Ten companies will present tributes to cultural leaders in the Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project’s “Dancing the Archive.”
“Your elders are your archive,” Mashaune Hardy, executive co-director of the Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project tells me. “When we need to know something, we have a subset of people behind us we can dip into for history and wisdom.”
Honoring elders who cleared the path for future generations is the theme of this year’s CBDLP’s concert, “Dancing the Archive” at the Harris Theater August 28. It’s a fitting theme for an organization dedicated to preserving, supporting and advancing Black dance in Chicago. Hardy says that she, along with artistic co-director Kevin Iega Jeff, were thinking about the current state of cultural affairs in the United States and reflecting on the positive impact of Black cultural and civic leaders who are now in their seventies to nineties. People who “have led amazing lives and are looking to cement their legacy by connecting to younger people to let them know what was done that led to the world they have now. Not in an arrogant way, but a legacy way: to let them know the shoulders they stand on.”
The one-night program at the Harris honors Chicago’s “legacy bearers” in chapters, entitled Record Keepers, Stewardship, Wordsmiths, Moral Courage, Sound, Voice, Space Makers, Cultural Allies, Cultural Memory Continuum and Transmission. “We came up with chapters that legacy bearers in culture and civics do,” Hardy says. “We’ve been through this before. We’ve been through erasure. We’ve been through trying to change our history, we’ve been through trying to be denied our rights. We’re asking the legacy bearers how they got through it. In telling their stories, our companies were able to learn about their legacy. That inspired choreography.”
Specific honorees of the evening include Dr. Carol Adams, former president of the DuSable Museum, civil rights attorney James Montgomery and his wife Pauline and dance advocate and supporter Pam Crutchfield. Cohort members to be honored include Joel Hall, Homer Bryant, founder of the Chicago Multicultural Dance Center, and Najwa I, founder of Najwa Dance Corps and once a dancer with the Count Basie Orchestra.
The one-night concert is but a page in the growing CBDLP archive: since 2019, the Project has supported cohorts of dance companies—some newer, some long-established—across a range of styles from West African dance to tap to Chicago Footwork, with advocacy, archiving, capacity-building and performance opportunities. The current cohort comprises ten companies: The Chicago Multicultural Dance Center, Deeply Rooted Dance Theater, The Era Footwork Collective, Forward Momentum Chicago, Joel Hall Dancers & Center, M.A.D.D. Rhythms, Move Me Soul, Muntu Dance Theatre, Najwa Dance Corps and Praize Productions Inc. Each company will present a short piece—some from repertory, some new—inspired by the theme.
After the concert, Hardy tells me the cohort will shift to capacity-building work, creating project plans to execute with support from a “creative table” of experts: the less visible and essential work that sustains companies, pushes culture forward, creates new legacies and brings excellence to the stage.
Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project’s “Dancing the Archive: Embodied Histories, Collective Power” at the Harris Theater, 205 East Randolph. Friday, August 28 at 7pm. Tickets start at $46. Tickets and info at harristheaterchicago.org.
