Liberation Dance
When I was a child growing up in Tennessee, I dreamed of being a ballet dancer. I danced ALL THE TIME because I loved it more than anything.
Getting lost in the music. Performing and feeling like I was in my own world on stage and also surrounded by warmth, love and support from the audience. Equally obsessed with the freedom of improvisation and the disciplined technique of the barre.
I danced everywhere - in parks, at school, in the grocery store. My mom stopped taking me grocery shopping with her because there were one too many close encounters between my pirouettes and jars of pasta sauce. But she was my biggest cheerleader, taking me to classes in studios across Tennessee, paying for expensive classical ballet training and costumes and dancewear, ensuring I had every possible opportunity to get the best possible opportunities.
Mine was almost always the only Black body in a sea of white bodies. But I didn’t care and I rarely even noticed. I was doing what I loved.
Dancing was how I moved through the world.
That is, until that day.
That was the day when I was 13 or 14 years old, sitting outside the office of the ballet school director as she talked to my mom. I could hear them talking but was not paying much attention until she said: “There aren’t any Black ballerinas. She will never be a ballerina”.
The first part of her statement - I knew it was a lie. I’ve followed absolutely stunning dancers like Raven Wilkinson and Lauren Anderson all my life, and my mother made sure I saw every Ailey performance I could - so I’d seen it.
But of some reason, I believed the second part. In an instant, the spark went out. I made a nest for myself in her lie, and I let my dream go to sleep.
I stopped dancing a year later. I wasn’t sure if I would ever perform again. I didn’t believe in myself - and I didn’t see the point. I no longer saw a space for myself in the world of ballet.
A few years after, I went to college at Vanderbilt University. There I found a group of Black student artists called Rhythm and Roots: Black ballerinas and hip hop dancers and poets and rappers and producers, telling Black stories at a very white school in unapologetically loud and proud ways. I joined that group because I wanted to remember how to exist in my Black body and still move through the world dancing. Together, we merged Black history and Black culture and our shared experience of being Black in America with performing art.
For all that my ballet training had given me, there was so much that didn’t actually work for a Black girl with dark skin and a bigger body. At some point during college, surrounded and inspired by incredible talent that looked like me, I realized that I could take what worked for me and leave the rest of it behind.
We danced to “Endangered Species” by Diane Reeves, the ultimate Black women survival anthem. That’s me, dancing for my life, in the foreground. (Talented Tenth, Feb. 2009)
In the years since and as a daily intention, I’ve decided to move through the world as a dancer again. In my life and work, I choreograph and improvise and refine my technique as fully embodied human with a unique expression and purpose in this world.
I practice a new kind of dance: the liberation dance. It’s the one where I move until my dreams wake up and the spark returns and I am free from the stories and lies that once crushed my spirit.
One of the only network TV shows I’ve ever cared about was So You Think You Can Dance, a dance competition that showcased different people, styles, bodies, and stories. OBSESSED. Sometimes the dancers would get a chance to “Dance for your Life” which was a short improv piece that they could do to stay in the competition if they were about to be cut. And they would ALWAYS. SERVE. IT.
Because self-expression is a radical, courageous act - but it’s also necessary. Without it, our dreams go to sleep.
There are still plenty of stories and lies that I need to get free from, no doubt. So I’ll be dancing and moving, releasing the bullshit, loving on this Black body, and moving through the world as I am.
What stories do you need to get free from?
This piece is dedicated to Stephen Laurel "tWitch" Boss. Your dance encouraged and inspired me, and I am grateful that I danced on this earth at the same time you did. Rest in Peace.