Influences
The two people I'm most inspired by are Harriet Tubman and Muhammad Ali.
Both of them exhibit and have exhibited unfathomable courage. They're the only two folks that I know of who demonstrated that they were not afraid of dying for their beliefs. Muhammad Ali did this thing that no other athlete maybe has ever done. As the most amazingly tuned athlete of his time he gave up his career in his prime because he didn't want to fight in a war. No one would do that today. And, Harriet Tubman, not only did she free slaves and take them through the Underground Railroad, she went back and kept doing it again and again and again.
Those are my true heroes. Whenever I get a little scared 'cause they're more white people in an audience than black people or if I use a little profanity or I'm scared of a little critic at some newspaper this just kind of puts it in perspective.
There are countless other heroes I have in the arts, both living and dead, like James Baldwin, Colson Whitehead, Junot Diaz, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni and, yeah, of course Ntozake Shange, and then choreographers like Bill T. Jones, Twyla Tharp and Alvin Ailey. But, the human artists I most admire are Muhammad Ali and Harriet Tubman.
When I was 10, KRS-ONE and Chuck D codified my awakening political consciousness through hip-hop music. When I was 14, Spike Lee codified my burgeoning hip-hop consciousness through cinematic volume. When I was 16, Nikki Giovanni framed my poetic consciousness through a radical black feminist lens. Against the backdrop of my 1990's NYC subway reality, I read her work from the late 1960's underground, in soft black (panther) leather textures and opened up to an a capella urgency that I've been striving to emulate ever since.
What to ingest to "get it": "Cotton Candy for a Rainy Day," and "The Women and the Men"
Quick link for quick fix:
www.nikki-giovanni.com
Ntozake Shange writes poetic fictions that costume a dancer's body inside the biography of witchcraft and diasporic music. There isn't a word on any of her pages that isn't bloodstained or still-sweating, either from a tenably harsh battle against patriarchal pushback, or because it left the dance floor kicking and screaming before being committed to paper. My first encounters with her work as a teenager changed me chemically, gave me a clearer sense of the man I wanted to be, inscribed an artistic chart for me that I continue to follow, as with Ms. Shange, to the end of my own rainbow.
What to ingest to "get it": "for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf"
Quick link for quick fix:
www.ntozakeshange.org/home.html
Dr. Rennie Harris' choreography, like the hip-hop culture that it elevates, will take your lunch money, fatally wound you, eulogize you, and than ritualistically resurrect you. He is able to cultivate micro-drama as micro body tic, offering no apologies like the Philly streets that raised him, humbly asserting that there are no apologies necessary like the sacred ground his movement occupies. No contemporary artist has built a more formidable aesthetic bridge from the seminal funk styles to the concert hall citadel, and few have done it with Dr. Harris' commitment to the physical, and ethnographic archive of hip-hop culture's multi-narrative.
What to ingest to "get it": "Facing Mekka"
Quick link for quick fix:
www.rhpm.org
Rennie Harris received the 2003 Alpert Award in Dance
From ""Beyond the Steps, an Alvin Ailey Documentary""
Saul Williams is the confluence of a startling plurality of oral traditions. His language transverses a space between Italy's Renaissance and Harlem's, nuanced and intergalactic, a middle point between Beat poetry and "I Need a Beat." ...tenderly, humbly, the universe places him in my path at key moments: my first semester in college, my partner's baby shower, my first play, my organization's Brave New Voices festival, Life is Living. His presence at these personal and artistic pivot points is a sign of both friendship, and pedagogical order. In all the ways that I endeavor to tether my words to my body, Saul's work teaches me to leave my body altogether...
What to ingest to "get it": "Said the Shotgun to the Head," Niggy Tardust
Quick link for quick fix:
www.saulwilliams.com
Formerly my student while she matriculated through high school and undergraduate studies, Chinaka Hodge long ago became my guide to all things geek fresh and black future. Her conjure woman language is spoken in plain Oakland, taking many forms, but always seeming to sob softly through laughter, like August rain. To paraphrase Ntozake Shange, dance is my thank you for poem, and I love her more than dance...
What to ingest to "get it": 'Mirrors in Every Corner'
Quick link for quick fix:
www.thickwitness.com