Wideman Davis Dance's journey revolves around the revelations found in repetition. In the following conversation, they walk us through their beginnings in formal ballet to their current process of deconstructing and reassembling movement to reflect American existence. For them, dance has been generative, transitioning them into culture work, archives, foodways, and so on and so forth. Continually turning their kaleidoscope, they showcase the rich colors and patterns found in the lived experience and cultural traditions of Southern Black communities through dance. 

Shalini Joseph: What drew you both to dance? 

Tanya Wideman-Davis: I didn't really have a choice in it. I started dancing when I was three because I'm originally from Chicago. My mom put me in dance and probably by the time I was eight or nine, I knew I wanted to do it professionally. When I graduated high school, I started working with the second company at Dance Theatre of Harlem. That was my entry point into the professional dance realm. I was in the school for a year and then I started working with the company. That’s how I started my professional dance career.

I knew early on that I was not going to dance anywhere else on the West Coast or the Midwest. I knew that I wanted to be in New York. The New York aesthetic of dancers was just so interesting to me. Once I graduated high school and went to Dance Theatre of Harlem, that opened me up to the New York sensibilities of dance that are just so aggressive and of the location. And that spoke to me in the sense of how I wanted to embody movement.

Thaddeus Davis: I was much later. I danced in my house my whole life. I danced at schools, at parties, from elementary school, all the way through high school and into college, actually. I almost didn't graduate as a result of the dancing at parties. 

But around fourteen or fifteen, I saw an episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood where he happens across Lynn Swan at a studio. And at the time, Lynn Swan played football for the Pittsburgh Steelers. But he runs in with this uniform on, and he takes off the helmet and the shoulder pads and all the gear and then he has on black tights and a white T-shirt, and he runs over and joins this ballet class. I'm playing football at that time and I'm thinking, "Well, he's a professional and he's just starting to take ballet to help his professional football career. If I were to start taking ballet now, I'm guaranteed to be a professional football player." 

That was the beginning around age fourteen or fifteen of me saying to my mother, "I got to take ballet class. I got to take ballet class like Lynn Swan." This was somewhere in the '80s or so. There was a big push for athletes to start to take dance classes for flexibility and agility, coordination, etc. That was my beginning and inspiration. 

Dance has been one of the things that has always been there for me and it has always propelled me forward. I went to college for dance. I moved to New York to dance for Dance Theatre of Harlem. I met my wife in dance. I've become a choreographer in dance. I'm making work that can help me think about Black life and Black existence with dance. It's always been my way of communicating.

Shalini: Coming from formal ballet backgrounds, how would you characterize the dance forms you create now? 

Thaddeus: It's based on a lot of the ideas of the choreographers we work with. There is the balletic background, and the foundation that's there, but then there's a notion of being able to deconstruct and reassemble movement so that what once was a phrase that may have had balletic feeling, when put next to a step from another genre, becomes incongruent. It's not flowing in the way that ballet may flow. It feels a bit more of the time or aggressive. It's more physical. That deconstructing and reassembling of movement allows us to stay inside the traditions that we understand as our foundation, yet able to expand and create new ways of moving for ourselves.

Tanya: For me, it really feels like design. The design concepts of all these different forms that we've danced and studied, but then a layering of different people. 

Thaddeus: We've evolved into this space that we're happy and comfortable in, where we are reflecting real people's lives and experiences. Working in a textile mill, that's physical. Working in a labor camp, called the plantation, as an enslaved person, that's labor. The light ephemeral ethereal quality that ballet has, even in its most aggressive, still has a sense of romanticism around it that we deviate from, because we're reflecting American existence.

Shalini: In creating movement for projects like Migratuse Ataraxia, does the space come first and have you ever had sites change the movement for you?

Tanya: For Migratuse Ataraxia, we knew we wanted to put it in the antebellum plantation home. We researched a lot before we even made the first step. We had to figure out how we were going to migrate through the home with these different interventions that would be in the four by four structure of an antebellum home. Four rooms on the top, four rooms on the bottom. So how the audience even walks through the home is really intentional for us too. 

The steps came out of us thinking about these spaces, visiting a host of different plantations in different states, looking at the differences between an urban and a rural plantation, and considering what those differences might be in terms of the labor there. The labor of people really informed how we were thinking about creating the movement content.

Thaddeus: And then there were elements like ghost structures. Ghost structures are something that we learned about while working here in Columbia, South Carolina. There's a house that's called the Mann-Simons House. Mann and Simons are two different African American people who in the 1830s owned property here, pre-emancipation proclamation. They only have one structure remaining — the original home — but they have these little metal frame ghost structures to indicate the many different dwellings they had. So ghost structures are a way of acknowledging the memory in a space. Sometimes the location changes the movement, sometimes the movement changes the location. It's always a back and forth thing.

The creation of movement is never a problem for us. We have a lot of modalities. Tanya danced with Alonzo King in San Francisco. I danced with Donald Byrd. Tanya also danced with Donald Byrd. We’ve worked with a host of choreographers and learned different strategies and approaches to making movements. And then there are two of us. So when one gets tired, the other—

Tanya: Kicks in.

Shalini: Repetition feels so intrinsic to the process of dancing and seems to manifest in other ways in your practice as well. What is your relationship to repetition and what does it open up for you?

Tanya: What's interesting about repetition is we always start our choreographic design day off by taking a ballet class to get warm. That is community for us. Our ballet classes sometimes can take two hours, because we're there talking with each other, sharing information. It becomes this repetitive communal experience that begins our process of designing phrases and choreography.

Repetition also plays a part in us getting to a place where we have done this so much. We've done this on so many different levels, from college level to professional levels, including our own company. We've choreographed on kids of all ages and in all of these years of doing this work, we've gained a lot of information. The repetition of building on that information as adults has helped us evolve into who we are, understand who we are, and understand what we are and are not interested in doing. 

Thaddeus: I think that repetition grounds us. And it reminds us of labor, because the act of dancing is physical, which means that there's labor happening. As we think about labor, we're constantly thinking about the labor of Black bodies. We don’t want to distance ourselves as artists that are off in a distant studio doing special dances. 

No, we bring dance into community as our anchor and as our way of speaking in a sense, but we're not bringing it in to show you particularly what we do. We're bringing it in to share, and to say, "Hey, this is how we express ourselves, but it is your idea that is really important, your life in your community." What dances do you do? How do the dances that we're doing reflect real life? And that repetition makes it work. It doesn't have to be this idea that we're artists that are separate.

What we've been successful at is being able to go into communities and share with them the thing that we found beautiful, that they've expressed to us. Not that we went in and dictated, "You don't know what your beauty is." No, these are the things that we learned in shared experiences, workshops, and talking to people at the coffee shop. We share our thoughts after connecting. And they go, "Oh my God, you see us." That really underscores this repetitive process and not having one way of connecting with different communities.

Tanya: Building trust with people can be difficult and takes repetition. We try our best to go into communities and give something to them. We may visit multiple times so that we have the opportunity to ensure we're not being extractive. There's a synergy in every community that we go in, and there is a host of information that we're trying to understand about Black existence in these environments. Sometimes it can be very guarded and other times, it can be open. Depending on if you have an entry point, which for us has been community partners, those relationships take cultivation and time.

Thaddeus: For instance, we'll leave on Monday for Huntsville. Five years ago, we met a lady at the Lowe Mill, which is a former cotton mill turned art center. A month ago when in Huntsville, we visited the mill because she had invited us to stop by if we were ever in the area. We went and were thinking, "Oh, wow. This would be a great place to come and film some stuff. Well, did Black people work in this mill in the mid-century, in the early twentieth century?" We've come to find out they did, but the history is not readily available or is only written from a certain perspective. Because there were mostly white people working in this cotton textile mill, the narrative was a white narrative, but you look at images and see Black folks. That's the kind of work we dive into: "Well, we see that they're here, and we know that there are probably descendants of these people still in this community. What's the narrative?" So we have to find the history and tease it out. You have to call this person and that person and put friends together with people that you don't know and ask questions. And that's a repetitive process. There's never one way to get at these ideas that we're trying to unearth. All of those ideas usually come before the dance. Sometimes, oftentimes, that's the fun part about just talking to people.

Tanya: And then the performances that we're doing, we're not touring these works. We go and we give to the community, "This is what we gathered from you. And we have not shared this with New York or we have not shared this with Chicago or Columbia because it's for you."

Thaddeus: It's really interesting to be in a community and make something about that community and share it with that community because then the buy-in and the investment remains in that community. Then when we're trying to do something again, that community is more apt to go, "Oh, I remember what you did last time and I really appreciated you working in our community. Yeah, let's talk." As we are putting these different relationships together, we're building trust on multiple levels. 

Tanya: If you come from a touring company and that has been the bulk of your professional career, for us, it felt like we missed something. I'm so grateful for that experience that we had, but we missed the conversations to be had with the people who saw those performances afterwards. We never got to do that because we were on the stage dancing.

Thaddeus: And then you're off to the next city.

Tanya: And then you're off to the next city. So what is this dialogue that we missed, that we were so hungry for in our own work to not just be in community with the dancers that we're performing with, but in community with the people that we're performing for?

Shalini: Could you tell us more about your journey expanding into foodways? 

Tanya: Foodways came about through a conversation with John T. Edge who wanted us to do something for the Southern Foodways Alliance. We originally were going to do a performance and then COVID hit and we decided to make a film. We had seen a film that had been done a couple years ago with the Southern Foodways Alliance with Ethan Payne and B. Brian Foster. After COVID, we worked with them to make this We Dance film about our family and foodways. It ended up being this relationship where we just kept working with Ethan. 

Also Migratuse Ataraxia, when we originally did it, had a foodways component too, where after the antebellum performance, the audience would trickle out the front door and would have a curated dinner based off of the foodways of that particular town or city. Food has been just something we've always been hovering over. We just never actually anchored down to do projects on it until then.

Thaddeus: We started working with Myron Beasley, who's a professor and a culinary anthropologist. He's a professor at Bates College. In our work with Myron, he was excavating the origins of ideas about food not just for sustaining the body, but the ritualistic practices of food and what it brought about in community. Myron brought in Chef BJ Dennis in Charleston, who's a Gullah Geechee chef and a very famous chef in the low country of South Carolina. Chef BJ took us to all of these places, not the restaurants, but to people selling plates of food out of their house. And he fed us with his hand, "Taste this, taste this.”

The sophistication that's in this Black culinary practice is being lifted up. It's not just food, it's choreography, it's dance, because it's dancing in your mouth and you're feeling good. And so this idea of culinary... we call it culinary, but cooking, good old-fashioned cooking, it was just amazing. And so then going forward to the We Dance documentary, we felt like food needed to be discussed. 

Tanya: For the We Dance documentary, my grandmother made pound cake and his mother made sweet potato pie, and now those recipes are documented. I don't bake so it's lost on me, but there is an archive of it now that if I did decide that I was going to go back and try and make that, then I have something that's tangible to pass down to the generations past us.

Thaddeus: Those processes of filmmaking and foodways document a specific part of our family, and then they document Black existence. These people existed beyond the census, there's a film about our families to show what life was like in Chicago, Mississippi, Alabama, and New York for this group of Black people. Dance transitions us into archives, transitions us into foodways, and so on and so forth. Dance is generative beyond just dancing or making dances. And that's what's exciting about this career, this experience that we continue to be afforded the luxury of having.

Shalini: How do you see your practice evolving further? 

Tanya: We've been super blessed to have these dance careers, but I’m also thinking about being at the age that I am and folding back into the university system now in a different way than I was able to when we first moved to Columbia. Currently, we're in the Department of African American Studies. We started out in the Department of Theater and Dance. That transition has allowed us to build on ideas in the classroom that then extend to our professional work.  

This semester, I taught a course called Performing Black Fashion Aesthetics. What it really made me think about was all of the women in our family who were seamstresses and who worked in textile mills throughout the South and up to the North. I’ve been thinking about this project that we're doing in visiting textile mills and looking at women's labor and what that hidden narrative is in those textile mills with Black men who were doing the dirty work of dyeing fabric. I think this interesting circle of information happens, and is allowing us to build projects that look very different than when we first became professors in the university system. There's definitely a bit more breadth.

Thaddeus: This transition into African American studies allows us to interrogate the everyday for long periods of time. 

How does an interview talking with elders from Montgomery differ from talking to elders in Harpersville, differ from talking to elders in Selma? Those locations are about forty-five minutes in different directions from each other, but when talking to senior citizens in those communities about their experiences, it’s like they’re in different worlds.

This academic space allows us to lean into that and just let it wash over our minds as we think about how we tell these narratives. How do we tell these untold stories of Black life in the South? Integration happened in 1968. There was a day it didn’t exist and then the next day it did. We never talk about that day when they announced that there's no more segregation in public spaces. Our families can talk about those things. 

Tanya: But also we're exploring this factory work in textile mills and how that was a large part of how some Black folks came into middle class existence. And then what happens when all of that labor is taken out of the country? What's left in these cities? We've traveled to so many of these different Southern spaces and the economies are not there anymore. How are these people surviving? What are they doing in these spaces to survive, but also to activate community other than church or the traditional ways that Black folks have been known to come together?

Thaddeus: And something else we’ve been thinking about is how language changes things and potentially, a person’s agency. Words like labor are words that are Chicago words. In the South, we don't reference it as labor. You just work. That idea of labor, to me, also denotes union. It denotes rules and equity, while the South are largely Right to Work states. You are subject to whatever they pay. I never even thought about how my grandmother worked in several factories. She worked in a Victorian furniture making factory when I was a little kid and then she moved to the sewing factory, but at the time, they weren't called factories. It was just the furniture place or the place where they make pillows. But in the south if we start calling them factories, we bring a different kind of language to it, which gives it a different agency. Because if you work at a factory, that means that you get on and off at a certain time, you make a certain wage. The culture beyond just Black and White culture, economic culture, city planning culture, all those things start to come together and paint a picture of why things function the way they do. It's a class-based experience. Language starts to change how we're able to interrogate, get inside, and think about different ideas.

Tanya: And the different ways of embodying self in these different environments.