When I took my seat at The Joyce Theater earlier this afternoon for a performance of Ayodele Casel’s “The Remix,” something felt very familiar. It was my first time in that performance space, seeing a new-to-me artist, but I couldn’t shake an overwhelming feeling of familiarity. I searched my eyes along the stage, which was dotted with cozy arrangements of chairs and pillows, a clothing rack, an old black & white style box TV. In the background, a DJ was playing music that, while not recognizable as a specific song, again felt familiar. Not quite déjà vu, but close.
Candomblé in Bahía (Brazil) Ritual Dance, Library of Congress Catalog
The show hadn’t started yet, but some of the dancers were mingling around, stretching, moving and testing out steps. Soon, Ayodele Casel came out on stage, and began to address the audience, talking about her life and memories as a “black and Puerto Rican kid born in the Bronx,” sharing a poem she wrote referencing days spent at Nuyorican Poet’s Café in her 20s, and expressing her deep-seated childhood desire to be a part of all this (spoken with arms spread out wide over the stage, the theater), I understood that what I’d been feeling was a sense of shared memory—shared desire. A recognition of knowledge existing under the surface of the performance, which was about to tell a story so similar to my own.
I believe dance has a unique ability to connect deeply to the unconscious, tapping into elements that are instinctive, primal, and spiritual, in order to convey story, perhaps even channel information from a plane exiting beyond the tangible and physical. It is as if dance (which I refer to broadly and generously to also include the various forms of creative movement and physical bodily expression that may challenge its traditional definitions) has a unique ability to serve as a kind of container of ancestral spiritual knowledge, and it is because of this that we are able to both learn and pass on history through this form of movement. In other words, dance performs as a living archive passed on from individual to individual, preserving, and continuing rituals, stories, traditions, joy, pain, loss, triumph. Or collectively: history.
It’s no secret that the history we are able to maintain, learn, and pass on is generally controlled by those in power, which often means that those of us from marginalized backgrounds need to find alternate ways to preserve, make, and share our stories that otherwise go unrecorded. In the 1993 documentary Dancing: New Worlds, New Form, the anthropologist Sheila Walker speaks about the concept of African-American or Black dance and art as “confiscation,” noting that what we know and experience now are forms of dance and music-making that were created by taking and putting together a variety of different elements that were available to the people who had been forcibly stripped of their heritage, in order to create (or perhaps recreate) something that was uniquely theirs. Confiscate is itself such a powerful word because it suggests a kind of law or authority behind the action; it’s not merely about taking, but claiming with power. Considered within the context of people who were not allowed to have “power” (at least not within a societal structure), the act becomes all the more significant. Dance then becomes a way to amplify silenced voices and democratize expression. It is resistance. It is reclamation.
As Joao Jorge Santos Rodrígues noted in the same film, it is through music and dance that people can rediscover their history, particularly when “allowed to dance and sing freely,” a process which is described by Candomblé practitioners as something that “comes from inside us…from ancestors whom we never even knew.” It is the same sentiment expressed in discussions about the role of drums in traditional rituals. When enslaved Africans were banned from using drums, likely due to white fear “of the power drums had” both as forms of communication and to “charge the air,” they found other ways to replicate the percussive sound and movement. As Bernice Johnson Reagon has noted, “the only way you can ban drumming is to destroy the drummer because drumming does not exist in an instrument, it exists within a need…within a human spirit.”
That idea is very much at the heart of why dance is such a powerful form of history-making and history-telling. Dance tracks the “DNA of a spirit of a people” that simultaneously remembers the struggles while responding to and mirroring new and ongoing societal challenges and evolutions, essentially shaping history. Though dance may often be dismissed as mere entertainment or recreation, we know that these movements are in fact containers of ancestral knowledge. With this understanding in mind, we are able to then trace the story back, effectively following the footsteps left by each teacher and dancer to an understanding of the essential truths rooted at its origins.