This year, the Festival of Us, You, We & Them will be specially curated by The Dance Complex teaching artists and members of our community. The first portion of the festival celebrates Hip-Hop dance in all of its forms. The festival’s second portion will focus on mindfulness, somatics and bodywork as means of self care and self preservation. The final portion will explore the definition of dance and encourage participants to think outside the traditional movement realm. We spoke with curators Elmer Martinez, Eliza Mallouk, and Roxanna Myhrum to learn about their work and plans for the festival.
Tell us a little bit about your work and your connection to the Dance Complex.
Elmer Martinez:
“When I was a Sophomore in Theater School I walked up to Peter DiMuro on the Green line after a show he had just co-hosted with the Beantown Lockers at Boston University. It was Halloween and I leaned over to my roommate, Nate, and pointed out that that was the producer from the show we had just left! I was still figuring Boston out and never shy to put my name out there as an aspiring Lighting Designer and dancer I walked right over. We hit it off and soon after that I became a regular on the Lighting designer roster at Dance Complex where I’ve designed, stage managed, trained and performed for the last five years.”
Eliza Mallouk:
“I guess I first discovered dance, meaning I took my first real dance class , when I was close to 50 years old. My children were grown up and I worked in Cambridge close to The Dance Complex and I took my first Modern dance class with Jody Weber at Green Street Studios. I completely fell in love with it! I took her series of classes for about a year and in that process I also discovered The Dance Complex. I started taking classes with Tommy Neblett who was teaching Modern for 55+ at the time. Soon after that he asked me and my friend, Marcie Mitler to be in the Elders Ensemble of Prometheus Dance. From there I took every class I could possibly take, ballet and modern with Marcus Schulkind and Danny McCusker, ballet with Anna Myer, Improv with Joan Green and many other classes. In 2010 Marcie and I hosted our first Across the Ages Dance Project concert. As older dancers, we were interested in continuing to perform and bring younger and older dancers together. It became a very popular annual show for several years including our most recent concert in 2019. We have not produced a show since Covid but have hope for the future. It’s thrilling to be my age and to have found such an incredible passion. I’ve had a very full career as a massage therapist, an Alexander Technique teacher, and Zero Balancer as well as teaching at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee. The Dance Complex for me has always been such a refuge, a real haven, and an amazingly inclusive, welcoming and supportive community.”
Roxanna Myhrum:
“I’m a director of non-realistic theater with a special focus in opera, puppetry, and site-specific work. I’ve taken classes at the Dance Complex for years, and I have been a guest respondent at several dance concerts–I’m a huge fan! I recently finished an 11.5 year tenure as the Artistic Director of Puppet Showplace Theater, another vital New England/Greater Boston presenting organization. Because puppetry and movement are so connected, there are many artists who have overlapped between both organizations.”
Which portion of the festival are you curating? What can participants expect from your portion of the festival?
Eliza Mallouk:
“Julianne Corey and I are planning a section that is called Caring for Ourselves – Dance for Release, Resource, Resilience. Right now, I’m reaching out to create a panel discussion with a diverse population of body-oriented therapists and teachers. I’m looking for diversity within that panel of mostly people who are interested in sharing their expertise and their understanding of what self care is, what it is to be in your body, not just as a dancer but as anyone in the world, how to really take care of this body, how to really look at how we do things in our lives and how do we have more choice available to us”
Elmer Martinez:
“The Hip-Hop Sessions and Forums— I’d say to expect to be welcomed as you are, expect to make new friends and expect to laugh and sweat! ”
Roxanna Myhrum:
“My portion is called “Dance, and…”. It’s an invitation to think about other performance disciplines and practices that overlap with and test the boundaries of what is traditionally considered dance”
What is the importance of Hip Hop and Street Dance dance in the world right now?
Elmer Martinez:
“I feel that there has always been a need for a counterbalance to the hardships so many folks are going through universally. In terms of hip-hop dance, to me, it really is a meditation practice. It’s a physical and emotional art that has asked me to accept a lot of different points of views that I otherwise wouldn’t have been exposed to. I feel the world needs more opportunities to accept the unfamiliar. Most of the time the lack of communication between communities is a core to a lot of the issues I see in our society. Mostly, people want to be safe, peace, trust, respect, honesty, integrity, loyalty- calm, confident, love and joy. Street Dance culture is an opportunity for millions of people to stop and understand that when we choose to celebrate together in peace we are deposed only by our own willingness to love.”
How can the Festival of Us, You, We & Them highlight this importance?
Elmer Martinez:
“The Festival space can serve to execute the programming to the best of our ability within the ethical and responsible articulation of Afro Diasporic art spaces. This is a sentiment I feel has to be paramount in any institutional programming that claims to be self aware of how they impact the communities they are intending to serve. By respecting and remaining equitable to the street dance culture(s) and the people who produce more of it. The festival can reinforce the idea that there needs to be more spaces held for Hip-Hop practitioners and the accountable distribution of accurate history and teachings of these art forms. If you can learn to support the people that conjure the opportunities to further incubate growth the way they are explaining they need support-on their terms- then the festival is fostering the perpetuation of how street dance is important in the world right now.”
In the past year the world has seen rapid social change. How can we utilize the gathering of the Boston Hip Hop community at the festival to aid in the increasing momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement?
Elmer Martinez:
“Hip-Hop is as political as it is black. There is no separating the two, especially in the United States. I’ll lead by saying Hip-Hop is a culture of Celebration. Inherently, Hip-Hop has always been a counterculture. Hip-Hop has always been about black liberation. It follows in the footsteps of every revolutionary black genre that came before it. I refer to one of my favorite quotes that reads,
“Hip-Hop, like the black musical oxygen that preceded it- blues, gospel, jazz, soul- cannot be looked at in a vacuum because the artists owe their lives to the context of their births. A discussion of the blues,then, without a discussion of slavery and Black southern life would not just be incomplete, but lame, too. A discussion on hip-hop, in the same way, must include what Dr.Jared Ball, hip-hop professor, calls ‘it’s proper context of political struggle and repression.’ Without this context, we are left, as Fred Hampton trumpeted one balmy Chicago afternoon, with ‘answers that don’t answer, explanations that don’t explain and conclusions that don’t conclude.’
Putting Hip-Hop in its proper context means understanding the inextricable link between Black music and the politics of Black life. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Called the freedom songs the ‘soul of the Movement’:
‘They are more than just incantations of clever phrases designed to invigorate a campaign; they are as old as the history of the Negro in America. They are adaptations of songs the slaves sang- the sorrow songs, the shouts for joy, the battle hymns, and the anthems of our movement. I have heard people talk of their beat and rhythm, but we in the movement are as inspired by their words. “Woke up This morning with my mind stayed on freedom” is a sentence that needs no music to make its point. We sing the freedom songs for the same reason the slaves sang them, because we too are in bondage and the songs add hope to our determination that “we shall overcome, Black and White together, We shall overcome someday.” The songs bound us together, gave us courage together, helped us march together.’
Going beyond the naive idea that Black music is simply entertainment helps us to better understand the current crisis. ‘It seems to me that if the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music,’ is how Poet Amiri Baraka puts it in ‘Blues People.’ So, in that way, to observe contemporary Hip-Hop is to observe ourselves.”
-M.K Asante
If the festival (meaning its producers and participants) can aim to understand the context for why hip-hop at all, that lesson in itself I would consider a step in a direction towards what Black Lives Matter is all about. The histories of BLM and Hip-Hop are two hues to the same color.”
In your opinion, what is the importance of bodywork and somatics in the world right now?
Eliza Mallouk:
“To me it feels completely essential. I feel very grateful that I happened to fall into the profession of bodywork and massage therapy because from the get-go it was really all about helping other people, but in the process of doing that you have to learn to take care of yourself so that you’re not injured, so that you have clarity, so that you keep yourself healthy and in so doing, you are able to serve your clients better.”
How can the Festival of Us, You, We & Them highlight this importance?
Eliza Mallouk:
“I think that our section of the festival will be speaking to what it is to really be present, to listen in and to be more fully embodied”
Following the pandemic, how do we as movers recognize the benefits of these practices moving forward in our daily practices? How can we share these benefits with our community?
Eliza Mallouk:
“Mindfulness can come in many different forms. We all hear about mindfulness meditation, but you can be mindful in the way you wash the dishes. You can be mindful in the way you do a plie. It’s really about how to take hold of your mind and body and learn how to sense what is really going on here in my nervous system. If there’s a lot of stimulation, a lot of stress in your life, all of that is having a profound effect on our physical body and our emotions. So, to really help people learn to listen in to what is going on here and let their decisions be based on listening in. As dancers, we know that the body has so much to teach us. It’s important to pay attention and allow our decisions to come from our body, mind and spirit. Balance is so important.
How will your portion of the festival offer the unconventional and stretch the definition of dance?
Roxanna Myhrum:
“A lot of time we think about dance as being confined to the body, dance can live in anything as well as anyone. We’re excited to connect with people working at the intersection of dance and object performance, where movement becomes a force for animation.”
What are you most looking forward to with the festival this year? What are your goals for the festival?
Elmer Martinez:
“I am most looking forward to dancing in person with people! My only goal at the end of the day is to remind people that we are more alike than we are different. Also, no one can tell you how to celebrate. It’s a feeling we each reach in our own space and time.”
Eliza Mallouk:
“My hope for the festival is that we reach a lot of people, that people will have fun and really enjoy themselves! Whether through taking a dance class or engaging in an interesting discussion, I hope that all who attend will have a sense that they can breathe a deep sigh, feel a sense of relief and reconnect after the pandemic to our wonderful community.”
Roxanna Myhrum:
“I’m excited about innovative ways to connect audiences to artists that have arisen during the pandemic, and with the possibilities for expanded outdoor activities. I love bringing artistic practice into the streets! My goal with everything is always to bring audiences a sense of wonder, possibility, and delight. I hope that people will be inspired by our artists to experiment with new forms of movement and to express themselves in new and unexpected ways.”
