Q: What has dance taught you that you have applied to your everyday life and how you engage in the world?

The two major things I have cultivated through dance that have a place in my personal life are integrity and discipline — doing everything 100 percent with your being and the discipline of setting a task and sticking to it. Discipline is easily fostered just because the work we do is so rigorous and a daily practice. There is no time where an artist is off — we are always honing our craft, even during this time. I feel like discipline is the backbone of any artist’s journey and I'm lucky enough to have my career also be my passion, so it’s easy to stay passionate about the process of discipline or honing discipline.

Q: What have been some challenges in your pre professional and professional career?
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Before college, I only trained seriously for four years, then I got into the conservatory at SUNY Purchase. So, to be considered for all this new repertoire there was huge to me. Then, to be taken out of the rep because the professors didn't know how to handle Black hair and couldn't figure out how to make an “appropriate” hair style for the specific ballet — I didn't know that was forshading my audition career. My talent not being seen but instead my hair being the catalyst for me being cut from an audition — that was a huge struggle for me. My Black identity and the beauty I see in myself was also the metric used against me to not advance in an audition and for not getting the part or the job. That was even a reason I didn't get into Ailey at one point.


Q: How did you begin dancing?
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From the very beginning, I was a very hyperactive child and always had an inclination toward music and dance. I grew up in the church, so music was always second nature to me, and being in the choir was like a right of passage in my family. My mom put me in tap class when I was really young, just to get my feet moving, but it wasn't until I was going into high school that I took my first ballet class. That was the beginning of my training. The founder of the school was a former Alvin Ailey dancer, as well as a commercial dancer, and she wanted to make the school curriculum as well-rounded as possible.


Q: What has dance taught you that you have applied to your everyday life and how you engage in the world?
‍
The two major things I have cultivated through dance that have a place in my personal life are integrity and discipline — doing everything 100 percent with your being and the discipline of setting a task and sticking to it. Discipline is easily fostered just because the work we do is so rigorous and a daily practice. There is no time where an artist is off — we are always honing our craft, even during this time. I feel like discipline is the backbone of any artist’s journey and I'm lucky enough to have my career also be my passion, so it’s easy to stay passionate about the process of discipline or honing discipline.


Q: Has dance helped you overcome any hardships in your life?
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Dance has definitely helped me get through heartbreak on many levels — not just romantic, but the growing pains of life and friendships, just learning the way the world works and how unexpected it can be. Dance has given me a place to deal with it in a healthy and productive way. Alvin Ailey is one of the companies that tours the most in a year, and the performance aspect of the job really helps me connect to a lot of the things that lie dormant emotionally and helps me explore what those things are. I am also an active journaler, so journaling paired with performing all the time and having a practice of getting things off of me has been really great. Dance has also helped me with patience, because in developing skill or pursuing opportunities in our career, time is not always on our side. It’s also taught me to be present and be the best version of myself where I am until other things can manifest and support the drive I have to always do and show more.


Q: What other interests and passions do you have outside of dance that influence and inspire your artistry?

I love reading and writing. I journal a lot. That helps me to organize my thoughts and set intentions. Reading keeps my imagination flourishing and considering different perspectives that are not my own. Most of my passions are centered around dance — creating with friends, improvising. A lot of my interests in the last few years have been centered around moving the body. It has also been nice as we tour and go to different places to take on the rhythm of that city and then transform that into a language — that’s a big interest for me, just observing the energy of a city. I love to wander around in new places. It may sound silly but I also love animation and video games and the ethereal aspect that they tap into. I love that larger than life, bigger than the universe thing — that really helps me color movement and think of other options that don't exist in the human form.


Q: What have been some challenges in your pre professional and professional career?

First, in college, one challenge for me was deliberately making a choice. I chose to grow my hair out. Before college, I only trained seriously for four years, then I got into the conservatory at SUNY Purchase. So, to be considered for all this new repertoire there was huge to me. Then, to be taken out of the rep because the professors didn't know how to handle Black hair and couldn't figure out how to make an “appropriate” hair style for the specific ballet — I didn't know that was forshading my audition career. My talent not being seen but instead my hair being the catalyst for me being cut from an audition — that was a huge struggle for me. My Black identity and the beauty I see in myself was also the metric used against me to not advance in an audition and for not getting the part or the job. That was even a reason I didn't get into Ailey at one point. That segways into my second challenge. I auditioned for Ailey seven years in a row before I finally got into the company, and part of that journey was someone pulling me to the side and saying, “They might not say this to you, but they probably won’t hire you with your hair like that.” So again my identity became part of the issue. This was something I had to deal with to advance professionally. At the time, I was dancing with Kyle Abraham and some other project-based opportunities, but all those years — year four, five, six auditioning for Ailey — I got discouraged and started to think maybe my dream wasn't meant for me, and maybe I needed to shift gears and put that energy somewhere else. Then I was invited to join Ailey II after auditioning for the sixth time. Being in Ailey II you are not guaranteed to get into the company. I was up against people who were closer to people in the first company and the artistic staff and it was a mind game, leaving a good job with Kyle to join a second company where you may not even get to the first company. That's when I thought about patience and prioritizing what it is I wanted to feel at my next job rather than attaching myself to the job itself. I learned how to not get my hopes up. Then it worked out after the seventh time and now I am going into my sixth year with Ailey, and I have my hair back and it is celebrated. The person that they wouldn't hire is now thriving. I cut my hair off when I was auditioning for companies and that is when I started making it further in the audition process. That is when people started being interested in the prospect of me, and I made it to the end of more auditions. On one end it was empowering because I thought, “I am talented, I’m not crazy, I do belong in these spaces”, and on the other hand I was like, “Why can't they take me for who I am?” Then the conversation about race comes up. I see my counterparts have hair down their back and my hair was half as long and I wouldn't get hired. But I decided to not get side-tracked by that question and just focus on my goals. When I was hired into Ailey, I had cut my hair at that time. I didn't grow it out until my second year in the company.


Q: How can dance be a platform for social justice issues?

I feel like at least for the work I do, it already is that. Specifically, my time with Kyle was so transformative. I was a fresh 21, just graduated college, and that's where I became co-workers with Rena Butler. Rena and I met in college and had been friends for years. Not only did I work with amazing co-workers and get a more intimate knowledge of those people, but we also made work that tackled such heavy weighted content. Like the first project I did with Kyle was ‘Live! The Realest MC’ — he was tackling being a Black gay man in society and the duality of having an effeminate character and a masculine bravado to pass in society. Dance is not only activism in the final product. It is not only a form of activism where we raise a mirror to society and say, “This is happening to us.” I feel like it starts that conversation in the audience, and then creates activists in the artists, spurs more informed dialogue, and creates more informed perspectives. The artists grew in the conversations Kyle facilitated while we were in the process of creating the work. The conversations we have to have in process in order for the audience to be moved are some of the most important and special work we can do. I left Kyle six years ago and am still always thinking about the ways he nurtured the dancers and encouraged us to create our own opinions. Kyle even came to Ailey and did a work about the prison industrial complex and how Black family structure is being ripped apart, or going through prison, and seeing how many generations of one family are affected through the prison system. I feel like the conversations are being had, the work is being done, and I feel the responsibility is on the audience to expand their way of thinking and look for all types of art they don't already consume. I think audiences need to be curious about art again.
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Q: How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected you as a performing artist? (community, financially, initial reactions, company shift, online class, emotions, initial cancellation reaction)

The company was on our 2020 domestic tour; we were one and a half months into the tour when they sent us home. We had so many more cities left — the tour was going to end May 10th in New Jersey. All of us split up and went our different ways. Some went back to NYC, some went to families outside NYC. Right now while we are off, we have been having conversations as an organization on ways we can continue to be creative and make efforts to reach the people that we would have been seeing or performing for. We also have AileyCamp — it's a huge organization. Right now the organization is really looking forward to getting everyone back together. I speak to many of my co-workers and administrative staff and we miss each other so much. We all want to get back to work. We are trying to be optimistic of perspectives on things. We are using “work” to do that for us. We give ourselves tasks to come up with creative ideas to address past and present repertoire. I am also taking the time to catch up on rest, which I haven't gotten in a long time. We had a 21-city tour, or we were about to be in the double digits. We did 30 to 40 performances in one and a half month’s time. So I have been using this time to sleep, talk to friends and family I haven't had the time to talk to, and just eat whatever I want. I am very happy to have some uninterrupted time to rest and re-prioritize a lot of things, and not only professionally. I have been doing a true spring cleaning of my apartment, too. I am not devastated by the tour cancellation. I am more devastated about the state of the world. I have been trying to weed out the different tones that the news is coming in and really find news that informs me but also keeps me sane and calm. To be in NYC, too — the latest in NYC is we are between 5 and 12 days out from reaching the peak number of cases in the city. 


Q: What social changes and responsibilities have you seen people making during the pandemic? Do you think the pandemic will make us a more socially conscious society?

The only time I leave home now is going to the grocery store. I’m an introvert, I love being inside. I am not thriving, but I'm enjoying myself more than I thought I would, being at home. People are not outside. They are six feet apart. People are wearing masks and gloves. I am in Harlem, so I am just speaking from what I see. Most of my friends are in Brooklyn and Harlem, some in the Bronx, and from what I can see and have heard, no one is really outside. I have some friends who do need to exercise in a certain way so people have gone out to run, but then they come right back home. It isn't a ghost town, but compared to what Harlem usually looks like, especially this time of year, it is very off-putting. Even when I go to pick up mail, people come outside with masks even to get mail — people are not playing around. I live not too far from Harlem Hospital, so there are doctors and a huge medical facility not too far away, and people stick their heads out and yell for the medical staff. It happens closer to the hospital than I live so I can't hear it, but I know it happens because I have seen videos of people in apartment buildings by the hospitals. 


Q: Using the idea of “worldmaking” how do you imagine the performing arts world after the pandemic? (Worldmaking: How you can re-imagine the world in your own terms, the way you want it to be. Using this tool one can construct new worlds and write themselves into narratives that have excluded them and systems that have disabled them.)

First I would want all artists — freelance, signed, unionized, whatever, to have some type of access to healthcare — everyone in the world should. But also, I feel like with the way mental health has been so acknowledged in recent years, I want there to be even more conversation about the health of dancers, period. Not just physically or mentally, but a new culture of: if you are sick, go home, reset, rest, come back when you feel better. I really do think that the culture of pushing through and pushing through pain — I feel like we have to let go of that to create environments where we don’t feel like our jobs will be threatened if we take time off to care for ourselves. It is a culture where we work so hard just to make ends meet, and there is little time to acknowledge the person and the spirit, and that makes us prime candidates for anxiety and illness. 

I would also like to see, in a perfect world, more agencies across genres of dance. For so long we have seen ballet dancers that do these festivals or one-man shows with amazing choreographers and get celebrated for their efforts, which is beautiful, but that same financial support and reception is not seen or given to certain pockets of the dance world. I do feel that there are so many voices that should be given the same amount of funding and support and opportunities to build an audience to ensure longevity, just like ballet institutions. When it comes to interdisciplinary art, I would like to see more crossover. Specifically concert dance, what we call the downtown dance scene in New York where the Kyle Abrahams live, versus where the elitism of ballet exists and creating more traction between the two. Or even young creatives, like the Rena Butlers and the new dance makers, the ones who are starting to carve out their own lane. I love ballet and the ballet world. In a past life I was a ballet dancer maybe. I feel like in classical dance there are different festivals that celebrate the different dancers and choreographers, but only as it relates to them. And they do invite people like Merce Cunningham, but I still see pockets of the world that could be more represented that could make these festivals more well-rounded… I want to see more opportunities for Black artists and queer artists to occupy festivals, and be celebrated and acknowledged in these spaces in ways that haven’t been seen before. Efforts have been made, and will continue to be made, but I want all of us to broaden our lens and see the beauty that is the whole dance world. There’s a lot of dance being made available online right now, like through On the Boards TV and other services, and companies are streaming their own works, so I feel like this is the time to oversaturate yourself with what’s been happening. I think it’s a great time to get an idea of how to involve more people and voices in the creation of things. It’s all about creating more opportunities. My version of success is not hoarding. I want to see more crossover success and more celebration for all artists and efforts in the dance world.