On Saturday night, we went to see a workshop / preview presentation of Why I Had To Dance at ideastream’s Westfield Insurance Studio Theatre. Written by Ntozake Shange and choreographed and directed by Diane McIntyre, this production of Why represented an early version of a collaboration between 2 important artists.
Shange’s initial splash, the Obie-winning For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, started out as a poetry reading in a Berkley cabaret; since then she’s written plays, poetry, novels, and essays and won numerous awards. McIntyre, whose praises we’ve been singing at every opportunity (see our preview in the 1/20/10 issue of Cool Cleveland here), “Cleveland, you don’t know how major Diane McIntyre is.”) is notable not only for her choreography for film, television, the Broadway and London stage, and for dance companies including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, but also for her many collaborations with important musicians and her mentoring relationships with many who’ve become leaders in the performing arts.
McIntyre and Shange first met in McIntyre’s dance class; only later did McIntyre learn that Shange was the author of For Colored Girls. Later still, as McIntyre tells it, Shange gave her a copy of the poem, Why I Had to Dance, and said, “Diane, you have to choreograph this.” So, like For Colored Girls, Why began as a text and became a staged narrative.
After the house lights went down we saw the youthful Elisa Hanna in the role of first person speaker, writing, pondering, sketching a dance movement and writing some more.
Then Hanna began to describe and explain what followed, a nostalgic inventory with illustrative dances. Through the youthful Hanna, author Shange recounts the story of her life with an eye to the titular question. Starting with dance that came to her, Busby Berkley movie musicals and Afro-Cuban social dancing in her parents home, Why progressed to dance that Shange sought out in classes and performances on the east and west coast, a life’s journey from childhood naiveté to artistic and political awareness and engagement.
It’s strange how a list, a sequence, can develop emotional power. Inevitably, the familiar strikes a chord and the unfamiliar gains new credence. Every living human being has some experience with Busby Berkley musicals, so the audience’s collective imagination filled in the spiral staircases and other elaborate production values while the 6 dancers illustrated the youthful narrator’s fantasy, an all-colored Busby Berkley musical.
Afro-Cuban social dancing is more culturally specific, but what McIntyre and the dancers showed on Saturday night struck a responsive chord in the largely African-American audience. “How our parents danced” was the way they described it in the question-and-answer session at the end. We watched and listened, filling in a relative void in our experience.
For us, the best moments in Why provided danced illustrations of new, surprising relationships between dance and politics. The Revolutionary Action Movement and Santeria. The first Black Power conference with music and dance provided by Olatunji and Chuck Davis. Traditional dances for Why depicting the Yoruba deities, the Orisha, Shango and Oggun, were provided by Oberlin-based Adenike Sharpley. Clevelander Mamie Johnson provided authentic Congolese dances.
And so the evening went, the lull of the familiar alternated with the shock of the new, a personalized dance history of the African Diaspora in America. The relevance of Why to African-Americans is obvious; to the rest of us Americans, it’s one more wake-up call to the pervasive presence of African culture in the American experience.
It’s far too early to say if Why I Had To Dance will make as big a splash as For Colored Girls. What we saw on Saturday night was only 30 minutes long and, as McIntyre said, would require much more dance material and much more rehearsal before it could fill a 90-minute evening. But even at 30 minutes, it’s a provocative piece that reminds us of the dance resources in Northeast Ohio.
From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas. Elsa and Vic are both longtime Clevelanders. Elsa is a landscape designer. She studied ballet as an avocation for 2 decades. Vic has been a dancer and dance teacher for most of his working life, performing in a number of dance companies in NYC and Cleveland. They write about dance as a way to learn more and keep in touch with the dance community. E-mail them at vicnelsaATearthlink.net.