Left to Right: Germaine Ingram, Leah Stein, Kristen Shahverdian, and Adrienne Abdus-Salaam improvise to a Wesley hymn during “Where Heaven’s Dew Divides.” (Photo: Nathea Lee)
Ananya Chatterjea shares with the PLC her thoughts on the connections between dance and movements for social justice. She sees connection in both realms through an embodiment of shared resonant experience:
I’ll begin with the idea of resonance and reflection, because very often, thinking about social justice movements – how they work, and how dance works I see such parallel tracks. I’m very strongly influenced by the idea of the Occupy Movement. And I think of it how the movement is a leaderless movement. But it’s also a movement that is multi-headed. It springs up here; it springs up there. You could say, “Today, at this time, there was this march or this rally that happened here.”
But for people who are constantly in the process, there’s not a material moment. There is not a material thing inside social justice movements. It is an experience, and you carry that resonance of that struggle, and those ideas, and the need to resist all the time within you. And that’s exactly what dance is. So resonance is very important. Hopefully, what we are left with in the moment of performing in the moment of witnessing resonates within us to shift things inside of us – just like any movement.
And I think we have to think about experience in very powerful ways, but perhaps not entirely in individualistic ways. I think we have to think about experience as being in relationship. If you’re witnessing dance, or if we’re in a relationship with the performers and the people around us sitting next to us. And if we are performing dance, we are definitely in relationship with our fellow performers and our audience members. So I think how we understand experience inside of resonance is very important.”
Here, Ananya declares the work her dance company does as their particular social justice work. Running parallel to other types of work in the same struggles, the power of performance is carried on. Alliances are formed within and outside the dance community, extending to organizations working for policy change and the like:
I feel like social justice organizations often ask us about accountability in terms of measurable policy change. That is not our job as artists. Our job is to provoke questions all the time and continuously. And we don’t just do one performance. We do performances, lectures, workshops. We teach and we work all the time in multiple ways. So we keep on pushing through our questions all the time. When I teach, I have these issues flowing through. Some of the questions flowing through our teaching are out of the movement we’ve created.
But that’s why we make alliances with organizations whose job it is to work with policy change. I think it’s important to make political alliances as well. The mayor’s office should know what you’re doing, because if a community of artists is thinking that way, I think it shifts things. You are doing action in one way; other people are doing action parallel in different ways. That’s why it is important that we not isolate ourselves. We have to do what we do best. We know how to work as artists the best. And within the power of the medium, we know how to harness it to shift people’s minds. And then let the next person take it on.”
Chitra Vairavan talks about recognizing movement and dance as a particular type of cultural activism:
I feel like I’m realizing it more and more over the years, but Ananya refers to us as cultural activists a lot of times. For a while I was like, “I don’t really feel comfortable calling myself an activist.” But I really feel we all are doing our investigations. And we’re not just dancers; we’re intellectual beings in the work. We’re building something else that’s not just movement. We have to learn how to define our own success, and frame these sort of small success stories, and use that as a way to spread. Because a lot of time we wind up thinking really big – “I wanna tour, and I wanna do this, and we want this much money” – and things like that. We lose track of some of the small, subtle things that are actually working. And they’re actually important to talk about and spread.”
Germaine Ingram discusses her role as researcher in creating Where Heaven’s Dew Divides
I took on the role for myself as principle researcher. There were people in the learning community who undertook their own research. Or I’d make a recommendation of a resource, and they’d get that resource and read it. Sheila talked with people who were members of Mother Bethel Church, and set-up an opportunity for us to meet with one of the historians of that church. So different people related to the history in different ways. But the idea was that, you know, here’s this rich history about the creation of the African American church here in Philadelphia, which was not only an important step in the religious trajectory of African Americans, but it was also important to the social context in which African Americans lived in Philadelphia in the late 1700s and early 1800s. And it grew into a movement that has had national and international implications for the role of religion in public life, and in the history of social justice – not only for African Americans, but for people around the world.
Sheila Zagar talks about her personal connection to members of Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church, and the ways in which dance opens up spaces for conversation that other expressive genres might not.
There were several people who I was teaching who were members of Mother Bethel Church… They thought it was wonderful. They were very moved. Mr. Wilson, – he had been the docent to pass on this history – said that he didn’t understand about the dance until he went to see it. And he said, “I saw things that I didn’t understand before.” When I was working with the German-Jewish Dance Theatre, people would come up and talk about how we were presenting something that they couldn’t talk about, that it opened up a new conversation. I really didn’t understand that, but I understand it now that I’ve seen it. Each medium, I feel, unearths something that the others don’t.
Dew Crew Memoirs 