LaTasha Barnes investigates where jazz lives
For decades, LaTasha Barnes has been a celebrated stand-out in two very different dance subcultures — classic Lindy Hop, which originated in Harlem in the 1920s, and urban underground house dance. But over the past couple of years, the 42-year-old Barnes’s work has showcased the two different American forms together as part of a continuum, highlighting rich connections throughout the lineage of Black vernacular dance. A scholar/creator as well as a dynamic performer, she’s broken into the dance world mainstream in a big way, bringing forward the genres she so loves — and the people instrumental to their development — with grace, insight, and seemingly limitless enthusiasm.
Barnes’s appearances, commissions, and honors include a Bessie Award, and The New York Times included her in the “Best of Dance 2021. Barnes and her ensemble of more than a dozen performers — including musicians — bring her critically acclaimed “The Jazz Continuum” to Boston for a Celebrity Series engagement Jan. 19-21 at New England Conservatory’s Plimpton Shattuck Black Box Theatre.
Q. You call the show “an offering to the continuum” that brings out common jazz roots in genres ranging from Lindy Hop to voguing. Can you elaborate on that connection?
A. The initial connection for me was hearing some rhythmic similarities between some of the old jazz albums my great-grandmother used to listen to and the cadence of some of my favorite hip hop artists, hearing the overlap of really great jazz tunes within the hip hop genre. So it wasn’t just this abstract notion of jazz being a connector or a sire, but it was actively present. Making space within my own journey to have a genuine relationship with the music helped clarify where jazz lives and how it was influencing some of the most powerful moments of social dances today.
Q. Like a kind of conversation, honoring influences and history while creating new relationships?
A. Yeah. It wasn’t until I humbled myself to understand jazz’s nuances and how it was shared then that I was able to see where the jazz was in my own dancing. I was really able to honestly embody those points of juxtaposition, not just jam them together side by side.
It’s not a fusion so much as a reviewing, an exploration coming from live negotiation of music into the dancers’ bodies and vice versa, cycling back. That’s why I refer to it as an offering — we’re honestly giving it to each other.
Q. When the company performed the piece at Jacob’s Pillow in 2021, it was like a rip-roaring party. Is that your way to pull viewers in?
A. The viewers get the privilege of watching this negotiation and celebration amongst this collective, but it’s not for them. It’s for the art and for those that preceded us. But aiming to be in that space pulls people into their own celebration of [what] they’re witness you’re ing. We love presenting and sharing, but it’s the acknowledgement of the continuum in each other that spills out into the audience.
Q. Spoken elements give the show some context, but it centers on improvisation. How does it change according to where performing?
A. My aim is to shift the perspective of how jazz impacted the area where we’re presenting. In Boston, some tunes will be more in alignment with the Boston soundscape from the jazz vocabulary, and we’re going to celebrate some of the dance forms that are a little more heavily represented in Boston like popping and other regional styles.
Q. Do you think people underestimate the power of social dance?
A. Oh yeah. There’s this notion of [casualness] or naturalness to the social atmosphere that we use to downplay the space. It seems complimentary to call people natural movers, but it does a
LATASHA BARNES
great disservice to the social space, because most of the things we see performatively are either watered down or hyper-digitized versions of the social experience, very much about the choreography versus the collective, the feeling. The social dance space is about how you interact with people, and because of that it’s given less value. But no dance would exist if not for social spaces — ballet wouldn’t exist without the court, social dance wouldn’t exist without the living room, then going out trading moves with friends, these intimate social spaces.
Q. I love that your mom says you were dancing in the womb before you were breathing and that your DJ dad helped ingrain dance and music into your everyday life. How important were they in inspiring your drive to lift up Black vernacular dance the way you’re doing now, really honoring influences and showing how it’s evolved, going beyond entertainment?
A. It’s taken me on as a mission. Talking to my great-grandmother, I realized that these were dreams of hers that she wasn’t able to achieve but I [also] wanted, and I found a way to fulfill those things. I feel like I’ve been asked to be a carrier, and all I can do is lean into it. It’s about bringing up everybody who makes you you, to make the unseen seen. These dance forms are an encapsulation of a lived experience. The existence of the work is a recentering of authentic jazz in the minds of Black people as the power center of so much of what we do and celebrate in contemporary music and language and social spaces, and to celebrate ourselves in this uniquely African American continuum.
‘It wasn’t until I humbled myself to understand jazz’s nuances and how it was shared then that I was able to see where the jazz was in my own dancing.’