Six months ago when Auntie Grace, artistic director of the National Dance Company of Ghana, asked me to teach a class for the company, I was slightly taken aback. At that point there was still a false boarder between my body and the international spaces through which I was moving.
But to move, to travel, to interact, and to create, has increasingly become a primarily physical experience. Similarly, having completed nine months of this year-long movement, I am ever opening to the chillingly physical nature of the transformations and understandings that this project has presented to my body. And this body, the basic yet elusive medium that both interprets and performs information and symbols, has dissolved and been re-built continually throughout my research.
The twenty or so joints of my spine, sweat into arches and new contractions in a dance studio in Burkina Faso, continue to elastically accept my travel to Brazil. Over the past three months I have taken company class with Dance Brazil, performed on a public stage as part of Salvador´s celebration of international dance day, and helped teach a movement class to a group of children in a poor area outside of Salvador. I have take ballet class taught to some of Salvador´s best dancers at a studio funded by a choreographer who somewhat adopts dancers, and I feel challenged to continually exist within this project, within Brazil, as first a participant and learner, a more direct route to fruitful collaboration.
The process of completing a Watson Fellowship is one of building precise visions and blueprints for action - black and white sketches that only experience and collaboration can color in. It is only action and time that invite these prints into the shadings of cultural truths and economic limits.
The past month has been especially broadening, with two weeks spent in Sao Paulo, one week spent in Rio attending the the global Laban conference, and then traveling back north to Salvador three days ago.
The experiences of putting the soars and sounds of entering and leaving studios, taking bus rides through Sao Paulo and walking through rainy twilight to brightly lit dance spaces, has tweaked and broadened even the most realistic expectations of these once far-off places.
Ivaldo Bertazzo, a choreographer notable for his massive collaborations with large numbers of children from the outskirts of Sao Paulo maintains one of the fanciest, chique dance studios I have ever seen. It is classy. Upon entrance the mostly upper-middle class clients of his pampering studio have to place their thumb upon a finger-print reading machine which then allows them to enter the studio. In a lean climate of artistic production he has carved out a sustainable and successful presence in the Sao Paulo and global arts scene.
It is difficult to dance, more difficult to fuse grace with a plan and perform a poignant piece of art, and in someways equally difficult to maintain a sustainable dance company. When I started this trip I had eyes pointed towards the exterior of dance companies, activities and programs that a stable company might maintain out of any extra resources they might manage to squeeze out of the ecology of art.
Re-focused, the dance company itself emerges as an initial and primary community building force. In Brazil, and more precisely in the poorer and more Afro-Brazilian city of Salvador, once a dancer joins a company, often the choreographer develops into a parental, or at least cultural guide and protector. In the case of Dance Brazil where I spent two weeks watching and taking classes with the company before they left for a U.S. tour, classes in singing are taught so that when the company is not active, the dancers will be more likely to find other work.
Mestre Jelon Vieira, the artistic director of the company, maintains a community arts center which he supports Capoeira training for kids who are at risk for drug abuse. It is a ways outside of Salvador and also seems to be a breeding ground for potential dancers. While I was there the center was dark, Jelon and the company were working tireless hours preparing for a tour. But you could sense in the way the dancers acted with Jelon, in the way he embraced each one as they would enter the studio, that the nature of building human ties and empowering relationships is something fundamental to the physical nature of creating and maintaining dances.
These moments of love, of support and acceptance, were somehow still perceptible in the back of my mind amidst the mayhem of teaching a movement class to two groups of children at a theater center outside of Salvador. A women and actress from a Capoeira group which I train with maintains a space on the third floor of her house where she holds classes for kids from her neighborhood. My roommate and I offered to teach a movement class and it was the first time that I broke the glass wall between analyst of community dance programs and teacher of dance.
As the second class came to an end, two evangelical preachers took to the street side and started broadcasting thunderous brands of Jesus pride. The amped screams of faith made finishing the dance class especially challenging, but it seemed fitting and the kids didn´t seem to mind to much. In their sweaty smiles and creations they were proud and open.
The jungle of dance is a humbling and ceaselessly human ecology. By human I refer to the realities of weight, of the stickiness of skin squeaking over floor, of the trust and dedication of studying movement.
It is in this ecology that I exist and my body is transforming. On the roads of Brazil, through dingy hotels and weeks of continual travel, my project, its dancers and its activists, continues to take care of me. It breathes and I respond in rhythm.
It is now clear that I would be in a much stronger position to collaborate with Auntie Grace of Ghana. Her mandate is something I would now view with respect and action. The transformations that have gone on in my body and mind are still unclear to me. They have not yet found their words, and it is unclear if they call for expression through music, sketches, writings, or movement. But things feel comfortably strange and new like childhood, and this magic sung ´Brazil´ calls on another night.
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