The Shades of Poetry Showcase
A reflection on an evening of words, music and dance
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The James Baldwin Festival of Words culminated in The Shades of Poetry Showcase at the Chattanooga Theatre Center. The Festival, produced by the Chattanooga Festival of Black Arts and Ideas, focused on the works of James Baldwin while also exploring the role of creativity in the community. When I saw there were going to be dancers at The Shades of Poetry Showcase, I knew I had to learn more. I never associated Baldwin with dance and I was curious to see what would transpire.
This week’s article goes to show that dance is everywhere, even where you least expect it. Have you found dance somewhere unexpected? Anything from a street scene to a fairy ring, tell us about it!
The Shades of Poetry Showcase
By Jenn McCormick
Photo: Chattanooga Festival of Black Arts and Ideas
Narrated by poet Erika Roberts with live music throughout, the evening was more a happening or event than a performance. Each set combined more than one art. The organizers started with a bed of music, then layered on spoken word, song, and/or dance in different and tantalizing combinations with each number.
While the audience enjoyed 10 distinct sets, not counting the hypnotic musical and poetic bridges, I’m going to focus on those numbers that contained dance.
The audience enters to the dimly lit main stage, arranged as a theater-in-the-round with a mat and candles creating a sacred space in the middle of the floor. We smell incense. Smooth jazz lubricates our entrance. On a screen at the back of the theater, a black-and-white still image of James Baldwin contrasts with video of pink and purple smoke swirling behind him. As the show progresses, the concept of the sacred space continues. The screen also becomes a throughline, with different images highlighting motifs of each performance.
Erika, in a saffron robe, begins with an invocation: Yes yes … The back of her robe features a goddess-like woman with hair swirling straight up over her head, making me think of intellectual energy. She welcomes us as if to a party: “This space. It’s not my home but tonight we’re gonna groove like it just might be.”
That sets another theme for the evening: this is a shared event. We’re all in the sacred space together. The audience/performer dichotomy will be broken repeatedly in various ways throughout the evening.
Erika moves on to a priestly invocation: Shades don’t equal color; shades tonight equal “feelings and vibes … messages beyond messages beyond messages.”
The lights fade to black as the invocation continues. Over her voice we hear drumming and soft footfalls. Singers seeded in the audience send up a wordless chorus of praise. This first number is performed by N’nako Kande’ with dancers Crystal Newson, Kenneth “KG” Glatt, Damien Chaney, Ryan Roberts, Dallas Bailey, and Tarrisha Hicks, and bongos by Michelle Simon.
As the light comes up dancers are everywhere. Wearing loose garments of printed fabric, they crouch, spin, and circle the central arrangement on the floor. Each moves independently, but they’re united in the rising energy.
Another figure, N’nako, portraying a poet or priestess carrying a staff, approaches. She takes over Erika’s role as hierophant, striking her staff on the floor with her steps. Then the dancers cluster behind the priestess as she prays the ancestors into them. They pantomime her words as if feeling energy enter them, changing levels and shifting weight from one foot to the other in generous waving movements.
One dancer kneels in front of the priestess. She puts a robe on him, conjuring “the water in your cells holds the memory.”
The other dancers flock on the other corner of the mat, still shifting levels so some are always lower or higher than the others, some weaving toward the group, some away.
The dancer with the robe receives the staff. His shoulders tremble, lifting energy. The other dancers run and pirouette in a circle, while the dancer with the staff leads the way off, beating his steps into the ground.
With its circular patterns and spiral composition — forming the sacred space, invoking and transferring the ancestral power of memory, and opening the space again — this dance suggests power and generational continuity. The dancers’ movements perfectly tell the poet’s story and add to it. Their wave-like movements and the aqua tones in their garments suggest the element of water, also invoked by the poet’s image of memory stored in the water of the cells.
The next dance element is a collaboration between poet Marcus Ellsworth and two dancers, KG and River. Dim blue figures in blue fog appear on the screen. Marcus begins his poem: “I am not real, apparently.” KG, now dressed all in white street clothes with a white cap, enters and pantomimes the words. His dance is a hard-edged hip hop style. But something’s wrong. It’s as if he’s a fighter in a ring with a really big guy in the other corner. He seems tough, defensive, and afraid.
But there’s no really big guy. Instead, River enters, wearing silky red clothing and a stole. This dancer uses a completely different movement vocabulary — runway style walks, Vogue-like movements framing his face. His style is easy and free as the dancer in white’s is hostile and constrained.
Now the dancer in white sees the dancer in red. The poem continues, an exploration of different ways of being men. Men who feel versus men who do not. Real men, hard men, live narrow, limited lives, the poet tells us.
The dancer in white investigates the dancer in red, mimics his movements, and, in a sudden gesture that draws gasps from the audience, chokes him and weighs him down to his knees.
But he rises.
They try to hold hands but strike each other away. The dim light really shows up the dancer in white’s movements, while the dancer in red is less clear — a different costuming or lighting choice might have made them equally visible. As it is, the dancer in red is forgotten as the dancer in white kneels in pain, beating his fists on the floor, then pantomimes a fistfight. He thumps his chest.
“We don’t need real men,” the poet concludes. “We need authentic men.”
Now the dancers join the poet. At last, the dancer in red gives his stole to the dancer in white, lending him color and softness. The piece ends on a note of reconciliation.
The next piece features two rappers and four dancers — Deux Hommes accompanied by Crystal, Damien, Ryan, and Dallas. This time, the dancers support the speaking artists, staying mostly behind them. Their number is energetic, but not so punchy as to take the focus away from the rappers. The dancers do a great job backing up the song, breaking off into couples to partner each other, then using box steps to circle each other. As in the first set, they use shifting levels to create constant visual interest. The dancers’ and rappers’ joy is infectious. The piece ends with many audience members standing in their seats, also singing and dancing.
The final song before intermission, is not, on face, a dance number. AND YET. The singer, with his romantic cries of “You blow my mind, baby, I’m so in love,” soon has the audience out of their seats with a dozen or so participating in an impromptu electric slide on the stage floor. Two tiny girls dance with them. The first half ends in joy as audience and performers cross the boundaries of the circle and become one.
After intermission, the singer begins the second half on a slower note with an R&B song. Even here, dance is present as the camera woman joins the singer in a duet, performing an impromptu, maybe unintended, dance about performance and the human gaze. Again, the audience sings along, swaying and making the bleachers rock.
The next song by The Ragland Boys also invites audience members to dance, this time participating in a hip hop circle along with dancers KG, Crystal, Damien, Ryan, Dallas, and Tarrisha. The boundaries between audience, speaker, singer, and dancer continue to dissolve even as the show approaches some of Baldwin’s chillier themes — his exploration of the sinister side of American life.
Erika then reads a poem to Art: “Dear Art, I met you before I knew myself.” As the poem progresses we realize they’re on a cliff together, she and Art; will one of them jump?
Then the spotlight comes up. The screen lights with a vivid blue sky. We see a dancer, Crystal, on the edge of the circle: a woman wearing layers of black, sliding, locking, moving softly then hard. A new poem begins, this by musician and poet Swayyvo. “I’ve been thinking about jumping off the edge.” The dancer panics. She pops, weaves, pantomimes a beating heart, a pounding head. Her thoughts overmaster her.
“I’ve been thinking about jumping off the edge.”
The dancer now describes the thought process with her body, whirling in a triple pirouette to the ground where she squalls for a moment like a wind-whipped leaf, then pulls through to a split, falls flat, and rebounds to her feet again, popping forward and back. Another spin and she’s down again, working through levels as if striving to rise and being cast back. She reaches and grasps for help, pantomimes a heart bursting.
In the distance we hear the call of a woodwind.
The dancer’s movements smooth out. She knocks out another multiple pirouette, more slowly, only to be cast down by the notes of a saxophone player who joins her on stage — the poet who just narrated this poem. She undulates up on the music, circles the stage, softer this time, and dances away.
The saxophone continues playing. On the screen we see Swayyvo in nature, another human contemplating the heights and the depths. He’s in a field in Tennessee somewhere; a mountain’s behind him. It’s a winter morning. He’s been there all along, but the woman’s dancing was so profound I hardly noticed him. He seems at peace.
The screen goes dark and the horn keeps calling, calling.
We’ve ended, I think, the trajectory started with the invocation of ancestral memory: the dancers and musicians have taken us on a journey from the group to the individual — the one individual who must confront her Art and find her way to the edge of sanity and back, supported by her ancestors but also, in many ways, alone.
But we’re not quite finished yet.
A new poem begins, sultry and slow, read by Nola X Trinity from the audience. “The breathing thought that speaks before a thought is uttered is language made specifically for poetry.”
We see a dancer — Tarrisha — wearing all black, lying huddled.
“Never overlooking love’s anticipation … ”
The dancer rises as the light rises, a slow arm up. Her dance is a memory of a romantic encounter. Red silks blow on the projection screen. The dancer hugs herself, remembering her lover. Over and over she gets to her feet, melts again, walks a long circle, imaging her lover texting her, message after message of praise, support for the vulnerability she has just experienced. Her sensuous dance transforms into girlish skips. She imagines her lover calling her Queen and pantomimes a spiky crown with her fingers, a gesture she repeats throughout the dance. Over and over she repeats the slow melt, one knee rotating in and down. She’s silent, almost boneless, in a beautifully controlled dance about feeling out of control. Her silence is so perfect that when she deliberately strikes the floor with her knee the audience gasps. Then she sits — another, soft noise. Two notes of punctuation. Then she rolls over, collapses on her back, hands above her head, palms up in surrender.
Baldwin wrote about love, too. In a world without racism or homophobia, he might well have been a gentle soul praising the love of one man for another, a prose lyricist his whole life. After all the soul-searching, all the invoking of art and justice and pride, maybe it all comes back to one human, alone in a room, drenched with love for another, invoking him with all her heart.
Erika invites all the performers to the stage for a well-earned recognition, naming each one and giving them ample time for bows and applause.
The Shades of Poetry Showcase is over. But the happening isn’t quite over. Erika invites the band to play and the audience to come down and dance, breaking the barrier between performer and watcher for good as she opens the circle for the last time.
About the performance
Shades of Poetry Showcase
Aug. 27, 2023
Chattanooga Theatre Center
Marsha Mills, lead organizer
Crystal Newson, dance director
Erika Roberts, poetic narrator
N'nako Kande’
Black Star & Denise Dave
Marcus Ellsworth
Deux Hommes
NuMac Band
Chef Lemont Johnson
Ragland Boys
YZ Dream
Swayyvo
Eric Hubbard
Nola Trinity
Michelle Simon
Damien Chaney
Kenneth “KG” Glatt
Dallas Bailey
Ryan Roberts
Tarrisha Hicks
River
Tiara Hoy
LaKeysha Nolan
Micah Rockymore, event organizer
La’Sha Rockymore, production coordinator
Vee Rhodes, fashion designer
Lunar Entertainment, lighting and production
SimonWest Agency, photography
Shades of Poetry Showcase is part of the James Baldwin Festival of Words, led by Marsha Mills, which is under the Chattanooga Festival of Black Arts and Ideas, led by Ricardo Morris. Performer information courtesy of Marsha Mills.
About the author
Jenn McCormick is a writer, editor, and dancer working in Chattanooga. She is the publisher and managing editor of DanceChatt.
Join the Chatt
Join the conversation! If you’re interested in pitching a story for DanceChatt or want to be added to the DanceChatt freelancers list, send an email to jennelisewebster@gmail.com.
Until then, keep dancing!
— Jenn