Dance as Activism: Questions for a Little Black Girl

Preface: The Girl and The Dance

Scene one

Lights Up:
Her petite six-year-old 3’ cocoa-brown body steps onstage from behind the left curtain. Clad in black tights that stop at her ankles and a yellow t-shirt that hangs to mid-thigh, she exudes nervous innocence. The audience — made up primarily of parents, family members and friends of the young girl and the other, yet to be seen performers — applauds generously. In the next moment the young girl bounces her body across the stage. Bare feet and heals lifted she takes each step of her rehearsed walk with melodious sass; her hips and arms swing from side to side in reckless abandon. Her torso twists and lulls the air around her as she moves through the space. When she reaches center stage, she stops and faces the audience. For a moment she gazes back at us. Her face appears to mirror ours: demanding, filled with expectation, filled with anticipation, filled with a cry to be entertained; yet, she appears to be analyzing each crease and crevice of the mass our muddled bodies create against the glare of the bright stage light. (She is probably just trying to see her parents.) This pause is only the length of a short sigh. This pause is an eternity. She breaks the silence, circles her torso and her neck. She, then, simultaneously tosses her right hand to her hips, her left hand to her head, flicks her head upward and freezes. The audience irrupts, roars, stomp feet, hands slap violently together. Black out.

Introduction

What is community art activism as it relates to the embodied discipline of dance in 21st Century America? In this paper, I query whether dance can be used as a pedagogical tool to unmask racist, colonialist, sexist and classist practices; inform revolutionary identities; and reinvigorate communities to build and/or resurrect foundational structures that honor, dignify and empower the community as a whole and each individual member wholly. I focus on girls and women of African ancestry (Black or/and African-American girls and women) in their encounter with dance in the social-justice and community-activist initiatives. My concerns are: (1) the intensification of the hypersexualization of the Black female body in contemporary United States cultural discourse; (2) the new and pervasive forms of cultural humiliation and violence exacted upon the Black female body; (3) the implication of both for the formation of Black female individual and community identity. Using critical social/cultural theories, womanist methodologies and performance-studies approaches, and drawing on interviews conducted with M’Bewe Escobar, C. S’thembile West, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, I examine case studies of community arts activists who employ dance as a primary tool for critical social/cultural interrogation and community building. As a dance artist, an African-Caribbean woman and a social/cultural activist who uses dance as a critical tool, I am situated in the midst of this conversation.

Intertwined in and interpenetrating through the concerns put forth in this paper are the questions that stirred at the 2008 National Community Arts Convening & Research Project Conference. Responses to questions such as where do you come from, where are you rooted, what is your passion for this work, and why are you here, inform encounters, curriculum, expectations, notions of power, beauty, and justice. These and other pertinent questions are explicitly and implicitly addressed in this paper.

The notion of community, broad and controversial as it is, is in this paper used to denote gatherings of persons with shared interests and investment in the maintenance of a collective in which honor, dignity and human flourishing are diligently upheld and the notion of revolutionary love is infused in all aspect of public and private encounter (hooks 2000, xv; Phillips 2006). With this in mind, it is impossible to have a community in which private or public  denigration of self or others is a prerequisite for belonging (Guijt, Shah 25). In such instances, other terms such as club, group, fraternity, sorority, neighborhood, town, city and even society (where there is no prerequisite for dignity or consciously engaged living) are likely more applicable. Hence, in this paper it is understood that sitting at the same table (living in the same neighborhood, attending the same public gathering) is not a marker that a community has been or has the intention of being formed; shared space does not organically imply community (Guijt, Shah 25).

Methodology

The methodologies used in this paper were chosen for their tendency to privilege lived experience. Critical social/cultural theories facilitate a reflexive examination of the ways in which social and cultural discourses are formed, informed and impact the lives and life possibilities of persons within a given society (Feagin 5).

Womanist methodologies draw on tools from various disciplines but its center of gravity is the lives and concerns of ordinary Black women. The feminist agenda has not always valued the lives and concerns of women of color. On numerous occasions, in the attempt to access and exercise power, feminists have consciously worked to the detriment of the lives and concerns of women of color: womanism offers a corrective to addressing structures of oppression without architecting additional displacement of the oppressed. With its center of gravity in the daily lives of ordinary Black women, ethics and spirituality are at the core womanist methodologies. Hence, it offers alternative modes and lenses for locating and negotiating power and oppression, while it holds the affirming of dignified lives, individual and community reflexive self-evaluation, ethical and spiritual responsibility, and the building up of holistic communities at the center of its praxis (Phillips).

Performance-studies approaches, because the focus on what actually takes place in the negotiation of life, offer the opportunity to explore the way in which Black women’s encounter with dance in community-building, community activism and social-justice work can empower, undermine, inform, transform, silence and/or frustrate possibilities for voice (Turner 40).

The Artists

The artists interviewed for this paper are Black women who facilitate encounters in community building and social/cultural activism. They are dance professionals who have (or have had) extensive performing careers and are active social/cultural activist, community builders and cultural practitioners with more than 30 years of experience. M’bewe Escobar, a teaching artist, is affiliated with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater/Ailey Camp. She works largely with elementary and secondary school children. C.S’thembile West is a professor in the Women’s Studies Department at West Illinois University and dance writer. She works chiefly with young adults and women. Jawole Willa Jo Zollar is the founder and artistic director of Urban Bush Women Dance Company. She works primarily in multigenerational community settings.

Why Dance?

Dance as a pedagogical tool is ripe with possibilities. Dance brings the troubling question of embodiment to the center of conversation and keeps it there. Since it requires the use of the body, it can offer up occasions for persons to act as subjects who name and define themselves and their environment. Dance calls on the practical-use multiple intelligences (including kinesthetic, music, intra- and interpersonal, spatial, logic, linguistic and nature intelligences), thus it offers up options for cultivating critically engaged social actors and cultural producers. Dance involves the calling forth of steps/movement sequences from cultural and social activities of the immediate and distant past, thus it can offer the chance for affirming, questioning, re-interpreting and re-visioning social memory. Dance offers a way of learning that etches deep into bones and expands beyond the horizon of dreams.

Educators Paulo Freire, Joanne Kilgour Dowdy, Lisa Delpit, Donaldo Macedo and Lilia I. Bartolome point to freedom as essential to education: They point to the formation/re-formulation of individual and community understanding of self, society and the world as necessary to the process and goal of education. Dance as a pedagogical tool provides opportunities for this type of deep learning encounter, a liberating process (Freire 16).

Contemporary United States culture, with its embrace and appropriation of the misogynistic aspects of hip-hop culture, reveals some of the ways dance can be used to stifle freedom. Young people (Black, white, brown and others) are. through the guise of entertainment, indoctrinated into this oppressive system (Hobgood 2000, 4). Coerced by the “hype” and the desire to be “with it,” young people, and those who seek to align themselves with youth culture, perpetuate the oppression of themselves and others (Mullins 2005, 684). By inscribing and symbolically infusing Black bodies with derogatory messages that announces as innate degrading ways of being in the world, contemporary United States culture circumscribe the Black person’s possibilities for experience and expression in the world (Sharp 2000, 290). Moreover, the Black female body is displaced from familial and community love, honor and safety and re-positioned as commodity on the grand capitalist marketplace that resembles, all too closely, the slave auction block.

Dance and Society

In “Society and the Dance: The Social Anthropology and Process of Performance,” anthropologist Peter Brinson identifies dance as an important tool in the analysis of society (207-215). Long before Brinson, Zora Neale Hurston used dance as one of her primary tools for critical social and cultural inquiry of the United States’ South. Since then cultural practitioners, including anthropologists, artists and educators, have drawn on dance to construct a lens through which to interrogate social, cultural and popular society and thought. Artists and educators such as Lavinia Williams, Pearl Primus, Eleo Pomare, Joe Nash, Alvin Ailey and Katherine Dunham were part of cultural movements that, through dance, queried the universalistic aestheticism of dance in the West and the implication of such aestheticism for social, cultural, gender and racial politicking. Why was aesthetics so critically important to these scholars, artists, community activists and social-justice workers? How does aesthetics relate to the crucial topics of social justice and community building?

Aesthetics

Because when you speak of beauty, you’re really talking about what it is to be human. When you find the core of humanity inside yourself, that’s when you know you are beautiful.
Sonia Sanchez (Byrd, Solomon)

Aesthetics is at the foundational core of every society. It informs the ways in which a given society embraces and understands itself and encounters others. Hence, it informs the construction of community and family, concepts of justice and honor, notions of responsibility and trust (Hobson 10; Reischer, Koo 298). A culture’s aesthetic sensibility is in performance in every crease and crevice of individual and community life. Yet, aesthetic sensibilities are so common places, so taken-for-granted within the culture of a given society that it becomes invisible, unquestionably “real” and unquestionably “logical.” It remains so until the questions bubbling within the undergirth of the unquestionable slide through the society’s fissures.

Nowhere is aesthetics more visible, more provocatively apparent, more performative than in the places/spaces in which a society is at odds with itself, and consequently at odds with those it labels “Other” (Yancy). It is in these places/spaces that taken-for-granted understandings are unmasked, latent questions hungry to be articulated explode from their hiding place, and the unquestionables are asked to account for themselves. These spaces/places are fertile ground for hitherto unimagined possibilities; possibilities for encountering the world in innovative ways, possibilities to discover, rediscover and/or reconfigure old formulas in order to respond to, inform and/or challenge new circumstance, or old circumstance in new guise. In most societies the arts play the crucial role of making visible, nurturing and promoting the culture’s aesthetic sensibilities, articulating its most deeply held beliefs about itself and others and passing on to each new generation the society’s aesthetic sensibilities (Hobson 9).

Black Women in the United States

Scene Two

Lights Up:
She had worn a sports bra and two leotards below her costume, but Irene Black[*] did not escape this comment by a church leader: “The dance was nice but a third of the way through, I was distracted by the outline of your nipples on your blouse when you sweat. It took away from my spiritual meditation. When you dance, I think it would be good if you and the other dancers duck tape your breast under your bra, leotards and costume. Then, your nipples will not make an outline when you sweat. Then, you would be less distracting to the congregation; we can then focus on the spiritual message of the dance.”

In contemporary western societies the Black female body is positioned at thresholds: She stands on the pulse between animal and human sinner and divinely burdened, reproached and deeply desired. She is gendered and raced, raced with sexualized violence, gendered with racialized brutality. She is the recipient of a sacralized hostility that endorses relentless cultural violence (Burton 8; Gilkes 242).

Forcibly displayed naked on public auction blocks during the time of enslavement, Black women were the first women in the United States to endure socially and culturally sanctioned public sexual exploitation, sexual humiliation, sexual abuse and sexual violence (Gilkes 242). Notions of her sexual availability and sexual appetite, a legal system that support and promoted enslavement and a society that did not apply its moral barometer to its encounter with the lives of the enslaved resulted in the unquestioned use and abuse of her body (West 66). Slaveholder were neither legally nor morally culpable for the treatment exacted on Black women’s bodies (Hill 56). The end of the slavery did not bring ease to the derogatory images and myths inscribed on the Black female body. It can be argued that these images and myths were, instead, intensified (Hobson 119).

Inform Revolutionary Identities

 Scene Three

My hair is a midterm; you have to study it to know me. You have to study it to know ME!

In June of 2007 at the closing exchange ceremony for the two-week trial Alvin Ailey Dance-Camp in Atlanta, Georgia, an elementary-school girl of African ancestry delivered the above line of her poem. In her statement she flipped the conversation around race, Black femaleness and power: She imagined that knowledge (not usability or instrumentality) of her being was somehow desirable; she imagined that the desire was fueled with passion that could (and certainly did) catalyze commitment, investment and patience; she imagined that the local knowledge of herself (Low, Lawerence-Zuinga 79), which she possessed in consciousness and in ancestral knowing systems, is valuable; she imagined that she has the power to orchestrate whether or not and under what circumstance and manner this knowledge of herself is let known to those outside of herself, regardless of color, gender, class, ethnicity or religion; she imagined that within the landscape of the contemporary United States she is a person in her own right. This little Black girl, in her audaciousness, follows in an honorary line of truth tellers, performing herself in much the same way Sojourner Truth did when she flipped the script, articulated a definition of herself and her place in the world, and forced her white audience to, for a revolutionary moment, see her as she saw and lived herself (Brooks 50).

This little girl of African ancestry, a little Black girl living in the big white United States, vocalized a power and presence that much of hip-hop culture and Don Imus and much of the contemporary United States have built hegemony against (West 66).  When this little girl breaks into her dance, with her twists, whines, spins, jumps, falls, convolutions and counterrevolutions, bounces and ripples and breezes, she is, for herself, intermingled in conversation with the revolutionary spirit of her present and ancestral selves, carving through the past, present, and future and creating dynamic presence through informed performed performance.

Callings Outside Our Names

On April 4, 2007, Don Imus, a controversial national radio host, referred to the group of young Black women who made up the successful Rutgers University women’s basketball team in racial and sexual derogatory terms. In his defense, he claimed the ordinariness of such statements within present-day United States culture. The young Black women, the recipients of Don Imus’ verbal attack, were asked to endure the burden of living lives as Black women in the United States. They were expected to, and did, carry this unearned burden of normalized cultural humiliation and violence with the stoic grace of “the strong Black woman” and play their already scripted roles on the national and international stage (Hobgood 4).

Mainstream United States culture has normalized the public denigration of Black girls and women. Don Imus was not speaking against the grain when he expressed his “controversial” thoughts in April 2007 (Feagin 14). His reinstatement back onto the airwaves in the latter months of the same year speaks more of the okay-ness of his popular gesturing than to any equity in the judicial system of popular and legal thought and culture. I would not deny that there is always, somewhere, a resistance to vulgar displays in popular culture. Such resistance to this aspect of contemporary United States culture is at best cursory, emanating from the whispers of tired older women and men or the quivering utterances of shell-shocked middle-aged professionals. My question here is: What happens when vulgar displays and, what Joseph Conrad called the corruption of human conscience, become normative, accepted as central to the culture’s understanding of itself?

Troubling the performativity of Don Imus’ gesturing, a little Black girl defines herself and her world, effectively trumping the Imus script. Who is this little Black girl who professes knowledge of the complexities of her hair as the requirement for knowing her, of knowing how she understands herself and her place in the world? Who is this little Black girl, whose complicated and tenacious hair — much like her cocoa-brown body — has throughout United States history been the object of ridicule, derogation and confusion? Her hair, identified as “a problem,” requires a multimillion-dollar industry to solve it. Her hair, a symbol of both her grace and her curse, is hair that dares to be regardless. Her hair, much like her dancing body, which she refuses to pathologize, is, indeed, an icon of her present and future selves; daring to be regardless (Phillips 9; Yancy).

But, who is this little Black girl for those who have been drilled daily, from birth to the grave, to carve up her body and negate her personhood (Macedo, Bartolome 4; Phillips 9)? Her breasts (not yet formed), her thighs, her womb, her lips, neck, hair and eyes and the space between her thighs are all eroticized, exotized, instrumentalized and commercialized (Gilkes 242). She is what Fred Moten calls the “commodity who talks” (Moten). In this case, she is the commodity who “talks back” through her dance and her vocal capacity. Anna K. Perkins points to the Black woman’s voice as her primary and perennial weapon against injustice. A Black woman may not posses economic strengthen, social status or political power but her voice (embodied and spoken) is always hers; and her inherited legacy of resistance requires her to “talk back” to protect herself and her family, to make visible and interrogate society’s unquestionables, to declare words and deeds unacceptable, to challenge and unmask the various mutations of isms the society is vested in, and to assert and affirm her dignity, honor and integrity.

Communities: Interview Excerpts

Scene Four

M’Bewe Escobar on her work with young people:

I have a lot of contact with elementary- and middle-school students. Young people self-express to find out who they are, to find a voice for themselves, to find their identity. Dance can help them to see a way to find a place in the world.

I notice that that the girls’ clothing are tight, their expressions are bound, their throats are bound. Their movement expression is limited by the tightness of their clothes. I am always surprised at how the boys are ready to move. There are always shy ones but most eventually come around. But, the girls are binding themselves.

One of my questions about hip-hop has to do with whether or not it has been a beneficial influence on our children. I have heard it said that hip-hop tells it like it is; that the message of hip-hop is about black culture. In one way I see it as potentially very, very powerful. However, the overwhelming message I have heard I do not enjoy. I think it has been denigrating towards Black girls and women, denigrating towards young Black boys as well, offering props to young black male to go ahead and denigrate. I think it has been very negative.

Wow, when these young people see these images of their idols, not benign nudity, it's very sexual. They want to mirror it.

I feel that that binding blocks them of their mental, emotional, spiritual and sensual freedom; all that binding shuts them down. I say, “Isn’t that exploitation?” In my mind it is. They have been taught to exploit themselves; they are in service to their icons. Why are our young girls taught that? It's very difficult to get them to see something different.

Art is encountering young people, hearing them.

C. S’thembile West on her recent work with young adult women:

My foundation is that we live every part of our lives through our bodies. We need to identify who we are in our bodies. When we self —identify we begin to find out who we are in our bodies. We become aware of how our bodies feel and become aware of what others feel.

Our bodies can be sites of protest. All the work that we produce is always a social commentary. That's how I see African-American dance. Even though some of these young people, who will not articulate anything of what I am talking about, I see it in the dances. You know how some of the dance moves are like something is being pushed off? I think that is it the structures of the society that are being pushed off. 

You have to be realistic and you don't want to turn them off at the first class.

One girl kept saying: I can’t do this. I told her, it's as simple as deciding you can. This work is much more than trying to teach a dance position or step. The body is a reflection of what your mind is doing.  

In a context where any kind of touch is sexual, then it is a difficult when we put people in a room [the dance studio] where suddenly the body is not supposed to be a taboo.

[With dance] you control what you want, so you can listen to other parts of your body, you want to come to some type of synthesis.

When we say justice, we are talking about change. We want people to live in dignity. I can't decide what part of this class you should hold dearest. We need to think carefully about how we live. There is a ripple, do you want your ripple to be one that causes global warming or retards it.

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar describes a project done in New Orleans:

I look at my work as working through two mediums: 1) concert stage where the artistic really gets into the work and 2) the community art where the building of community is central. There are two different types of logic looking at serving a larger community in relation to issues that want to be brought to the surface, want to be told, and collaboration not just with the dancers on the stage but with the community. In order for dancer to collaborate there has to be a break from the model of do what you are told. There has to be pure dialogue and respect between artists. We have to be able to interact in peace.

Building and exiting community is a leadership model of how you enter a space of the unknown with respect for history of the community, where the community is, and where the community wants to go.

1) Research/prep work is necessary. You need to find out where the leadership, where it has been, where does it see itself going, and, 2) the work that you do together to listen. Research is in process; it is ongoing. Question like: What do you free? What has been destroyed? Who’s coming back who's not? Not just sitting at a table” The building of community is through this art making experience together. In ways that everyone can see what is unearthing. Questions are revealed through a continuous process. There is point where the performance gets the focus, and afterwards there is, 3) the debriefing: In the debriefing we discuss what we learn. What were the things that didn't get addressed? What is the community’s next step? We are going leave, what will you carry forward/how can we assist you?

Implicit in what all three artists shared about their experiences in community arts activism is the notion that community is, and should be, a space in which dignity, honor and individual and communal flourishing are upheld, a place where revolutionary love drives each and every interaction, a place where no individual’s sense of belongingness is predicated upon the denegation of self and/or other.

Interrogating popular hip-hop culture, M’Bewe Escobar views the tight clothing young girls are encouraged to wear as binding not only to their bodies but also to their minds, obstructing their ability to self-express, voice their presences and concerns in the world. By capturing the imaginations of young Black girls, popular culture indoctrinates the girls into patterns of social constraints. Limitation on the ways in which young Black girls are allowed to define, identify and assert themselves, are promoted through a one-dimensional view of Black womanhood (Emerson120). This view of Black womanhood is hypersexualized and morally tenuous (Hobson 10). As Escobar points out, the nudity promoted by popular hip-hop culture is not “benign nudity; it is very sexual.” This sexual objectification, where sexuality, sensuality and spirituality are violently torn apart from one another and sexuality is highlighted at the cost of personhood and holistic beingness, is a repetitive pattern in United States culture’s dealing with regards to Black femaleness.

For Escobar, young women are taught to bind themselves in tight clothing that simulates the nudity of their popular hip-hop idols. This carries negative consequences for voice; it carries negative consequences for young Black girls’ ability to self-express, their ability to “talk back.” In essence, it negatively impacts young Black girls’ ability to assert themselves in defense of themselves against various forms of injustices.

In her workshops, Escobar engage young girls about their clothing, help them to identify types of clothing that would allow them the greater movement possibility. In so doing, Escobar helps young Black girls to give themselves permission to experience presence, voice and personal growth within the space of the dance studio with the hope that this will propel the freeing of their imagination, the embracing of opportunities to experience, explore and engage the world in new and transformative ways. 

Highlighting the body as foundational to the experience of life, C. S’thembile West notes: “When we self-identify we begin to find out who we are in our bodies. We become aware of how our bodies feel, and become aware of what others feel.” Conscious engagement in the body is essential to an individual’s personal development and growth, and crucial to the ways in which individuals encounter others, build community and build societies. The body as a site of “social commentary” is a provocative space. West points to a history of African Americans’ use of the body though its popular dances to comment on, contest and resist dominant white society’s script about their identities and lives (West 68). In her work, West encourages young women to explore and develop movement vocabulary that speaks of all aspects of their lives, to choose when sexuality is the topic of conversation/commentary, and to be informed by justice in their voice and actions (West 2005, 66). West notes: “In the context of movement, each encounter with another dance provides an opportunity to distill learning and to ‘try on’ new kinesthetic clothing: nuance, insinuation, attitude, feeling, sense and intelligence” (West 66).

For this reason, West does her homework, not wanting to “turn students off” on their first visit to the dance studio, West judiciously employs music from popular hip-hop culture, choosing the artist and message with care. Sifting through popular hip-hop music to find the right artist or songs is not easy: “I wince because it [the messages in the music] just go through me. I am not trying to validate it, but I at least have to hear it. It's like I need to know what the porn is, but I don't have to sanction it.” In this way, West is able to make herself available to extend a genuine invitation to young Black women, meeting them where they are. But also meeting them in a space where she is safe, hence tending to the essential activity of self-care while working on the project of building community. Building on an initial encounter in which she and her young adult participants are honored, West introduces spirituality and justice into the movement and verbal conversation. She encourages young Black women to expand their expressive vocabulary, so that they empower themselves to move beyond the confines of popular hip-hop culture and contemporary United States cultural rhetoric about their bodies, their lives, their power and their voices. West speaks from a deeply rooted African-American spiritual base that she hopes will be passed on to the young Black women she encounters.

In her multigenerational community arts encounters, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar applies a three-pronged method: (1) Research/Prep Work, (2) Listening together and (3) Debriefing.

Research/Prep work is the time taken before entering the community to find out about the community’s current situation, its history, its identity. By making contact with designated community leaders, insight is given into where the community sees itself going.

Listening and creating together requires work from all participants. It is through deep listening that members of the community come to know each other better, engage in the building of art that reflects the interests/concerns of the community, and develop or rediscover skills that promote the community’s well-being. Zollar notes, “The building of community is through this art-making experience together.” This moment of collaboration is potentially transformative. Collaboration, whether it is with dance-company members or with members of the site community, the requirements are the same: respect for the views and ideas of others, and willingness to engage in the discovery and creativity necessary for bringing ideas together. For Zollar, collaboration does not find its center in compromise, it finds its center in pure dialogue.

Debriefing takes place after the artwork has been exhibited. It is here that community participants discuss what they have learned, what was not brought into discussion, and how the community will continue on. Calling attention to the finitude of the workshop, Zollar reminds the site community: “We are going leave. What will you carry forward? How can we assist you?

Zollar’s community-building work allows participants to engage in deep learning and bonding with others in the community through the shared experience of art making. By providing common ground in which respect and dignity of each community member is upheld and equally valued, individuals are more likely to voice their interests and concerns. In so doing, Zollar’s notion of “pure dialogue” is made possible. Pure dialogue becomes the instrument for the creation of an authentic community artwork. In the art-making space facilitated by Zollar and her company, the youthful voices of young people are as valued and honored as the seasoned voices of their elders, the potential for shared experiences, knowledge and wisdom is made possible. Such a space offers possibilities for the “unearthing” of that which stirs in the undercurrent of the community, opening up the hope for healing and transformation. Having engaged in a model of deep collaboration informed by pure dialogue, these skills now become a part of the community’s local knowledge base, tools to call on in order to carry on the necessary healing and building work outside the workshop space.

Conclusion

Based on the insights put forward by Escobar, West and Zollar the little Black girl in performance in Scene One, the young Black woman in Scene Two, and the little Black girl in Scene Three can, when paired with facilitators conscious of the world Black girls and women are asked to negotiate, 1) find, in the embodied practice of dance, space/place to discover themselves, locate and articulate their voices, and engage in embodied critical social commentary; 2) learn the skills necessary for the building up of a spiritual foundation that ultimately informs notions of justice and empowers Black girls and women to live in ways that honors their spiritual foundation; and, 3) experience the powerful affirmation of having a voice, equally valued, in a community made up of those invested in the maintaining of a collective in which honor, dignity, and human flourishing are diligently upheld and the notion of revolutionary love is infused in all aspects of private and public encounter (hooks 2000, Phillips 2006).

Dance in social justice and community activism holds hope for providing young Black girls with the necessary skills for negotiating the onslaught of cultural violence they will encounter. Yet, how do we begin to build a world where this violence is not a part of their lives?

Black Out: Curtains Close.

Break it Down: The Questions

What are the questions for a Little Black Girl? The questions I have for a Little Black Girl — the Little Black girl in me and in the mothers, aunts, friends and other women of age, the Little Black Girl who lives in the present and carves out the future with deep understanding of and responsibility to the past, present and future, the Little Black Girl who is the daughter and/or niece of Jesse Jackson, Lil Boosie, Clarke Howard, Colin Powell, Don Imus, Spike Lee, Plies, Tiger Woods and Barack Obama; the Little Black Girl who must speak - my questions are: Is it enough; is training young girls to deal with the onslaught of anticipated psychic and cultural violence enough? Is it enough to be ready with the right cutting words or brazen attitudes: is it enough to be skillfully trained in heart to heart, skin to skin, spirit to spirit, winner-takes-all vicious combat? Is it acceptable to train the innocence out of little girls’ hearts in order to protect her souls, enough? At what point is it unacceptable to continue this program of violence? At what point should demands for critical, thought-out solutions rupture the complacency of normalized violations? Is it possible to inspire this society, which at its core is not invested in the well-being a Little Black Girl or her community, to become true stakeholders in upholding the human dignity of a Little Black Girl? With Escobar’s assertion that popular hip-hop culture is “giving props,” rewarding boys and young men for their denigration of Black girls and women, is it possible to build a community that takes stock in a Little Black Girl, invested in her value, her honor, her power and her potential? Is it possible to become critically constructive architects of a future open to the honor, dignity and empowerment of the community as a whole and each individual member wholly? As West notes: “When we say justice, we are talking about change.” We are talking about embracing an aesthetic notion that resonates in the honor and dignity of each individual and community. We are talking about beauty reflected in culture and society, in politics and economy, in race/ethnic and gender relations. We are talking about the art of building, healing, and sustaining community.

This essay is part of the Community Arts Convening & Research Project, 2008, funded by a Nathan Cummings Foundation grant to the Maryland Institute College of Art.  The essay was reviewed and selected by the project's Editorial Board: Ron Bechet, Xavier University of Louisiana; Lori Hager, University of Oregon; Marina Gutierrez, Cooper Union; Ken Krafchek, Maryland Institute College of Art; Sonia Mañjon, California College of the Arts; Amalia Mesa-Bains, California State University Monterey Bay; Paul Teruel, Columbia College Chicago; and Stephani Woodson, Arizona State University.

Carole Marie Webster is a dance/theater artist, a cultural anthropologist, and theologian.  She uses dance/movement to engage communities in critical reflection and conversation on issues of gender, race/ethnic, disability and class justice.

[*] In order protect this young Black woman’s identity, the fictitious name Irene Black is used.

Works Cited

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Bennett, M., and V.D. Dickerson. Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representation by African American Women. New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Rutgers University Press, 2000.

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Original CAN/API publication: August 2008