Moving toward freedom, justice
This year, Dance Mission’s Dance in Revolt(ing) Times festival, to be hosted online due to the ongoing pandemic, is titled “Harriet’s Gun: Shapeshifting Towards a Radically Reimagined Black Future.” That Harriet is of course Harriet Tubman, who carried a pistol on her rescue missions, both as protection from slave catchers and to keep frightened runaways from turning back. It’s a charged image that carries a complicated mix of pain, defiance and hope for shifting paradigms.
As D.I.R.T. festival cocurator Adia Tamara Whitaker explains it, “Harriet’s gun forced you to be free — whether you were free in life or free in death, you were about to be free.”
Whitaker, an Oakland native who now lives in Brooklyn and directs Àse Dance Theatre Collective, recently spoke to The Chronicle between teaching virtual dance classes in New York City. On the video call with her from Oakland was Sarah Crowell, artistic director emeritus of Oakland’s Destiny Arts Center and festival cocurator. The two women have admired each other’s work for decades, and though this is the first time they’ve worked together, their rapport crackled on the screen, Crowell snapping her fingers as Whitaker’s riffs accelerated.
Their collaborative synergy shines in the festival’s programming, which streams live Friday, March 5, and again March 13. Together they’ve chosen two programs featuring soloists and dance companies from across the country, including Miami’s Hattie Mae Williams, New Jersey’s Kamille King, Oakland’s Afro Urban Society, Chicago’s Red Clay Dance Company and Brooklyn’s UFly Mothership.
“These artists we’ve chosen really are the folks doing the reimagining of the world through their work,” Whitaker said. She pointed to Zaccho Dance Theater in San Francisco, “taking people literally into the air,” and Nicole Klaymoon’s Embodiment Project presenting a dance that uses text from Joy DeGruy’s book, “Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome.”
And while the performances will be prerecorded, the D.I.R.T. festival will be hosted live by another eminent participant, Rhodessa Jones, whose Medea Project has produced awardwinning theater with incarcerated women for 23 years.
Sure to be a festival highlight is work from spoken word artist and theater director Marc Bamuthi Joseph, a Bay Area talent who rose from a position as chief programmer for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to become artistic director of so
cial impact at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Whitaker calls him “an incredibly powerful voice for moving the narrative from the Black pain body to the Black joy body.”
Crowell is also keen to spotlight the intergenerational aspect of the festival, pointing to a short piece called “Seed Language” that she produced in 2016 with Destiny Art Center’s teen company.
“Black Lives Matter was a fairly new movement at the time, and I took the young women to hear the founder Alicia Garza speak,” Crowell recalled. “They use that speech verbatim as the opening of the show, and it’s a speech saying the names of Black folks who have been killed by the state. So you watch the grief, and you also watch the emergence of a voice that has blossomed into an international movement.”
The two say this year’s festival, the seventh annual, has provided a mechanism not only to showcase Black imagination, but also to exchange practical support.
“One young artist had some beautiful work, but unedited, so we said, ‘We’ll get you a video editor to help you articulate that,’ ” Whitaker said of Florida dancer Alex Jones’ entry. “It’s an exchange. It’s hard to be Black during the revolution. Instead of waiting for someone else to give us reparations, we said, ‘No, we’re going to repair ourselves.’ ”
Both Crowell and Whitaker believe this particular moment — despite the distance the COVID-19 pandemic has forced upon many throughout the country — is especially live, and especially open.
“We’re acknowledging that we are living in the break,” Whitaker said. “What happens in jazz, you’ve got a loop going over and over again, and then you get that break, and you don’t know what’s happening because this is the improvisation, this is where you give up the imitations of the past and become something new.”
“Shapeshifting” in this break is a process for everyone, Whitaker added. “A lot of white folks don’t know where to get into this work so that it doesn’t just repeat the cycles that exist in a different way. So we’re all trying to figure out how to be with each other.”