What does it mean to sustain a Black-woman–led dance company for 40 years? What kind of vision is necessary? What are the key resources, broadly interpreted—not just money, but also people-places-things? What is the additional creative labor that leadership must take on to embed the company’s core values in every part of the work, and to engage communities in meaningful ways? 

I’ll start with what I thought was the middle.

​

I checked the weather reports, and a major storm was fast approaching. I still hadn’t figured out a way to secure my tomato plant against heavy winds. With its pot nestled in the corner of my fire escape, it had long ago overgrown the three-foot, cone-shaped cage I bought from the garden center, and the fire escape rails were doing most of the caging.

When COVID-19 smacked the world in the face during spring 2020, pushing a premiere of a new work three years ahead seemed sensible, responsive and strategic. It felt like if we just wait it out long enough, we’ll be able to do what we used to do. Now, we are fully into​​ Season 3 of the pandemic, and COVID continues to be regarded as an inconvenience to how we have always lived our lives. 

Melanie George’s career has been defined by multiplicity. Widely known as one of the most in-demand dramaturgs in the dance field, she is also a choreographer, a scholar and an educator. In 2012, she founded Jazz is… Dance Project, dedicated to the dissemination of jazz-dance education, choreography, performance and scholarship.

In Episode 1 of Black Dance Stories, a web series that launched on June 25, 2020, Stefanie Batten Bland talks about how she has no childcare. In another episode, Leslie Parker Zooms from the Twin Cities, where she is having solo rehearsals at a theater three blocks from the epicenter of the George Floyd protests. Nia Love starts her episode with an energetic dance that grounds her before she dives into sharing that she is recovering from a case of COVID-19 and is grieving the transition of family members.

Friends, I'd like to deliver some news that might be challenging for you. As much as we have been trained to believe "the show must go on," I can assure you right now, it will be fine if it does not.

​

I understand. Trust me, I do. The pandemic arrived smack in the middle of a performance project I've been creating since 2017.

As a Black dancer, I often grapple with a question I asked in my 2015 work BodyBusiness: What is my body worth? Over the years, fundraising for SLMDances, the collective I founded and direct, has proven to be an uphill battle. It is not lost on me that what is being funded is not just a creative process, but also my physical self and the physical bodies of the artists with whom I collaborate. 

From dancers using their art to speak truth to power to theaters opening their doors to protesters, the dance community is mobilizing in our national reckoning with racial injustice. But what is the impact of confronting systemic racism in our dance organizations, especially for Black dancers? How does confronting racism and implicit bias regularly in their creative work affect artists psychologically?

SLMDances, the dance-theater collective I founded and run, found our footing in our art-making practice creating community-engaged and accountable works. Our mission — to work in communities to organize for gender and racial justice through experiential dance performance — began to manifest in 2011 when we started developing The Window Sex Project. ...

Do you know when you are unwell? Not unwell like a cold, but unwell, like not well. Can’t think straight or maybe thinking too straight. Brushing your teeth is pushing a boulder uphill. There is a dull yellow dustiness hanging about you. In your feelings. Lachrymose. Out of body. Missing sense of self. Not sure and not used to not being sure. If there is a you that you know, that you are intimately acquainted with, not-well-you is a pale or blurry or refracted reflection.

This weekend at Danspace Project’s DraftWork, choreographers Maria Bauman and Andre M. Zachery will show new works in progress. Although they are working in disparate modes – Bauman in a solo improvisational practice  and Zachery working collaboratively at the intersection of movement and technology - each choreographer’s artistic investigation focuses on self-actualization.