In the News

In silence, three casually-dressed men walked slowly onto the stage of the Martha’s Vineyard Performing Arts Center. Their faces stony, their bodies tensed, they stood before the audience as if ready for a fight.

Then the music of Sergey Prokofiev began to play and the dancers snapped into motion. Joined by female performers, they danced in pairs, in threes, in groups and on their own, flowing through moves that blended the aesthetics of hip-hop and modern ballet into a compelling new form.

Choreographer Victor Quijada first became interested in dance as a child growing up in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. Hip-hop culture was on the rise, breakdancing was the rage, and he had no shortage of opportunities to express himself.

“My real initiation into dance was in those circles…after school and on the street corner and in garages as a teenager,” Quijada tells the Straight by phone. “That became a very important part of my life.”

After more than a decade of running his own dance company, becoming a success on his terms, far from his upbringing on the streets of Los Angeles, Victor Quijada wondered what else there was.

“Did I create this tomb I’m going to die in?” he thought. “When you’re young, you want it all and I had made a big list. A lot of it had come true. But I was stalling out and thinking about how change happens. Sometimes it happens to you, sometimes you choose it. Sometimes, you have to figure out how to live in a new normal or you get swept up in it.”

The dancers flutter, imitating the wings of blackbirds painted by legendary artist Jacob Lawrence.

A dancer pirouettes, matching the pose in Lawrence’s portrait of a woman all dressed up and waiting on a train platform.

The music fades and dancers “become” a train, making the sounds of a locomotive, moving across the stage as if they were indeed a train on which thousands of African Americans rode from the South to the North in what is now known as the Great Migration.

C. Brian Williams stepped into a new life path during Homecoming weekend his freshman year at Howard University in Washington, D.C.

He just didn't know it yet.

The marketing major knew very little about stepping and the African American fraternity and sorority system that had created it in the early 20th century. But seeing it in action generated a lasting memory.

'I'll just never forget it,” he said. 'It was a dance form that was distinct - a percussive form that I'd never seen before.”

In 1739, a group of Africans enslaved in Stono, S.C., revolted and fled for freedom. Very few made it. The rebellion was crushed, and its clearest outcome was the terrified slaveholders’ reaction: the Negro Act of 1740, which restricted the assembly of slaves and their use of instruments helpful in gathering groups, notably drums.

Just last week producers Nelle Nugent, Ron Simons and Kenneth Teaton announced that Camille A. Brown will direct the upcoming production of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When The Rainbow is Enuf on Broadway in 2022. 

ZOMORODI: This is Camille A. Brown. She's a dancer, director and perhaps one of the most sought-after choreographers on Broadway. And her passion for dance started right in her living room as a little girl.

The busy choreographer returns to the stage, maybe for the last time, in her celebrated trilogy exploring Black life.

The Joyce Theater, open to audiences again, has been transformed. I don’t mean by the new seats, which look like brighter, cleaner versions of the frumpy old ones. I mean by the presence of Ragamala Dance Company, the Minneapolis-based troupe that is inaugurating the theater’s in-person fall season.