How People Move People

Mid-Ground: Episode 1, Tara Aisha Willis

Episode Summary

In this episode, host Tara Aisha Willis, Ph.D. (Chicago, IL) introduces Series Three, "Mid-Ground," which brings pairs of dance and performance artists together in kinship around their roots and work in the Black Midwest. Interviews for "Mid-Ground" feature dance artists, writers, dramaturgs, and cultural activists Ajara Alghali, Gabrielle Civil, Melanie George, Jennifer Harge, Meida McNeal, Bebe Miller, Katherine Simóne Reynolds, and Reggie Wilson.

Episode Notes

Episode Transcription

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to How People Move People, a podcast about the impact that our words, art, stories, and lives have on each other. Each series' journey unfolds in a sequence of six episodes. This series titled "Mid-Ground" is hosted by dancer, curator, and scholar, Dr. Tara Aisha Willis. “Mid-Ground,” brings pairs of dance and performance artists together in kinship around their roots and work in the Black Midwest.

TARA AISHA WILLIS: I currently live in Chicago. Many people think of Chicago as the main urban hub of the Midwest portion of the United States. It is the third largest city in the country, running up behind New York and Los Angeles. It's a cultural destination, especially for people from other parts of the Midwest. It's also one of many Midwest cities which have been shaped by industrial change. It has the expansive terrain of the prairies and flat, flat farmland surrounding it, just like many other cities in the Midwest. And it particularly has the presence, the labor, and the creative contributions of black communities over the last century and a half, especially though not only black migrants from the South of the U.S. during the Great Migration which lasted from about the early 1900s through the late 20th century. A cultural result of that changing landscape in that era comes quickly to mind for most people in the form of the Harlem Renaissance, the 1920s, 1930s in New York City. But actually in the Midwest, it was the 50s and 60s when a significantly higher number of Black folks who were born in the South had moved actually more to Midwest states than to East Coast ones.

To that influx of migration, we might credit things like the music and dance of Detroit's Motown Soul Machine, Chicago's legendary jazz scene, which my dad was a member of starting in the 1950s when he moved as a part of the late portion of the great migration, house music’s rise in the 70s and a lot more. I myself am a first-generation Midwesterner born and raised in Chicago. My father is from Jackson, Mississippi and my mother is from Ohio.

My life in the dance field took me to New York City for many years, but it also returned me back to Chicago in 2017 when I was invited to create this podcast series a few years later. It was that transition, that path of return to my home that got me thinking about what kind of conversations I wanted to have from where I am now. The first thing I noticed about being back in the Midwest, was something that had never been quite so plain to me when I was growing up, nor even on brief trips home to Chicago. It took being here again, day after day, for an extended period after living for so many years in the cramped, crooked churn of New York City and the winding roads of the East Coast with its tiny states and rolling mountainous terrain. Even among the biggest downtown skyscrapers of the Midwest, something about the flatness of the land, and the spread-out state borders opens up the sky. It makes the world bigger around you. Not every part of the Midwest is totally flat, but there is a feeling to many of our cities that it's possible to look down a street and see for miles. Expressways, yes, expressways, not highways, that's what we call them in Chicago, often wind over top of a grid, making you see only more sky.

There's a particular spacious sprawl and homey intimacy to many of the Midwest cities, big and small, Chicago and beyond. It seems specific to me, spaced out, unlike the dense East Coast, flat and without the West sweeping land formations, decidedly Northern but deeply influenced by the South. And in some places like St. Louis or even Cincinnati, where my mom grew up really blurring into the Central South directly in terms of the culture of those places. The Midwest is a bit of an enigma and the Black Midwest is even more so. [pause] For some examples, internet tests for regional accents, if you've ever done them online, skew decidedly white. So when you do one for Chicago, you'll get a test that points out the flat A's that come from a Euro-American immigration pathway from the Northeast that have kind of been adapted in the Midwest over time. But you won't usually get the kind of particular Southern inflected drawl of black South and West Side Chicagoans, for example. The whiteness of my Chicago accent is strong, but I will never forget realizing that when I was living in New York, people did not understand what I meant when I said things like, ‘I'm gonna go put that up’ instead of ‘I'm gonna go put that away’. It's a Southernism that has become a black Midwesternism. This is not to say it doesn't exist in other places, it migrates, you know, these language things migrate. But that was a really clear moment of recognition for me.

When the needs and desires of middle America come up in political debates across the country, they rarely refer to the particularities of Black disenfranchisement in the Midwest, despite our longstanding presence here. Despite or maybe precisely because of the clear visibility of black Midwesterners over the last decade in instances of racialized police brutality and then the galvanizing protest movements that have been initiated in response, the Midwest has still not quite congealed in the national imagination as a place where Black people live, work, organize and create. But as many of my guests on this podcast point out, maybe that's for the best.

You'll notice I haven't thus far defined which states I'm actually including in the Black Midwest. In the book, Black in the Middle: An Anthology of the Black Midwest, the Black Midwest sometimes might be overlaid with actually a larger map of the Rust Belt, which includes parts of Pennsylvania, among other states that aren't usually considered to be Midwestern. That migration that happened was largely focused on industrial jobs.

And the subsequent loss of industry that is central to the narrative is really core to the story of what formulates that map. In the book's forward, Jamala Rogers writes, quote, “Like a middle child, black Midwesterners have struggled to project our unique identity sandwiched between two pretentious sibling coasts. Our collective mannerism often comes across as subdued and unassuming. The history contradicts that myth on so many levels.” Rogers calls this a modest posture. It's the phrase that I just love. This modest posture is a way at times of surviving within Black enclaves of largely conservative states and the kind of landscape of largely segregated cities. At other times, it's a way of just getting busy, staying focused on our work, and minding our own business. (pause) It feels very Midwestern to me.

It's not hard to see the way that coastal cities take up so much airspace in the writing of the arts, dance history, designating the relevance of culture. But it's far more evident to me now than it was when I actually lived in New York City. In the years since I've moved back to Chicago, I've been personally and professionally thinking through my relationship with place in a way that I never did before. There's some larger sense of familiarity, a Midwestern ethos that's ingrained in my hometown but goes far beyond it that I'm interested in. But specifically a relationship with this blurry but true feeling thing that gets called sometimes the Black Midwest. So this podcast is my chance to draw on my own networks of dance people to selfishly help me address my own self interrogation about this place, being from it, leaving it and arriving to it.

I've gathered the guests in this series around my own curiosities as I figure out what it is about here, what on earth I'm doing here, what broader mesh I'm part of here. I knew there was a connection I wanted to make between Black Dance practices and the Black Midwest, specifically in relation to our lineages, our roots, our work preserving, archiving, and transmitting our pasts for the future. So, I ask each pair of my guests questions that I've been asking myself. Is the Black Midwest a real thing or just whatever we make it to be? Does it even matter to call it that or to label it? How are we in relation with a place or an idea of a place? One answer to that must include a sense of what's come before, what we're already working with when we move through that place, what that place and the people there have given us, and what we pass along.

An aspect of each guest's work is concerned with archives, history, and transmission of dance knowledge, whether it be through teaching, working with archival materials in their artistry, preserving their own legacies as artists, or advocating for Black lineages and influences to be better understood more broadly by more people. This podcast is essentially a constellation of people who are part of what I think of as a Black dance Midwest or dancing Black Midwest. Not all of them live here. Some were born and raised but moved away. Some came here as adults. Some started here and remain here. I admit that my pool of participants is fairly Detroit and Chicago-centric, as is my own viewpoint, but it also includes Milwaukee, Wisconsin, St. Louis, Missouri, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Columbus, Ohio, and others. Many of the stories lay out a similar or at least related cultural landscape, regardless of city size and what position each individual has taken up within it. Dancing, movement, and embodiment are central to how these folks all talk about their relationships with both the Midwest and their roots and lineages as artists and as people.

In turn, talking about dance and performance reveals an embodied geography of the Black Midwest. The series holds four paired conversations across five episodes. It starts with a conversation between curator and artist, Katherine Simone Reynolds and writer/performer Gabrielle Civil. Both of their work lives more in the performance art world, but their focus on the body in the landscape of the Midwest is singular. And they were both part of the Black Midwest Initiatives first convening in 2019, which led to that Black in the Middle anthology I mentioned, which they both contributed to. Next, you'll hear a conversation with Meida McNeal and Ajara Alghali, who both have been building organizations which preserve and promote legacies of African diasporic dance as social space, as well as doing extensive work to build arts infrastructure in their respective cities. Another conversation is with Reggie Wilson and Melanie George, who have crossed paths in the concert dance world before but now sit down for the first time to think through together how their investment in studying lines of dance influence through ethnographic and embodied research and teaching overlap with their respective Midwestern upbringings. The series then closes with a conversation between choreographer Jennifer Harge and the legendary dance maker Bebe Miller, who Jennifer has looked up to for many years as part of a black postmodern and experimental dance lineage.

Each conversation has a focus that I have, I would say, choreographed into each pairing and each set of questions. But there are unexpected throughlines that came up as conversations unfolded. The series is, after all, about how people move people. What better way to find out than to bring them into conversation with each other and find my way through the middle of that exchange? This brings me to the title, "Mid-Ground." Obviously, this is connected to the idea of the Midwest, the third coast. But Mid-Ground also evokes the middle ground of a dialogue. The space between voices where conversation unfolds, commonalities are found, overlaps are explored. When I say ground, I'm thinking of the ground on and over which we move, where we dance, choreograph, migrate, and share space,

Where we make homes and find roots, family, and community, but also artistic and cultural lineages that we carry wherever we go. This series is about a place or an idea of many distinct places that are connected by geography as well as culture. It's also about how a place is both geographic and physical space, as well as the people that move through that space, making dance happen, finding relationship through motion. Ground is the support for our activities. It is paved for us by others and we pave it for those to come. With that in mind, in each conversation, I ask guests who their work is for. This is based on something I heard author Alexis Pauline Gums say. She was talking about reading deeply the work of 1970s black feminist writers like Audre Lorde, and she described feeling like she could feel these writers loving her from the past, like their writing was meant for people like her, but it was written before people like her were there to read it.

What does it mean to make a body of work, to move and take action in the field of dance and in relationship with the landscape of the Midwest? But specifically, what does it mean to create for others and for whom are we working, making, and moving? I see all these pairs of guests as part of a growing network of Black folks who are working in dance across and influenced by the Midwest. None of them were already well acquainted with their dialogue partners, if at all, but because of these conversations, now they are. The mid-ground of these pairings, I hope, will continue beyond each episode's duration. That is when I'll know that my work here has worked. When these people move each other and others, as well as myself as interlocutor, and hopefully you as listener. At the beginning of each conversation in the series, I asked the participants to share what they do. Not their titles or their roles, but rather what does the doing actually look like? How would they describe their practice? How do they make things happen? What's the activity of their work? What shape does it take? So I'll close by saying my own version of that.

I see my work as crafting rooms over time. By bringing creative people together in conversation, gatherings, and performance, by making dances and performing in work myself that sculpt space, body, and social worlds that alter our sensory attention and open possible ways of being, and by researching and writing about artists who shape how culture unfolds in community. I see all those elements of my work as crafting rooms for Black folks and for dance itself in the present as well as the future. I hope this podcast can be part of how Black Dance practices in and of the Midwest are discussed and presenced down the road.

OUTRODUCTION: How People Move People, is brought to you by The National Center of Choreography at The University of Akron, or NCCAkron. This podcast is produced by Jennifer Edwards, James Sleeman is our editor, theme music by Ellis Rovin, sound design by Damon Locks. transcription by Arushi Signh, cover art by Micah Kraus. I’m DeMarcus Akeem Suggs, Director of Development at Mid-America Arts Alliance, Founder & Framework Culturalist at kummbuntu LLC, and an NCCAkron Board Member. Special thanks to The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for their continued support of NCCAkron programming like this. To learn more about NCCAkron, please visit us online at nccakron.org and follow us on Instagram or Facebook @nccakron. We hope you enjoyed this episode and encourage you to subscribe on your favorite podcast streaming platform by searching for How People Move People.