Race in Contact Improvisation: A Conversation with Taja Will, Richard Kim, Leslie Heydon, and Rebecca Bryant
(This interview took place over Zoom on September 15, 2020)
Photo credit from exhibit menu: Taja Will & Brian Evans by Nanne Sorvold
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
REBECCA BRYANT is an Assistant Professor of Dance who teaches studio courses in modern/contemporary dance, improvisation, composition, and pedagogy. She specializes in the creation of multi-disciplinary danceworks and cross-disciplinary collaboration.
LESLIE HEYDON is a trained Expressive Arts Therapist, who has worked in specialized programs for Women and Black youth, providing individual therapy and facilitating groups. In 2016, after years of toe-dipping, she began the practice of Contact Improvisation Dance in earnest. She facilities a monthly Person of Colour CI Jam and is on the Toronto Sunday Contact Jam Safety Committee.
RICHARD KIM is a CI dancer, teacher, and organizer, as well as an improvising musician, technologist, and lawyer. He co-created the DEI Scholarship at Earthdance and was a presenter at the Earthdance Consent Culture in Contact Improvisation Symposium 2020. He writes on CI and publishes the writings of others at contactimprovblog.com.
TAJA WILL (Taja/they) is a choreographer, performer, educator and healing justice practitioner. They are a long time practitioner of improvisation, contact improvisation and somatic movement modalities. Taja values the work of improvisational practice as a tool for nervous system awareness, personal resilience, socio-political revolution, and community care. www.tajawillartist.com
RESOURCES & SHOUT OUTS
From TAJA WILL - Thank you for helping me stay in: Jun Akiyama, mayfield brooks, Nhu Nguyen, Melecio Estrella, Ishmael Houston- Jones, India Hartville, wcciJAM organizing team
CI Intersections, 2018, Contact Quarterly “Folks with marginalized identities are somatically and psychically guarded, from generations past and a lifetime of systemic oppression; it is in the body and it will enter the dance.”
While each of us have dynamic and complex relationships with multiple dance communities in a wide range of geographical areas, it is important to note several of us spoke directly about a relationship to Earthdance. Earthdance Creative Living is the popularly known CI hub of the United States. Speaking critically of our experiences at and with Earthdance is generative as a real time example of how this socio-cultural work is unfolding in the field of teachers, practitioners, community members and CI spaces. As Earthdance moves into new phases, with new board, staff and shifting leadership I am excited to continue to develop and deepen my relationship with them. - Taja Will
From RICHARD KIM - A few things I wanted to note and correct:
I misspoke in two places in the video and I want to clarify what I meant. I referred to an incident of brownface as “actual racism” (c. 55:47) and “straight-up racism” (c. 56:37) and that could have left the impression that I don’t consider the incidents of fragility that Taja and I mentioned to be “actual racism.” To be clear: while I draw some distinction between more explicit and more implicit acts of racism, I consider it all to be part of racism. Racism means that we act in ways that reinforce racial hierarchies and racial superiority, whether by laughing at people who are different or by reacting with fragility to people bringing forward social justice. While not every questioning of a social justice initiative is racist, I think the examples given are pretty good examples of how, among other things, when social justice initiatives point out ways that a space isn’t sufficiently inclusive or sensitive to the needs of people of color, people sometimes react with a desire to uphold the status quo—thus perpetuating a racist environment. This isn’t explicit racism, but working to uphold racism within one’s environment, especially in the moment when that racism is being pointed out, is, in fact, racist.It’s complicated, and I think there are exceptions, but for me, these examples are not terribly close calls.
While I told a story about racist fragility at Earthdance, I want to point out that, in my opinion, part of the reason that this kind of incident occurred at Earthdance is because Earthdance has a social justice commitment that brings forward these issues. Earthdance is an imperfect institution that has made many mistakes, but it’s also one of the few institutions in contact improvisation that has actively grappled with race and social justice, if imperfectly, and continues to do so. The DEI committee I served on wouldn’t have existed at most other CI institutions, not because those institutions have solved racism in their communities, but because those institutions have yet to confront it.
I understated the amount of martial arts experience that Funda Gul has! I believe I said she had 5 years of aikido and 5 years of systema (a Russian martial arts form); it’s more like 15 years of martial arts experience total (as of 2020)—8 years in aikido and 8 years in systema! I think some of those years overlap.
Some links and resources I wanted to share:
I want to share some some links for several people of color I mentioned in the talk:
I mentioned the Facebook group, POC-CI (People of Color - Contact Improvisation).
Finally, I wanted to share a document that I started, About Anti-Racism & Race in CI, crowd-sourcing resources regarding race in contact improvisation. Feel free to add to it!
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