Groovin' Griot

Lela Aisha Jones: [00:00:00] I was, I was hooked. I was like, Oh, this is what Black people be doing? Okay, wait a minute. Wait a minute. I got to go see all this, and I did go see it. That bob and weave is real…cause in freestyle, you can't control what's in your body, right? You're going to try to censor while you freestyle and "no, I can't use that cause" you know, if it's in your body, then it's a part of it, right?
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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’.
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OreOluwa: On this episode, we spoke with Dr. Lela Aisha Jones, founding Director of Flyground Dance [00:01:00] Company, Associate Artistic Director of Brownbody, and Assistant Professor and Director of Dance at Bryn Mawr College.
Azsaneé: Dr. Jones has such a vast array of dance experiences, spanning the U. S. and various other countries across the African Diaspora.
She's traveled the world as a dancer and choreographer, as well as researcher, educator, and student of African Diasporic dances. We asked her to break down some of her journey for us.
Lela Aisha Jones: I have to go back again to my family, right? Cause I got to also archive the social dances. So two step, slow dancing. Um definitely freestyling, like by force, you know, "get in the middle of that circle. You ain't gonna show y'all moves. You all at home doing that. You better get in there" because you were not allowed to come out with out rhythm. My crew, they would have you in the circle and we would pressure each other.
And then of course we got shout, right? We got shout, the high step, running, the bending over, the waving the hand in the air, the [00:02:00] not knowing where you are, even what you're doing, right? Like that is deep church gospel singing, clapping, right? The choir, the preacher and the cadence, right? Like, I'm citing all that.
Um, and I went to Margo's School of Dance, which was pretty much the only Black girl dancing school when I grew up. And Margo Blake danced with Arthur Hall, who was Yoruba and did the Yoruba dances. Um, and also did dances from Ghana. So Margo studied with, Margo studied with Chuck Davis and the African American Ensemble, but she also studied Ballet and Jazz and Tap.
So I did all that growing up with her and she would turn those into amazing musicals, but she really filled us up with that performance style dance, but from that very Black dance perspective, from multi-Diasporic Black dance perspective.
Azsaneé: Dr. Jones clearly got an early and multidisciplinary start in formal dance training. And I love how she, [00:03:00] as she puts it, "archived the social dances" she grew up with as well.
OreOluwa: Same. I didn't have the early training Dr. Jones had but I can't remember a time I was not dancing at Nigerian weddings, Yoruba Naming Ceremonies, or just around the house for absolutely no reason at all.
Azsaneé: I love that. Um, I did have early training in classical dance as you know, so it seems like Dr. Jones's experience brought together both of our early dance experiences.
OreOluwa: And at one point, Dr. Jones mentioned not dancing in high school and instead pursuing sports, like basketball. She talked about that being an important part of her embodied learning. I played a bunch of sports growing up as well. And I completely agree. I learned so much about body awareness, about dynamic movement, and especially about moving together with a group of people for a common goal.
Did you play any sports growing up, Azsaneé?
Azsaneé: I tried. It was pitiful. Um, I played basketball in the third grade and my most distinct memory of that experience is being hit in the face [00:04:00] with a ball. Um, and I was a little bit better at soccer, um, but I should probably just stick to the studio.
OreOluwa: Poor thing. But Dr. Jones saw all of these ways of moving as a part of her movement repertoire. She sort of gets at that when she talks about getting back into dance during her college years.
Lela Aisha Jones: University of Florida is where the next big hit happens. Um, I'm taking Hip Hop with, uh, Darryl, I think, I can't remember what Darryl's last name was, but he was teaching Hip Hop and he was like, you know, there's this company coming here. You need to dance with them. So it was Urban Bush Women. They came and they did a piece called Bitter Tongue.
And that was my first, that was my first experience with modern dance. I thought Urban Bush Women was it. Like when I got to Graham and all that, I was like, wait a minute, what? I was like, this modern? Cause that's the modern that I want to do. But anyway, I got rudely awakened. It was rudely, and I loved, you know, I loved Graham and Cunningham and all that and the things that they, it offered [00:05:00] right, because everything offers something Back to the Diaspora.
Like I said at that time, um, Joan Frosch, who I believe is still there, um, was beginning the World Center for Arts and Culture. So every year I was able to work with a major dance company that, you know, set a work on us. Chuck Davis and the African American Dance Ensemble. Um, Dance Brazil, with Jelon Vieira and Edileuza Santos who taught Oshun, Ogun, Samba, Samba de Roda, and, um, you know, what came out of the carnival processes for Black people when Black folks started being in Carnival in Brazil.
Um, and you see this and you see these forms in Ilê Aiyê and other groups, Black groups, Carnival groups. So I learned those forms with them. Moustapha Bangoura, the first works that I did with him were Sorsone, um, [00:06:00] Yankadi Makru. So that was my first touch, like with Guinea and Baga dance. Um, and somebody who was so proud of his particular ethnic group.
That's what I remember about Mustapha is that he would always talk about the Bagadia. Bagadia, he had a song about it, right? Like, uh, he had a song for the Baga folks. And that always struck me too, like how proud of his ethnic group he is, cause not a lot of teachers always insert their ethnic group like that.
[Musical interlude]
So we fast forward, I go to Ghana. I studied Gahu and Polongo and a little bit of Bamaya, which is from the North. And then, in grad school, I went to Brazil and Cuba and I did study, um, very briefly with the Ballet Folklórico in Cuba. Oh my, listen, I didn't feel like I could dance when I was in the room with [00:07:00] them. They did like a four hour Ballet class and then they did four hours of Orisha.
I was dead. I was dead. I felt so out of shape. I, and I mean, when I tell you they went all the way to the edge, you want to talk about energy as a technique? Hands down, they got it. And I would feel the same way about going to Ecole des Sables, which was another, like, life changing experience of being, um, engulfed in Diasporic Blackness.
There were people from all over the continent of Africa and Germaine, um, Mama Germaine Acogny would set us up so that we would, teach everybody would teach. So I taught like Southern Bass cause I was from the South and some like, uh, Reggae that I grew up, like old school Dance Hall or Hip Hop, Reggae, right?
People from Zimbabwe were teaching, from the Congo, from Ivory Coa..., I mean, from all [00:08:00] over the continent, they were teaching traditional dances all in this one place for two months. I mean, it was crazy the amount of exposure, embodied exposure, we had to the to dances.
Azsaneé: Dr. Jones continued her dynamic exploration of dance through her dissertation fieldwork, in which she collaborated with and studied the work of dancers and choreographers exploring African diasporic movement in really expansive ways.
Lela Aisha Jones: It's, it's been an interesting journey. It's like, when did I write that in 2018? Oh, Lord. Um, I was thinking about when I wrote my dissertation and when I started asking those questions. It really, it really got to these five Black U. S. based women identifying folks who were not as, recognize for the work that they were doing as practitioners, in my opinion. Because there's so many people out there practicing diasporic form and holding down community that do not actually, are not at these higher echelons of being noticed.
So Nia Love lives in more of the contemporary sphere and [00:09:00] experimental, uh, uh, I probably could say a lot of other things. Jazz based. way of, mode of being in her body, right? Um, and then you got Shani Sterling, and she's in based in, uh, Texas and is deeply rooted in ballet and also Ghanaian dance. And then you've got Ojeya Cruz Banks at Denison University, who was also in New Zealand for 10 years and she's Pacific, she's Gua..., she's Chamorro and African American.
Um, and has been studying like, West African traditional dance for years and choreographing with the Pacific mind. You know, and Dr. Nzinga Metzger, who is, her father's Sierra Leonean and her mother is African American and, uh, she had studied all kinds of Afro Cuban, and, uh, West African dance forms.
And, Jeannine Osayande, who is from Swarthmore and has a strong hist..., she is a part of the history of Blackness in [00:10:00] Swarthmore.
Her West African experience was mostly Ghana. She's done some other things too, but she also brings that Quaker, which is, you know, Quaker culture to it. So I think , like I brought all those kinds, those people together that had, you know, really done all these various dances from different countries and had their own sort of mixedness going on to, many of them.
And all of us really do, like, have a cultural mixedness unless you just were insulated, but for me, it really saved me. Um, seeing Black people all over the world saved me and dance was the way that I did it. Um, realizing that the way that people were existing in joy, in liberation, and also suffering in this country was not the only way that we existed.
OreOluwa: Dr. Jones went on to use what she had learned from her studies, her training, and her travels to found Flyground, the creative home in which she continued to develop and cultivate her diasporic artistry.
Azsaneé: We [00:11:00] talked a little about how Flyground came to be and how the choreographic practice she has been cultivating over the years started to show up in one of Flyground's earlier pieces, Native Portals.
Lela Aisha Jones: And so the First Person Arts work was about um, it was called Native Portals, Lynching and Love, and it was a question of whether or not we could actually love this country with that kind of history.
Um, and we ended up using this method that I've been developing over time called Mining, Witnessing, Archiving. And mining is, all of this is really, the beginning of it was probably mine. growing up in the Southern Baptist Black Church and seeing testimony. So the mining is an improvisatory or freestyle, uh, that a person is engaging with a particular topic.
In this case, it was your first engagement with lynching. So when I, this was like the first time I really made a large work outside of college. So it was a pretty heavy topic. Um, and I wanted there to be a lot of care in the process. And I would say, I didn't really [00:12:00] know exactly what I was doing.
Everybody was, we were experimenting together about whether or not it would work. So you have the miner, the testifier, the person digging for the content that exists in their archive, their embodied archive. And then you have an embodied witness who is moving with them in real time. Um, while they're doing this freestyle, an improvisatory moment, um, which could last anywhere from, you know, 3 minutes to 15 minutes.
Um, but the embodied witness, just like in church, if you were a testifier, people would be moving and swaying and responding verbally and embodied ways, but they're not making up their own movement.
They're actually trying to synchronize with the person who's moving, um, as a And then the archive is the process of the embodied witness offering back what, what did they archive in their body from the movement? So they might give them back movement that they remember from the moment they had with him.
And it's very intimate because although [00:13:00] that person is not verbally expressing what content is being drawn, um, out of that process of being a miner and a testifier freestyle and improv in relationship to lynching. They're still transferring the energetic um, narrative of that and how it's living in their body.
Azsaneé: Flyground's Native Portals piece, and the process of mining, witnessing, and archiving that helped create it, was about more than description or representation or aesthetic.
Lela Aisha Jones: Honestly, it's the generativity of making.
And particularly making with embodiment as your foundation, mostly in the collective making process. So letting things be emergent, letting trust occur as an embodied being, building trust and community as an embodied being is that phrase with everybody moving across the floor and no requirement for people to be on the same time or to be, right? Fifteen people just moving across. They have the sentence. They have [00:14:00] the, you know, embodied ask, but they're not asked to align with everybody except for energetically.
The moments that are supposed to be tender have to be tender. The moments that are supposed to be sharp have to be sharp. The moments that are supposed to be closer to the earth have to be closer to the earth. The moments when we have to see each other, we have to see each other. So there is their energy requirement more so than a, uh, rigid synchronousness, right?
The ener…, the synchronicity is in the energy. If you're in West African dance, you, that's a requirement to bring your àṣẹ, right? Or you not doing it. That's my personal opinion. If you're on stage and your àṣẹ is not there, you're not doing these Diasporic forms, Rumba, and so can, you know, you just got to imagine somebody up there, like robotic. That's not it. It [00:15:00] actually is not the dance, without your àṣẹ.
OreOluwa: Azsaneé, you also brought up how this type of synchronicity of energy, while respecting distinctiveness and movement and aesthetics, requires its own type of rigor.
Azsaneé: Yeah, during the interview I mentioned how although in Western society we view Ballet and other more technical styles of dance as the height of rigor, the movement practices we discuss with Dr. Jones also require a different kind of expertise.
OreOluwa: And Dr. Jones goes on to talk about how freestyle is a big part of striking this delicate balance in her choreography.
Lela Aisha Jones: I think at the core of all of it is, for me, is when it emerges from a freestyle.
Now I have also made choreography that was specifically You know, Guinea Lamban. Like I've also done that, right? I've also, um, made choreography that was, you know, really set in whatever the lineage is of that particular. I call them the dances with long lineages because sometimes I get tired of traditional.
But the dances that have touched so many people, [00:16:00] it's almost hard to count, right? But I mostly love freestyle and my love of freestyle really came from House. It didn't come from West African Bantabas. And, but I think the way that I learned the Bantaba was, it was a chance for you to display your prowess in that dance form, that technique, right?
Um, and you can freestyle too, and people do that, and I, you know, but the way I grew up in it, you know, it was this dance, you do this dance, and you show your skill set, and you work with the drummers. It was a chance to work with the drummers one on one, which, oh wow, just amazing, right? And so, the trans lineages element, for me, really was about how do all those things merge and then remerge into your body, your being, and then come back out.
Cause in freestyle, you can't control what's in your body, right? You're going to try to censor while you freestyle and "no, I can't use that cause" you know, if it's in your body, then it's a [00:17:00] part of it, right?
Azsaneé: While she has experience in lots of African Diasporic dance forms, Dr. Jones talked about her approach to improvisation being deeply informed by her background in House and Jazz.
Lela Aisha Jones: But it's something about the multilayering of, uh, the chaos of Jazz, right? The chaos of it in the middle of staying together and a rhythm, rhythmically being aligned and knowing when to come back and when to leave and um, and just the magical prowess of most jazz musicians and their ability to like departure and return and, and it don't even seem like they missed a beat, you know, that then required us as movers to live up to that.
And I think that's one of the very, that's one of the strongest places where music has led, led my dance career, stronger than any other way because I am always trying to fight that too and dance in silence and then come to the music. Because I'm like, when you play the music sometimes you can't find yourself, like, you're only finding what they did.
But for me, that [00:18:00] House feeling of freestyling, is what my, most of my choreography came from. Um, I think House for me was the place where I was most free and it took me so long to be liberated in that space.
Cause I was scared of House. When I first went to, I went, when I lived in Atlanta, there was a club called the Underground and I was in my twenties. I was still, you know, I had just come out of, uh, undergrad. But, you know,
dancing with people in front, without a stage, and people that just had they style together. Like you could see their signature all over every move they made, right? And I was freaking out. I was like, Oh, I don't want to go in the center. Like, I still do that. I still have that sometimes, but I went out and I, you know, once I did it the first few times, it took me a while to get out there though. And I really haven't touched another liberatory space. It's [00:19:00] like that sense, like that experience of being in House when it's not a meet market. It's not about meeting nobody. It's not about, it's about dancing. And that is all that it is about.
Cause that takes you right back to that sort of collective individualism. Like that was what house looked like, right? To me, it was like all these bodies and they all had all this different kind of influence, you know, but they were finding their signature, but it was, it was really watching the people who were seasoned and it looked like they was just signing the room with their embodiment, you know?
[Musical interlude]
Azsaneé: Time for another movement break.
OreOluwa:This time, I took a House dance class. Here's some audio from the experience.
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OreOluwa: Alright, I just got off the trolley. I'm on my way to this House dance class
I'm going to be early, which is a [00:20:00] first.
And I'm feeling pretty good about that. Um, but yeah, I'm thinking about what Dr. Jones was talking about how people can seem like they're signing the room with their embodiment, with their movement.
Um, so yeah, I'm just, I'm looking forward to engaging with the space in different ways, engaging with the folks in the class in different ways, um, and finding my own sort of signature. We'll see, we'll see how that goes. All right, here we go.
[Audio from House dance class fades in]:
*Voices and music from House Dance Class *[00:21:00]
[Audio from House advance class fades out]:
OreOluwa: I am now on the trek home after this very intensive class. I knew it was going to, uh, put the fire under my feet, but I don't know if I was adequately prepared, uh, for how winded I'd be. Um, But I'm really glad I did it
Um, it was [00:22:00] like a really thoughtful technique class. so there was, a lot of intention put towards the actual, rigor of the footwork, but in a way that felt safe and like you could play around, you could, innovate, you could have your own variations
Yeah, it was great because I feel like I found moments where I could catch my groove and, um, you know, like match it with the folks who were next to me and sort of vibe with them. Um, and I think that's sort of what Dr. Jones was talking about where, you know, you are sort of really connected to the space, um, but it's, you're also really connected to yourself.
And yeah, it was a great time. Ten out of ten. Ten out of ten.
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Azsaneé: We hope you enjoyed that movement break. We're going to get back to Dr. Jones, who talks about how her approach to improvisation and community building also informs her work in other spaces.
Lela Aisha Jones: I work with Brownbody, which is an all Black ice skating dance company. I'm the Associate Artistic Director there in Minnesota. And one of the things [00:23:00] we're working on is figuring out what is Blackness on ice. Because when you see skating, you know, the root of it is Ballet. If you have a movement training.
Right. And you also know, um, and Ballet can be very Black too. So let me just be real about that. But the Blackness you see there, the Ballet you see there is not Black. And the requirement is to check your Blackness at the door when you hit the ice. If you are a Black skater, period. Um, and it's getting, it's gotten better over the years, but it's still really rough.
Nothing like, dance has moved somewhat, you know, and made some strides, but skating is, like, still way behind and Deneane Richburg, the Artistic Director would say any of this that I'm saying now. And I think that, um, trying to put Blackness on the ice, thinking about West African movement on the ice, like this, that's a space where, Oh, my freestyle is utterly welcome.
Okay. Not by every skater. Because sometimes we have [00:24:00] internalized processes around our own perceptions of ourself. And sometimes as a guide, I can't get past that, right? But it is, it is salvation over there. Like for real, like when we be checking each other, like, oh, that's real.
We be, we be checking our own internalized racism, our own internalized hate for Blackness. Like we check each other on that so that we can actually get to that real liberation. But girl, we said equality over quantity, are we going to do that though?
OreOluwa: This comes back to the rigor in synchronization of energy that you were talking about, Azs. It's not just about a standardized technique of a particular movement, but a harmony of energy brought to a collective practice, and a willingness to call attention to when this harmony is out of whack, so to speak.
Azsaneé: Yeah, I hear that. And it reminds me of something else we were discussing earlier in the episode about how we should be careful not to assign technique to classical Western dances and improv or energy to African or other Folk dance traditions.
Sometimes this can slip into [00:25:00] assumptions that classical dances have the real rigor and Folk dances just have, like, pizzazz.
OreOluwa: Right? And in the case of West African dances, I don't know about you, but I sometimes hear it's, you know, so earthy or so gritty. Um, you know, stuff like that.
Don't get me wrong, these dances definitely take the natural world seriously, and we both live in a city that literally named one of its mascots Gritty, so I got nothing against that adjective. But these dances are also so much more. Dr. Jones talked about why it's important not to make these sorts of snap judgments.
Lela Aisha Jones: So I have people in the company who If you looked at the company dancing, you would never know they were not a Modern Dancer, right?
They had only studied West African and Afro Cuban, but they did the movements of Modern fine because they were so comfortable. There's something so deep about knowing your body. You know, it is more important than technique. Like, having a sense of your bones and your cells and your [00:26:00] muscles and how each part of it flows with the other, you know, from a very visceral place, not a cognitive thinking place, but a trusting of muscle memory and cell memory, you know, and blood memory.
So if I, you know, I can notice when you're doing Guinea Fare' or when you're doing Oshun or when you're doing, but many people, when they see a choreography, they can't. You know, if you haven't danced those forms, you haven't studied those forms. That's a beautiful thing about studying in the Diaspora, now you've got a whole wide range of global vocabulary or embodied, uh, sensation that many people totally miss when they see these, these kinds of pieces that are contemporary works.
You know, people can say, "Oh, that's African. I see some African in there," but they can't say, it's Mali, you know, that's, that's Lamban. And even if I say it's Lamban, I know it's 10 other things. So I think that that's the beauty of [00:27:00] Flyground is that we were able to validate a House and Hip Hop, whatever you trained in. And there were a lot of Modern dancers, but they were, they, the other things that they had been a part of weren't validated in choreographic practice.
Azsaneé: To close out the interview, as we do with each of our guests, we asked Dr. Jones about what she's grooving to these days
Lela Aisha Jones: Well, I love Sara Tavares, who passed away, she was very young, but she had been dealing with brain cancer. Her music is absolutely amazing. Um, and, you know, just showed me a whole nother side of the, the world of that sound. That was so influenced by Brazilian music and also by Cape Verdean music. Yeah. And, and Portugal yeah..
And of course, if I say Jazz, I got to mention Christian Scott, which I think he has shifted his name. He has more names now. But, um, I think it's Adjuah Tunde, maybe all the rest of his names. Uh, but the Jazz he's [00:28:00] doing, the song Perspectives, um, and there's a couple of other songs that I just love, Tantric, um, yeah.
I think I can. Leave it at that. I covered lots of genres there.
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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 at gmail. com. And you can continue to listen to episodes of [00:29:00] Groovin' Griot wherever podcasts are found. Thanks for groovin' with us.
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