Like so many art forms, dance is co-opted and commodified, often to an extreme extent. Migration and cosmopolitanism threaded seamlessly through the sounds and the people on stage. Many other members of the cast and crew come from abroad also. Byrne tells us he is an immigrant, brought over from Scotland as a baby. Throughout the music and dancing, there are messages about the importance of voting and the desperate injustice of police brutality against, in particular, black people. We do indeed, and aside from the extraordinary talent on display, there was something else to admire about American Utopia - that was the sincerity and the refusal to budge from the high-minded aspirations of the title. You want to be able to release, you know, it’s very easy for us to criticise ourselves, but we have the whole world to do that.” And I think it’s important to remember to bring that with you when you go into whatever movement class you’re in, because you want to be able to have fun. “How you’re digging into that mother tongue when you’re the most relaxed, the most comfortable, the most connected to whatever your home space is - whatever is coming up out of your body is organically you. This mother tongue happens without any instruction and before any formal training, and is something she urges dancers to keep a hold of. Kuumba, who was part of that ensemble for many years and still works with them, explains movement as our mother tongue this way: “Like how you started dancing with your mom in the kitchen, or where you’re making a little dance with your cousin.” A 2021 MacArthur Fellow, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar is revered in the dance world for forming the Urban Bush Women - a performance ensemble dedicated to exploring the use of cultural expression as a catalyst for social change in 1984. She tells me about movement as a person’s mother tongue, citing Jawole Willa Jo Zollar as a proponent of that idea. Before we can speak words, we yell, we holler, we cry.” Using a lexicon more familiar to me, plain old English words, Kuumba explains that I don’t need to worry, because movement is innate. Movement is a language, but it doesn’t feel like one I can speak. And then, little by little, we see people start to get up and figure it out on their own because they get up and realise no one is telling them to sit down, you know?” The trick is that you can, but maybe we don’t let you know until the very end, so it’s kind of turned maybe a little bit of crowd control of not letting everyone know how much they can release until we finally let them in. I spoke to one of the cast, the vocalist and dancer Tendayi Kuumba, and asked what that felt like from her perspective when we all started to dance. The divide between us and the cast seemed to close in those moments as we all danced together. Permission felt important, but there was more to it than that. One obvious answer is that towards the end of the show, Byrne told us we could dance if we wanted to as long as we didn’t block the aisles. I had to know what alchemy occurred to get a bunch of New Yorkers and tourists to move in ways we usually wouldn’t, in public, with such joy. Perhaps you’re thinking: “Uh, Maeve? Imagine the person seated behind you and their surprise as you blocked their view?” But the thing is, we were all at it! The whole theatre, up on our feet, absolutely thrilled. Instead, I found myself leaping out of that seat and dancing my heart out along with the real dancers on stage! I imagined a big clap at the end, the most physical reaction I would muster. I was there as an audience member, an observer, committed to the unspoken contract that I would watch from my seat and enjoy the show politely.
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