“In the Company of Ancestors: Love, Lineage, and Citation at the 2022 Elevate Chicago Dance Festival” by Tempestt Hazel (Elevate 2022 Festival Writer)

 

As I write this I’m resisting the urge to quote the entirety of Judy B. Massey’s 1987 piece A Love Story Written in the Light. It is an essay of prose published by the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) in the anthology NOMMO: A Literary Legacy of Black Chicago (1967-1987). In only two pages, Massey gives an exquisite and blazing testimony on the ways that Ancestors show up in the very human struggles between mind, heart, spirit, logic, and love. Instead of quoting it in full, I’ll offer this excerpt: 

“Gently, the Ancestors encourage us to move toward what we see, holding our hands each step of the way and promising to stand near. This gives us the courage to open ourselves and hear the sound of the expression. A sound so sweet that we find ourselves dancing and losing control in the joy of the melody of the words as we find that the thoughts spoken bring form to the abstract ones of our own. We are swept closer and closer like a child in wonder and suddenly the image becomes clear and we see the face of a Warrior that is the essence of a beauty we hold dear. In it, we can trace a character, a spirit that has explored adventures similar to ours. And even drawn from them the same wisdom. Uncontrollably our hearts go out to them. Lay themselves bare before them and promise to love without question.”

I was reminded of this piece and this book in the wake of the most recent iteration of Elevate Chicago Dance because like Massey and the members of OBAC, the artists of the festival made a point to practice deference–not only practice it, but to hold it as an inextricable part of the works they were presenting. Many forebearers and predecessors of these pieces were conjured and embedded through sound, movement, and words. Through rhythm, lyricism, and a harnessing of earthly elements. With every work I witnessed, a new and stronger legacy connection was made and a pattern emerged beyond the obvious discipline-specific or site-specific linkages between the works. It was a festival of mirrors, reverberations, and pronounced citations, which is fertile ground for someone like myself who enjoys footnotes, bibliographies, and liner notes just as much as the work itself. 

I embraced the festival’s multiple invitations to go back to a place of basics, showing the many familiar ways that love shows up in our worlds, which is another reason why Massey’s prose frequently came to mind. Many of the literal and overt citations that prefaced or were presented with the works felt like love notes to the bodies of knowledge that the artists were giving their time, attention, and appreciation to. As references tend to do, their references beckoned me to the places where their work aligns and the shoulders on which it stands. The artists’ deliveries were vocal and physical, rendered through roll calls, shout outs, stylistic echos, and embodiments. Even within the abbreviated, adapted, and in-progress versions of some works, the artists found ways to both give space to something that is being created and recognize the material that allowed for its creation. There’s something loving about humbleness in praxis, and the intentional naming of who and what makes the work and ideas possible. 

That said, I’m taking a cue from these artists. In the tradition of the roll call as an act of love, acknowledgement, and honoring, I’m offering a few recounts of the moments when Ancestors, elders, and patron saints were called into the room, and everyone in attendance had a chance to experience them dancing with and through the artists, and know what it feels like to be in the company of their power.

 

 

I saw the first literal roll call at the point where I began the festival, which was with a documentary about the Dyerettes, a Chicago-born group of dancers that were formed by legendary choreographer Sammy Vashon Dyer in 1950. The original six Dyerettes—Florence Saunders (Jones), Muriel Burns (Foster), Shirley Hall (Bass), Jean Cornell (Robinson), Clarice White (Pruitt), Gloria Broussard (Wilkes)—were known for being versatile performers with a level of preciseness that was unmatched. This led them into opportunities to tour with and open for some of the most renowned musicians and performers of the mid twentieth century, such as Sarah Vaughn, Nat King Cole, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Count Basie. When several of the original members were interviewed, their reverence for Dyer and the mentors that surrounded them throughout their careers radiated throughout the Chicago Cultural Center’s Claudia Cassidy Theater. In the film, they each took turns citing how much care and attention was put into them as professional performers and what legacies they carried.

 

 

The reverence continued when Cristin Carole took the stage to pick up where the film left off. While standing proud in her place as the great niece of Shirley Hall Bass and a third generation student of the Sammy Dyer School of Theater, Carole wouldn’t allow the presentation to go on without first acknowledging the people who have already made their transition and whose lives and work made her current ensemble, Shiny Stockings, possible. In her Ancestor roll call she listed the names of important figures within the Dyer legacy, and dedicated the day’s event to Nichelle Nichols, a fellow alumna of the Dyer School of Theater. After delivering a deep history lesson, Carole welcomed Ms. Clarice White Pruitt and Ms. Muriel Burns Foster to the stage to speak about their memories of being Dyerettes. Then, it was breathtaking to watch five members of Shiny Stockings perform an excerpt of a choreographed piece followed by White Pruitt and Burns Foster giving honest and encouraging notes to the keepers and continuers of their heirlooms. The care that was taken within that hour made it clear that if you know Shiny Stockings, you will know Shirley Hall Bass, and if you know Shirley Hall Bass, then you will know the names of the other original Dyerettes, and if you know them, then you will know Sammy Dyer. You will be met with three generations of powerful educators and performers.

In a way, this opening hour set a tone for the rest of the festival, with Ancestors letting themselves be known across days, performances, and sites. The Chicago Cultural Center continued to be blessed through Ivelisse “Bombera de Corazón” Diaz and the artists she shared the stage with who all used the building’s halls and walls to amplify the sights, sounds, and history of Bomba. Between and throughout the songs, everyone in the room was schooled on how this distinctly Afro-Puerto Rican art form carries generations within it. There are entire heritages in every bang of the drum, snap of a skirt, or belt of Diaz’s voice. By the end of it all, we knew and felt within our bones that Bomba is much more than just a form of expression, it’s the language of its Ancestors.

 

I was reminded of Ayako Kato’s ETHOS in Massy’s words about the power of abstracted expression as a tool of Ancestors and its ability to bring clarity and expose connectivities across bodies of knowledge and experiences. In ETHOS, Kato is conducting an extended and episodic exploration into how dance can be used to create an ideology for humanity that holds awareness, acknowledgement, affirmation, allowance, and action as its anchors. Drawing from the practice of fūryū, a Japanese word meaning “wind flow” and styles of dance that are carried by or drift on the wind, Kato’s LUCA/Res Communis: ETHOS Episode III interweaves longstanding Japanese concepts into movements that honor Indigenous ancestral sites and histories of Zhigaagoong. Although I only experienced it remotely, the whip of the fabric in the musician and dancers’ garments and the rumble of the air in the recording of the live stream made the presence of the wind undeniably known and its call to be acknowledged and respected impossible to ignore. The wind as a source of wisdom and power in both Indigenous and Japanese traditions appeared to be converging in Palmisano Park that day.

 

 

If you asked any hip hop head to name the patron saints of the culture, it would be tough to trust the opinion of anyone who didn’t have producer, musician, and definitive force J Dilla (a.k.a. Jay Dee or James Yancey) on their list. Through Nico Rubio’s By Way Of Taps: A J Dilla Tribute and its sonic suites, Jay Dee was called into the room through some classic and era-defining moments within his iconic repertoire. As each record was spinning at the hands of Rubio, everything from Slum Village to Erykah Badu, Q-Tip, The Pharcyde, and De La Soul, the four featured dancers–Rubio included–channeled the keepers and defining artists of tap using tactics seen across both art forms. The improvisation, sampling, and call-and-response that are characteristic of and wielded within J Dilla’s work was concurrently being used to call on and honor legends like Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, The Nicholas Brothers, the previously mentioned Sammy Davis, Jr., and Gregory Hines–not to mention all of the other forebearers of tap whose names were never recorded and have missed their place within the archives and history books.

 

 

Then, there was the joy, sweat, and synergy of the Ancestors to be found, left, and extolled on the festival’s many pop-up dance floors, some of which felt much more like devised club scenes than festival stages. The artists of BraveSoul Movement with Chi Buck Movement as well as the artists who brought Erin Kilmurray’s The Function to life all proved what many of us already know to be true–that sound is a shapeshifter, our physical response to the music reaches new territories when it is uncontained and unscripted, and that the dance floor is anywhere. And like Kato’s ETHOS, which channeled the choreography held within the earth’s elements, BraveSoul, Chi Buck, and Kilmurray’s works each felt like falling into an ocean wave that’s poetically unpredictable, but offers currents where you’re involuntarily charmed towards falling into a flow with everyone and everything around you. Although they happened on different days and at different sites–one at the Chicago Cultural Center and the other at Mana Contemporary, respectively–these works were undoubtedly signaling to one another. 

 

 

To get this far in an attempt to articulate what I experienced of the festival has a kind of miracle quality to it. When words and video serve as proxies, they often, if not always, fall short of being capable of translating an experience as indescribable as being in the presence of artists and Ancestors. How do I capture what it felt like to be in the sprawling, open arena of Segundo Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center and to experience a version of Force! an opera in three acts knowing that its shaping has been encased in the memories and accumulations of actions by multiple generations of abolitionists and Ancestors? And knowing that from this work entire libraries and lexicons on the relationship between waiting and liberation could be generated? What words can be strung together to communicate the moments during Juke for Liberation when Christopher “Mad Dog” Thomas honored his mother and the fraught history of public housing as he illustrated the astounding preservation practices of Black people that survived chattel slavery and show up as traces within transcendental and distinctly Chicago music and danceforms like house, juke, and footwork? What’s an adequate or expansive way to recount the recalling of how Enneréssa LaNette and Monique Haley were in terrifyingly unpredictable circumstances during a trip to Ghana at the height of the pandemic, they each placed their trust in godly and ancestral forces and ended up with a new understanding of themselves, their connections to other artists, and their artistry. 

 

 

Although Massey writes so concisely about the ways of Ancestors, she also conveys “the challenges of expressing a talent that will not be contained.” Her words ask me to remember that it is not my responsibility to communicate this all with precision or comprehensiveness. Instead, it’s my privilege and duty to simply draw you in so that the artists and Ancestors can, together, do their work. 

 

Header Image: “LUCA/Res Communis: ETHOS Episode III” by Ayako Kato/Art Union Humanscape | Performers: Susana Ollin Kuikatl Tekpatzia Bañuelos, Danielle Gallet, Ambrosio Martinez, Tuli Bera, Darling Squire, Sophie Allen, Silvita Diaz Brown, Angela Gronroos, Carla Gruby, Lydia Jekot, and Ayako Kato | Elevate Chicago Dance 2022 | Palmisano Nature Park | October 15, 2022 | Photos by Ricardo E Adame