The Occidental Jet Stream: tellin’ stories, a response to the article: “Chicago dance has had a long love affair with process. Doubling down, are their audiences on board?” by Maya Odim

A response to an article on See Chicago Dance prompted by an inquiry from MMAPS.

A response by Maya Odim

The dance community I would like to be a part of in Chicago recognizes the world, and the dance world, as immense and naturally multiethnic and multiracial and multicultural; furthermore, it is a community that recognizes the role that conscious choice plays in the designing of the landscape of dance in Chicago— and the world at large.

While reading the article, “Chicago dance has had a long love affair with process. Doubling down, are their audiences on board?” on See Chicago Dance, I could not stop thinking about an essay I encountered in 2009 by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, titled: “The Danger of a Single Story.” Adiche reflects upon the stories she would write as a grade school youth growing up in Nigeria— a nation colonized by Great Britain. As I am a dual citizen of the United States and Nigeria, someone who travels to and has a family home there, Adiche’s reflections are all too familiar to me. I know what Nigeria looks like, smells like, tastes like, sounds like, and feels like. It is not grey, overcast and rainy where people rejoice each time the sun appears. But these were the ways Adichie portrayed Nigeria in stories she'd written. Why was Adichie casting stories this way? Because in the years Adichie was in grade school, the majority of Nigeria's scholastic efforts were disproportionately controlled by British colonial powers that were teaching the stories they understood, validated and valued.

Adichie goes on to contend that what one produces is directly influenced by the sources from which one learns. Maybe some people don't think about dance as more than “The Nutcracker” because of what they have access to as a demonstration of dance. Maybe they don’t care about dance because they have never witnessed dance they care about.

I find the term “niche” to apply more to the aesthetic found in “The Nutcracker” than to anything else because Go-Go out of Washington D.C., Breaking & every other Hip Hop movement aesthetic, Vogue, Tap, Rumba, Flamenco, Bomba, Disco, Funk, Salsa, Bachata, Merengue, Dance Hall, Cumbia and a litany of other movement techniques from the regions of the world referred to as North America, Central & South America, the Antilles, the Caribbean & West Indies, Polynesia, Australasia, the continent of Africa, the Middle East, South East Asia, and Central Asia, are globally recognized dance forms.

I recently picked up this book and have been intentionally reading it slowly to allow the story to last longer: Like a Bomb Going Off: Leonid Yakobson and Ballet as Resistance in Soviet Russia by Janice Ross. Don’t stop at “The Nutcracker” if what you want to witness is Ballet.

Alongside: Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion by Susan A. Manning, don’t stop at Martha Graham if what you want to witness is modern/contemporary movement forms.

My first in-depth interactions with ballet were through encounters with the work of Judith Jameson and Alvin Ailey. I saw Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre perform live decades before I ever attended a “Nutcracker'' performance— the first of which I attended because my nieces are ballet students at the Hyde Park School of Dance. Their “Nutcracker” performance tells the story by including many stories— technical Ballet and Breaking, by having the mice and soldiers perform Breaking as part of their story line. Tickets to The Hyde Park School of Dance’s Nutcracker regularly sell out.

I do not think it is the audience's job to evaluate “whether or not the artists realized their intention,” it is the audience's job to serve as a witness. The audience's job is to attend shows, performances, sharings, studio visits, etc. of the artists whom they choose to witness.

If we accept the audience as witness to an artist's work, then the question becomes: What do you want to be witness to? I think part of the lack of support for specific globally recognized dance in Chicago is because of a cycle that funders and audiences are in with each other because of assumptions each makes about the other. I posit that supporting organizations assume audiences attend what they want to, without considering: Have they been exposed to enough to even choose? And I contend that audiences assume funders are supporting specific kinds of dance because they are “good,” without considering: What do I want to witness? (As an audience member I have made the assumption that an organization's support is corollary to a dancer's engagement in communities of movers.)

I am perplexed by this idea: that an artist is promising an audience something when performing; that an audience is entitled to anything other than their choice to be there. I identify a connection between getting what I’m promised, and entitlement. They are two sides of the same coin used as cultural capital in a colonized nation. What I identify, as both an artist and audience member, is that the artist and audience have to commit to their choices. An artist commits to performing for an audience who has committed to witness. Even by the end of the article I was still wrestling with this idea of promise. There is no promised land. What about the idea of choice?

Am I thinking about this in the wrong way? Is the promise to allow an audience to witness? But the question still remains: What do you have a choice of witnessing?

I identify dancers and choreographers wanting to provide their audiences with a chance to witness their process. That is a promise: I promise to share with you how I got here. In the foreword to Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison wrote, “We have to know where our ideas come from.” Morrison acknowledges the muse's existence but perhaps more importantly, highlights the need to investigate from where our ideas come. To know there is a muse means little if we do not explore why something is, and from where it emanates. That is not at all abstract or esoteric. What is abstract and esoteric is making the statement that a performance is a promise of anything other than an opportunity to witness.

By the end of reading this article I could not stop thinking of the book The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara. It is one of my mother’s favorite books and she often quotes this to me, "Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?”

“...Just so you're sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, ‘cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.”

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Maya Odim's work as an artist and extracurricular educator has been designed to meet people where they are, to investigate relationships between movement and poetry in performance, and to normalize dance experiences. Working in both Spanish and English, Maya purposefully directs productions, teaches classes, and collaborates in workshops to mount performances in ‘non traditional’ performance spaces to both remind people of what they’ve known and to challenge the occidental framing of performance as it is known. Maya works in K-12 schools with community-based organizations, nonprofits, and individuals to share and create space for poetry and dance. Maya holds a B.A. in American Studies from Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT) and lives and works in Chicago, traveling often. Maya is African American, Igbo, and a dual citizen of Nigeria with an Afro-Cuban lineage. More of Maya's work can be found here: www.mayaodim.com and on Instagram here: @maya.odim