When the spirit moves
Dancing for God and Gaga, Muntu Dance “baby” Asiel Hardison grows up.
When Asiel Hardison moved to Los Angeles in 2004—bent on actually making a living as a dancer— he had red dreads. At auditions, he says, “I was wearing my African jewelry, bangles, earrings. I had a bone in my ear, shells in my hair. I was so like: ‘I’m African! It’s my culture! Take me, take me, take me!’ In LA, you hear from casting directors, ‘Give me you. Show me something different.’ I didn’t know how to do that any other way. But I learned I had to not be so in-your-face with it, not so specific—show I could be a blank canvas.”
Hardison says the level of dance work in LA is “like no other in any city in the world. And my creative being craves the lights, TV, the traveling.” He lost the locks and modified his style at auditions. Six months after he arrived in the city, word of mouth got him his first big gig: choreographing an opening Afro-Cuban number for a Gloria Estefan tour. In 2008, Hardison made it onto Lady Gaga’s “Fame” tour and has danced with her ever since. But in those early days he was told, “No, no, no, no,” he says. “I was too skinny, too black, too ethnic. I didn’t even know I was a tall person when I moved to LA!”
Hardison, 30, attributes that unaccountable self-perception—he’s six foot four—to the way he grew up, artistically and personally, in the family of Chicago’s Muntu Dance Theatre, an African and African-American music and dance organization founded in 1972. “When Muntu puts people in positions,” Hardison says, “it’s about the talent. It’s not about the height or the look—that stuff’s not at the forefront.”
Hardison wasn’t happy last February when Lady Gaga suffered a hip injury that cut short the “Born This Way” tour. But there was a silver lining. When he called Amaniyea Payne, Muntu’s artistic director for 25 years, she told him, “Baby, just come on with your workout clothes and get on this floor.” So a few months ago the Chicago native came home to choreograph his first-ever work for Muntu, part of its “Rhythm Keepers and Global Griots” joint concert with Home Tone Music & Arts Foundation.
Born and raised in Beverly, Hardison says his South Shore grandmother, Gloria T. Wells, is the reason he’s a dancer: “Thank God to Granny! She was a dancer, model, journalist, she had a radio show. She introduced me to AfricanAmerican culture.” She got him acquainted with the ETA Creative Arts Foundation, where he went to summer camp, then continued with theater classes and the occasional play. Hardison got his first glimpse of African dance and drumming in middle school, at an Alyo Children’s Dance Theatre concert—and “that really ignited fire,” he says. Alyo artistic director Kimosha Murphy took him to his first Muntu show, “Fat Tuesday and All That Jazz,” which he saw as the ultimate expression of black theater.
Hardison took classes and performed with Muntu until, at his father’s insistence, he started college, studying dance at the University of Memphis. But he quit a few weeks afterward, when 9/11 hit and it seemed the end of the world was nigh, to devote himself to finding a job in dance. A friend let him know that the Memphis Grizzlies NBA team was looking for a dancer; he did a rehearsal and got on the squad.
That connection led to a gig with the WNBA’s Miami Sol. In Miami, Hardison met LA dancers working on a movie (“we kicked it, freestyling in clubs”) who encouraged him to try his hand in LA. But before he moved there, he came back to Chicago for a few months. “I needed some more nurturing, some more hugs, a little push. Over the years, I’ve tended to come home and catch my breath,” he says.
When I ask whether he’ll also be dancing in Muntu’s upcoming show, Hardison laughs and high-fives Payne. “Praise His name!” he says. “All the sections, I’m gonna be up on that stage, smiling and sharing my gift and what was taught to me. I’m so excited to be alongside these angels again.”
In his Twitter profile, Hardison calls himself a “dancer for GOD & @ladygaga.” But, he says, “I’m not a religious person, though I’m a very spiritual person. I do have a religion that’s in the forefront for me: the Lucumi tradition from the Yoruba of Nigeria [the progenitor of Cuban Santeria]. That’s something I got into junior year in high school—