The Body is the Ultimate Political Arena

The word “Hip Hop” comes from the Wolof “hipi” which means “to open one’s eyes” and the English word “hop” which means “to move.” Hip Hop then means to be a knowledgeable mover of a knowledgeable movement. I learned this lesson from one of my first dance teachers, Duane Lee Holland. A former Olympic bound gymnast turned Broadway dancer, Duane is a man with open eyes. When we met he wore his hair in shoulder length locs, he has light brown skin, and always dresses in leather jackets and studded shoes. He dresses for an occasion, and if there is no occasion he intends to make one. He gave lectures on the power and importance of Hip Hop, its history and mission. He talked in lecture halls, in conference rooms, in hallways, in bathrooms, in gyms, wherever there was a chance to share his knowledge he shared it. Duane had the rare condition of being a man who believes in what he says. He didn’t speak so that he might be seen speaking, as many do, but because he knew desperately the necessity of what he had to say, that it must be said, and hardly anyone else would have the courage to say it. Among a group of dance students he asked ”If you know the word tendu, if you know plie, and pas de cheval, why won’t you learn jackhammer, jerk, boogaloo? Don’t these moves you watch on your phone and on your television, don’t they also have names and history? Isn’t this also a technique that we must honor?”

In the studio, Duane moves with all the thunder in his voice. He is powerful and gentle, intelligent and guiding, he pushes and pulls his body between power and mercy, he moves like water. Duane taught me both Hip Hop and Modern. I learned Horton, Limon, Haus, and Breaking from the same mind, and in doing so I was able to learn why these dances, new and old, are so important, why we must honor all dances as relics with their own sacred weight. A dance is a body-knowledge, it is a history that we keep in the soma, like literature written in bone and breath.

It is this awakening to the movement in me, the history of motion, that called me to be a dancer. I began dancing at the age of nineteen. This is, for dancers, incredibly late to the game. As it happens, Duane also did not start dancing till his late teens. The technical rigor of any kind of dance requires years of training, and many primas start as early as three years old. It is a brutal and beautiful commitment, but that scares many latecomers from ever making an attempt. But, like all art, there are two components to a dance. There is the message you communicate, and there is the medium, movements, or technique through which you communicate that message. Almost all dancers begin their journey by learning the “how” of the dance, how to turn, how to glide, how to walk, how to demonstrate a timeless story like Gisselle, Swan Lake, Coppélia, where the story is already written and familiar. But Duane and I began our training at the “why.”

My training began first in poetry. At the age of fifteen I competed in poetry slams, and began publishing in small journals. As a part of that training I had to become familiar with the movement of an idea, the flow of language. I grew a love for the mind and its letters, the jar that contains our reality, and the architecture of thought. But it was in 2016 that I began to distrust language. During the American presidential election, I watched words dissolve in the public mind. The word “nasty” was used to mean “woman” the word “illegal” meant “humans we cannot love” the word “great” well, I still don’t know what was meant by that. I grew a fear that what I said could be a weapon, or worse, that what I said could mean nothing at all.

Two years into my conflict with language, I auditioned for an undergraduate program for Hip Hop and Spoken Word artists. I was still trying to be a poet, to use words in order to find truth, and I thought that going to college with other truth seekers would help me find that. The creative director, Christopher Walker, is a dance professor. At the audition, he picked out twelve of us, poets, MCs, and artists, and put us in a small dance studio.

“I want you to walk in a circle, and when I clap my hands change directions.”

“I want you to improvise movement while you recite a poem.”

It was strange, but of course with a big scholarship on the line we flung ourselves around on command. As my feet hit the wood floors, as my face went red, as I moved faster than I thought, I felt something small but hungry opening its eyes inside me.

“I want you to hold a pose of rage. Now grief. Now love. Now grief, but deeper.”

I shook nervously, sweating under the fluorescent lights.

“No, deeper”

I wrought my face, covered my ears, pretended to cry.

“Deeper.”

I dropped to the floor, slammed my full weight on the wood, the thing inside me roared.

The audition was over. We dried ourselves, and exchanged looks to ask what the hell just happened. In awkward clumps of two and three the group shuffled out the door to eat dinner and prepare for the interview portion. I took my time, sad to leave the studio and this new magic. As I neared the door Christopher stopped me.

“Jackson, are you a dancer?”

“No sir. I’m auditioning with poetry.”

“Hmm. You will be a dancer.”

“What do you mean?”

“The dance major audition is in November. I will see you there.”

I should have been scared, or confused, but all I felt at those words was an unfolding, as though I’d reached the beginning of something terrifying, glorious, and inevitable, like having a child, or accepting your death.

When I really think about it. I believe dance made so much sense to me, because it is so much like language. At the end of this thing called our lives, when it really comes down to the moment, language and the body are our only possessions in life, the only things we have, the only things we’ll keep.Our clothes, our cars, our houses, even our loved ones, they’ll be gone eventually. But the body, the mind, those are our infinities. When they’re gone, we’re gone. And for me ( really all of us), I need both. I can’t only know language because the body is more ancient than words. Before you could speak, you were feeble flesh, before you met this side of life you were two cells, multiplying. And before we were a species with words, we were fish, amphibians, neanderthals who must move to stay alive, we were thought and motion long before we could speak. This doesn’t mean there was no language, but that movement was the language before letters. Martha Graham says “the body doesn’t lie.” How do you lie about survival? The body names your hunger, your thirst, your desire, and rage. Often language is the place where we distort these truths. But the body, the animal that we are, it can only speak to what it is, what it wants. And that, that is what I needed living in a country of falsehoods.

In the studio with Duane, I was given a new vocabulary to find truth. His course DANCE125, was an introduction to Hip Hop movement. It was an elective class, (though it is now mandatory for majors) and fell among an assortment of courses such as “African Movement” or “Asian American Movement” which dancers could choose from to fulfill extraneous credits.

Each class began with a lecture. Duane would list out the names of moves we would learn and provide a brief history on the place of origin, the style, and iconic appearances of the gestures.

I think it’s strange how we know without question or hesitation the word for the angle of the head on stage in a ballet, and yet, when we have words for vernacular African American techniques, folks can hardly be bothered to learn the genre of dance it is. Duane knew this intimately, and refused to coddle it. We were learning a dance language with an awesome, frightening history, and we would speak of it accordingly.

Black dance in America and globally is subject to a familiar paradox. It is simultaneously consumed, used, and reproduced more than any other movement techniques— in music videos, movies, television, social media, parties, clubs, drill teams, concert dance, avant garde work, documentary, weddings, birthdays, etc, etc, etc— and it is valued the least in terms of respect, prestige, or ownership. Nonblack people rarely learn what to call the dances we take from Black people, because we do not see Black dance as a thing worth naming.

There is a long history to this consumptionist attitude toward Black dance, and thus the Black bodies which perform them. In her book, Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery, Katheryn Dyonne Thompson discusses the history of dance during the trans Atlantic slave trade and into the twenty-first century. While it is a commonly held belief that Minstrel shows were the first uniquely American dance form, Thompson argues that white Americans began curating, stealing, and commodifying Black dance from the moment they arrived in the African continent. On the voyage from Africa to the United States, white shipmates would make enslaved Africans dance as an exercise regimen to keep them healthy for sale and as entertainment for the crew. If there were many people from one tribe, the captive Africans would perform sacred or ceremonial dances from their culture, distorting profound spiritual movements into cheap fun for white audiences. If no one came from the same tribe, without common movements or language, they would invent creolized dances by blending elements from multiple tribes. These dances would be performed on plantations and in white homes as entertainment, and would later be used by white people to create the choreography for Minstrel shows. The first American dance form then, was not a white invention but the invention of Black people, stolen and repackaged for a new cruel performance.

Fast forward to the Bronx, New York in the early 1970’s. New York City, facing near bankruptcy, obliterated municipal services including sanitation, fire safety, and after school programming. White families fled to the suburbs taking their property taxes with them, and Black and brown families were left to fend for themselves. With no music, arts, or dance programs in the schools, young Black and brown people had to create their own creative language with the tools available to them. Using turntables, mixing equipment, and record collections, a new sound was born. Mimicking kung-fu movies, martial arts, and James Brown, a new movement was born. This was the birth of Hip Hop. This art form, this artistic language, it arises to refuse that dehumanization which whiteness insists on. Whiteness removed every resource it could imagine, and so the people of the Bronx imagined new resources. This is the legacy of Hip Hop culture, and we have a duty to respect and preserve it.

In 2019, fourteen year old Jalaiah Harmon, a Black girl from Fayetteville, Georgia, invented the iconic Renegade dance. The dance amassed popularity on the app Dubsmash, and was quickly shared across the platform. As the dance made its way to TikTok users shared and mimicked the dance with great success, all without giving credit to Jalaiah. White Tik Tokers like Charli D’amelia gained millions of likes and follows as well as attention from major media outlets for performing the dance, commodifying virility into more significant currencies, while Black creators were left out of the light.

It is true that the body and the mind are the only things we own, the only things which we might surely call ours. It is also true that white people have tried to, and indeed still do, own the bodies of others. They placed them in fields and prison, in order to make a cheap t-shirt, in order to build chairs for sixty cents an hour. Where does this begin? Where does a man lose so much empathy as to believe he can treat another man this way? I think it begins in the minutia. When you steal a man’s food, his language, his speech, his movement, the body that performs those movements, when those things are all commodities which one can buy and sell and graph, eventually the person is up for sale too. Dance is powerful because it communicates both what a body can do, and what can be done to a body. It is the ultimate political arena. It is that emotive language of a people, the body’s cry for what it knows it deserves. When a community dances together, when people gather in motion, and proclaim those needs and demands of the body populace, we call that a movement.

With this knowledge of the power and importance of dance, which I myself learned from Black scholars and dancers, I want to use Memberful to teach dance not only as a movement, but as a device for learning history, and activism. I’m proposing a dance class which doesn’t just teach choreography, but breaks down the intimate origin, history, and lineage of its movements, a dance class that teaches its students how to honor the dances they bring into their own bodies. Students will learn the styles of Hip Hop such as Breaking, Locking, Uprock, Popping, or Step, and will learn the names of the legendary B-boys and crews that created these movements. The money generated from these courses will go directly to the individuals and communities who invented them. I want to invite my teachers, and the dancers I have learned from to also teach and speak, so that we create a community of learning. In this environment we create the cultural exchange that dance has always facilitated, as I pour into you, you pour into me.

I think that Memberful can be a platform which not only delivers information, but creates a community with the knowledge to look itself in the eye, to “open one’s eyes” as it were. Hip Hop arrived out of a lack of resources, the theft of resources, and it’s time to give resources back. In doing so we might unlearn our culture of hoarding and taking which the internet has exacerbated, and learn to give materially and spiritually to those people and communities to whom we owe our artistic language.