OSU performance reflects differences, commonalities
Crystal Michelle Perkins and Susan Van Pelt Petry have a lot on their minds, and they want to say it using their bodies.
In a new performance, the professors in the dance department at Ohio State University, aim to confront issues of race, gender and age using movement.
The professors choreographed and will perform the two-person show “Land, Sugar, Bone & Other Illustrations,” which runs Sept. 30 through Oct. 2 at Riffe Center’s Studio One.
The program does not shy away from the outward and inward differences between the two: Perkins, 42, is Black, and Petry, 63, is white.
“There is something about seeing a Black woman, who is younger, and an older white woman together, just standing in space,” said Perkins, a native of Augusta, Georgia, who lives in Dayton and serves as an assistant professor at Ohio State University.
“It is already a conversation, and when an audience looks at that, they are having a conversation with themselves,” Perkins said.
Petry, a longtime member of Ohio State’s dance faculty and currently the department’s interim chair, agrees.
“We amplify and magnify the fact of our backgrounds and differences,” Petry said. “We’re not camouflaging that . ... We are really making a point that we are not the same.”
The choreographer-dancers want audiences to examine their own biases in watching the dancers.
“Are you privileging watching one more than the other?” Petry said. “Are you empathizing with one more than the other? Probably. And maybe it makes us face our biases in a deeply visceral way, a deeply personal way, as opposed to just making language about it.”
The inadequacy of language to express ideas about race and prejudice is part of what prompted the colleagues to embark on a dance.
Several years ago, Perkins and Petry attended an implicit-bias workshop at the university. Both were left underwhelmed.
“That particular training was OK, but I think Susan and I both thought that there left something to be desired,” Perkins said. “Susan approached me, right at that meeting, and she said, ‘I’d like to do some work together around this.’ ... I said, ‘Sure, certainly!’”
The process began with candid conversations.
“We started with narratives about how we wore our race, how I felt as a white woman, how she felt as a Black woman,” Petry said.
Work started on the project in 2018, but, due to their workload as academics as well as the emergence of the pandemic, the project was delayed.
“During the depths of COVID, we just met on Zoom and we would look at videos that we had from rehearsals and talk about them,” Petry said. “Once we got vaccinated, we’ve been able to pretty much do it full-out.”
“Land, Sugar, Bone & Other Illustrations,” which runs about 35 minutes, consists of three dances: a solo by Perkins, a solo by Petry and a duet to conclude the performance. Recorded music by composer Mark Lomax II will be interwoven throughout the performance.
Before showtime, a coin toss will determine whether Perkins’ piece, “In Lieu of Flowers,” or Petry’s piece, “History Unfinished,” will be performed first.
Both solos will feature the choreographer-dancers meditating on their roots.
“I am very much working from the perspective of being a Black woman who was raised in the American south,” said Perkins, whose piece deals in part with loss.
“What I’m hoping to bring forward is, in our loss, both natural and unnatural, our responsibility to keep each other safe and also to remember,” she said.
In “History Unfinished,” Petry wrestles with her own northern European heritage.
“(I’m saying), ‘This is where I come from,’” she said. “This is all the privilege that I have in my background and my blood, and now what? (I ask) the question of how do I shift center now as we go forward?”
In the finale, the dancers share the stage in an attempt to find answers.
“It’s not a super-confrontational, angry piece — we’re not cut out that way,” Petry said. “In the end, there is more space for Crystal, and I retreat a little bit.”
The scenic design — redolent of the Old World and Age of Discovery, Petry said — references the history of the Atlantic slave trade.
“We have a map of the world and its trade routes on ... an old-fashioned library map table,” Petry said. “We have a whole motif about the royalty as a kind of metaphor for power, and European versus African. We literally have crowns and robes and thrones.”
Although their dances confront timely — and thorny — topics, the collaborators have also been reminded of the things they share.
“As humans, we’re both great partners in our marriages; we’re both wonderful mothers,” Perkins said. “We’re teachers at the university; we believe in sharing knowledge.”
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