I felt this article was crucial to development of dance everywhere.
Dance as Activism: Questions for a Little Black Girl
By Carol Marie Webster
Preface: The Girl and The Dance
Scene one
Lights Up: Her petite six-year-old 3’ cocoa-brown body steps onstage from
behind the left curtain. Clad in black tights that stop at her ankles and a
yellow t-shirt that hangs to mid-thigh, she exudes nervous innocence. The
audience - made up primarily of parents, family members and friends of the
young girl and the other, yet to be seen performers - applauds generously.
In the next moment the young girl bounces her body across the stage. Bare
feet and heals lifted she takes each step of her rehearsed walk with
melodious sass; her hips and arms swing from side to side in reckless
abandon. Her torso twists and lulls the air around her as she moves through
the space. When she reaches center stage, she stops and faces the audience.
For a moment she gazes back at us. Her face appears to mirror ours:
demanding, filled with expectation, filled with anticipation, filled with a cry to
be entertained; yet, she appears to be analyzing each crease and crevice of
the mass our muddled bodies create against the glare of the bright stage
light. (She is probably just trying to see her parents.) This pause is only the
length of a short sigh. This pause is an eternity. She breaks the silence,
circles her torso and her neck. She, then, simultaneously tosses her right
hand to her hips, her left hand to her head, flicks her head upward and
freezes. The audience irrupts, roars, stomp feet, hands slap violently
together. Black out.
Introduction
What is community art activism as it relates to the embodied discipline of
dance in 21st Century America? In this paper, I query whether dance can be
used as a pedagogical tool to unmask racist, colonialist, sexist and classist
practices; inform revolutionary identities; and reinvigorate communities to
build and/or resurrect foundational structures that honor, dignify and
empower the community as a whole and each individual member wholly. I
focus on girls and women of African ancestry (Black or/and African-American
girls and women) in their encounter with dance in the social-justice and
community-activist initiatives. My concerns are: (1) the intensification of the
hypersexualization of the Black female body in contemporary United States
cultural discourse; (2) the new and pervasive forms of cultural humiliation
and violence exacted upon the Black female body; (3) the implication of both
for the formation of Black female individual and community identity. Using
critical social/cultural theories, womanist methodologies and performance-
studies approaches, and drawing on interviews conducted with M’Bewe
Escobar, C. S’thembile West, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, I examine case
studies of community arts activists who employ dance as a primary tool for
critical social/cultural interrogation and community building. As a dance
artist, an African-Caribbean woman and a social/cultural activist who uses
dance as a critical tool, I am situated in the midst of this conversation.
Intertwined in and interpenetrating through the concerns put forth in this
paper are the questions that stirred at the 2008 National Community Arts
Convening & Research Project Conference. Responses to questions such as
where do you come from, where are you rooted, what is your passion for this
work, and why are you here, inform encounters, curriculum, expectations,
notions of power, beauty, and justice. These and other pertinent questions
are explicitly and implicitly addressed in this paper.
The notion of community, broad and controversial as it is, is in this paper
used to denote gatherings of persons with shared interests and investment in
the maintenance of a collective in which honor, dignity and human flourishing
are diligently upheld and the notion of revolutionary love is infused in all
aspect of public and private encounter (hooks 2000, xv; Phillips 2006). With
this in mind, it is impossible to have a community in which private or public
denigration of self or others is a prerequisite for belonging (Guijt, Shah 25).
In such instances, other terms such as club, group, fraternity, sorority,
neighborhood, town, city and even society (where there is no prerequisite for
dignity or consciously engaged living) are likely more applicable. Hence, in
this paper it is understood that sitting at the same table (living in the same
neighborhood, attending the same public gathering) is not a marker that a
community has been or has the intention of being formed; shared space does
not organically imply community (Guijt, Shah 25).
Methodology
The methodologies used in this paper were chosen for their tendency to
privilege lived experience. Critical social/cultural theories facilitate a reflexive
examination of the ways in which social and cultural discourses are formed,
informed and impact the lives and life possibilities of persons within a given
society (Feagin 5).
Womanist methodologies draw on tools from various disciplines but its center
of gravity is the lives and concerns of ordinary Black women. The feminist
agenda has not always valued the lives and concerns of women of color. On
numerous occasions, in the attempt to access and exercise power, feminists
have consciously worked to the detriment of the lives and concerns of
women of color: womanism offers a corrective to addressing structures of
oppression without architecting additional displacement of the oppressed.
With its center of gravity in the daily lives of ordinary Black women, ethics
and spirituality are at the core womanist methodologies. Hence, it offers
alternative modes and lenses for locating and negotiating power and
oppression, while it holds the affirming of dignified lives, individual and
community reflexive self-evaluation, ethical and spiritual responsibility, and
the building up of holistic communities at the center of its praxis (Phillips).
Performance-studies approaches, because the focus on what actually takes
place in the negotiation of life, offer the opportunity to explore the way in
which Black women’s encounter with dance in community-building,
community activism and social-justice work can empower, undermine,
inform, transform, silence and/or frustrate possibilities for voice (Turner 40).
The Artists
The artists interviewed for this paper are Black women who facilitate
encounters in community building and social/cultural activism. They are
dance professionals who have (or have had) extensive performing careers
and are active social/cultural activist, community builders and cultural
practitioners with more than 30 years of experience. M’bewe Escobar, a
teaching artist, is affiliated with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater/Ailey
Camp. She works largely with elementary and secondary school children.
C.S’thembile West is a professor in the Women’s Studies Department at West
Illinois University and dance writer. She works chiefly with young adults and
women. Jawole Willa Jo Zollar is the founder and artistic director of Urban
Bush Women Dance Company. She works primarily in multigenerational
community settings.
Why Dance?
Dance as a pedagogical tool is ripe with possibilities. Dance brings the
troubling question of embodiment to the center of conversation and keeps it
there. Since it requires the use of the body, it can offer up occasions for
persons to act as subjects who name and define themselves and their
environment. Dance calls on the practical-use multiple intelligences
(including kinesthetic, music, intra- and interpersonal, spatial, logic, linguistic
and nature intelligences), thus it offers up options for cultivating critically
engaged social actors and cultural producers. Dance involves the calling forth
of steps/movement sequences from cultural and social activities of the
immediate and distant past, thus it can offer the chance for affirming,
questioning, re-interpreting and re-visioning social memory. Dance offers a
way of learning that etches deep into bones and expands beyond the horizon
of dreams.
Educators Paulo Freire, Joanne Kilgour Dowdy, Lisa Delpit, Donaldo Macedo
and Lilia I. Bartolome point to freedom as essential to education: They point
to the formation/re-formulation of individual and community understanding
of self, society and the world as necessary to the process and goal of
education. Dance as a pedagogical tool provides opportunities for this type of
deep learning encounter, a liberating process (Freire 16).
Contemporary United States culture, with its embrace and appropriation of
the misogynistic aspects of hip-hop culture, reveals some of the ways dance
can be used to stifle freedom. Young people (Black, white, brown and others)
are. through the guise of entertainment, indoctrinated into this oppressive
system (Hobgood 2000, 4). Coerced by the “hype” and the desire to be “with
it,” young people, and those who seek to align themselves with youth
culture, perpetuate the oppression of themselves and others (Mullins 2005,
684). By inscribing and symbolically infusing Black bodies with derogatory
messages that announces as innate degrading ways of being in the world,
contemporary United States culture circumscribe the Black person’s
possibilities for experience and expression in the world (Sharp 2000, 290).
Moreover, the Black female body is displaced from familial and community
love, honor and safety and re-positioned as commodity on the grand
capitalist marketplace that resembles, all too closely, the slave auction block.
Dance and Society
In “Society and the Dance: The Social Anthropology and Process of
Performance,” anthropologist Peter Brinson identifies dance as an important
tool in the analysis of society (207-215). Long before Brinson, Zora Neale
Hurston used dance as one of her primary tools for critical social and cultural
inquiry of the United States’ South. Since then cultural practitioners,
including anthropologists, artists and educators, have drawn on dance to
construct a lens through which to interrogate social, cultural and popular
society and thought. Artists and educators such as Lavinia Williams, Pearl
Primus, Eleo Pomare, Joe Nash, Alvin Ailey and Katherine Dunham were part
of cultural movements that, through dance, queried the universalistic
aestheticism of dance in the West and the implication of such aestheticism
for social, cultural, gender and racial politicking. Why was aesthetics so
critically important to these scholars, artists, community activists and social-
justice workers? How does aesthetics relate to the crucial topics of social
justice and community building?
Aesthetics
Because when you speak of beauty, you’re really talking about what it is to
be human. When you find the core of humanity inside yourself, that’s when
you know you are beautiful.
Sonia Sanchez (Byrd, Solomon)
Aesthetics is at the foundational core of every society. It informs the ways in
which a given society embraces and understands itself and encounters
others. Hence, it informs the construction of community and family, concepts
of justice and honor, notions of responsibility and trust (Hobson 10; Reischer,
Koo 298). A culture’s aesthetic sensibility is in performance in every crease
and crevice of individual and community life. Yet, aesthetic sensibilities are
so common places, so taken-for-granted within the culture of a given society
that it becomes invisible, unquestionably “real” and unquestionably “logical.”
It remains so until the questions bubbling within the undergirth of the
unquestionable slide through the society’s fissures.
Nowhere is aesthetics more visible, more provocatively apparent, more
performative than in the places/spaces in which a society is at odds with
itself, and consequently at odds with those it labels “Other” (Yancy). It is in
these places/spaces that taken-for-granted understandings are unmasked,
latent questions hungry to be articulated explode from their hiding place, and
the unquestionables are asked to account for themselves. These
spaces/places are fertile ground for hitherto unimagined possibilities;
possibilities for encountering the world in innovative ways, possibilities to
discover, rediscover and/or reconfigure old formulas in order to respond to,
inform and/or challenge new circumstance, or old circumstance in new guise.
In most societies the arts play the crucial role of making visible, nurturing
and promoting the culture’s aesthetic sensibilities, articulating its most
deeply held beliefs about itself and others and passing on to each new
generation the society’s aesthetic sensibilities (Hobson 9).
Black Women in the United States
Scene Two
Lights Up: She had worn a sports bra and two leotards below her costume,
but Irene Black[*] did not escape this comment by a church leader: “The
dance was nice but a third of the way through, I was distracted by the
outline of your nipples on your blouse when you sweat. It took away from my
spiritual meditation. When you dance, I think it would be good if you and the
other dancers duck tape your breast under your bra, leotards and costume.
Then, your nipples will not make an outline when you sweat. Then, you
would be less distracting to the congregation; we can then focus on the
spiritual message of the dance.”
In contemporary western societies the Black female body is positioned at
thresholds: She stands on the pulse between animal and human sinner and
divinely burdened, reproached and deeply desired. She is gendered and
raced, raced with sexualized violence, gendered with racialized brutality. She
is the recipient of a sacralized hostility that endorses relentless cultural
violence (Burton 8; Gilkes 242).
Forcibly displayed naked on public auction blocks during the time of
enslavement, Black women were the first women in the United States to
endure socially and culturally sanctioned public sexual exploitation, sexual
humiliation, sexual abuse and sexual violence (Gilkes 242). Notions of her
sexual availability and sexual appetite, a legal system that support and
promoted enslavement and a society that did not apply its moral barometer
to its encounter with the lives of the enslaved resulted in the unquestioned
use and abuse of her body (West 66). Slaveholder were neither legally nor
morally culpable for the treatment exacted on Black women’s bodies (Hill
56). The end of the slavery did not bring ease to the derogatory images and
myths inscribed on the Black female body. It can be argued that these
images and myths were, instead, intensified (Hobson 119).
Inform Revolutionary Identities
Scene Three
My hair is a midterm; you have to study it to know me. You have to study it
to know ME!
In June of 2007 at the closing exchange ceremony for the two-week trial
Alvin Ailey Dance-Camp in Atlanta, Georgia, an elementary-school girl of
African ancestry delivered the above line of her poem. In her statement she
flipped the conversation around race, Black femaleness and power: She
imagined that knowledge (not usability or instrumentality) of her being was
somehow desirable; she imagined that the desire was fueled with passion
that could (and certainly did) catalyze commitment, investment and
patience; she imagined that the local knowledge of herself (Low, Lawerence-
Zuinga 79), which she possessed in consciousness and in ancestral knowing
systems, is valuable; she imagined that she has the power to orchestrate
whether or not and under what circumstance and manner this knowledge of
herself is let known to those outside of herself, regardless of color, gender,
class, ethnicity or religion; she imagined that within the landscape of the
contemporary United States she is a person in her own right. This little Black
girl, in her audaciousness, follows in an honorary line of truth tellers,
performing herself in much the same way Sojourner Truth did when she
flipped the script, articulated a definition of herself and her place in the
world, and forced her white audience to, for a revolutionary moment, see her
as she saw and lived herself (Brooks 50).
This little girl of African ancestry, a little Black girl living in the big white
United States, vocalized a power and presence that much of hip-hop culture
and Don Imus and much of the contemporary United States have built
hegemony against (West 66). When this little girl breaks into her dance,
with her twists, whines, spins, jumps, falls, convolutions and
counterrevolutions, bounces and ripples and breezes, she is, for herself,
intermingled in conversation with the revolutionary spirit of her present and
ancestral selves, carving through the past, present, and future and creating
dynamic presence through informed performed performance.
Callings Outside Our Names
On April 4, 2007, Don Imus, a controversial national radio host, referred to
the group of young Black women who made up the successful Rutgers
University women’s basketball team in racial and sexual derogatory terms. In
his defense, he claimed the ordinariness of such statements within present-
day United States culture. The young Black women, the recipients of Don
Imus’ verbal attack, were asked to endure the burden of living lives as Black
women in the United States. They were expected to, and did, carry this
unearned burden of normalized cultural humiliation and violence with the
stoic grace of “the strong Black woman” and play their already scripted roles
on the national and international stage (Hobgood 4).
Mainstream United States culture has normalized the public denigration of
Black girls and women. Don Imus was not speaking against the grain when
he expressed his “controversial” thoughts in April 2007 (Feagin 14). His
reinstatement back onto the airwaves in the latter months of the same year
speaks more of the okay-ness of his popular gesturing than to any equity in
the judicial system of popular and legal thought and culture. I would not
deny that there is always, somewhere, a resistance to vulgar displays in
popular culture. Such resistance to this aspect of contemporary United States
culture is at best cursory, emanating from the whispers of tired older women
and men or the quivering utterances of shell-shocked middle-aged
professionals. My question here is: What happens when vulgar displays and,
what Joseph Conrad called the corruption of human conscience, become
normative, accepted as central to the culture’s understanding of itself?
Troubling the performativity of Don Imus’ gesturing, a little Black girl defines
herself and her world, effectively trumping the Imus script. Who is this little
Black girl who professes knowledge of the complexities of her hair as the
requirement for knowing her, of knowing how she understands herself and
her place in the world? Who is this little Black girl, whose complicated and
tenacious hair - much like her cocoa-brown body - has throughout United
States history been the object of ridicule, derogation and confusion? Her hair,
identified as “a problem,” requires a multimillion-dollar industry to solve it.
Her hair, a symbol of both her grace and her curse, is hair that dares to be
regardless. Her hair, much like her dancing body, which she refuses to
pathologize, is, indeed, an icon of her present and future selves; daring to be
regardless (Phillips 9; Yancy).
But, who is this little Black girl for those who have been drilled daily, from
birth to the grave, to carve up her body and negate her personhood
(Macedo, Bartolome 4; Phillips 9)? Her breasts (not yet formed), her thighs,
her womb, her lips, neck, hair and eyes and the space between her thighs
are all eroticized, exotized, instrumentalized and commercialized (Gilkes
242). She is what Fred Moten calls the “commodity who talks” (Moten). In
this case, she is the commodity who “talks back” through her dance and her
vocal capacity. Anna K. Perkins points to the Black woman’s voice as her
primary and perennial weapon against injustice. A Black woman may not
posses economic strengthen, social status or political power but her voice
(embodied and spoken) is always hers; and her inherited legacy of resistance
requires her to “talk back” to protect herself and her family, to make visible
and interrogate society’s unquestionables, to declare words and deeds
unacceptable, to challenge and unmask the various mutations of isms the
society is vested in, and to assert and affirm her dignity, honor and integrity.
Communities: Interview Excerpts
Scene Four
M’Bewe Escobar on her work with young people:
I have a lot of contact with elementary- and middle-school students. Young
people self-express to find out who they are, to find a voice for themselves,
to find their identity. Dance can help them to see a way to find a place in the
world.
I notice that that the girls’ clothing are tight, their expressions are bound,
their throats are bound. Their movement expression is limited by the
tightness of their clothes. I am always surprised at how the boys are ready to
move. There are always shy ones but most eventually come around. But, the
girls are binding themselves.
One of my questions about hip-hop has to do with whether or not it has been
a beneficial influence on our children. I have heard it said that hip-hop tells it
like it is; that the message of hip-hop is about black culture. In one way I
see it as potentially very, very powerful. However, the overwhelming
message I have heard I do not enjoy. I think it has been denigrating towards
Black girls and women, denigrating towards young Black boys as well,
offering props to young black male to go ahead and denigrate. I think it has
been very negative.
Wow, when these young people see these images of their idols, not benign
nudity, it's very sexual. They want to mirror it.
I feel that that binding blocks them of their mental, emotional, spiritual and
sensual freedom; all that binding shuts them down. I say, “Isn’t that
exploitation?” In my mind it is. They have been taught to exploit themselves;
they are in service to their icons. Why are our young girls taught that? It's
very difficult to get them to see something different.
Art is encountering young people, hearing them.
C. S’thembile West on her recent work with young adult women:
My foundation is that we live every part of our lives through our bodies. We
need to identify who we are in our bodies. When we self -identify we begin
to find out who we are in our bodies. We become aware of how our bodies
feel and become aware of what others feel.
Our bodies can be sites of protest. All the work that we produce is always a
social commentary. That's how I see African-American dance. Even though
some of these young people, who will not articulate anything of what I am
talking about, I see it in the dances. You know how some of the dance moves
are like something is being pushed off? I think that is it the structures of the
society that are being pushed off.
You have to be realistic and you don't want to turn them off at the first class.
One girl kept saying: I can’t do this. I told her, it's as simple as deciding you
can. This work is much more than trying to teach a dance position or step.
The body is a reflection of what your mind is doing.
In a context where any kind of touch is sexual, then it is a difficult when we
put people in a room [the dance studio] where suddenly the body is not
supposed to be a taboo.
[With dance] you control what you want, so you can listen to other parts of
your body, you want to come to some type of synthesis.
When we say justice, we are talking about change. We want people to live in
dignity. I can't decide what part of this class you should hold dearest. We
need to think carefully about how we live. There is a ripple, do you want your
ripple to be one that causes global warming or retards it.
Jawole Willa Jo Zollar describes a project done in New Orleans:
I look at my work as working through two mediums: 1) concert stage where
the artistic really gets into the work and 2) the community art where the
building of community is central. There are two different types of logic
looking at serving a larger community in relation to issues that want to be
brought to the surface, want to be told, and collaboration not just with the
dancers on the stage but with the community. In order for dancer to
collaborate there has to be a break from the model of do what you are told.
There has to be pure dialogue and respect between artists. We have to be
able to interact in peace.
Building and exiting community is a leadership model of how you enter a
space of the unknown with respect for history of the community, where the
community is, and where the community wants to go.
1) Research/prep work is necessary. You need to find out where the
leadership, where it has been, where does it see itself going, and, 2) the
work that you do together to listen. Research is in process; it is ongoing.
Question like: What do you free? What has been destroyed? Who’s coming
back who's not? Not just sitting at a table” The building of community is
through this art making experience together. In ways that everyone can see
what is unearthing. Questions are revealed through a continuous process.
There is point where the performance gets the focus, and afterwards there is,
3) the debriefing: In the debriefing we discuss what we learn. What were the
things that didn't get addressed? What is the community’s next step? We are
going leave, what will you carry forward/how can we assist you?
Implicit in what all three artists shared about their experiences in community
arts activism is the notion that community is, and should be, a space in
which dignity, honor and individual and communal flourishing are upheld, a
place where revolutionary love drives each and every interaction, a place
where no individual’s sense of belongingness is predicated upon the
denegation of self and/or other.
Interrogating popular hip-hop culture, M’Bewe Escobar views the tight
clothing young girls are encouraged to wear as binding not only to their
bodies but also to their minds, obstructing their ability to self-express, voice
their presences and concerns in the world. By capturing the imaginations of
young Black girls, popular culture indoctrinates the girls into patterns of
social constraints. Limitation on the ways in which young Black girls are
allowed to define, identify and assert themselves, are promoted through a
one-dimensional view of Black womanhood (Emerson120). This view of Black
womanhood is hypersexualized and morally tenuous (Hobson 10). As Escobar
points out, the nudity promoted by popular hip-hop culture is not “benign
nudity; it is very sexual.” This sexual objectification, where sexuality,
sensuality and spirituality are violently torn apart from one another and
sexuality is highlighted at the cost of personhood and holistic beingness, is a
repetitive pattern in United States culture’s dealing with regards to Black
femaleness.
For Escobar, young women are taught to bind themselves in tight clothing
that simulates the nudity of their popular hip-hop idols. This carries negative
consequences for voice; it carries negative consequences for young Black
girls’ ability to self-express, their ability to “talk back.” In essence, it
negatively impacts young Black girls’ ability to assert themselves in defense
of themselves against various forms of injustices.
In her workshops, Escobar engage young girls about their clothing, help
them to identify types of clothing that would allow them the greater
movement possibility. In so doing, Escobar helps young Black girls to give
themselves permission to experience presence, voice and personal growth
within the space of the dance studio with the hope that this will propel the
freeing of their imagination, the embracing of opportunities to experience,
explore and engage the world in new and transformative ways.
Highlighting the body as foundational to the experience of life, C. S’thembile
West notes: “When we self-identify we begin to find out who we are in our
bodies. We become aware of how our bodies feel, and become aware of what
others feel.” Conscious engagement in the body is essential to an individual’s
personal development and growth, and crucial to the ways in which
individuals encounter others, build community and build societies. The body
as a site of “social commentary” is a provocative space. West points to a
history of African Americans’ use of the body though its popular dances to
comment on, contest and resist dominant white society’s script about their
identities and lives (West 68). In her work, West encourages young women
to explore and develop movement vocabulary that speaks of all aspects of
their lives, to choose when sexuality is the topic of
conversation/commentary, and to be informed by justice in their voice and
actions (West 2005, 66). West notes: “In the context of movement, each
encounter with another dance provides an opportunity to distill learning and
to ‘try on’ new kinesthetic clothing: nuance, insinuation, attitude, feeling,
sense and intelligence” (West 66).
For this reason, West does her homework, not wanting to “turn students off”
on their first visit to the dance studio, West judiciously employs music from
popular hip-hop culture, choosing the artist and message with care. Sifting
through popular hip-hop music to find the right artist or songs is not easy: “I
wince because it [the messages in the music] just go through me. I am not
trying to validate it, but I at least have to hear it. It's like I need to know
what the porn is, but I don't have to sanction it.” In this way, West is able to
make herself available to extend a genuine invitation to young Black women,
meeting them where they are. But also meeting them in a space where she is
safe, hence tending to the essential activity of self-care while working on the
project of building community. Building on an initial encounter in which she
and her young adult participants are honored, West introduces spirituality
and justice into the movement and verbal conversation. She encourages
young Black women to expand their expressive vocabulary, so that they
empower themselves to move beyond the confines of popular hip-hop culture
and contemporary United States cultural rhetoric about their bodies, their
lives, their power and their voices. West speaks from a deeply rooted
African-American spiritual base that she hopes will be passed on to the
young Black women she encounters.
In her multigenerational community arts encounters, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar
applies a three-pronged method: (1) Research/Prep Work, (2) Listening
together and (3) Debriefing.
Research/Prep work is the time taken before entering the community to find
out about the community’s current situation, its history, its identity. By
making contact with designated community leaders, insight is given into
where the community sees itself going.
Listening and creating together requires work from all participants. It is
through deep listening that members of the community come to know each
other better, engage in the building of art that reflects the interests/concerns
of the community, and develop or rediscover skills that promote the
community’s well-being. Zollar notes, “The building of community is through
this art-making experience together.” This moment of collaboration is
potentially transformative. Collaboration, whether it is with dance-company
members or with members of the site community, the requirements are the
same: respect for the views and ideas of others, and willingness to engage in
the discovery and creativity necessary for bringing ideas together. For Zollar,
collaboration does not find its center in compromise, it finds its center in pure
dialogue.
Debriefing takes place after the artwork has been exhibited. It is here that
community participants discuss what they have learned, what was not
brought into discussion, and how the community will continue on. Calling
attention to the finitude of the workshop, Zollar reminds the site community:
“We are going leave. What will you carry forward? How can we assist you?
Zollar’s community-building work allows participants to engage in deep
learning and bonding with others in the community through the shared
experience of art making. By providing common ground in which respect and
dignity of each community member is upheld and equally valued, individuals
are more likely to voice their interests and concerns. In so doing, Zollar’s
notion of “pure dialogue” is made possible. Pure dialogue becomes the
instrument for the creation of an authentic community artwork. In the art-
making space facilitated by Zollar and her company, the youthful voices of
young people are as valued and honored as the seasoned voices of their
elders, the potential for shared experiences, knowledge and wisdom is made
possible. Such a space offers possibilities for the “unearthing” of that which
stirs in the undercurrent of the community, opening up the hope for healing
and transformation. Having engaged in a model of deep collaboration
informed by pure dialogue, these skills now become a part of the
community’s local knowledge base, tools to call on in order to carry on the
necessary healing and building work outside the workshop space.
Conclusion
Based on the insights put forward by Escobar, West and Zollar the little Black
girl in performance in Scene One, the young Black woman in Scene Two, and
the little Black girl in Scene Three can, when paired with facilitators conscious
of the world Black girls and women are asked to negotiate, 1) find, in the
embodied practice of dance, space/place to discover themselves, locate and
articulate their voices, and engage in embodied critical social commentary;
2) learn the skills necessary for the building up of a spiritual foundation that
ultimately informs notions of justice and empowers Black girls and women to
live in ways that honors their spiritual foundation; and, 3) experience the
powerful affirmation of having a voice, equally valued, in a community made
up of those invested in the maintaining of a collective in which honor, dignity,
and human flourishing are diligently upheld and the notion of revolutionary
love is infused in all aspects of private and public encounter (hooks 2000,
Phillips 2006).
Dance in social justice and community activism holds hope for providing
young Black girls with the necessary skills for negotiating the onslaught of
cultural violence they will encounter. Yet, how do we begin to build a world
where this violence is not a part of their lives?
Black Out: Curtains Close.
Break it Down: The Questions
What are the questions for a Little Black Girl? The questions I have for a
Little Black Girl - the Little Black girl in me and in the mothers, aunts,
friends and other women of age, the Little Black Girl who lives in the present
and carves out the future with deep understanding of and responsibility to
the past, present and future, the Little Black Girl who is the daughter and/or
niece of Jesse Jackson, Lil Boosie, Clarke Howard, Colin Powell, Don Imus,
Spike Lee, Plies, Tiger Woods and Barack Obama; the Little Black Girl who
must speak - my questions are: Is it enough; is training young girls to deal
with the onslaught of anticipated psychic and cultural violence enough? Is it
enough to be ready with the right cutting words or brazen attitudes: is it
enough to be skillfully trained in heart to heart, skin to skin, spirit to spirit,
winner-takes-all vicious combat? Is it acceptable to train the innocence out of
little girls’ hearts in order to protect her souls, enough? At what point is it
unacceptable to continue this program of violence? At what point should
demands for critical, thought-out solutions rupture the complacency of
normalized violations? Is it possible to inspire this society, which at its core is
not invested in the well-being a Little Black Girl or her community, to become
true stakeholders in upholding the human dignity of a Little Black Girl? With
Escobar’s assertion that popular hip-hop culture is “giving props,” rewarding
boys and young men for their denigration of Black girls and women, is it
possible to build a community that takes stock in a Little Black Girl, invested
in her value, her honor, her power and her potential? Is it possible to become
critically constructive architects of a future open to the honor, dignity and
empowerment of the community as a whole and each individual member
wholly? As West notes: “When we say justice, we are talking about change.”
We are talking about embracing an aesthetic notion that resonates in the
honor and dignity of each individual and community. We are talking about
beauty reflected in culture and society, in politics and economy, in
race/ethnic and gender relations. We are talking about the art of building,
healing, and sustaining community.
This essay is part of the Community Arts Convening & Research Project, 2008, funded by a
Nathan Cummings Foundation grant to the Maryland Institute College of Art. The essay was
reviewed and selected by the project's Editorial Board: Ron Bechet, Xavier University of
Louisiana; Lori Hager, University of Oregon; Marina Gutierrez, Cooper Union; Ken Krafchek,
Maryland Institute College of Art; Sonia Mañjon, California College of the Arts; Amalia Mesa-
Bains, California State University Monterey Bay; Paul Teruel, Columbia College Chicago; and
Stephani Woodson, Arizona State University.
Carole Marie Webster is a dance/theater artist, a cultural anthropologist, and theologian.
She uses dance/movement to engage communities in critical reflection and conversation on
issues of gender, race/ethnic, disability and class justice.
[*] In order protect this young Black woman’s identity, the fictitious name Irene Black is used.
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Original CAN/API publication: August 2008!
By Carol Marie Webster
Preface: The Girl and The Dance
Scene one
Lights Up: Her petite six-year-old 3’ cocoa-brown body steps onstage from
behind the left curtain. Clad in black tights that stop at her ankles and a
yellow t-shirt that hangs to mid-thigh, she exudes nervous innocence. The
audience - made up primarily of parents, family members and friends of the
young girl and the other, yet to be seen performers - applauds generously.
In the next moment the young girl bounces her body across the stage. Bare
feet and heals lifted she takes each step of her rehearsed walk with
melodious sass; her hips and arms swing from side to side in reckless
abandon. Her torso twists and lulls the air around her as she moves through
the space. When she reaches center stage, she stops and faces the audience.
For a moment she gazes back at us. Her face appears to mirror ours:
demanding, filled with expectation, filled with anticipation, filled with a cry to
be entertained; yet, she appears to be analyzing each crease and crevice of
the mass our muddled bodies create against the glare of the bright stage
light. (She is probably just trying to see her parents.) This pause is only the
length of a short sigh. This pause is an eternity. She breaks the silence,
circles her torso and her neck. She, then, simultaneously tosses her right
hand to her hips, her left hand to her head, flicks her head upward and
freezes. The audience irrupts, roars, stomp feet, hands slap violently
together. Black out.
Introduction
What is community art activism as it relates to the embodied discipline of
dance in 21st Century America? In this paper, I query whether dance can be
used as a pedagogical tool to unmask racist, colonialist, sexist and classist
practices; inform revolutionary identities; and reinvigorate communities to
build and/or resurrect foundational structures that honor, dignify and
empower the community as a whole and each individual member wholly. I
focus on girls and women of African ancestry (Black or/and African-American
girls and women) in their encounter with dance in the social-justice and
community-activist initiatives. My concerns are: (1) the intensification of the
hypersexualization of the Black female body in contemporary United States
cultural discourse; (2) the new and pervasive forms of cultural humiliation
and violence exacted upon the Black female body; (3) the implication of both
for the formation of Black female individual and community identity. Using
critical social/cultural theories, womanist methodologies and performance-
studies approaches, and drawing on interviews conducted with M’Bewe
Escobar, C. S’thembile West, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, I examine case
studies of community arts activists who employ dance as a primary tool for
critical social/cultural interrogation and community building. As a dance
artist, an African-Caribbean woman and a social/cultural activist who uses
dance as a critical tool, I am situated in the midst of this conversation.
Intertwined in and interpenetrating through the concerns put forth in this
paper are the questions that stirred at the 2008 National Community Arts
Convening & Research Project Conference. Responses to questions such as
where do you come from, where are you rooted, what is your passion for this
work, and why are you here, inform encounters, curriculum, expectations,
notions of power, beauty, and justice. These and other pertinent questions
are explicitly and implicitly addressed in this paper.
The notion of community, broad and controversial as it is, is in this paper
used to denote gatherings of persons with shared interests and investment in
the maintenance of a collective in which honor, dignity and human flourishing
are diligently upheld and the notion of revolutionary love is infused in all
aspect of public and private encounter (hooks 2000, xv; Phillips 2006). With
this in mind, it is impossible to have a community in which private or public
denigration of self or others is a prerequisite for belonging (Guijt, Shah 25).
In such instances, other terms such as club, group, fraternity, sorority,
neighborhood, town, city and even society (where there is no prerequisite for
dignity or consciously engaged living) are likely more applicable. Hence, in
this paper it is understood that sitting at the same table (living in the same
neighborhood, attending the same public gathering) is not a marker that a
community has been or has the intention of being formed; shared space does
not organically imply community (Guijt, Shah 25).
Methodology
The methodologies used in this paper were chosen for their tendency to
privilege lived experience. Critical social/cultural theories facilitate a reflexive
examination of the ways in which social and cultural discourses are formed,
informed and impact the lives and life possibilities of persons within a given
society (Feagin 5).
Womanist methodologies draw on tools from various disciplines but its center
of gravity is the lives and concerns of ordinary Black women. The feminist
agenda has not always valued the lives and concerns of women of color. On
numerous occasions, in the attempt to access and exercise power, feminists
have consciously worked to the detriment of the lives and concerns of
women of color: womanism offers a corrective to addressing structures of
oppression without architecting additional displacement of the oppressed.
With its center of gravity in the daily lives of ordinary Black women, ethics
and spirituality are at the core womanist methodologies. Hence, it offers
alternative modes and lenses for locating and negotiating power and
oppression, while it holds the affirming of dignified lives, individual and
community reflexive self-evaluation, ethical and spiritual responsibility, and
the building up of holistic communities at the center of its praxis (Phillips).
Performance-studies approaches, because the focus on what actually takes
place in the negotiation of life, offer the opportunity to explore the way in
which Black women’s encounter with dance in community-building,
community activism and social-justice work can empower, undermine,
inform, transform, silence and/or frustrate possibilities for voice (Turner 40).
The Artists
The artists interviewed for this paper are Black women who facilitate
encounters in community building and social/cultural activism. They are
dance professionals who have (or have had) extensive performing careers
and are active social/cultural activist, community builders and cultural
practitioners with more than 30 years of experience. M’bewe Escobar, a
teaching artist, is affiliated with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater/Ailey
Camp. She works largely with elementary and secondary school children.
C.S’thembile West is a professor in the Women’s Studies Department at West
Illinois University and dance writer. She works chiefly with young adults and
women. Jawole Willa Jo Zollar is the founder and artistic director of Urban
Bush Women Dance Company. She works primarily in multigenerational
community settings.
Why Dance?
Dance as a pedagogical tool is ripe with possibilities. Dance brings the
troubling question of embodiment to the center of conversation and keeps it
there. Since it requires the use of the body, it can offer up occasions for
persons to act as subjects who name and define themselves and their
environment. Dance calls on the practical-use multiple intelligences
(including kinesthetic, music, intra- and interpersonal, spatial, logic, linguistic
and nature intelligences), thus it offers up options for cultivating critically
engaged social actors and cultural producers. Dance involves the calling forth
of steps/movement sequences from cultural and social activities of the
immediate and distant past, thus it can offer the chance for affirming,
questioning, re-interpreting and re-visioning social memory. Dance offers a
way of learning that etches deep into bones and expands beyond the horizon
of dreams.
Educators Paulo Freire, Joanne Kilgour Dowdy, Lisa Delpit, Donaldo Macedo
and Lilia I. Bartolome point to freedom as essential to education: They point
to the formation/re-formulation of individual and community understanding
of self, society and the world as necessary to the process and goal of
education. Dance as a pedagogical tool provides opportunities for this type of
deep learning encounter, a liberating process (Freire 16).
Contemporary United States culture, with its embrace and appropriation of
the misogynistic aspects of hip-hop culture, reveals some of the ways dance
can be used to stifle freedom. Young people (Black, white, brown and others)
are. through the guise of entertainment, indoctrinated into this oppressive
system (Hobgood 2000, 4). Coerced by the “hype” and the desire to be “with
it,” young people, and those who seek to align themselves with youth
culture, perpetuate the oppression of themselves and others (Mullins 2005,
684). By inscribing and symbolically infusing Black bodies with derogatory
messages that announces as innate degrading ways of being in the world,
contemporary United States culture circumscribe the Black person’s
possibilities for experience and expression in the world (Sharp 2000, 290).
Moreover, the Black female body is displaced from familial and community
love, honor and safety and re-positioned as commodity on the grand
capitalist marketplace that resembles, all too closely, the slave auction block.
Dance and Society
In “Society and the Dance: The Social Anthropology and Process of
Performance,” anthropologist Peter Brinson identifies dance as an important
tool in the analysis of society (207-215). Long before Brinson, Zora Neale
Hurston used dance as one of her primary tools for critical social and cultural
inquiry of the United States’ South. Since then cultural practitioners,
including anthropologists, artists and educators, have drawn on dance to
construct a lens through which to interrogate social, cultural and popular
society and thought. Artists and educators such as Lavinia Williams, Pearl
Primus, Eleo Pomare, Joe Nash, Alvin Ailey and Katherine Dunham were part
of cultural movements that, through dance, queried the universalistic
aestheticism of dance in the West and the implication of such aestheticism
for social, cultural, gender and racial politicking. Why was aesthetics so
critically important to these scholars, artists, community activists and social-
justice workers? How does aesthetics relate to the crucial topics of social
justice and community building?
Aesthetics
Because when you speak of beauty, you’re really talking about what it is to
be human. When you find the core of humanity inside yourself, that’s when
you know you are beautiful.
Sonia Sanchez (Byrd, Solomon)
Aesthetics is at the foundational core of every society. It informs the ways in
which a given society embraces and understands itself and encounters
others. Hence, it informs the construction of community and family, concepts
of justice and honor, notions of responsibility and trust (Hobson 10; Reischer,
Koo 298). A culture’s aesthetic sensibility is in performance in every crease
and crevice of individual and community life. Yet, aesthetic sensibilities are
so common places, so taken-for-granted within the culture of a given society
that it becomes invisible, unquestionably “real” and unquestionably “logical.”
It remains so until the questions bubbling within the undergirth of the
unquestionable slide through the society’s fissures.
Nowhere is aesthetics more visible, more provocatively apparent, more
performative than in the places/spaces in which a society is at odds with
itself, and consequently at odds with those it labels “Other” (Yancy). It is in
these places/spaces that taken-for-granted understandings are unmasked,
latent questions hungry to be articulated explode from their hiding place, and
the unquestionables are asked to account for themselves. These
spaces/places are fertile ground for hitherto unimagined possibilities;
possibilities for encountering the world in innovative ways, possibilities to
discover, rediscover and/or reconfigure old formulas in order to respond to,
inform and/or challenge new circumstance, or old circumstance in new guise.
In most societies the arts play the crucial role of making visible, nurturing
and promoting the culture’s aesthetic sensibilities, articulating its most
deeply held beliefs about itself and others and passing on to each new
generation the society’s aesthetic sensibilities (Hobson 9).
Black Women in the United States
Scene Two
Lights Up: She had worn a sports bra and two leotards below her costume,
but Irene Black[*] did not escape this comment by a church leader: “The
dance was nice but a third of the way through, I was distracted by the
outline of your nipples on your blouse when you sweat. It took away from my
spiritual meditation. When you dance, I think it would be good if you and the
other dancers duck tape your breast under your bra, leotards and costume.
Then, your nipples will not make an outline when you sweat. Then, you
would be less distracting to the congregation; we can then focus on the
spiritual message of the dance.”
In contemporary western societies the Black female body is positioned at
thresholds: She stands on the pulse between animal and human sinner and
divinely burdened, reproached and deeply desired. She is gendered and
raced, raced with sexualized violence, gendered with racialized brutality. She
is the recipient of a sacralized hostility that endorses relentless cultural
violence (Burton 8; Gilkes 242).
Forcibly displayed naked on public auction blocks during the time of
enslavement, Black women were the first women in the United States to
endure socially and culturally sanctioned public sexual exploitation, sexual
humiliation, sexual abuse and sexual violence (Gilkes 242). Notions of her
sexual availability and sexual appetite, a legal system that support and
promoted enslavement and a society that did not apply its moral barometer
to its encounter with the lives of the enslaved resulted in the unquestioned
use and abuse of her body (West 66). Slaveholder were neither legally nor
morally culpable for the treatment exacted on Black women’s bodies (Hill
56). The end of the slavery did not bring ease to the derogatory images and
myths inscribed on the Black female body. It can be argued that these
images and myths were, instead, intensified (Hobson 119).
Inform Revolutionary Identities
Scene Three
My hair is a midterm; you have to study it to know me. You have to study it
to know ME!
In June of 2007 at the closing exchange ceremony for the two-week trial
Alvin Ailey Dance-Camp in Atlanta, Georgia, an elementary-school girl of
African ancestry delivered the above line of her poem. In her statement she
flipped the conversation around race, Black femaleness and power: She
imagined that knowledge (not usability or instrumentality) of her being was
somehow desirable; she imagined that the desire was fueled with passion
that could (and certainly did) catalyze commitment, investment and
patience; she imagined that the local knowledge of herself (Low, Lawerence-
Zuinga 79), which she possessed in consciousness and in ancestral knowing
systems, is valuable; she imagined that she has the power to orchestrate
whether or not and under what circumstance and manner this knowledge of
herself is let known to those outside of herself, regardless of color, gender,
class, ethnicity or religion; she imagined that within the landscape of the
contemporary United States she is a person in her own right. This little Black
girl, in her audaciousness, follows in an honorary line of truth tellers,
performing herself in much the same way Sojourner Truth did when she
flipped the script, articulated a definition of herself and her place in the
world, and forced her white audience to, for a revolutionary moment, see her
as she saw and lived herself (Brooks 50).
This little girl of African ancestry, a little Black girl living in the big white
United States, vocalized a power and presence that much of hip-hop culture
and Don Imus and much of the contemporary United States have built
hegemony against (West 66). When this little girl breaks into her dance,
with her twists, whines, spins, jumps, falls, convolutions and
counterrevolutions, bounces and ripples and breezes, she is, for herself,
intermingled in conversation with the revolutionary spirit of her present and
ancestral selves, carving through the past, present, and future and creating
dynamic presence through informed performed performance.
Callings Outside Our Names
On April 4, 2007, Don Imus, a controversial national radio host, referred to
the group of young Black women who made up the successful Rutgers
University women’s basketball team in racial and sexual derogatory terms. In
his defense, he claimed the ordinariness of such statements within present-
day United States culture. The young Black women, the recipients of Don
Imus’ verbal attack, were asked to endure the burden of living lives as Black
women in the United States. They were expected to, and did, carry this
unearned burden of normalized cultural humiliation and violence with the
stoic grace of “the strong Black woman” and play their already scripted roles
on the national and international stage (Hobgood 4).
Mainstream United States culture has normalized the public denigration of
Black girls and women. Don Imus was not speaking against the grain when
he expressed his “controversial” thoughts in April 2007 (Feagin 14). His
reinstatement back onto the airwaves in the latter months of the same year
speaks more of the okay-ness of his popular gesturing than to any equity in
the judicial system of popular and legal thought and culture. I would not
deny that there is always, somewhere, a resistance to vulgar displays in
popular culture. Such resistance to this aspect of contemporary United States
culture is at best cursory, emanating from the whispers of tired older women
and men or the quivering utterances of shell-shocked middle-aged
professionals. My question here is: What happens when vulgar displays and,
what Joseph Conrad called the corruption of human conscience, become
normative, accepted as central to the culture’s understanding of itself?
Troubling the performativity of Don Imus’ gesturing, a little Black girl defines
herself and her world, effectively trumping the Imus script. Who is this little
Black girl who professes knowledge of the complexities of her hair as the
requirement for knowing her, of knowing how she understands herself and
her place in the world? Who is this little Black girl, whose complicated and
tenacious hair - much like her cocoa-brown body - has throughout United
States history been the object of ridicule, derogation and confusion? Her hair,
identified as “a problem,” requires a multimillion-dollar industry to solve it.
Her hair, a symbol of both her grace and her curse, is hair that dares to be
regardless. Her hair, much like her dancing body, which she refuses to
pathologize, is, indeed, an icon of her present and future selves; daring to be
regardless (Phillips 9; Yancy).
But, who is this little Black girl for those who have been drilled daily, from
birth to the grave, to carve up her body and negate her personhood
(Macedo, Bartolome 4; Phillips 9)? Her breasts (not yet formed), her thighs,
her womb, her lips, neck, hair and eyes and the space between her thighs
are all eroticized, exotized, instrumentalized and commercialized (Gilkes
242). She is what Fred Moten calls the “commodity who talks” (Moten). In
this case, she is the commodity who “talks back” through her dance and her
vocal capacity. Anna K. Perkins points to the Black woman’s voice as her
primary and perennial weapon against injustice. A Black woman may not
posses economic strengthen, social status or political power but her voice
(embodied and spoken) is always hers; and her inherited legacy of resistance
requires her to “talk back” to protect herself and her family, to make visible
and interrogate society’s unquestionables, to declare words and deeds
unacceptable, to challenge and unmask the various mutations of isms the
society is vested in, and to assert and affirm her dignity, honor and integrity.
Communities: Interview Excerpts
Scene Four
M’Bewe Escobar on her work with young people:
I have a lot of contact with elementary- and middle-school students. Young
people self-express to find out who they are, to find a voice for themselves,
to find their identity. Dance can help them to see a way to find a place in the
world.
I notice that that the girls’ clothing are tight, their expressions are bound,
their throats are bound. Their movement expression is limited by the
tightness of their clothes. I am always surprised at how the boys are ready to
move. There are always shy ones but most eventually come around. But, the
girls are binding themselves.
One of my questions about hip-hop has to do with whether or not it has been
a beneficial influence on our children. I have heard it said that hip-hop tells it
like it is; that the message of hip-hop is about black culture. In one way I
see it as potentially very, very powerful. However, the overwhelming
message I have heard I do not enjoy. I think it has been denigrating towards
Black girls and women, denigrating towards young Black boys as well,
offering props to young black male to go ahead and denigrate. I think it has
been very negative.
Wow, when these young people see these images of their idols, not benign
nudity, it's very sexual. They want to mirror it.
I feel that that binding blocks them of their mental, emotional, spiritual and
sensual freedom; all that binding shuts them down. I say, “Isn’t that
exploitation?” In my mind it is. They have been taught to exploit themselves;
they are in service to their icons. Why are our young girls taught that? It's
very difficult to get them to see something different.
Art is encountering young people, hearing them.
C. S’thembile West on her recent work with young adult women:
My foundation is that we live every part of our lives through our bodies. We
need to identify who we are in our bodies. When we self -identify we begin
to find out who we are in our bodies. We become aware of how our bodies
feel and become aware of what others feel.
Our bodies can be sites of protest. All the work that we produce is always a
social commentary. That's how I see African-American dance. Even though
some of these young people, who will not articulate anything of what I am
talking about, I see it in the dances. You know how some of the dance moves
are like something is being pushed off? I think that is it the structures of the
society that are being pushed off.
You have to be realistic and you don't want to turn them off at the first class.
One girl kept saying: I can’t do this. I told her, it's as simple as deciding you
can. This work is much more than trying to teach a dance position or step.
The body is a reflection of what your mind is doing.
In a context where any kind of touch is sexual, then it is a difficult when we
put people in a room [the dance studio] where suddenly the body is not
supposed to be a taboo.
[With dance] you control what you want, so you can listen to other parts of
your body, you want to come to some type of synthesis.
When we say justice, we are talking about change. We want people to live in
dignity. I can't decide what part of this class you should hold dearest. We
need to think carefully about how we live. There is a ripple, do you want your
ripple to be one that causes global warming or retards it.
Jawole Willa Jo Zollar describes a project done in New Orleans:
I look at my work as working through two mediums: 1) concert stage where
the artistic really gets into the work and 2) the community art where the
building of community is central. There are two different types of logic
looking at serving a larger community in relation to issues that want to be
brought to the surface, want to be told, and collaboration not just with the
dancers on the stage but with the community. In order for dancer to
collaborate there has to be a break from the model of do what you are told.
There has to be pure dialogue and respect between artists. We have to be
able to interact in peace.
Building and exiting community is a leadership model of how you enter a
space of the unknown with respect for history of the community, where the
community is, and where the community wants to go.
1) Research/prep work is necessary. You need to find out where the
leadership, where it has been, where does it see itself going, and, 2) the
work that you do together to listen. Research is in process; it is ongoing.
Question like: What do you free? What has been destroyed? Who’s coming
back who's not? Not just sitting at a table” The building of community is
through this art making experience together. In ways that everyone can see
what is unearthing. Questions are revealed through a continuous process.
There is point where the performance gets the focus, and afterwards there is,
3) the debriefing: In the debriefing we discuss what we learn. What were the
things that didn't get addressed? What is the community’s next step? We are
going leave, what will you carry forward/how can we assist you?
Implicit in what all three artists shared about their experiences in community
arts activism is the notion that community is, and should be, a space in
which dignity, honor and individual and communal flourishing are upheld, a
place where revolutionary love drives each and every interaction, a place
where no individual’s sense of belongingness is predicated upon the
denegation of self and/or other.
Interrogating popular hip-hop culture, M’Bewe Escobar views the tight
clothing young girls are encouraged to wear as binding not only to their
bodies but also to their minds, obstructing their ability to self-express, voice
their presences and concerns in the world. By capturing the imaginations of
young Black girls, popular culture indoctrinates the girls into patterns of
social constraints. Limitation on the ways in which young Black girls are
allowed to define, identify and assert themselves, are promoted through a
one-dimensional view of Black womanhood (Emerson120). This view of Black
womanhood is hypersexualized and morally tenuous (Hobson 10). As Escobar
points out, the nudity promoted by popular hip-hop culture is not “benign
nudity; it is very sexual.” This sexual objectification, where sexuality,
sensuality and spirituality are violently torn apart from one another and
sexuality is highlighted at the cost of personhood and holistic beingness, is a
repetitive pattern in United States culture’s dealing with regards to Black
femaleness.
For Escobar, young women are taught to bind themselves in tight clothing
that simulates the nudity of their popular hip-hop idols. This carries negative
consequences for voice; it carries negative consequences for young Black
girls’ ability to self-express, their ability to “talk back.” In essence, it
negatively impacts young Black girls’ ability to assert themselves in defense
of themselves against various forms of injustices.
In her workshops, Escobar engage young girls about their clothing, help
them to identify types of clothing that would allow them the greater
movement possibility. In so doing, Escobar helps young Black girls to give
themselves permission to experience presence, voice and personal growth
within the space of the dance studio with the hope that this will propel the
freeing of their imagination, the embracing of opportunities to experience,
explore and engage the world in new and transformative ways.
Highlighting the body as foundational to the experience of life, C. S’thembile
West notes: “When we self-identify we begin to find out who we are in our
bodies. We become aware of how our bodies feel, and become aware of what
others feel.” Conscious engagement in the body is essential to an individual’s
personal development and growth, and crucial to the ways in which
individuals encounter others, build community and build societies. The body
as a site of “social commentary” is a provocative space. West points to a
history of African Americans’ use of the body though its popular dances to
comment on, contest and resist dominant white society’s script about their
identities and lives (West 68). In her work, West encourages young women
to explore and develop movement vocabulary that speaks of all aspects of
their lives, to choose when sexuality is the topic of
conversation/commentary, and to be informed by justice in their voice and
actions (West 2005, 66). West notes: “In the context of movement, each
encounter with another dance provides an opportunity to distill learning and
to ‘try on’ new kinesthetic clothing: nuance, insinuation, attitude, feeling,
sense and intelligence” (West 66).
For this reason, West does her homework, not wanting to “turn students off”
on their first visit to the dance studio, West judiciously employs music from
popular hip-hop culture, choosing the artist and message with care. Sifting
through popular hip-hop music to find the right artist or songs is not easy: “I
wince because it [the messages in the music] just go through me. I am not
trying to validate it, but I at least have to hear it. It's like I need to know
what the porn is, but I don't have to sanction it.” In this way, West is able to
make herself available to extend a genuine invitation to young Black women,
meeting them where they are. But also meeting them in a space where she is
safe, hence tending to the essential activity of self-care while working on the
project of building community. Building on an initial encounter in which she
and her young adult participants are honored, West introduces spirituality
and justice into the movement and verbal conversation. She encourages
young Black women to expand their expressive vocabulary, so that they
empower themselves to move beyond the confines of popular hip-hop culture
and contemporary United States cultural rhetoric about their bodies, their
lives, their power and their voices. West speaks from a deeply rooted
African-American spiritual base that she hopes will be passed on to the
young Black women she encounters.
In her multigenerational community arts encounters, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar
applies a three-pronged method: (1) Research/Prep Work, (2) Listening
together and (3) Debriefing.
Research/Prep work is the time taken before entering the community to find
out about the community’s current situation, its history, its identity. By
making contact with designated community leaders, insight is given into
where the community sees itself going.
Listening and creating together requires work from all participants. It is
through deep listening that members of the community come to know each
other better, engage in the building of art that reflects the interests/concerns
of the community, and develop or rediscover skills that promote the
community’s well-being. Zollar notes, “The building of community is through
this art-making experience together.” This moment of collaboration is
potentially transformative. Collaboration, whether it is with dance-company
members or with members of the site community, the requirements are the
same: respect for the views and ideas of others, and willingness to engage in
the discovery and creativity necessary for bringing ideas together. For Zollar,
collaboration does not find its center in compromise, it finds its center in pure
dialogue.
Debriefing takes place after the artwork has been exhibited. It is here that
community participants discuss what they have learned, what was not
brought into discussion, and how the community will continue on. Calling
attention to the finitude of the workshop, Zollar reminds the site community:
“We are going leave. What will you carry forward? How can we assist you?
Zollar’s community-building work allows participants to engage in deep
learning and bonding with others in the community through the shared
experience of art making. By providing common ground in which respect and
dignity of each community member is upheld and equally valued, individuals
are more likely to voice their interests and concerns. In so doing, Zollar’s
notion of “pure dialogue” is made possible. Pure dialogue becomes the
instrument for the creation of an authentic community artwork. In the art-
making space facilitated by Zollar and her company, the youthful voices of
young people are as valued and honored as the seasoned voices of their
elders, the potential for shared experiences, knowledge and wisdom is made
possible. Such a space offers possibilities for the “unearthing” of that which
stirs in the undercurrent of the community, opening up the hope for healing
and transformation. Having engaged in a model of deep collaboration
informed by pure dialogue, these skills now become a part of the
community’s local knowledge base, tools to call on in order to carry on the
necessary healing and building work outside the workshop space.
Conclusion
Based on the insights put forward by Escobar, West and Zollar the little Black
girl in performance in Scene One, the young Black woman in Scene Two, and
the little Black girl in Scene Three can, when paired with facilitators conscious
of the world Black girls and women are asked to negotiate, 1) find, in the
embodied practice of dance, space/place to discover themselves, locate and
articulate their voices, and engage in embodied critical social commentary;
2) learn the skills necessary for the building up of a spiritual foundation that
ultimately informs notions of justice and empowers Black girls and women to
live in ways that honors their spiritual foundation; and, 3) experience the
powerful affirmation of having a voice, equally valued, in a community made
up of those invested in the maintaining of a collective in which honor, dignity,
and human flourishing are diligently upheld and the notion of revolutionary
love is infused in all aspects of private and public encounter (hooks 2000,
Phillips 2006).
Dance in social justice and community activism holds hope for providing
young Black girls with the necessary skills for negotiating the onslaught of
cultural violence they will encounter. Yet, how do we begin to build a world
where this violence is not a part of their lives?
Black Out: Curtains Close.
Break it Down: The Questions
What are the questions for a Little Black Girl? The questions I have for a
Little Black Girl - the Little Black girl in me and in the mothers, aunts,
friends and other women of age, the Little Black Girl who lives in the present
and carves out the future with deep understanding of and responsibility to
the past, present and future, the Little Black Girl who is the daughter and/or
niece of Jesse Jackson, Lil Boosie, Clarke Howard, Colin Powell, Don Imus,
Spike Lee, Plies, Tiger Woods and Barack Obama; the Little Black Girl who
must speak - my questions are: Is it enough; is training young girls to deal
with the onslaught of anticipated psychic and cultural violence enough? Is it
enough to be ready with the right cutting words or brazen attitudes: is it
enough to be skillfully trained in heart to heart, skin to skin, spirit to spirit,
winner-takes-all vicious combat? Is it acceptable to train the innocence out of
little girls’ hearts in order to protect her souls, enough? At what point is it
unacceptable to continue this program of violence? At what point should
demands for critical, thought-out solutions rupture the complacency of
normalized violations? Is it possible to inspire this society, which at its core is
not invested in the well-being a Little Black Girl or her community, to become
true stakeholders in upholding the human dignity of a Little Black Girl? With
Escobar’s assertion that popular hip-hop culture is “giving props,” rewarding
boys and young men for their denigration of Black girls and women, is it
possible to build a community that takes stock in a Little Black Girl, invested
in her value, her honor, her power and her potential? Is it possible to become
critically constructive architects of a future open to the honor, dignity and
empowerment of the community as a whole and each individual member
wholly? As West notes: “When we say justice, we are talking about change.”
We are talking about embracing an aesthetic notion that resonates in the
honor and dignity of each individual and community. We are talking about
beauty reflected in culture and society, in politics and economy, in
race/ethnic and gender relations. We are talking about the art of building,
healing, and sustaining community.
This essay is part of the Community Arts Convening & Research Project, 2008, funded by a
Nathan Cummings Foundation grant to the Maryland Institute College of Art. The essay was
reviewed and selected by the project's Editorial Board: Ron Bechet, Xavier University of
Louisiana; Lori Hager, University of Oregon; Marina Gutierrez, Cooper Union; Ken Krafchek,
Maryland Institute College of Art; Sonia Mañjon, California College of the Arts; Amalia Mesa-
Bains, California State University Monterey Bay; Paul Teruel, Columbia College Chicago; and
Stephani Woodson, Arizona State University.
Carole Marie Webster is a dance/theater artist, a cultural anthropologist, and theologian.
She uses dance/movement to engage communities in critical reflection and conversation on
issues of gender, race/ethnic, disability and class justice.
[*] In order protect this young Black woman’s identity, the fictitious name Irene Black is used.
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Original CAN/API publication: August 2008!