museum was three pages.  We were asked to remove any swag with Cher’s name on it just so that set-up staff working the event could infer nothing.  I’m still not sure from my conversation with Harry Styles backstage before the event if he even knew whom he was introducing. And staying mum was not just a matter of NDA job requirement, it was also about protecting myself.

The thing is, I am a hopeless fashion tragedy, a disgrace to prided homosexual values (however stereotypic), a parade of rebellion against efforts to look fabulous all the time. My gay card was temporarily revoked regularly by colleagues and friends – especially when I was on Broadway.  Compounding the abomination was my tendency to drape large flowy clothes all over what they consider a brilliant frame; this was wasteful.   I reminded them that as a dance captain on Broadway maintaining the show and putting people in it, I was basically always in rehearsal or performing, so why add costume changes?  And I loved winter because layering was essential (and slightly forgiven).   Still, out of love, Motown the Musical friends were the worst:

“No, Jamal, that’s not tight! Those pants don’t even fit!”

“The boot cut is done. Throw those away.”

“You look homeless. Really, you do. It’s not okay.”

“Just don’t wear anything. It would be such an improvement.”

I made efforts to defend myself to approximate the sense that I was wounded by these attacks.  But my lack of shame angered friends even more.

Eric LaJuan, who slayed his Jackie Wilson, Rick James and Billy Gordon roles nightly and would just shake his head in dismay every time I walked into our double dressing room, is in some corner of heaven—designer pants sewn onto his thighs—sipping a drink in disbelief.

Because the fact that I would now be at probably the most highly anticipated fashion event of the year is, well ironic—especially since I scarcely understood its industry importance.

Zara / Top shop options.

Here is how it went down:

In rehearsal for the Gala, Diana Craig Patch, curator for the Egyptian collection at the Met, gives us a crash course in the fragile 1st Century BC sandstone Temple of Dendur, in front of which we would dance but not face squarely while exhaling.  I hug Bob Mackie. I joke with Baz Luhrmann as he stands in for Serena on stage left so that Melanie can incorporate into the rehearsal escorting her to her mark. We space the numbers and then started running things. When I am standing on the platform far out into the house, I spot an impossibly statuesque and short woman below me whose hair brings to mind Anna Wintour. I smile at her mid-step, connecting no dots.

Later, she comes over and thanks us all for being there, honored that we are performing.  She says other things as well, but I am busy berating myself for not processing sooner who she is, for not remembering that she annually coordinates the hell out of this event. I am cutting my eyes up at Eric whose I-told-you-so’s drop down and side-saddle every word Anna Wintour speaks.  

“I just want to know,” Ms. Wintour asks, “what will you all be wearing?”

Now, understand that I am on my knees talking to Cher when she arrives, and although the entire creative team are there, I am closest in proximity. Yet for an answer, she looks dead at me.  Not Melanie, who had the microphone for most of the rehearsal, not Cher or her famous manager who are sweating distance from me. 

And this is the real one, so yes, yes, that was a question, directed to the one person who could scarcely remember the colors of the costumes, let alone reference anything in the lexicon of fashion that would quickly get the paragon editor of Vogue the gist.

“As little as possible, of course,” I say.

Laughter.

Relief.

“That sounds great,” she says.

But I was not out of the woods.  A last-minute change required that I go buy a pair of stylish pants with holes in them, pants that fit. My large open sweater with the hood worked great provided I wore it with no shirt. But now I had the painstaking task of trying to dress this body.

For a number with Cher.

At the Met Gala.

Eric Lajuan is now surely in a full kiki, as I tromp from store to store trying on pants, irritated at how invasive they are, taking pictures to send to Baz Halpin (yes there were two), determined to find more boot options so as not to deal with exposing my Achilles—which is the new style.  I long for the bell bottom to come back.  Has nobody read about Achilles and how Paris of Troy slew him?

I consider this, as well as my healthy level of respect for Anna Wintour, who has taught naysayers the ways in which fashion affects all the business sector industries that consider themselves more important.  This is reason enough to surrender to the task at hand.

Of course, my private fashion odyssey proves worth it – the surprise Cher unleashes on that camp-clad room of celebrities is epic. While we wait, I teach Harry Styles how to pony  backstage right side where we warm up - he learns quickly! Soon after, Lady Gaga and dancers from the hit show Pose stand by so that she can introduce them.  In their blue and green catsuits festooned with keychains, key rings and keys, they turn it. I understand a few of the keys may have sailed into some of the camp drag in the audience, but it seems entirely appropriate for gay house culture to smack our consciousness any time it can.

Then, as is the case with “special appearance” gigs, the variable come fast:

Serena is stunning.

The stage is slick as hell.

Tracee Ellis Ross looks amazing. Flirt with her.

Watch your boss because stage left is slickest.

What did we decide for this non-shield alternative here?

EPHRAIM SYKES???

JAWAN JACKSON??

This is the moment I get got. Surprise!  Two family members from Motown the Musical along with others I love from the close knit black Broadway tribe, make themselves known to me.  They are here no doubt because of they are amazing as The Temptations in Ain’t Too Proud. So no it is not handsome RuPaul or ecstatic Sarah Paulson or real marvel(ous) avenger Naomi Campbell who surprise me.  It is my talented friends who are there to witness me at this fashion event.

I gag in high definition.

When it is time for me to leave the stage and trek to the platform at the edge of the audience my friends accost me.  We have a quick, hug festival reunion, temporarily leaving the Met Gala and entering the bliss of comfort that only comes with this kind of familiarity.  

Word to the wise: when an icon is on stage, everyone does everything they can to get close.  We are as far away from it as possible at the platform, so the bulk of my audience are the dancers from Pose. I could not have asked for better.  Never in my career was a developpe a la seconde into a back fall more necessary.

I finish the number, exit, make the costume change into our black for If I Could Turn Back Time and come back to stage.  Because we were added at the last minute, the dancers are thinking about blocking. I am no exception. Even with 17 years of hearing the song in shows, I work to bring it to my consciousness.  Punch on turn, back and time. Peace out on reach, the and stars. Switch positions on key cues…

I dash past the many celebrities at the King Arthur-style table on house right to make it to the platform for the end of the number when I realize that Serena is not on the corresponding side of the party; she is where I first saw her stage right.  This means Melanie cannot escort her on to the stage.

After Cher leaves, I fly past the King Arthur table, run up the stairs, sprint across the stage to the other side and jump off of it to land in front of Serena. 

I extend my hand.

“I got you.”

She comes with me up the stairs.  Crisis averted.

There is a misconception that because you perform at the Met Gala you are attending the Met Gala.  It’s hogwash.  The minute we are done, we are whisked to the green room to get out of costume and beat the parade of Escalades and Cadillacs getting stars out of the building.

I peel off the Top Shop pants, cursing (and missing) my Broadway family and friends.  

Then over a very strong margarita, I work out how to tell this story.  I am wearing a large, blissfully comfy pair of black sweat pants…

Hurrgency

In all sixteen years I’ve danced for Cher, my one physical challenge has not changed: the hair problem.

For most of my post-adolescent life before her, I enjoyed a low-maned, maintenance free existence. Get up in the morning and go. Rub something on it and call it a day.

Until Doriana, then director/choreographer, told me our boss is a hair girl. “Do not cut it. Period.”

This Samson edict has been manageable with few hiccoughs except on tour. Granted, the constant toggle between numbers with headpieces and numbers with hair out has been taxing, and made funner with quick-changes. But after a certain length of hair the only solution is cornrows.

In Melbourne’s South Yarra, this means struggle.

Now, in my younger days, I would chase the do. I horrified friends and family by trekking to somebody’s living room in Southside Chicago after the cashier at the CVS offered to braid my hair when she got off. And was it Glasgow where Akua @onlyupward, who was at Dance Theatre of Harlem at the time on their UK tour, rowed my stuff back in the hotel?

But post-youngster, the stakes are a little higher, as is my position at work. So I aim for tamer pursuits.

I ask the concierge if they can recommend any places.

They cannot.

The local physical therapist mentions a stylist at an upscale salon nearby.

No appointments this week.

On the way to pick up a white sweater I saw the day before, I see a trio of beautiful chocolate women walking toward me. I stop them and ask the one with braids where I can get cornrows.

“Footscray.”

The others nod vigorously,

“Oh yeah, it’s nothing like this area but you’ll be fine,” another says.

“Can I get to it by train?”

“Oh yes, it’s a stop on the train line.”

“And is there a certain place I should find once I get there?”

The ladies look to each other for confirmation before one says, “No, just go. You’ll be fine.”

The handsome Turk running the Cipo and Baxx disagrees.

“You don’t want to go there, man,” he says. “That’s the ghetto. I’m sure we can find somewhere closer to get you what you want.”

“You think so? Go for it.”

He 90’s-baby’s that phone, gets a number, calls it. “…Yes cornrows…for a man…how much…$110?…and when is your next appointment….next Tuesday.”

He is appalled on my behalf.

“You know what, Footscray is not so dangerous,” he says. “I can’t imagine it’s like the ghettos in Chicago or Detroit. I just know Australia gives off this impression that because the murder rate is among the lowest in the world there’s no crime. There is theft and vandalism every day, organized theft.”

Organize theft? Turns out that segregated gangs of Pacific Islanders, Sudanese, (mostly white) bikers, and Vietnamese thugs take things from people quite a bit, the primary targets Indians in descent.

“Why Indians?”

“They’re thought to be more nicer, gentle people.”

Never in my black American life have I heard people from India stereotyped as docile. Now, my quest for a hair solution on tour has run me into new stereotypes, international misconceptions and consideration of ghettos.

When I make it to Footscray, I understand what the three ladies mean. Folks from two different regions of Africa stand on the corner near a Chinese woman and two Indian men, waiting for the light. The entire area looks very much like a well-kept swapmeet of sorts, with a coffee shop down the road that could still slay Starbucks. I walk toward it and run upon a barber shop and salon. Assuming that if there is probably one woman in there, she can probably braid hair, I check it out.

A woman with a baby and stroller is having a time with the door. I help out. A young Ethiopian joins me and I pray she is my answer. She is.

“Show me what you want.”

I pull out a picture of Collin Kaepernick.

“Sure. I can do it. $50. This okay?”

“Yep.”

“You sure?”

She had no idea how much stylized braids cost in the states, nor how beneficial the exchange rate was for us.

Nor that my hairgency superseded cost concerns at this point.

“I promise it is.”

She begins combing out my hair.

“Feel free to braid product into if necessary.”

She shakes her head. “Your hair is nice. It combs out easily.”

She looks at the picture again and begins to strategically part my hair. The braid feels amazing. I try not to compare her to the Nigerian women in Harlem that are painfully skilled - emphasis on painfully. Memories of a face pulled so frozen that Botox would be jealous came back. The difference is that with Bella, my current hair solver, I am able to hear her story, that she is a nursing student who prefers hip hop and R&B to Ethiopian music.

A barber, most likely the alpha, comes over to look at Kaepernick on my phone and converse with her in Tigrinya, one of the widely spoken tongues in Ethiopia. I interrupt the music only to explain to him that the longer pull of hair into the the center is the aspect of the picture I want them to copy, not so much the number of braids. He explains this. I am thrilled that I have these two beautiful East Africans sorting out my hair in a language I seldom hear.

I sneak a photo.

It takes Bella only 40 minutes to braid my whole head. During this time, I ask her if this area is as mild as I think it is.

“It’s not too dangerous. If you are a good person, do your thing, people don’t bother you.”

“yeah, then Footscray is not ghetto to a black American.”

“You’re black?”

I am astonished. It takes a second to process that it is not my skin color; the gradient spread of Ethiopians in the shop is as wide as any other part of the black diaspora. She is reacting to my hair. Because I washed and conditioned it 36 hours ago, it cooperated with her comb way too easily. The sisters who pioneered the Mixed Chicks line would be intrigued - and verified.

“Yes, Bella,” I say. “All day long and evenings too.”

When she finishes, the beautiful alpha barber who turns out to be the owner asks his associate, Yousef, to edge me up. He is as meticulous as Bella, and I am glad to have nothing to do other than wander around the museum later. Somehow, the music has now shifted to Jay-Z, Will.i.am, Nicki Minaj.

There is dissent about how much Yousef should be paid. I want to sort it out, agree to the higher fee. But I selfishly enjoy the musicality of the argument. Solo handles it (I tip Yousef to make up the deficit).

Hair problem solved once again. We’ll see what happens in Sydney.

In the meantime, if anybody black finds themselves in metropolitan Melbourne needing braids, an edge or both, go to Footscray, specifically Solo’s shop on Paisley Street, IG @solo.barber.footscray.

Bella was kind enough to share with me the word for Thank You in Ahmaric, the other widely used tongue in her homeland: Amesegenalehu.

Indeed. Amesegenalehu indeed.

The Art of Conviction

Aboriginal art already hangs in my house.  On tour in 2005, the last time I was here, I bought enough to share with family members. Prints, limited editions, small works of eels, watering holes, mimi spirits, goannas.   Because at that time, I could not walk three blocks without seeing a boutique gallery specializing in the sale of indigenous art.  And as a student of aboriginal culture, I owed it to myself to make this sacred energy a part of my housewarming.

Thirteen years later, finding this art it is like re-enacting a CSI episode. 

In Brisbane, the hotel sent me to a gallery in Fortitude Valley that had only art I cannot afford.  Another curator down the street from there explained that fraud trends closed down several shops. New policies on the sale of art have also complicated matters.

So in Melbourne, I head to the Koori Heritage Trust, cultural preservers of the First Nations population of south-east Australia.  The facility has no art for purchase but sends me to a place called The Torch in St. Kilda.

Sarah, the woman who works there, is new. But in cosmic harmony, Kent Morris, the man who runs the place, walks in behind me.

I tell him about my art pursuit.

“You’ve come to the right place,” Kent says.  “The Torch is a non-profit that uses art to support incarcerated indigenous men and women with opportunities for life after prison and income for their families while they are in prison.”

As he says more, I study a few gorgeous pieces in the lobby gallery of the small shop.  One large, detailed one in particular stands out. 

“That one is quite special and it’s here because we are preparing to photograph it for an upcoming book about The Torch,” Kent explains. “A Victorian ex-premiere, Jeff Kennett, saw it and wanted to buy it. When I told him that Victorian government policy prohibited prisoners from making money, even under these circumstances, he wanted to find out more about what The Torch did and is now chairman of the board.”

The circumstances are that while Indigenous Australians account for only 3% of the population—partly due to the attempted genocide they suffered on Tasmania and on the mainland—they comprise 28% of the nation’s prison population. Thus, they are the most incarcerated ethnic group or race on the planet per capita.

They are being put away not just for criminality that comes out of displacement from their homeland, or extreme need in neighborhoods rendered inhumane from resource reduction, or lack of consideration of domestic abuse during sentencing. They are also fifteen times more likely than whites to be convicted for swearing.

Swearing.

Kent peppers his lessons with references that suggest a personal connection to aboriginal culture. I try to infer, confused.  

“My father was always worried about what might happen to me and my sister due to discrimination he faced as child. And I never understood the worry because we don’t look like him. But over time I learned that once people find out you’re Aboriginal at all, discrimination can follow.”

And this is when I understand. This white man before me is of direct Aboriginal descent.  Suddenly, I see the clear features, more robust than narrow, the set of the eyes, the shape of the mouth. But of course anywhere in the world, this man would present as nothing other than white. Not fair-skinned. Not passing. White. We speak of being white adjacent in America. We understand the penalties of even black association (see the movie Mud for a well-executed, contemporary version of this). But I had never considered the penalties of black adjacency, and in this case I mean adjacent by bloodline, not by way of pursuit.   Whereas proximity to whiteness in terms of skin color still affects ones station back home, Aboriginal people are so reviled from both racist and xenophobic places that Kent loses a massive chunk of his privilege the minute people learn his heritage.

I relate a recent conversation I had with a white Aussie who, after acknowledging the horrors inflicted on Aboriginal people, posited that countless social programs exist to ease indigenous transition into mainstream society. That Aboriginals are recalcitrant, combative and uninterested. Lazy.

“Did he mention that the condition is that you give up all of your beliefs, all aspects of your culture? You have to separate from your family permanently and bring nothing of your traditions with you.”

The answer is no, he did not. And what a civilized deal.

The ex-premiere helped Kent and his non-profit negotiate with the state government to alter the government policy so that these prisoners, most of whom were locked up for petty offenses in an effort to covertly extend holocaust, have a chance at life outside.   The goal:  that 100% of the proceeds from sales go to the artists directly. No split. No sharing. No cut for the prison system or the state.

How does Torch stay afloat?

Kent tells me as I comb through dozens of original and magnificent canvases that they have laid out for me to browse.

“Donors sponsor the 10% commission,” Kent explains. “We can at least raise this.”

I am beyond impressed.

There are scarves too, beautiful silk scarves made by an inmate at one of the women’s prisons. I must also budget for at least three, lest the recipient of one inspire some hateration from other loved ones.

Two hours later, Sarah notes that none of the work I select has been priced.  She promises to gather the information as soon as she can.

In the meantime, I struggle to figure out what wall space can be cleared in my house…

For more on this and to see the art, please visit www.thetorch.org.au.  If you look through the gallery, know that the pictures do this art no justice.

Missing Mr. Mitchell

cheat:  a term that describes exploiting the audience lack of depth perception to “pretend” to look at a person or persons upstage (behind) of your profile sight line in an effort not to turn the head or body too far from front.

I had never worked with Arthur Mitchell.

              During my senior year of college, a close friend auditioned for Dance Theater of Harlem’s studio company with a video of us dancing Raymonda. They offered me a gig too, but I turned it down, in part because at the time I was secretly afraid that I would never be able to meet the aesthetic and technical standards of a New York ballet company, especially one founded on the principle that black dancers can and have to do it better. 

              Last year, glorious retired DTH principal Lorraine Graves, for whom I have no No’s, called and invited me to dance I’ll Be Seeing You for the concert portion of a Columbia University effort to archive work connected to Mr. Mitchell.  

At the tech rehearsal, Lorraine attempts to introduce me to him and I attempt to re-meet him. 

              He shoos me away and I flee, relieved there is no fly swat.

              He shouts at my friends on stage as if they are still tweens learning to stand up correctly.  These are venerable, google-worthy colleagues like Alicia Graf and Paunika Jones and Akua Parker, who have had laudable careers and enviable levels of discipline in their bodies. He loves them like they are his.

              Yet they can do no right.

              In an escape attempt, I try to apply all of their notes.  I run my solo, in which a shirt is used to represent a loved one who has passed on.  There are gestures before the music starts. 

“What is that? What is he holding?”

If I can hear it closely from the stage, Lorraine’s ears are scorched. I continue dancing, understanding that now I have to be pretty flawless to thwart annihilation.

I carry on with the synecdoche. More gestures. Feelings. The shirt reminds me of the loved one. I bring it to my chest to feel it close.

              “Well is he smelling the shirt?”  It comes as a javelin from the house, less a question than an accusation.

              When I get off stage, Mr. Mitchell asks me what the solo is about.

              “It’s about an experience of loss. The year Lorraine saw it, three black male dancers in three different generations had passed, including Albert Evans—”  

              “What does that have to do with me?”

              Every answer that might work seems fraught with button-pushing potential toward my demise.  Giving him his flowers while he’s living might imply that he’s a relic on the way to extinction.  Explaining my connection to his legacy via the resurgence of DTH through studio performances years back might invite him to ask why I never auditioned while he was the artistic director.   And I’d sooner yank out my tongue than use it to throw Lorraine under the bus, although she probably has a small flat there when she’s coordinating for Mr. Mitchell.  I am stumped. I reply the best way I can.

“I wanted to perform it as a tribute to you because of your influence on us all.”

It suffices. Barely.  He proceeds to re-choreograph the top of the solo. I follow every instruction, noting that since he did the same with Rasta Thomas earlier (see paragraph above about venerable colleagues), I am in good company. To make the soft cotton read as a garment, I have to keep it buttoned for the whole piece, which means I cannot put it on at any point during the solo.  I adjust.

              Then for the show, Mr. Mitchell sits in a special downstage right, just beyond the proscenium, and proceeds to curate the evening. No wonder the interview; he needed to know what to say.

  He plans to introduce each piece before we dance. 

We are horrified.  

Brooklyn Mack (another paragon to add above) and I pray for Mr. Mitchell’s microphone to be off during the pieces, until we realized that he is situated so close that his commentary would need no amplifying.  Somehow, we all arrive from this unscathed, and I am thrilled when the smile he returns to my bow is warm.

              Months later, for another intimate dance event Mr. Mitchell would curate, Paunika asks me to dance with her a 1970’s pas de deux from a piece made on titans Keith Saunders and James Washington.   I immediately prepare my spirit for brutalizing rehearsals, a few deep digs, an alert that really I’ve sucked all along, perhaps some admonishment for not training at DTH. Etc.  It’s old-school and borderline abusive, but because I’ve already been beat up and broken down by similar mentors, I am ready to be blessed with anything Mr. Mitchell has for me.

Unfortunately, a fall at a gala takes him out of commission for a while, leaving Paunika and me to our own devices.

              On the day of the show, after the four, half-hour tech rehearsals that run from 9 to 11 a.m., just as Rasta Thomas, NYCB principals Maria Kowroski and Amar Ramasar, and Paunika and I are heading to the dressing room to prepare and right before the stage would be cleared so that the house could open, Mr. Mitchell swoops in. When I say swoops, I mean that he enters as robustly as an octogenarian recovering from a recent fall can, determined, focused and angry at the cane for its necessity.

              “Okay, let’s begin. I need to see everything.”

              As soon as he sits, a beautiful older black woman with a glorious neckline and joy in her eyes comes to hug and kiss him. She may as well be a swarm of wasps because he shoos her too.

              “Not now, I need to do this. I’m busy.”  

(I feel instantly better when I later learn that she was one of his first principal ballerinas ever.)

              The dancers know better than to speak unless spoken to, reserving our admiration, greetings and hugs for some other point in the distant, post-show future.

              “Let’s start with Doina.”

              It isn’t even first on the program.

              Without looking squarely at him, I see Rasta laughing. He was generous enough to help us earlier by giving us at least one brief rehearsal with notes and suggestions.  He also knows that I ran the pas de deux twice moments before, which means this first one for Mr. Mitchell would make three before the performance, if I made it through with just one run. I feel Rasta’s prayers and sympathies.

              I do not complain. I go to my place Stage Left, grab Paunika out of a handstand and assort her on to my body so that I can enter slowly with her.

              “Use your stomach muscles. You have to use your stomach muscles to roll up,” he says.

              She is the target this time, thank God.  He shouts a few notes to me as well, stern enough to dare me to get any of them wrong.

              Then it was time for Maria and Amar in Balanchine’s Agon pas de deux.  Silent, I sit on the side and watch Mr. Mitchell rehearse this masterpiece made on him over half a century ago.  The clarity of his insights blows my mind.

“Remember,” he says, “she can’t do anything without you. You lead all of it.”

Very much how Mr. Mitchell lived his life, leading “all of it” in the face of guerrilla racism, providing generations of dancers shoulders to stand on.  This was a man notorious for crazy goings-on, for coordinating dancer proficiency expectations with the zodiac, for terrorizing the entire administration of his company, for being generally irascible most of the time.  But privilege is when nothing—not even inhumane Big Brother tyranny (Steve Jobs), nor a very public marriage to your step-daughter (Woody Allen)—besmirches the gratitude history pays your legacy.  Privilege. And as a black man from anywhere, Mr. Mitchell had none.  As I sit on the floor learning, I understand how important it is to balance this deficit with our stories.  It means understanding the paradox of pioneering blackness into an inherently exclusive aesthetic art form while maneuvering around the tendrils of it that cradle self-hatred. It means forgiving him for places where he might have fallen short.  

He had the self-esteem to lead all of it nevertheless.

Rasta tells me after this 92nd Street Y noon-time performance that Mr. Mitchell complimented his performance from Columbia based on a subsequent video viewing. 

“He saw it though, right from on stage, yes?” I ask.

“Not really. He was cheating.”

“Lies!” All that stress only to find out he missed a lot of it until he saw the video,

“He was concerned about lighting that cheekbone. You know that man is vain.”

And I am so much better for it.

The whole world is so much better for it.  

How #aborigines #Cher and #dance came together

When I boarded the plane for the 15-hour flight to Sydney, I did not have an itinerary with our rehearsal and performance schedule over the six days I'd be working there.  But somehow, I knew that I would connect with the First Nation. I would find time, by hook, crook or sleeplessness.  

You see, the last time I was in Australia, I had just read Marlo Morgan's cultural immersion testimony, Mutant Message Down Under.   This only encouraged to me to refresh my research on everything I thought I needed to know about the aboriginal community there.  And when I got there, I bought lots of aboriginal art from the artists with corresponding perspective and DNA.  This way, my house could receive these vibes every day, and my walls would remind me daily how simply and wholly and positively life can be lived. 

So I had to connect.  And the universe (or perhaps a kind mimi spirit) responded. In January of this year, a small, but powerful contingent of First Nation dancers came to the International Association of Blacks in Dance Conference (IABD) 30th Anniversary conference and festival, bearing a wonderful energy of exchange, presence and warmth.  And my downstairs neighbor reminded me that she was a dance presenter over in Sydney and that she could connect me with local concert dance forces there.  

One of them invited me to do a full interview at Koori Radio, Sydney's First Nations radio station.  I couldn't have been more thrilled.  I hopped on the train, to Redfern, had a beautiful latte in a small cafe near the station, and then sat with Gavin, the show host who connected the hashtags of this post long before I did, for over an hour.  

We covered a lot, connecting dots of a circles that include, among  many other things, IABD, his background as a dancer who trained at NAISDA Dance College, aboriginal embrace of Cher as First Nations family because of her Cherokee descent, and my experience in Australia during their Mardi Gras a second time.  (For the full interview, please visit https://www.mixcloud.com/mako-khan/in-conversation-with-jamal-story/ )  It was ultimately the most fulfilling full-circle, aha moments I've had this year. 

The good news is that the year is not over and I have a sense that I will be back there in 2018.  I plan to connect even more firmly with this corner of the black diaspora, and through its serene spirit of inclusion show where more of these oft disparate hashtags converge. 

I can't wait.

On Playing Jesus

After our third performance of the Luminario Ballet show Breathless, the man in this picture approached me, his eyes shining, and told me I was amazing.  I He said, “I am 90 years old and I’ve seen a lot. Watching you up there invigorated me. It makes me feel like I have more life in me yet.”

There is no greater compliment than this, of course.  No review gets you to the level of joy and divine clarity of purpose that this kind of moment__and human being__provides.

It also helped me to reconcile right away all of the demons I faced over the processes of The Last Supper, a 45-minute aerial/dance extravaganza that explores the hypothetical of Jesus, Mary and Judas going to Coachella. Although another work of mine was featured in the show, The Last Supper was the only piece I danced. And last year, as much as I was intrigued with the idea of it, I had issues to work out before I could commit to helping choreograph the work. Fortunately, Judith, the co-choreographer and mastermind of this, was unfazed by my challenges. That I had never been to Coachella, for example, or that inasmuch as I resemble the Jesus described in the Bible—woolly hair and all—I had no personal connection to the grunge music canon she wished to invade. I had to research Weezer and The Sweater Song before I could figure out how it might serve as the backdrop for the Crucifixion.  I grew up with Nina Simone’s Take Me to the Water, not The Talking Heads Take Me to the River.  This was not my scrapbook to mine.

Then there was my deficit of ego.  How did I think I was worthy of playing Jesus?  The lingering DSH (dance self-hatred) is ever evident in the fact that I not once bothered to judge whether others, like John Legend in the upcoming live version of Jesus Christ, Superstar, should play Jesus. No, this question mark was reserved only for me.  (NOTE: Most pre-social-media-age dancers, especially those who have had extraordinary careers, suffer from DSH, but if you need more clarity, please ask and I will blog about it subsequently).

The good news is that last year, I had no space for such issues.  I had specific, narrow windows of time with my aerial partner Sheila to work out our Mary/Jesus hammock duet, and only a week to choreograph the dance material I was responsible for. During the course of all this, I figured it out:  Jesus is about humility, dummy, not ego.

Other than a persistent foot injury to navigate, I had fewer issues this year, especially after friends and family members, who are (thank God) often merciless in their honest responses to anything I’m in, enjoyed the show and me in it last year.  They bought my Jesus.  And it dawned on me that there are only a few other artists I know who could—and would—agree to the technical and aerial challenges the show promises.  For example, just to make the entrance on to the stage during the Resurrection requires that I climb a silk in the third dark wing, wrap myself in a lock and then hang out until the preceding duet ends.

All of this was worth it the minute that Dorsay, the woman pictured, brought over to me her brother Sonny, a nonagenarian who saw the assassination of MLK when he was my age and whose grandparents were probably slaves.  He said, “I felt so energized – it made me realize that I could fall in love again.”

My cousin Benny, who is more like a sage uncle, turns 90 this weekend.  And shortly ago I received the link to a feature on a 91-year-old trailblazing physician in Harlem. https://www.facebook.com/heyirisdotcom/videos/1705054572895222/   They, and Sonny, have taught me so much in the last few days, not the least of which is that as long as you're here on the planet, living continues until you decide it stops.

And clearly, minor injuries notwithstanding, I'm not done living on stage.

Artists of Ailey Petition

We don’t do it to get rich, this so-called artist "thing." We do it because we must. For years, the one piece of advice I have offered elite professional dancers trying to balance out the art/business binary is to ask for what they are worth relative to what the employing organization has to offer them. It is a paradigm often more fair than anything that happens in the business world, where most professionals (for better or for worse) demand standard compensation irrespective of their employers’ resources. But I would never expect to make with Lula Washington Dance Theater, a struggling nonprofit, what I make with Cher.

That said, when there are means to pay artists, as is the case with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, those means should create livable salaries so that dancers can simply dance - not search for second jobs to keep up with the rising cost of living in New York City. Dancers in the most decorated collection of black movement artists in the world dancing the most seen ballet (Revelations) in the canon of modern dance ever should not be worried about making ends meet, especially when their associate artistic director makes $1.3 million a year, the presiding artistic director half a million, and the artistic director emerita (legend notwithstanding) $217K – and that was in 2015. Don’t take my word for it; a quick Google search will pull up the I-990 tax document that is public record for all nonprofit organizations. Pages 16 and 43 of the 2015 return are particularly noteworthy: 
https://projects.propublica.org/non…/organizations/132584273

The dancers have launched a petition asking for support for their pursuit of fair wages, a movement whose first large public moment was their boycott of an annual Kennedy Center gala designed to raise millions for the company every year. As an advocate for dancers/artists and a board member of SAG-AFTRA, the sister union to AGMA who stands behind its Ailey dancer members, I urge you to sign this petition.

Understand that this is not an assault on the legacy of Alvin Ailey, nor a declaration of war on the art his company produces. It is simply a call to action that big business ideals not invade and exploit artists in an artistic space - or at all.

By supporting the dancers, you are supporting the Ailey vision. You are supporting high art. 
You are supporting what’s right.

After all, there is no performance without them.

To sign, click here. 

https://www.change.org/p/aaadt-i-support-the-artists-of-ailey

Why I was devastated leaving Black Panther (spoiler alert)

It is a glorious film.  It is a symphony of black excellence, from acting to wardrobe to direction to storytelling.  It is a festival of authenticity. It is a mining and then remix of the lesser understood, often ignored beauty (and wonder) of African technological advancements, especially in Giza where brown and black genius is still plain and utterly visible. It is a testament to the nurturing in our relatively small village of black performing artists, as several folks my colleagues/friends and I know are in the movie with lethal vibranium spears or holding down the title role.

              It is all the things. And I love it with fervor.

              Yet I found myself overwhelmed with devastation on several occasions throughout the experience.  It started with the moment T’Challa dropped into a forest as Black Panther to help rescue a group of young women being carted by militants across Africa.   The fight sequence was exciting, and the forward momentum of the storyline__he “froze” shonuff__brilliant.  But it was not enough to slow my tears over the real Boko Haram girls—there is no Black Panther to rescue them. 

              My Vulcan self kicked in soon after: of course the “what if?”of Wakanda is only possible to display if contextualized with current, real-world tragedies affecting black people.  To leave these out would imperil the thesis statement central to the movie.  But the paradox for me is that during each moment of poignant realism, I had to face my pain about it.   There were respites of course__the visual festival of Wakanda in its balance of technology and natural surroundings, the glow of age hierarchies and corresponding respect within the culture, the sense of humor both in global and afro-specific punchlines. But my melancholy persisted.

              Black Panther took the worst parts of our current situation as black folks in the diaspora permanently scarred and culturally disfigured by colonization and presented us with a mecca that had only two options:  one, to continue to live in cultural black utopian isolation while ignoring (in large part) the devastation inflicted on its brethren, or two, colonize our colonizers by inverting the status quo, thus becoming our oppressors.   I couldn’t shake it. After all, these two options were played out in the war between T’Challa and Erik Killmonger throughout the movie, orchestrated with aplomb to remind us that no villain exists in this clash.

              And though T’Challa offers us a third scenario at the end, the sharing of scientific, and thus synonymously, cultural riches with the world via UN treaty, there is little historical information to justify the feasibility of such a gift.  White colonizers have always leaned heavy into using might and weaponry seasoned with xenophobia to disempower and eliminate aboriginals in places they wanted to be.  Pizarro did it to the Incas of Peru.  Cortez did it to the Aztecs. And for good measure, they did it to each other as well; the Vikings collected Slavic and British slaves for five centuries.    And while one could argue that pre-colonial peoples of color are also guilty of participating in acts of conquest with each other, none have resulted in or aimed for the annihilation of entire civilizations based on supremacy.

              So it is hard to rejoice in the possibility that even with a Wakanda in the Motherland, we might get Anglo participation, that those who sit on their thrones of patriarchy might be interested in black and brown concepts like cooperative economics and collective work and responsibility and community momentum.  Cousin Erik, whose sociopathy was clearly a consequence of his successful climb from racial oppression through the American dream scaffold (thank you Marvel for not getting in the way of all this real talk), experienced the “No” of this firsthand.  His suggestion was that we simply skip the UN part, the efforts at peaceful ascension together, the inevitable attempt to pilfer technology that did not require a ransack first, and then jump to the part where it’s us or them.

              Perhaps I’m too cynical, or maybe just worn down by everything from Philando Castille to Trump.  Perhaps I need to hold out some hope that today, as white patriarchy has taken a huge hit with Weinstein and Spacey and the like, T’Challa’s ideals have promise.  And maybe when I see the movie a second time (yes, of course I’m going back), dryer eyes will have room for the audacity of hope.

              In the meantime, Wakanda Forever.

Take a Gorgeous Breath

I had experienced these failures before. 

Yoga had  happened to me in in 2003 in Germany somewhere, and earlier this year when a friend yanked me from the decline bench at my gym and dragged me into his hot yoga class at Crunch one Sunday.

              But this was yoga by Karine Plantadit, dance goddess, life coach, Tony award nominee, ex-Ailey-an, humanitarian and good friend. In a pre-production rehearsal with a handful of other mature artists, the rehearsal directors made the mistake of pairing us for the exploration of a Warren Carlyle Latin number; much to rehearsal their regret, I (we) had more fun doing this than anything else this holiday season.

              So when Karine invited lovely chocolate youngster Ahmad, whose name inspiration our mothers' shared, to try her Yang Yin class at noon on Sunday, I was inspired to go to.

              The class was so full that there was a waiting list for cancellations. One woman came in asking about class at another time and, upon hearing Karine’s name, said, “Oh yeah, the one with the funky hair? I like her, she’s cool.”

              Cool?  Really?  Instant indignation with “Why don’t you know who she is—Google her dammit!” righteousness ensued.  Which was good, because now I had something to tame in this yoga class, right?

              I walked into the room and picked one of the last two spots available, up against the stairs in the back of the room.  I spread my mat out and laid the towel over it, only so that Karine could suggest that I move to the front of the room right in front of the door where she came in.  It dawned on me once I did so that the area I left was the only place from which she could actually teach.

              Thus commenced the first of my series of failures.

Horizontal, face up, taking wonderful breaths, inhaling generously through my nostrils and sending from my mouth, I heard Karine ask us to use the blocks to rest our open thighs. Odd. But I put the blocks on top, wondering if perhaps the sensation of even a little bit of weight was all the body needed as impetus to make the inner thighs let go…

              Karine took the blocks off and re-positioned them under my knees for support. Oh, that’s what she meant. Resisting laughter out loud at Microfailure #1 was necessary so as not to disrupt all the Zen in the room, which I did anyway shortly after to make Microfailure #2.  You see, the moment I realized that my upper body was too tight to facilitate Downward Dog without substantial discomfort, overcompensation and weakness, My hands slid away from me often, lowering my hips, sweat from the heat filling my eyes giving me "Apocalypse Now!" I had to laugh at myself.  It couldn’t be helped. Because I might not make it to the end of this movie.  

              Then I was okay for a while with the Yang portion, robust movements that required us to move in and out of Downward Dog and into things like Warrior 2, which my hips loved. Figure eights for infinity because this is life. Glimpses of Sun Salutation.  Karine’s musical voice driving us through with warm reminders—take a beautiful breath, take a gorgeous breath. I surrendered, stopped worrying about whether someone might open the door into my head during the flatback. I celebrated my newfound maturity of not making fun of the poses and renaming them as I did years ago to the chagrin of my mini-(better-than)-me adopted family Kyle when he became a yogi.  Yes, yes, sure. Cherie, I am yoga...

              Until she asked us to stand on one leg, open up the back hip, look up into the sky, grab our hearts with both hands. And then grab the leg with the back hand to stretch the quad.

              “Balance is not stillness but constant motion, a series of small movements…”

              I have been dancing professionally for 20 years and the majority of it has seen no dearth of ability to be on one leg, do some impressive things on it in fact. But in this moment, no combination of small movements was going to keep me balancing on this leg.  I tried to look up to the ceiling and felt myself falling the five inches into the yogi beside me, a professional with handstands and cobras under his belt. I grabbed the wall desperately to keep myself out of fallonmyassana (sorry Kyle, old habits die hard).   Thank God Karine put me there.

              The only thing more devastating than this Epic Failure #1, was getting to do it on the other side.

              My Zen was gone.  It was on the floor next to those blocks I didn't know how to use. Now, I was just trying to survive.

              The good news is that I figured out why yoga is so hard at first for bodies like mine. Hypertonic muscles fire all the time, involuntarily and with no effort.  It used to be a huge problem for me learning dance technique because I could not disengage the specific muscles that were prohibiting me from achieving whatever small task was at hand—plie, tendu, lengthening, whatever.  Success in dance for me has been an evolution of letting go of the right muscles at the right times so that I can get to a neuro-skeletal connection and feel space in my joints.    

              I’ve figured it out with the staples/fundamentals of most modern and ballet techniques (ask me if you want this scintillating information).  So in dance, I can be efficient. I can find a space of peace and Zen inside of complicated movement because it takes only moments to figure out efficiency in them and transcend my physical self.  Introduce me to something new and now I have to learn the vocabulary so that I can get out of my head, which applies a Matthew Bourne approach to moving that says "fire everything at will."  It just means I need to (and will) take a few more yoga classes to get there__maybe a lot more.

              Understanding this nugget was my Big Success in class until we got to the Yin part, the smaller moon consciousness that involves introspection.  Stretches.  Deep lack of thought.  Internal consciousness.   Smaller movements. I remember years ago when a critic said to Donald Byrd that I was going to be a brilliant dancer once I figured out how to do handle small movement. How ironic—now they are my safest space. I told Karine after that I need an entire class of Yin Yoga, please. 

              The beauty is all the laughter that comes out of experiences like these, knowing that all of these failures are actually not failures at all, but gifts of having nothing to prove.  Why did it take so long to get here?

              Please go take Karine’s class.  I don’t care what she’s teaching. Yoga, dance, martini mixing, Home Depot shopping, whatever.  Currently, she’s at Modo Yoga in the West Village, 434 6th Avenue.

              Just make sure you sign up hours before you go…

Auntie Brenda

Since we are in a ceremony meant to celebrate Brenda, I have to admit she would be pissed if I didn’t tell this story. Years ago, I invited her and my mother to the Opening of The Color Purple, my first show on Broadway. When we got to the red carpet event, she stood before a cluster of my esteemed colleagues and corrected my introduction:  “No, no, I’m his ghetto auntie Brenda.  Those other ones you meet are just faux aunties.”

I had been trying forever to get my mother and aunts to try the Lush store lotion, Sympathy for the Skin.  Not normally one to buy into cosmetics zeal too much, I thrust this product upon them, justifying the price tag with regular accounts of how moisturizing it is. 

This is what I use now at the hospital.  I find that when our loved ones can’t do for themselves, all we can do is pick up where they left off.  With stage four cancer, most of it is up to God.  But the parts that we can cover, we cover.

 Of course beyond her address on Marcelle, there was very little ghetto about my ghetto Auntie Brenda.  She took care of most of the people in her life, took no short cuts, and saw far beyond the immediacy of her environment. Inasmuch as I’m a dancer/aerialist, she is far more brave. Tried exotic foods.  Invested in new workouts before it was a thing.  Bungee jumped from the Queen Mary when she was 56…

She doesn’t believe in ashy skin at all, is as pissed that nobody has addressed it as she is that the partial paralysis from the stroke has left her tongue motionless to say anything.  Fortunately, my luggage was still in the car, Lush sympathy for the skin in it. So I lotion her legs, letting her know that my mother would fall completely apart before she could even get it on her hands. 

She was a baby boomer who refused to live her life in fear, who understood loyalty and taught me, by example with Mom, how to be a good friend.   And she constantly chastised me for taking too long to take over the world.

I start to feel odd, halfway expecting Auntie to jump up and holler at me for the impropriety of it all.  A nephew had no business rubbing anything on her thighs. Mid-thigh would have to be as far as I went.  The crime is amplified by my aunt’s usage off these legs – she had become so skilled at salsa over the past ten years that I dared not attempt to dance with her, my vocabulary unsuitable.  The temptation to insist the nurse conduct this moisturizing passes; she has been more than kind so far.  I watched her turn my aunt over on her side earlier to prevent bedsores.   

If Auntie could talk, she would say to pull the plug, except that there wasn’t one to pull.  This was bout number three with cancer; stellar genetics and will helped her win the first two.  Her family has several cancer survivors, and a few octo- and nonagenerians, so she is prone to outliving loved ones.  She is also a realist. With a mouth. “You know, nephew,” she told me only a few weeks before, “you have to hurry up and make some money cuz me and yo mama are too old to be out there on the corner. Don’t nobody want no old snatch, and you have to take care of us.”

So it makes sense that this festivity is about living, really living, since she showed us, her family, friends, associates and colleagues how to do it. We’re all blessed because she helped fashion nooks of heaven right here, long before she got to the real one.  I'm sure if she is in the ghetto there, every angel wants an invite. 

[Brenda Josenberger passed 10 weeks ago after a second stroke related to deterioration from a chemo/radiation combo treatment. The italicized text is from remarks I made at her homegoing celebration August 17.] 

Sikiliza

Where are the highway lamp posts???

I’ve been 40 only two weeks and it is clear I’ve not learned enough to see it coming.

 On a tour of the state-of-the-art facility I would be working in for a week, Deb, the energetic, robust and spirited woman who hired me, pointed to the lodge up the hill and instructed me to follow her there.

 “So just make sure when you open the room door and the closet doors, you want to go slow just in case there’s a rattlesnake or bobcat in there,” she said casually. 

 “I’m sorry, a what?” 

 “Yeah, they’ve been known to sometimes end up in the lodge or on the grounds; we’re out here in mother nature territory so you’re bound to see something,”  she said. 

 “I see how this works, you neglect to tell me this stuff until—“

 “After you get here, correct.” Add smart to the list of adjectives above. “And now you’re here!”

 “Here” is Stallion Springs, home of Woodward West, a sprawling, 23-acre gymnastics/parkour/biking/skateboarding/action sports paradise of a summer camp for hundreds of kids that I might have killed to be one of back in the day.    They have foam pits in not just the gymnastics gym, but also the airplane hangar sized building where athletes on wheels could negotiate landing flips and tricks with their bikes.   The high profile nature of the facility I was clear on.

 Bobcats and rattlesnakes? No.

 In fact, I had a whole different set of concerns based on an advance research that the closest thing to a city, Tehachapi, is a conservative small town fond of homogeny and comfy in xenophobia, where an interracial relationship might invite property damage.  Woodward West is a cultural oasis twenty minutes away, which meant an idyllic drive from the freeway through sprawling wine country with one screen-saver-worthy vista after another.  But until I got there I should be concerned.

 Like any individual with a pulse and an imagination and an afro, I worried. I had seen Get Out twice.  Its eerily stunning and effective theme song Sikiliza Kwa Wahenga - Swahili for “Listen to your ancestors, run” -  played in my head.  And even though I had made it to Stallion Springs, the ruddy Steinbeckian men who hopped out of the gray, battered pick-up truck at the lone gas station down the road gave me cause for pause. And the waiter at the lone diner across the street unnerved me with her accusation that I wasn’t from there.

 But none of this turned out to be the issue.  The guys at the gas station were affable, Sikiliza came back only at night driving through Blair Witch pitch, and that same waiter yucked it up with me at lunch the next day.  In fact, save the Chinese proprietor of a massage parlor in town who chose audacious racial profiling on two of us (another blog for sure), I suffered no reasons to get out.

 Except maybe the Nat Geo Wild realness. When we got to the lodge that first day, Deb clapped her hands hard three times during the tour of these grounds.  First to get to the stairs, then to exit the hallway to the promontory where I could see the prison housing one of the Menendez brothers and at one time Charles Manson, and then once we got to the room.

 “We own the lodge so there isn’t really a front desk....” Clap. 

 “We convert wind into energy and then sell it to Los Angeles for electricity....” Clap.

 "Why the claps?"

 “Just to startle anything that creatures that might be in your way.”

 Insert pearl-clutching shriek of horror here. 

 “And what happens if I see an animal that isn’t paying Woodward for occupancy on these grounds?” I asked.

 “Just call me and I’ll call the maintenance people to get rid of it.”

 You mean I can’t just pick up the old school Dial M for Murder phone on the counter next to the bed for anything other than to try it as a weapon?

 I was way off. I needn’t worry about dying in a tumbling pass or going missing forever.  It was the potential for annihilation by a snake or bobcat or gaze of raccoons.   

 Or an elk.  

 Yes, days later, Deb recalled how an elk made recently stood there next to her car, threatening it and her.  She had the nerve to show me pictures.  I promptly added the damage waiver insurance to the rental car, so that if I survived I wouldn’t have to pay for the pieces of the Kia that were left after the elk had fun. (I should point out that Deb drives a Kia too.)

 Now she made up for all of this of course.  She took us wine tasting. I hung out with Bart Conner.  I choreographed a quick dance on Laurie Hernandez.  And she surrounded me with beautiful 20-somethings hell bent on giving me no time to remember I had just turned 40.

 But dammit did she ever make me challenge my nature fears. And make me  regret not having  paid more attention to Morgan Freeman’s voice on the Discovery Channel whenever it was on in the house. Before we leave racial profiling completely, note that we’ve never seen Morgan out there with the lions and elephants.

And I have to write Michael Abels and thank him (or curse him out) for that movie theme...

On Tony

He taught me a huge lesson about auditions and self-esteem right off the bat. 

The first time I ever toured with a legendary artist, the show was confronted with a dancer injury and a side-lined swing.  The show needed someone right away, and the director could think of no one with the skillset to cover the guys, as we each brought special things to the table.

“How about Tony James?” I offered.

“Who’s that?”

“Tony James!  Don’t you remember? He was amazing at the audition. We applauded when it was his turn.”

“Really? What does he look like, remind me…”

I was stunned.  I couldn’t understand how anybody could forget:

It was the final callback and the legend was sitting in the front of the room watching each of the “specialty” folks do our thing.  Tony took off his shirt and shoes and stood in the corner, a pair of black jazz pants hugging his massive thighs. There were sinewy, caramel muscles on top too. And when they started the music, he commenced to do everything.

By everything, I mean everything.  Sort of like the 20 acrobatic tricks Velma Kelly says she and her sister Veronica did in their double act with “splits, spread eagles, back flips, flip flops one right after the other..." Except that Tony danced between his tumbling passes and X-outs, this on a hard studio floor without the protection of a sensible Nike. 

I was awestruck.  Pissed (I was next). Enamored.  Envious. And the first to applaud DURING a freestyle that was surely a precursor to Simone Biles’ floor routine.

How could they not remember? 

I understood, processing that people have goldfish memory and MTV Cribs attention spans, that no matter how talented we are, we can never rely on employers to remember it when it counts. Nor can we assume that the organization of the hiring process in commercial dance (or acting for that matter) is gushing with common sense.

I insisted that they look for his perfect headshot. Upon reviewing the video (imagine!), the creative team was excited once again and sought him out.

Not to disparage the creative team, or digress too far from the emotional gravity of Tony James having departed this planet, but this lesson has never left me.  It has colored my experience and restricted me from personalizing the other side of the table.

I’ll also never forget Tony.  We got to hang out for the short time he was on that gig (the first of many times over the years). Throughout the stress of getting the show up, he was always affable, good-natured, sanguine, unencumbered by streams of negative consciousness.   Nothing was too, too serious and I always wanted to be around him.  He was all the things—Timon playful and Genie shrewd, boy-next-door cute and threatening stud bootylicious.

He even had me convinced that his eyes were really green until he confessed his contact lens concealment techniques. 

“You want to know how I do it?” he told me one night, a gigantic grin on his face. “Go ahead, tell me I have beautiful eyes.”

I bit, moving in toward him in the organic way that people always do when giving this compliment.

“Thank you!” he said, as he turned his head in slow motion and lowered his lids shut so that the smile could upstage my efforts.

I laughed for two days behind this.

That's the other lesson. The Biles-worthyfloor routine, amazing jumps and energized dancing were buoyed by the fact that people wanted to be around him.  So through my devastation about yet another memorial fund replacing a wonderful artist too young to be gone, I am reminded to smile.

Doriana, a dear friend__and also boss for many years__told me that during the 80's, when she had lost so many friends in the space of only a few years, she coped by telling herself that they were simply on tour.   This is an applicable strategy and I'm borrowing it.  I'm sure God tours too.

And If Tony is on that one, our maker is getting a good kee kee.

And a split.

To donate to the Tony James Memorial Fund to help with his arrangements and the fund, please click here.

Elite

Tuesday, November 1

Osaka

I like to think I’m an elite traveler.  I get to the new city unafraid, on a mission, and walk with the velocity of somebody who knows where he’s going better than even the people who live there.  In this way, I’m truly a soloist, moreover than even in dance than in any other aspect of my life including dance. Like the stoic spy from any Hollywood blockbuster who knows languages, topography, civil engineering and cultural nuances of every major city in the world.

Except that I’m not this person outside of my mind. 

Especially not in Japan.

But this does not stop me.  I am famished, you see. So once my ever-so hospitable hosts chaperones me to the Daiwa Roynet Hotel in a part of Osaka I haven’t bothered to learn the name of yet, I swoop out of it in my Zara black Matrix coat, make a left down the street and walk briskly until I see something that looks fetching.  The place two blocks down on the corner is promising, so in I go.

When a place is so small that the seven people in it turn to look at you when you walk in, it’s hard not to commit to it.  Think bar/restaurant where television investigators or police chiefs of assistant DA’s show up to vent or unwind, only a third the size.  Sam Jackson’s curse words wouldn’t have even had room, let alone an actual Tarantino fight sequence.

So I sit at the bar, understanding that the host—a little more Waffle house vet than obsequious Japanese woman—doesn’t speak English really. She has some scant sense of the language, which is that she is fluent in comparison to my Japanese.   She asks if I want a drink, and when I suggest no, she pushes the point, helping me understand it is mandatory with a menu.

“Sake” is a Japanese word I do know.  I say this.  She brings me a menu that has about 10 different kinds (there are that many?) of sake. I pick one with authority.  After all, I am an elite traveler.

She then brings me a food menu with nothing but the three full alphabets with which Japanese is written. I gag. The Kenji is intimidating. I understand the prices and that’s about it. Not a picture anywhere.  I surrender my elite traveler status and confess the obvious, that comprehension on my part is futile. 

She points to a space of wall behind and above me with pictures of entrees.  I pretend to know what is depicted on the pictures.  She starts to explain, and the word “pasta” jumps out.  Then I shamelessly point to it like a small child, feeling very much like an insipid, stupid American.   She nods emphatically.

Twenty minutes later, as I sip sake that will certainly leave me unable to walk the 50 meters to the hotel after, she comes out with a beautiful black bowl of ramen and broth with fish. Yellowtail? Mackerel? It doesn’t matter. It is divine.  Go figure I come to Japan and the first meal I have is the authentic version of the one I used to have as a kid because it was easy to make and great for lower income and/or single parent households. 

The older gentleman at the table with two women walked by and said a few words in English I understood, welcome, thank you, medical. Before I could put the last one together, my more relaxed waiter now said some things in English connecting to the “medical” part of the conversation.

“Show. I watch…” she said, trying to find more words. 

“Show, show, a medical show?”

“Grey Anatomy.”

“Grey’s Anatomy!!!!! Yes, I love it! It’s great isn’t it?”

“Yes! Yes! The doctor die in sixth season.”

“Dr. Sheppard. Patrick Dempsey!”

This was the connection I needed to feel okay.  There in the too-small for TV/film restaurant/bar with no translator, this waiter was connecting to me in a big way about a vital ingredient for human sustenance, wait for it -

“I don’t speak English but I watch! I like, like the Chinese girl," the woman says.

“I love Christina Yang.”

“Yes! Yes! Yang!”

“But you know it’s human. Of course you understand anyway…”

And this was my introduction to elite traveling alone in Osaka. Maybe God was co-signing on my taking this teaching gig, where the primary communication between me as a sensei and the dancers in each class will be body language, by connecting me with a person through a television show using "anatomy" as a super-metaphor.    My lesson:  people all over the world love Grey’s Anatomy and if there is ever a language barrier, Shonda Rhimes is a good place to start. Maybe when I make it to Brazil on a dance performing or teaching assignment, I can say Annalise Keating when I run out of my limited cursory Portuguese…

Arigatou Gozaimasu

Public restroom at Moronomiya subway station in Osaka. There is no filter on this shot.

I broke down and did it. For the first time in 15 years I had a McDonald’s cheeseburger. And fries.  I was starving.  You see, the reason that the Japanese are so enviably snatched is that they eat smaller portions, and I don’t mean European-size small. THIS is something different, on a Pai Mei torturous eat-that-bowl-of-rice-and-walk-up-those-stairs-with-two-buckets-of-water kind of way (yes I realize I went to China just now but bear with me cuz I'm about to ping pong you through worse).  If I order a fish entrée, it’s hard not to see an appetizer because America has ruined me in yet this way as well. Turns out that I’m not a fat bitch inside by myself – America is comprised only of fat bitches and the degree to which our ginormous stomachs need sating is proportional to our degree of ruin... 

The point is, I was starving, dreadfully and hurtfully.  Last night I went to two different restaurants to eat, first in a shrimp joint that served the crustaceans with heads and shells on (I peeled, avoiding being grossed out) and then at a random place where I had chicken skewers and fries. 

So today I had to just do one meal that didn’t make me want to suffer the embarrassment of ordering two full entrees in the same sitting.  As I sat with my cheeseburger,  which miraculously tasted like it came from a real cow, and drank my coke that was mostly real ingredients in a small cup instead of the trough of water and chemicals they sell at home, I had an epiphany about hospitality.  I had been wondering why everywhere I’ve been abroad this year, people delivered it in spades, genuine hospitality..  The Israelis went out of their way, coloring our endeavors with education about the whys, hows and cultural origins.  The Bajans were equally lovely, resort expectations notwithstanding. The Japanese are on a whole other level, somehow obsequious and relentlessly proud at once.

Between fries, it occurred to me that perhaps genuine national warm welcome is engendered by connection to a sturdy culture steeped in thousands of years of tradition.  The sharing and cultural exchange is built into the pride; what I experienced abroad this year is the native interest for visitors to not only behold the unifying legacy, but to feel it too.

It was never more clear until I got to Osaka, mainly because the Japanese, beyond being hospitable, are exemplary.  I stood over the subway platform and saw a railroad free of refuse, litter, rats. My awe followed frustration that I could find no trash receptacle anywhere to dump my litter because these folks believe in finishing their ingestibles before making it to the station, let alone the train.   The people here respect their stuff. 

So it’s no wonder that when I walk into a class, the students stand and greet me with a chorus of welcome before giving me their undivided attention to gather whatever information I have. They call me sensei because they trust that the people who hired me know what they’re doing.

And this is why I have felt like such an alien when people discuss America in terms of cultural pride. I can’t relate.  We have jigsaw-pieced together a construct of culture that takes bits and pieces of every settler (read: invader) who showed up.   Our cultural scaffold is theft, which is why I try to contextualize my censure of Beyonce (see link of her xeroxing  European choreographer Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker’s work for her video to understand how I got here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDT0m514TMw); she’s all-American.  Anyway, thievery is just one part; the instruction manual had other steps.  Devalue the natives. Snatch the resources. King the robber barons—these are not judgments yet, I’m just at what actually happened in America.  Then incorporate whatever fragments of culture from England, Spain, France and other colonialists to make something new.  Add the Puritan work ethic, for example, and convince everyone that following it means success.  This is our Cliffnotes, fast-track path to national culture.

Don’t get me started on where black folks fit in, since our culture-ancestral reference points were annihilated on the boats. Let’s forego the re-appropriation debate and just jump to facts:  the White House was literally built by black people, which is why when Barack was campaigning to be in it, I shouted Hallelujah at Michelle revealing that she felt nationalism for the first time at age 46. I was right there with her (now we’re at judgment).  If our contributions extend beyond economy- and brick-building, it is because black excellence has often been a direct reflection of suffering. The lion share of our patents, from Sarah Boone’s ironing board to Charles Brooks’ street sweeper, were borne as solutions to hard labor (pun intended).  And the hymns and rhythms that became sediment for the entire American songbook were first sung in field of fatigue.

So even with our inclusion, we’re back to theft and oppression ONLY as common cornerstones of a melting pot American culture.  How then, would we arrive at genuine pride about it? Something tangible other than our celebration of difference and the option to not rebel?  No matter how “free” we are in our system, Americans don’t get to not participate in it and live there. So how do we teach our kids to respect a country that shows them every day the brutality of its nervous system, the sketchiness of its skeleton? 

I’m not letting millennials off the hook here, just identifying other things that play into the profoundly beautiful arigatou gozaimasu (#thank you) I’ve experienced here in Japan. And let’s be clear, I am certainly not suggesting that Japanese legacy is absent horrors. Ask the Chinese and they’ll gladly tell you. Also, many would find an imperial nation so steeped in regimen Borg-ish in the most unappealing, Orwellian way.  My guess is that a Japanese homosexual banished from his family for disgrace might prefer American tradition, until of course he makes it to a Southern Baptist church that agrees with his folks.  I maintain, though, that an old nation with an ancient culture is clear on the composition thereof, good and bad, and the value is—in this case—clean gumless sidewalks, a freakishly low homicide rate and trains that arrive and depart on schedule to the second.

For me, the South is as close as we get in the States. There is a clear persistence of mores and customs that dictate how people ought to speak to, respect and host each other (there’s the legacy), heinous chattelization of black people notwithstanding (there’s the horror).  With the cultural status quo clear, I can better understand the Southerner who delights in feeding me home-cooked dinner while telling me between my bites that I’m going directly to hell for sleeping with a man.

Which brings me back to these fries. Real potatoes were involved.  Because the Japanese equivalent of the FDA believes people should eat actual food.   I have more to think about on all of this of course; we’ll see what happens during the morning sushi meal…

Hiplet?

Years ago in Glasgow, the Cher Farewell Tour I was on intersected the Dance Theater of Harlem UK Tour.  After gushing with rehearsal directors Keith and Kellye Saunders about running into other black people on the street, I took company class and spied on a rehearsal. I watched the Robert Garland ballet Return and became a huge fan of the dancer doing the “Mother Popcorn” solo set to James Brown at the top of the ballet.   Please allow me to digress:  Dionne Figgins was tremendous because she was able to apply star power and black girl magic to the already challenging job of negotiating classical steps with old school, vernacular jams our parents did at dance halls back in the day (i.e., the slop, the four corners, etc.). This was a rehearsal, yet Dionne danced 100%, not a single step taken for granted.

I was off that night and able to see the DTH concert.  It seemed that Dionne was understated. She was dedicated on the pointe shoe and then physically inhibited in vernacular steps. The incredible flip between ethereal lift and booty back black that awed me hours before was missing.  It turns out that she had been given a note by then Artistic Director Arthur Mitchell to dial it back. Too much hip, too much weight, too much getting down into the ground.  This was a ballet company, after all.  The dancers needed to look dignified.

I was horrified.  It devastated me that a visionary who leveraged his unprecedented privilege in classical ballet with a garage to train young, otherwise rejected black folks in it saw no value decades later in offering social dances belonging to our “classical” form equal respect.  The slop needs to be revered and fully danced with all the information—in this case the heaviness and stank and sweat and years of recovery from slavery—as sou-sou, releve and fifth position.  Honor needs its life in both idioms, even if they are choreographed into the same eight counts.

This is why I have a hard time with the “Hiplet” these young ladies are doing.  It’s not that I cringe at the fusion of ballet and hip hop. But this fusion should recognize and respect the specific attributes that authenticate them both as art forms, and the difficulty of maintaining the key ones (especially in a point shoe) through this merger is tremendous.  To do disservice to point shoe mechanics for the sake of a groove doesn’t make us better or imaginative or new. It makes us irreverent.   Because the truth is that critics, employees and colleagues (myself included) would never have forgiven Dionne had she forsaken classical ballet specificity just because James Brown was screaming on the track.

As much as I’m happy to see my young sisters on Good Morning America, I can’t forgive compromises on ballet technique in this context any more than I can stomach the re-appropriation of hip hop by white folks who lack the information (see third paragraph since a lot of those things apply here too).  Please note the qualification—not all white people, just those who make no effort to understand the origins of hip hop and are unable to connect to whatever rhythmic imperative our black grandmothers involuntarily bopped their heads to.  The reason dancers cringe when we see the theft is that there is profound audacity in building on a dance language when the perpetrator lacks the fundamentals.

In the case of Hiplet, we’re talking about masterful usage of the feet, articulation of the arch, precision on the box, a second-nature relationship with fifth position, and a whole lot of other things that non-dancers would be bored silly reading in this blog. That mastery needs to be there in spades before we get to the butterfly or the cabbage patch. The evidence is there in the first two counts of eight, when the ladies are in place approximating very classical footwork that comes straight from the syllabus.  You shouldn’t fly the plane before you ace the simulator.  You oughtn’t reverse two-and-a-half somersault dive from the platform until you’ve worked out flipping dry in a harness. Most would call it dangerous; so is subjecting an unskilled foot to the precarious nature of toe shoe. The bottom line is that this Hiplet presentation wasn’t ready to put before the five million folks who watch Good Morning America.  

Nor was it ready to be shared on Youtube prior.

So that we’re clear, this is not about shaming young people.   I want these girls to succeed; my investment in the first ever audition for black ballerinas by IABD in January was about seeing that they have places and opportunities to dance professionally.  If Homer is able to profit from this buzz in a way that will result in enrichment, financial opportunities, scholarship and maybe master training for these ladies, fine. I mean them no ill will.  But otherwise, this prematurity does the young ladies in the video few favors.

Consider this:  Misty Copeland, and a slew of her contemporary black colleagues whose names the world unfortunately does not know, honored and respected that point shoe and all the expectations therein.  Every trite expression applies:  She defied the odds. She persevered to make history.  Whatever doors she didn’t break down, she walked through them ready to win.  She did not get there presenting sub-par point technique. This video provides the naysayers, ballet “purists,” and racist gatekeepers of classical ballet a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card for perspectives that impeded Misty’s—and her predecessors'—ascent.

God knows I am so happy that Homer Bryant has, like several dance teachers with fewer resources than they deserve, taken up the mantle of bringing young people to dance. And God bless him for opening his mind to ways of keeping kids invested. But there has to be a balance (pun intended) between reach and integrity—and if anybody wants to find funding, I’d be happy to fashion a solution that will get these kids closer to this balance, along with the fusion they are after.

In the meantime, can we stay out of cockpits and off of diving boards, shall we? 

Inspiration

I was only in the plush Uber for three minutes when SIRI announced over the speaker: “Bitch, oh you faking today, huh. Okay.”

There was a lot to process but before I could get it together, the dreadlocked brother driving said, “I’m so sorry about that man. My girl issues all up in the car. Faking? This thing said ‘bitch’ so it might as well have done ‘fucking’…”

Then I put it together completely.  And without a complete re-hashing of my war on technology, this moment reaffirmed that at the very least, conveniences like automated text message notification sharing in the car creates a management problem.

Especially if you’re an Uber driver.

With a rider. 

Who was at this point laughing hysterically.

“It’s all good, man, no worries,” I said.  “Sometimes they get upset…”   Yes, I know it was terrible to egg him on, but I was leaving DC, where I had spent the majority of the week investigating how a 2013 conversation between Melissa Harris-Perry and bell hooks about black female voices could be fleshed out with movement on six black women dancers at Howard University.  For the third time in my career, I had completely cast aside male perspectives (including my own, to a certain extent) to make something resonant about women; I deserved to hear this dude.

“I met her at the club and she was supposed to be a one-night stand. She caught me off guard. I’m not gone’ lie. It’s like when I’m dealing with her I’m dealing with myself.  I’m used to sticking with my normal thing.”

“What’s the normal thing?”

“I call it Build-a-Bitch.”  Uh oh.  “You take a six or seven and turn her into an eight.  I don’t mess with females that are too established because they start acting like you need them.  This one is established. She’s a sweetheart but she been through a lot with men and it’s made her cold. But you know, I’m feeling shit for her now, so I might have screwed up.”

Whoops. Maybe not this dude. 

“She got me all messed up man. And then there’s my girl…”

“By that you mean the one you’re with?”

“Yeah, yeah, you know the one I been kicking it with for years.  But we’ve been through a lot. Trying to live together, working stuff out and but the chick that texted is pissed I’m still boning old girl…”

I was riveted. I had missed the last few episodes of Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder, so this was delicious.  But I had to make sure I had taken care of business first.

“I told you Dulles, right?”

“Yeah man, and don’t worry. I’ll get you there.  People always trip when they find out I’m a paraplegic because when I’m driving this car, I gets it in.”

He was proud for sure, articulating five syllables of paraplegic (you didn’t know there were five?) as if saying Heisman Trophy winner. This is when I peered into the front seat to see the hand controls.

“Did it cost you a lot to get this car hooked up for that?” I asked.

“Get it hooked up? It would have cost $1500 to get it hooked up. But I did it myself for $300.”

It’s important to note that I gave myself a quiet mental reminder to apologize to everyone who loves me for getting cozier in the car instead of pulling him over right away in exchange for a new Uber. I figured with yet another 501c3 needing me to perform (for love) services they could not afford, God probably was going to keep me on the planet intact for a while longer, so I wasn’t worried.  

Despite the hubris, and the sexism, and the irony, and the presumptuousness, I clearly had a lot to glean from this experience.  Here was a man who did not have a mastery of a specific trade, or English, or full usage of his legs. Yet he did not share my deficiency of ego.  It made me start to wonder where in the path of artistic development did my legs—like those of so many dancers—surpass my ego’s capacity for admiring what they can do.

“…yeah I’m not looking for nothing. I just wanted to show her there are good dudes out there. But, I had to ask for more. I opened Pandora’s Box and I guess you have to be prepared for whatever comes out of it…”

On some level, this man was an inspiration for my ego to do better.  It is finally time to do everything I need to do for self.

“…then I got beat up by her son…”

“Naw man, really?”

“Look, no man in his right mind is going to watch a kid disrespect his mama. I called him on that shit and he knocked me out of my chair, and got to swinging. He’s a teenager so I told his mama to get him to stand down cuz if I had rolled over on his ass it would have been game over…”

Yes. The one-man show that I sat down one summer three years ago and wrote finally needed to happen. Because if this man could dance, or do a shushunova, or tumble a combination pass, he would be a superstar.  Actually, with social media the major life-connecting artery that it is, he still might be one anyway; it turns out his paralysis is temporary. 

“Once I get through this physical therapy, I’ll be back walking again, man. I’ma miss the footage I get from my iphone from my chair height though. I be pretending I’m texting and I get the good ass shots. They don’t even be knowing.”

My show. It’s coming.