Dancing for God: An Interview with Penny Godboldo

Penny Godboldo is artistic director of the Dance Ministry at Hartford Memorial Baptist Church in Detroit, Mich., head of the Dance Department at Marygrove College, and owner of the Pemajju School of Dance and Related Arts with her sister, Maryanne. Godboldo co-created the Michigan "Hallelujah" and brought a number of her students to participate in "Hallelujah/USA" at the University of Maryland in 2002. Godboldo is prominent in the field of liturgical dance, forming the Detroit Liturgical Dance Collective in May 2000 to bring untrained community members together with dance ministries, dance artists and other spiritual people interested in using dance as a medium to praise God. The first Liturgical Dance Conference, "Dancing for God," was hosted by Marygrove College. The full membership includes well over 200 people. I interviewed her on August 1, 2002, about this vital and interesting community art form, and about the echoes of "Hallelujah" still being heard in Michigan. — LB

Penny Godboldo. Photo by Linda Burnham

Linda Burnham: How was your second liturgical dance conference? Was it at Marygrove?

Penny Goldboldo: It was at Marygrove and my church. It turned out really well because our pastor, Dr. Charles Adams, had agreed to do the sermon on two nights, Friday night and Saturday night, and we were just so shocked and pleased, because he's so very busy. He did a two-part sermon on David, when he was dancing into the holy city. He talked about David bringing the Ark of the Covenant into the city, and about how David danced out of his clothes. And then he said, "In Part Two, I'll tell you the rest of the story." So, a lot of people came back the second night because they wanted to hear the rest of the story. He talked about how David's wife was ashamed of him and he just ignored her, because he said, "You don't understand, I am so on fire for God that that's more important to me than worrying about dancing out of my clothes and worrying about being kingly." He talked about how much a part of the spiritual experience dance is.

LB: How did you become involved with the Dance Exchange and "Hallelujah"?

PG: We got funding at the same time Liz did to start our activities. Hers was the "Hallelujah" project in Detroit and our funding was to give our first liturgical dance conference. The luncheon to announce it to the press and for all the different entities who had gotten funds happened at Marygrove, and Liz was the keynote speaker. She did a wonderful presentation, and afterwards I talked to her and told her what we had been funded for, and I said, "Your 'Hallelujah' project sounds like there might be some way we could overlap." She said, "Yes, that sounds wonderful, I love liturgical dance and if there's anything I can do, let me know." So, we did our first conference and then the Lerman company came back and I mentioned it to Liz again and told her how the first one had gone and said I'd really like to have a component of what she does. She asked me what 'd like and I said it would be really great if somebody could come and do a workshop for choreographers and more advanced dancers, and [Lerman company member] Margot Greenlee came. The conference was three days and Margot was there a day-and-a-half and she gave a wonderful workshop and people really loved it. It was the Tools workshop. Not only was it good for doing choreography, but it was good for teaching others choreography. So, we had a really wonderful response to Margot's class. It was a wonderful overlapping because they came right into the heart of our second conference.

LB: When was that?

PG: It was May 2001.

LB: So, "Hallelujah" was still cooking at that point.

PG: Yes, including some of my choreography that I had done some time ago for a revival at our church. Liz and I were talking about the word "Hallelujah" and what it meant and how it meant a lot of different things to a lot of people. And I said I have this piece, "Shout," and that ended up in the body of the "Hallelujah" project in Detroit. And we're reproducing it here. So, not only did Margot come and share from the Lerman Exchange, some of the material I taught at the liturgical conference ended up in the "Hallelujah" piece.

LB: I'm most interested in after "Hallelujah" was over: Do you feel like there's any energy left over from that that's still occurring in your community?

PG: I think so. I know that there were some groups that came together that probably never would have. Matrix Theater was there, a lot of different groups from Detroit. Those young kids from Winans Academy.

LB: You have a relationship with them now?

PG: The Winans are a very famous family, gospel recording artists. They also have a church in Detroit, and, as it turns out, one of my dance majors at Marygrove is director of their liturgical dance group. So, she was one of the people who was in Margot's class and loved it so much. As a matter of fact, there were a lot of people in that class who also run dance ministries. There were two workshops that it was surprising to some that most people liked. It wasn't surprising to me. I put the conference together and I knew what I wanted to expose people to. One thing people were really excited about was the Old Testament dancing, the Jewish and Israeli dancing, because a lot of people would like for the Old Testament to come alive for them. They were surprised that they enjoyed the Jewish dancing so much. My good friend Harriet Berg taught those classes, and she brought in another professional dancer. The other thing was the choreography classes that exposed people to new vocabulary, because a lot of the people who work in churches don't really have that under their belt. They don't have choreographic experience, it's primarily through inspiration that they move and create, and some of them did not understand the whole choreographic process. So, when Margot came with tools for that, that worked really nicely for them. Margot's class was specifically for choreographers and directors, that's who we directed towards her class. They really enjoyed it a lot. I would say that we're really still in the midst of all this because our young people were really excited about coming here.

LB: How many came?

PG: Five very young ones who are in middle and high school then my daughter came, who is a U of M. student, and I have a Marygrove student coming next week. And I have three high-school students from a Detroit public school and Akira from Matrix and Michael from University of Michigan, and my good friend Robin Wilson from U of M is also coming back.

But you know there were some other spin-offs. For example, I taught a class that mirrored a class that was created in Ann Arbor at U of M called "Dance Politics." I taught the class in Detroit and there was another professor who taught it at U of M and our classes came together. We met separately and then we came together three times. We went here and they came to Detroit and our students mixed up and shared our materials. It was in true Liz Lerman style that we came together, made some plans, went away, brought it back together and did a performance in an inner-city area. Some of those U of M students had also been at that site in Detroit teaching, and they learned a lot from the young people that they were servicing. Then we had a small production where the family and friends in that community came out and we shared what we had been doing. So, that was a nice little spin-off. Liz wasn't even there when we went through the course.

LB: Back to the Jewish dances: Did that have anything to do with Liz, or was it just part of the conference?

PG: No, it was an element of the conference. I wanted to include the Old Testament. We included the origins of traditional religion, which is African. We encouraged everybody to take everything, so we started with the traditional African. Most of our people are African-American, so they can understand how their religion evolved from an African prospective. Then we moved into Old Testament, which is logically Jewish. I have a good older fried who teaches Jewish dances. After the first conference, she got really excited and went to New York and started working with all these teachers who are teaching rabbis how to dance the Torah. She came back really excited and said, "I'm ready for conference #2," so I asked her to focus on the Torah, which is part of the Old Testament, and then we moved to the Christian faith, and within that we had modern dance and classical ballet.

I had this vision. The thing that made me put the conference together the way I did, with my co-director Bridget McDonald, was that I wanted to find the commonalities among people who believe. That's why we called it "Dancing for God," whatever you call God. But I wanted to focus on the commonalities and, of course, people discovered that traditional African has a lot in common with the Old Testament because they're both very old religions, and the Old Testament has a lot in common with the Christian faith because Christians look at the Old and New Testaments. Every worship service, we have scripture from the Old Testament and the New Testament. If I'd had the money I wanted, we would have also gone into Islam. When I was in Israel, I discovered that the Islamic people also believe in Jesus, they just don't believe he was the Son of God. So, I thought that was a natural connection. And if we had had even more money, we would have included the Native Americans, because Michigan has quite a history of Native American Indian culture. People don't know that Christianity has been traced back to Africa since the first century A.D., so they don't know that those Africans who don't practice Christianity made a conscious effort not to, but that they are familiar with it and there are many Africans that practice Christianity. I know, because I went to many of the churches in West Africa. So, it was logical to me that we could bring all these people together.

Linda Frye Burnham is co-director of the Community Arts Network.

Original CAN/API publication: March 2003