{"id":312,"date":"2022-02-01T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-02-01T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/robiky.com\/?p=312"},"modified":"2023-10-17T00:32:38","modified_gmt":"2023-10-17T00:32:38","slug":"is-dance-enough-to-meaningfully-address-something-like-black-lives-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/robiky.com\/index.php\/2022\/02\/01\/is-dance-enough-to-meaningfully-address-something-like-black-lives-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Dance \u201cEnough\u201d to Meaningfully Address Something Like Black Lives Matter?"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n
2016<\/strong>: I was asked to create a duet for RAWdance (Ryan T. Smith and Wendy Rein) in San Francisco at a time when my heart was caught in a perpetual state of reeling from the constant murders of African Americans by law enforcement, most recently the murder of Walter Scott, who was shot in the back in South Carolina after being stopped for a nonfunctioning brake light. I knew I had to address the killings, but I didn\u2019t know how. I felt incompetent, my work felt inadequate. So after a career dedicated to the intersection of choreography and social activism, I created Enough?<\/em>, a piece that asks whether dance can meaningfully address social movements like Black Lives Matter.<\/p>\n 1991:<\/strong> I was finishing Urban Scenes\/Creole Dreams<\/em>, my first commission for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a work juxtaposing the early 1900s stories of my sharecropper Creole\u00ad grandmother in the swamps of Louisiana with my own stories as a gay African American in New York City\u2019s East Village at the apex of the AIDS pandemic. The work called out the sexism, racism and homophobia that extended from my grandmother\u2019s era into my own. One night after rehearsal I participated in ACT UP\u2019s (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) takeover of Grand Central Terminal at rush hour in order to bring that evening\u2019s commute to its knees and force attention to America\u2019s anemic response to the AIDS pandemic.<\/p>\n And take over we did. Being part of hundreds of screaming protesters taking up space in Grand Central turned an act of desperation into an act of empowerment. AIDS received the attention we demanded. What AIDS did not receive was empathy. We were hated by the understandably livid commuters; they spat at protesters, shouted AIDS-phobic slurs, and the event was one step from erupting into violence. Our protest was necessary and I was honored to be there. But I wondered what the impact might be if the commuters could deeply feel the enormity of the grief that propelled us into this takeover?<\/p>\n Creating this empathy was not the purpose of our takeover. But it became the purpose of my art-making. Without losing the political urgency of my work, I now wanted to create those bridges of empathy that would better transcend the boundaries of difference and allow the disenfranchised to shout tales of their personal and political histories while also allowing viewers to see themselves in the lives of these very disenfranchised. As a politics major at Princeton, I understood that a necessary first step in oppression of any kind is to dehumanize the oppressed. At that protest, my mission consciously became to \u201cre-humanize.\u201d Urban Scenes<\/em> remained an urgent calling out of racism, sexism and homophobia, but the piece became less about<\/em> those \u201cisms\u201d and more about the eternality of devastating loss due to <\/em>those \u201cisms.\u201d<\/p>\n