The Artists: An Inheritance of Hope

For Helanius J. Wilkins, a multihyphenate choreographer, it’s about the conversation. During the interview, Wilkins reached back to Louisiana, where his artistic journey began, narrating every significant milestone as we trekked the path that led him to Boulder, where he will unveil the third iteration of his work, “The Conversation Series: Stitching the Geopolitical Quilt to Re-Body Belonging,” sometime this fall. “The Conversation Series” is an evolving work that demands a lot of Wilkins, but he understands the call. He sees what he has inherited from the artists he admires and what it means to leave something behind for those who have yet to come.

Even Fear is a Dance

While there wasn’t a single flashpoint moment that Wilkins could pinpoint as the singular event that made him fall in love with dance, what was surprising is the fact that his affinity for expressing himself through movement didn’t start with “The Sound of Music” or the infamous “streetsweeper” scene in the classic breakdancing film “Breakin’.” It wasn’t film or dance at all. The first movement Wilkins attributes to expression was powered by fear. “As a child, I was very shy and afraid of people. The way in which I responded and expressed myself was by moving my body in some way, shape, or form, navigating the challenge, if you will. The challenge was fear, and how I navigated that was to move. And, at that time, [the movement] may have been just to scurry or hide beneath the table. Whatever it was, whether it was to grab my grandmother’s leg, it involved effort and a shift in my body. Not knowing then what I now know, I was activating how my body can be a vehicle to navigate commentary, to reorient to my surroundings, and create change.”

Wilkins’ words aid those of us who use words to understand how dance can be seen, akin to a child who can’t express what hurt them, but they can point to where they are hurt. The motion of dance often has an underlying emotion or idea that it’s trying to communicate. In “Thrive Global,” Nicolein Dellenson described what she sees as metaphors for dance: “[Let’s] talk about conversations that are more like a dance battle than anything else. I’m sure you can instantly recall similar experiences you’ve been in before. Those conversations where both parties shout their own thoughts and opinions as loudly as possible to get attention, where arguments and facts fly around and nobody is willing to give the other space, let alone have the floor.”

These conversations remind me of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” video, where he intervenes as a kind of mediator to ensure everyone is ultimately performing the same moves as one team. A dance battle is a solid example of how movement can suggest underlying emotion. People involved aren’t fighting, but the gestures are no less angry or vicious. The hurt and passion are on clear display. When Wilkins talks about scurrying for shelter, one can see how that motion and the feelings that spurred it can be the initial steps of a dance.

Representation and Inheritance

Although Wilkins doesn’t attribute the moment of seeing Alvin Ailey on PBS as the time he truly fell in love with dance, seeing Ailey’s work on TV had an undeniable impact on him: “One of my earliest childhood memories is watching a PBS special on the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and introducing himself as a choreographer and remembering that very distinctly resonating with me. Even though I didn’t know what the word ‘choreographer’ meant, this set me on a path of sorts. The power of enacting change the way that Ailey did is, in many ways, whether consciously or not, an inheritance of will. For example, before Ailey launched the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1958 in New York, he learned under renowned choreographer Lester Horton. Horton’s importance in the world of American dance has several facets. As remarked on the Alvin Ailey website, notable among his vectored impact was his stance on integration in the world of dance: ‘He was also among the first choreographers in the U.S. to insist upon racial integration in his company — in his 1995 autobiography, Alvin Ailey wrote, “What it came down to was that, for Lester, his art was much more important than the color of a dancer’s skin.”’

When Horton died unexpectedly, Ailey took on a leadership role before starting his own dance company that still teaches Horton’s technique to this day. Not only that, although Ailey’s company is known for giving Black men a space to learn dance, the school’s philosophy still maintains Horton’s philosophy. The will was passed from teacher to student, and now Wilkins, with his current work, is taking on that same path.

Racism as a Pandemic

When Wilkins opened up about his experience dealing with COVID lockdown, he talked about examining what was going on with the world around him. While it put a pause in his creative process, within that time, he and his team simply learned to adapt to the new normal: “The first thing that came out was this screen dance called ‘Dirt.’ That allowed me a platform to really carry forward some of the things that were slipping away and allowed me to address things not directly related to COVID but everything that was happening that was leading to the various protests and holding structural racism as a pandemic. How this goes back to creating a space of fear, a space that needed to be examined, I was afraid to be outside. I was afraid to be in public. I was even afraid to be in my own home.” This prompted Wilkins to go back to that scene of fear from his childhood that made his body move, and with the help of his team, he discovered a way to use that fear to fuel what would become the “Conversation Series.”

Rebuilding a World One Patch at a Time

Witnessing what happened to George Floyd in broad daylight cracked and shattered my sense of place in the world. The beats were stuck on repeat: this has happened before; this will be a talking point for a while, but when it loses steam, some people in the world attempt to handwave away what we all witnessed as an isolated incident despite the clear pattern. Much has been written about that moment, the movement it sparked, and what was left in the ash once the fervor of rage burned through. Words alone, perhaps, are not enough to convey the deeply layered experience of being Black in America in a post-COVID world.

Lauren, from Natural Embodiment in Colorado, wrote about how the body can be an ally in creating dialogue and a means to treat trauma, especially when digging into the layers of one’s feelings as part of a healing process: “The drama of our lives plays out within our bodies. Moods, emotions, desires, boundaries… these are things that we feel in our muscles, hearts, and stomachs. We can dive much deeper into your WHOLE experience by tuning in to the body, allowing new insights to emerge.” When Wilkins talked about his experience in addressing racism as a pandemic, it isn’t so much protest as conversation.

“What I do is build worlds. I’m a world builder. That’s what I’m interested in. It’s not about what I can do with dance, what I can do with film, what I can do with any other form. I’m asking myself what is required to build that world. I arrive at a medium because something in the process says that’s necessary, not for the sake of spectacle.” He acknowledged there are bells and whistles in the production that chime and blow, but they only exist to embellish the overall message.

How to Make a Quilt

The image most of us think of when hearing the word “quilt” is actually a “patchwork” quilt, wherein the quilt maker takes different pieces of cloth and stitches them together to make a whole cover. Wilkins took this approach to his masterwork where he combined his background in film and dance to create a stage production that gives voice to those often unheard of by interviewing people from each of the fifty states. “It’s about me going to communities and learning what it means to be a resident where they live, what are the things they care about, what are gathering sites, what are matters of urgency. It’s not about me being centered. It’s about me being de-centered in order to learn. How do we build a world that is more inclusive? For me, it’s listening to each other.”

Wilkins talked about other aspects that dictate the “first phase” of his process: — conversations about belonging, discussing specific places within that state or city that residents can’t go to, places where their ancestors didn’t belong, and then going to those places. This is all before the stage production. Each production will play out differently as the aim is to visit all 50 states, with each new state informing and reshaping the work as he stitches old and new stories together. The most human aspect of this work is that after every cycle of this process — going to a place, speaking to a people, learning.