Dance as "Reparative Art"
So reparative arts work on a few different levels of really thinking through what knowledge is, how knowledge is cultivated, and which knowledges have been subjugated and intentionally erased and how much of that knowledge is embodied.
OreOluwa:Welcome to Groovin' Griot, a podcast about how we use dance to tell stories. I'm OreOluwa Badaki.
Azsaneé:And I'm Azsaneé Truss. Let's get groovin'.
OreOluwa:On this episode of Groovin' Griot, we talk with Dr. Jasmine Lynn Blanks Jones, who is currently the Executive Director for the Center For Social Concern at Johns Hopkins University. She actually did this interview while holding her adorable newborn daughter. You probably heard her patting her on the back in the beginning opening clip.
Azsaneé:Dr. Blanks Jones, Ore, and I all met while pursuing our PhDs at the University of Pennsylvania here in Philadelphia, a place where Dr. Blanks Jones has many important connections.
Jasmine Blanks Jones:I'm from Philly, so it was really awesome to be there as a doc student a few years ago because I was born there, but didn't really grow up there. Philadelphia is where I consider home despite not having lived there for most of my childhood or my adult life. It's where I had a lot of my early experiences, in my, it's like learning about being a Black woman. I was in a, like, an all black girl scout troop where we did African dance and, things that when I just look at even that example that cross the civic and political because that's what scouting is all about, like patriotism and all that stuff. Well, right along with, like, womanhood or girlhood.
Jasmine Blanks Jones:And, because we were in a Black community, all of those things melded. So, Philadelphia is really important for me in terms of how I think about my identity.
Azsaneé:We were all a part of the Collective For Advancing Multimodal Research Arts or CAMRA. We started the CAMRA archives podcast together and, Ore, as you know, this was where some of the ideas for Groovin' Griot started to take shape.
OreOluwa:Right. And on the first episode of the CAMRA Archives podcast was a recording of a panel that Dr. Blanks Jones, myself, Dr. Deb Thomas, and Dr. Jasmine Johnson were on called "What the Body Knows". We wanted to start off by coming back to a question that Dr. Blanks Jones posed for that panel and see how her thinking has developed since posing the question years ago. Here's Azsaneé with the question.
Azsaneé:It was the what the body knows panel, and there was a question, that you asked, which was about how, researching in and through the body creates possibilities for collective, participatory knowledge creation differently, from other forms of multimodal research. And I'm curious to hear what you would, say to that question now.
Jasmine Blanks Jones:I think with that question, now, a couple of years later, I think about the Performing the Archive course that I teach and the Black Storytelling for Public Health course that I teach. And I think that there's, that when we don't think about the body and the place of histories and archives, that a lot can easily be missed of the story. And it might not be that this is the story case in point and it's factual and this is everything that the archive says because we're dealing with archives that are constructed without Black people in mind oftentimes. We're just beginning to create many of our own archives, community archival work, and things that really center Blackness in important ways. But when we are dealing with archives that have left out particular stories intentionally and because they just weren't considered important when we chose the materials that would become the archive.
Jasmine Blanks Jones:There's a lot of learning that can come about by thinking about which bodies interacted with materials and how those bodies interacted with them. So that's one piece that I think about a bit differently than I did when I originally posed the question.
Azsaneé:Dr. Blanks Jones goes on to describe a specific example from her work at Johns Hopkins where she brought people together to think more intentionally about how bodies interacted with materials and the role of dance and storytelling in helping us to unpack the affective dimensions of this sort of work.
Jasmine Blanks Jones:A lot of my thinking about reparative arts was shaped from a visit to the historic home that's on the campus at Johns Hopkins University, on the Homewood campus that was owned by the Carroll family. And when we visited that home, there was a sign on the wall that listed the names of the people who were enslaved. And the museum had begun steps towards telling the story of that home in ways that centered the Carroll family, yes, but also the 2 main families who were enslaved there, the Rosses and the Connors. But beyond telling those stories, there hadn't been anything done to recognize and celebrate their lives. And when I spoke with a lot of my, colleagues who are part of the Inheritance Baltimore project in that 1st year, they talked about there being this feeling of, like, heaviness and of just discomfort on the campus as Black people, as Black women in particular, that they couldn't shake and they talked about that it wasn't, like, just them, but that they know people in the Baltimore area who just didn't like coming on to campus, so they didn't feel good being there.
Jasmine Blanks Jones:And, Esther Ohito writes about this and some of the she's an educationist. She writes about this experience on, campuses that have a plantation history, that there's this feeling. And we don't talk a lot about feelings in academic work, not nearly enough, but there was this feeling that people were experiencing there, and it had a lot to do with spirituality and with, the unsettled nature of knowing people's names and not dignifying their lives as full people, not just as slaves. And I'll say that intentionally because that placed them in a space of property. So, yes, now stories are being told about people who were property, but beyond that, how had their lives been celebrated?
Jasmine Blanks Jones:So we held an event that I led called the Ritual of Remembrance in that 1st year, and that gave us a space to dance and to have African drumming, to actually, in line with this podcast, have some of the, the storytelling. We had a group come in that drew on the traditions of the Griot traditions from the Senegalese culture. We had a a Djeli orchestra that incorporated not just African drumming with the talking drum, but string instruments that have a whole different, meaning within the the traditional ballets of the Senegalese culture, that are for royalty. So how do we think about, the Black people who were enslaved at Homewood, not just in the space of being property as slaves, but being the Black ancestors of Homewood and having a legacy that leaves an inheritance for Black people who step foot on that campus as a place where Black labor has created the conditions for Black students to now be able to learn there, and not as people who are lucky to have been accepted to an institution like Hopkins, but who have who are legacy, if we're gonna think about that. I mean, in the moment of CRT and who should be accepted and all of these other things, but without legacy, when I mean, like, elite white legacy students, they're not in jeopardy for their education experiences in this moment, but people of color are, 1st generation students are, how do we think about the role of Black labor in the building, in the maintenance of these spaces that constitute our academic halls, creating a legacy and an inheritance for Black students who would come to occupy those halls.
Jasmine Blanks Jones:And, how do we create a space where when Black students in particular come to these campuses and learn about these really hard histories, and I lean into doctor Martha Jones's work around hard histories there. She's also at Hopkins. When they learned about these hard histories, that it doesn't, like, hit them like a truck, but that we are telling these stories in a way that embraces them, that affirms their belonging in the academic institution that they've chosen to to come to.
OreOluwa:Throughout the series, we'll be taking what we're calling Movement Breaks, moments where we bring our personal movement practices into the podcast. For this break, we're sharing a clip from a Lamban performance I was a part of last summer. Lamban is a dance done by the Griots or Djalis in the Senegambia region, and the music incorporates both the drums and the string instruments, of which the kora is the most famous, that Dr. Blanks Jones was talking about.
Azsaneé:Lamban can be a celebration dance, and it can also be a dance of healing and cleansing. Given doctor Blanks Jones's call for embodied experiences that help us deal with the hard histories of the places we currently occupy, we felt this would be a relevant movement practice given the ideas she discusses.
OreOluwa:Welcome back. We hope you enjoyed some Lamban Rhythms. We'll get back to the interview with Dr. Blanks Jones.
Azsaneé:So much of Dr. Blanks Jones' work around citizenship, public health, and community engagement falls under what she is calling "reparative arts". We asked her to talk a little bit more about how she is thinking about embodiment within her conceptualization of reparative arts.
Jasmine Blanks Jones:Inspired very much by Dorinne Kondo's work in "reparative creativity", where she talks about how a lot of theater making considers the dominant audience, which is middle class white people. And even if theater work attempts to engage in serious thinking about race and racism, much of that work is softened so that, the white audience members can go to dinner and feel good about themselves, even if they participate in racist acts from time to time. So, Dorinne's work focuses on the artists that are creating work that doesn't make it just easy to consume things that are harmful. I begin with Durin and extend it because when I think about reparative arts in a scholarly way, solely, I'm thinking about, how the arts don't solely function as creativity, but as pedagogies, as processes, and methods. I think a lot about how, the arts can be used as research methodologies.
Jasmine Blanks Jones:In particular, I taught a course on performing the archive that thinks about how the body helps us to understand archival materials in a in a different way. It opens up new insights for us as researchers, and just even the arts, if you think about, like, arts and sciences, like, the arts aren't always perform performance based. They, have a lot to do with disciplinary work and how we're approaching, our epistemological traditions. So thinking about the arts as a source of knowledge making is, mostly where I enter the conversation. The work around reparative arts for me comes off of a year and a half of a post doctoral fellowship that I had at Johns Hopkins prior to stepping into my role at the Center For Social Concern.
Jasmine Blanks Jones:And I was, an inaugural postdoctoral fellow of the Inheritance Baltimore Project, which is a catalyst for reparations for black Baltimore through the humanities. And that, for me, was really the springboard into thinking about the reparative. If we're going to think about reparations and what it means to through the humanities, through history, for many of my colleagues, but for me through, performance art in particular, how we're able to create spaces of repair that is largely an epistemological project if you're approaching it through the humanities. How do we reconstruct our thinking around how knowledge is, I would say, produced with the caveat that, even in that, I've been challenged to think about when bodies are, like, coming together in artistic endeavors. It isn't necessarily a production of knowledge as much as a cultivation of knowledge and a co cultivation of it.
Jasmine Blanks Jones:Like, if we think matter can either be produced or destroyed, like, we can think about it in that way, but we can also think of it in terms of that, if we lean into Freire's work because he's an it's an easy touch point. Right? A lot of people are familiar with that. We don't have a blank canvas that we're starting off with for learners in in the space of education, but this is also very much, out of African indigenous, thinking around learning is that in the collective, there's already knowledge that exists and when the collective body comes together, there are ways of cultivating, nourishing that knowledge so that it comes out in ways that are much more poignant and that, tell a fuller story, so on and so forth. So thinking through the reparative arts as a way to, not just challenge, but to center the the types of knowledge that come out of collective processes, that come out of embodied experiences and that come out of a real desire by actual people to change their circumstances in ways that they have reason to value.
Jasmine Blanks Jones:Thinking about humans, all humans, regardless of, their background and I say or their ethnic group of their culture, of their race, as people who are reasonable, who can, operate from a place of making decisions because they have sense making that occurs not just through what we're told makes sense, not just through what our academic can and say, knowledge is, but sense making that comes through the body, that comes through our ancestry, and that comes through our being together. So preparative arts work on a few different levels of really thinking through what knowledge is, how knowledge is cultivated, and which knowledges have been subjugated and intentionally erased, and how much of that knowledge is embodied.
OreOluwa:Dr. Blanks Jones' work on reparative arts began long before she moved to Baltimore. Her background is as a music and theater educator.
Azsaneé:Yes. In 2009, she founded Burning Barriers Building Bridges Youth Theatre, or B4 Youth Theatre, in Liberia. The company slash nonprofit engages youth in theater and the arts as a way to promote community health and wellness.
Jasmine Blanks Jones:What I found very quickly in being in Liberia was that the use of theater for creating social cohesion if we want to think about like, international development language or other types of bonds that are created through having a project oriented mindset around what it means to be part of project oriented mindset around what it means to be part of society. So leaning into my advisor, Dr. Sigal Ben Porath's work about having a project based way of thinking about citizenship rather than an identity based way of thinking about citizenship. Like, we are working towards something that we all will benefit from as a project, that we all have, skin in the game essentially for a particular project to be seen through. Like, if democracy is that project or if well, whatever that project might be.
Jasmine Blanks Jones:But in societies where there are multiple identity groups. So, we face that here in the US. Right? If you ask, and I don't mean just because people are coming from different places in the contemporary moment, but if you ask a Black American, what they feel about being an American, you might get a very different response from a White American based on the history of racism in the country. So to say that Americans have a shared identity can be a really fraught way of thinking about what it means to be a citizen of this place.
Jasmine Blanks Jones:If that's how you, if that's your entry point to thinking about citizenship. But if we're thinking about a project instead, and in a very tangible way, creating a theater production as a project, as a citizenship project, as a civic project where young people are learning how to be together despite their differences. In Liberia, despite differences in ethnicity, differences in gender, there are ongoing problems around the treatment of girls in schools in particular. And that was one of the issues that the young people would always bring to the fore. That theater making was a very accepted way of working through problems.
Azsaneé:As our conversation continued, doctor Blanks Jones went on to talk about how her work with B4 Youth Theater helped break open and challenge assumptions that are commonly held about the universality of certain embodied experiences and emotions.
Jasmine Blanks Jones:Instances that I consider is from some of my own work in Liberia with my, collaborator, Tara Cariaso of Waxing Moon Masks in Baltimore. She came over to Liberia with me about, oh, oh, let's say 7 or 8 years ago, and we had worked on a curriculum coming out of Commedia dell'arte that she studied for years. It's a a physical theater pedagogy that she had been developing. And one of the assumptions that underlies that work is that there are certain emotions that are essentially universal in terms of where they can be felt. Right?
Jasmine Blanks Jones:So if you ask, an audience most audiences, let's say, in the US, how are people in general, when they think of joy and they're feeling joy, where in their body do they feel it? So for for you, Azsaneé, where in your body do you feel joy? If I ask you to take in a deep breath and exhale joy, where are you feeling that joy?
Azsaneé:Where do I feel joy? I think the first place that comes to mind is kind of, in my chest, in a in a interesting way, which is, or which is interesting to me because I that's also where I feel anxiety. But it's it's more of like a fullness here than it is like a tightness. Like, it's kind of the opposite of that feeling. And I also I don't know.
Azsaneé:I'm like, this is so cliche because I'm also a mover, but, like, in my feet. Like, that's the other place that's, like, kind of starting to, like, warm up, I guess you could say. But those are those are the 2 places for me.
Jasmine Blanks Jones:No. That's great. And not cliched at all. And Ore I'm not gonna go to you, but not because I'm not interested. Only because Azsaneé's response is generally what Tara and I have experienced in Western context.
Jasmine Blanks Jones:It's if you ask someone from the US, from Western Europe, where they experience joy, and to give us a movement that shows that arms become wide open, chest becomes open, and they feel it in their chest, in their heart because that's where we are told we experience joy. I don't know. That's that's what we've been socialized to feel. When, Tara brought this physical theater pedagogy over to Liberia and went through the same exercises of
Jasmine Blanks Jones:inhaling the emotion and, sitting with inhaling the emotion and, sitting with the emotion and exhaling it with a gesture, our students, by and large, gave back movements that were in the feet, not the chest.
OreOluwa:That's so funny.
Jasmine Blanks Jones:Not the arms. The feet. And Tara, someone who has studied this form for decades at this point was like, oh, something here is different. This is not my training.
Jasmine Blanks Jones:This is not what I've been told is the thing. Emotion is located somewhere else in the body here. What is that about? And, we can think about, older anthropological research around, like, were the movement styles from Africa retained in the African diaspora population, yea or nay, you know, Herskovits and friends or enemies, you know, however you wanna think about that. But we can also just maybe be open to that there are some parts of culture that we're either socialized into that that make our bodies respond in certain ways, that that cause us to sense certain things the way that we we do. We can look at maybe Butler's work on, you know, around gender to think about that as well.
Jasmine Blanks Jones:But there is maybe far less that's universal that has been assumed in a lot of movement work, and, that really is my particular interest in the body and in the arts and how they work together and against each other, especially within collectives and how we're understanding what bodies do.
OreOluwa:During the interview, Dr. Blanks Jones shared numerous scholars and thinkers that she draws from in her scholarship. We were also curious about other storytellers or griots that inspire the multifaceted and dynamic work she does.
Jasmine Blanks Jones:The first that comes to mind is, Mama Janice Greene with an e, and there's a whole history there. Here in Baltimore, she is, Maryland's griot for the state of Maryland and she's been president of the Black Storytellers Association and other things like that. I met her, gosh, many, many years ago and she's been just a close personal mentor and inspiration to me and we now co teach our Black Storytelling in Public Health course, Public Health in the Black World at Hopkins. We co teach that, and that's a lot of fun. I'll also say MaBa Shabu, that's Mama and Baba, rest in peace.
Jasmine Blanks Jones:Baba Shabu. In Liberia, they, were born in the United States and sometime in the, I wanna say, 1960's , went to Africa and lived in different parts of the continent, learned a lot of things, and settled in Liberia, gave up their US citizenship to become Liberians, and, continue to make art there, and to do a lot of work around land justice, climate justice, and, to develop small circles of learning and sharing. So they're a constant inspiration. I talk to Mama almost every day. Those are 2 of the the griots that immediately come to mind.
Jasmine Blanks Jones:I will say also, Baba Menes Yahudah, here in Baltimore who directs Urban Foli, Djembe orchestra. He and his team, they did come to do the Ritual of Remembrance for us at Hopkins and helped inform a lot of my understanding of the connections between reparative arts and our African ancestral traditions. I think that's really important work.
Azsaneé:This episode of Groovin' Griot was a production of the Digital Futures Institute at Teachers College, Columbia University. It was produced and edited by me, Azsaneé Truss, and my co host, Ore Badaki. Our theme music is Unrest by ELPHNT and can be found on directory. Audio.
OreOluwa:You can email us at groovingriot@ gmail.com. That's g-r-o-o-v-i-n-g-r-i-o-t@ gmail.com. And you can continue to listen to episodes of Groovin Griot wherever podcasts are found. Thanks for Groovin' with us.
