Unbounding the Body through Dance Groovin’ Griot Episode 2

May 10, 2024

Deborah Thomas: [00:00:00] I think I came to recognize that how I encounter the world is first and primarily through movement. You know, how I understand what's going on in a situation, anywhere, is through movement. the ways people's bodies are, the ways people's bodies are engaging or not engaging with each other, people's gestures, people's small movements.

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OreOluwa: Welcome to Groovin’ Griot, a podcast about how we use dance to tell stories. I'm OreOluwa Badaki.

Azsaneé: And I'm Azsaneé Truss. Let's get groovin'.

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OreOluwa: For this [00:01:00] episode, we spoke with Dr. Deborah Thomas, the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology at University of Pennsylvania and Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography, or CEE.

Azsaneé: Dr. Thomas has worn many hats over her dynamic career and we started by asking about how her background as a professional dancer with Urban Bush Women, among other companies, inform the choices and moves she made as a researcher, professor, community organizer, and multidisciplinary artist.

Deborah Thomas: I think often one looks back at the trajectory of career choices or movement from one space to the next and it, it looks like it all was planned, like it makes sense and it's seamless. But at the time, it was totally just serendipity or right place, right time. And, uh, Bush Women was definitely one of those kinds of, um, things.

When I graduated from college, I moved to New York to dance. I had gotten into That two year [00:02:00] program at Alvin Ailey I had auditioned in December, in between semesters, and they anticipated that I was going to come in January. Uh, but obviously, I couldn't, so they just, said I'd have to reaudition. But I had also gotten a fellowship from Brown. Um, that I was going to defer because of the Ailey, um, opportunity. And that was a fellowship called the Arnold Fellowship. And you wrote a sort of independent research project.

And what I had written to do was to go to Brazil. And work with, uh, dancers and musicians and theater artists there, who were sort of coming out of a renewed interest in sort of Black arts, right? And people who were at a time in New York and in the U. S. when multiculturalism was starting to really become a buzz word, [00:03:00] they seemed to be moving back to an appreciation of a specific, you know, Afro-Brazilian identity that was grounded in the music and the dance and the ritual practices of Candomblé.

So when I came back from Brazil and needed a job, I called Bush Women and they ended up, uh, actually needing an administrative assistant. So I started and on my first day, um, the company at that point toured about 35 weeks out of the year.

And it happened to be a day when they were home and Jawole, uh, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, who is the founding artistic director of Urban Bush Women, Jawole was in the office. And so I was meeting her and she was looking at my resume. And she said, Oh, I didn't know you were a dancer. And you know, the conversation just kind of continued like that. That day or the next day, somebody dropped out of the company, and they were leaving the following week on a tour.

And so she had to have a [00:04:00] really quick audition. So, she called me, asked me to audition, but, um, I was a quick study. So, she hired me and that's how I ended up, um, joining the company. And I loved working with Urban Bush Women. I loved, um, seeing the world, through the practice of dance, and therefore linking in all these different places with other artists and other practitioners and people who were taking us to their favorite spots, you know, after the show. Um, and it was a real, um, different kind of education.

OreOluwa: I remember when we had this conversation, Azsaneé, you and I were both struck by how thoughtfully Dr. Thomas seemed to follow her curiosity and her intuition. Throughout her early career she remained clear sighted about how she hoped to use art to collaborate with and support the communities that matter to her.

Azsaneé: Right, and this delicate balance was a core aspect of her work with Urban Bush Women.

Deborah Thomas: And then, um, Jawole [00:05:00] was interested in a more kind of popular education, uh, practice. So, she brought some people on board with us to begin a process of thinking about how we could use dance and music as tools for other kinds of social change, consciousness raising, um, conflict resolution, you know, all of these sort of popular education tenants and brought in a bunch of people to train us in these practices and to train her as well. And the first, uh, the first, we called them community engagement projects. So the first community engagement project we did was in New Orleans for three months at the beginning of 1992, and we spent the two years prior to that back and forth to New Orleans, working with different grassroots organizations and community based groups, thinking with them about what [00:06:00] they wanted to do, if they felt like a collaboration would be useful. What kind of collaboration that would be.

And ultimately, we developed a kind of cohort of maybe 10 different organizations who wanted to work with us and it was just a really great experience and it got me thinking about, um, what would that look like at a higher level of scale. You know, we were working really at the grassroots level, which is so needed, and I think so important and still something that You know, I know you all are committed to, and that I've been committed to. Um, but I was interested in, you know, how artists change the world.

Azsaneé: As fate would have it, or maybe the ancestors, Dr. Thomas found her way to a Ph. D. program at NYU, where she got her bearings as an anthropologist.

OreOluwa: She then found another opportunity that would lay the foundations for the work she now does with the Center for Experimental Ethnography. [00:07:00] 

Deborah Thomas: I saw an ad for a postdoc, um, at Wesleyan at the Center for the Americas, which was just written for me. It was on cultural production in the Anglophone Caribbean. You know, and since I had done my research on the ways, um, dancers and other performing artists in Jamaica were attempting to transform a national consciousness or a national cultural identity. It just seemed like a really good fit.

 And, uh, it worked out and that tracked, tracked me, you know, in a certain kind of academic way. Um, and I guess, in a way, the CEE is sort of a way to go back to that original plan of having a kind of community arts center. But this community is university and beyond, um, but it still is really about using the arts to create important conversations that can be world changing.

Azsaneé: [00:08:00] CEE is sort of a parent organization for the Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts, or CAMRA, which is where Ore, myself, and our guest from our last episode, Dr. Jasmine Blanks Jones, began engaging in conversations around embodiment, dance, and African diasporic traditions.

OreOluwa: Dr. Thomas was also on the panel we discussed with Dr. Blanks Jones, last episode, called What the Body Knows. And like our last episode, we wanted to pick up where we left off. We asked Dr. Thomas about a question that she had posed on this panel in 2021.

Um, but the question that you asked that I thought would be really great to kind of bring it to this space, you would ask, does the body know differently? In other words, do the things you learn from the body present themselves in different ways from the things you learn in other ways?

You had mentioned, you know. It's a different type of education. What sort of education is that for you?

Deborah Thomas: It's a really good question.

OreOluwa: You asked it, it came from you!

Deborah Thomas: Yeah, but I think it's a [00:09:00] question that many of us struggle with right? And, um, you know, we talk a lot about embodied knowledge as if it's something That we all know the definition of.

Um, and I think we don't. I mean, it's something I'm actually exploring now, trying to do some reading, obviously, of work we already know, Aimee Cox's work, Jasmine Johnson's work, uh, Maya Berry's work, like dancers who have also become, uh, anthropologists or ethnographers in one way or another, and are thinking through the body toward other things, right?

Obviously, what I've been doing as well. I think I came to recognize that how I encounter the world is first and primarily through movement. You know, how I understand what's going on in a situation anywhere [00:10:00] is through movement. The ways people's bodies are, the ways people's bodies are engaging or not engaging with each other, people's gestures, people's small movements.

And I think that also comes through then in the visual work that I do, because somebody was watching one of the films at one point and said to me after, You know, I think because you're a dancer, you're picking up on gestures that are recurring because when you edited that film, what I saw was the recurrence of particular gestures over and over and over.

I was like, yeah, that's, I said, that's really cool. You know, I'm like, yes, tell me what I'm doing

OreOluwa: more

Deborah Thomas: because I think we do these things and we don't know. That it's because at our core, how we see the world is through movement or through gesture or through dance or through whatever. But you know, then it requires somebody else to point that out and to tell us what that means, you know? So also I'm waiting for people to tell me what it means. [00:11:00] 

Azsaneé: Something I found really interesting in Dr. Thomas' response, Ore, was how she talked about the information her body takes in without ever really thinking about it.

OreOluwa: Right. We talked a bit about how when you're learning a new movement or combo, you sometimes don't have time to break down all the steps cognitively. You sort of have to release the need to know the movement in order to do the movement. And although this sometimes happens subconsciously, it's still a skill that is learned and cultivated.

Azsaneé: And, at least in African diasporic dance traditions, that skill is cultivated in and with community, something Dr. Thomas also talked about. One of her ongoing projects is the Tambufest, an annual celebration of a dynamic and vibrant Jamaican tradition called Kumina. The event is a collaboration between Dr. Thomas, Junior "Gabu" Wedderburn, Nicholas "Rocky" Allen, and the St. Thomas Kumina Collective.

OreOluwa: There's a great description of Tambufest and Kumina on the CEE website, and we'll link to that in the show notes.

But, as a summary [00:12:00] "Kumina was developed by members of the self-described Bongo Nation, who found a unifying cultural heritage through Kumina, one that interweaves musical, linguistic, movement, and spiritual practices that connect them to the ancestors." Let's take a quick movement break and listen to the sounds of Tambufest.

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*Voices and music from Tambufest *[00:13:00] 

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Azsaneé: Here's Dr. Thomas again with more on Tambufest,

Deborah Thomas: right so, you know, we run this Kumina Festival every year called Tambufest. Um. And by we, I mean me, Junior "Gabu" Wedderburn, who has been longtime collaborator. In fact, he was the drummer with Bush Women when I was dancing with them. So we've been working together for over 30 years.

 And, um, he has always, um,, ,as a musician, worked toward the kind of, um, preservation and elaboration of these dance and drumming forms in Jamaica. Um, so Junior and me and, um, Nicholas "Rocky" Allen with the [00:14:00] St. Thomas Kumina Collective.

And, um, I initially saw, my work with that as support, right? So I'm going to support Junior and what he wants to do because he has supported me and what I want to do. And he rejected that. He was like, no, you have to take this on as fully as I take on your projects. You know, this is also you. And, you know, that was very uncomfortable for me because, um, you know, I'm not from this particular community, I'm not Black in the way that they're Black, you know, I feel self conscious if I get up in the big public setting and dance with people because I feel like I then become the spectacle.

People wonder, Oh, what's that White girl doing up there? Or, you know, because that's what they see, right? Um, in that context. [00:15:00] Um, You know, but it's been a really interesting thing to have to sort of abandon a little bit or just let go of a kind of hyper attunement to the way my body is read in this space, which is a space of, um, producing something, right?

Producing through an artistic practice, a space for community to come together and think together and problem solve or learn together about different kinds of issues with the speakers that we bring in to that, um, but to have to kind of suspend like anthro, I think also the reading, my first year, I had to suspend a lot of disbelief, like reading all of this work by people who were talking about primitives in Africa and all of this, and using this language, I was like, what?

You know, it was like, okay, I'm going to get through this because I know there's something on the other end, you know. So now it's like I have to do that the other way, like I have to suspend the understanding of how my body [00:16:00] is read in that space and just be, You know, be as a spirit and as a close friend and collaborator and as somebody who's known people in this community for years, you know, and just let go of that.

OreOluwa: The point Dr. Thomas makes there about suspending judgment or disbelief in order to be present and awake to what is going on around you, had me thinking about one of the other points she made during the "What the Body Knows" panel a couple years ago, where she talks about dance as a portal.

Deborah Thomas: And I think it was because dance was really always for me, a portal. You know, sometimes a portal to the kind of joy and ecstasy and togetherness and freedom, certainly that you're talking about in so far as one experiences that in different settings, whether it's on stage with other people really feeling a piece of choreography going to a next level, or it's, you know, in a club or going down the line in Haitian [00:17:00] dance class, or, you know, everything just clicking, those kinds of things.

And so, you know, as an individual, it sort of helped me to enter new spaces, you know, but then later when I was performing with Urban Bush Women, it also, then dance also became a kind of portal toward broader projects of social and political change, you know, so it was the, the, the tool that we use to access these other forms of consciousness raising or other ways of being together or ways of reducing tension or anxiety or conflict within communities are ways to teach literacy, or, you know, so embodiment then became this other thing you know it was still something that.

I loved to do, personally, but also it then served some other kind of social purpose. So that's what I ultimately ended up studying.

Azsaneé: This concept of dance, [00:18:00] or embodiment, as a portal, factors into Dr. Thomas scholarship on the afterlives of imperialism, which we went on to ask her about.

Deborah Thomas: Yeah, well, I think there are very obvious ways in which the afterlives of imperialism and slavery redound to the body.

Structurally, symbolically, representationally, the whole movement to map out a different sensibility around cultural identity that was not grounded in colonial stereotypes was a movement to value, um, the embodied practices of Afro-Jamaican people, while still making them, um, consumable, I suppose, by, uh, national, audience. Nevertheless, to value the African heritage that had been denigrated, um, during the period of colonial rule. Denigrated and outlawed, right?

So at the same [00:19:00] time, of course, people never stopped practicing the things they practice or never stopped elaborating the beliefs that they had. So there's this tension always in that afterlife, I think, um, that Uh, sort of bursts into the open from time to time, but, um, is sort of that tension between the, um, taken for granted, African underpinnings of Jamaican Anglophone Caribbean society, which people like Sylvia Winter and Kamau Brathwaite felt was the actual basis for the creativity of Caribbean populations.

Not this kind of creolization or this hybridization or this kind of acculturation toward whiteness or Europeanness, right?

OreOluwa: Building on this [00:20:00] conversation about Kumina, Dr. Thomas also spoke about the relationship between spirituality and African diasporic movement practices. She explains how dance can unbound the body and allow the dancer to integrate the spiritual into their embodied experiences.

Deborah Thomas: Have been thinking about ontologies of the body and, uh, how African ontologies, and I'm using the continental designation there on purpose, um, tend to envision the body as, open, right? Unbounded. The body is a space, uh, also for ancestors. So it makes it temporally unbounded. Past, present, future can all coalesce within the body in what in Jamaica we call myal, right? A possession, ancestral possession, or in other spaces. a possession by spirit or God or [00:21:00] deity or in Candomblé it would have been whoever mounts you, you know, in Haitian Vodou as well. But that the body is open to that, which is different from a European conceptualization of the body, which is separated, obviously, from the mind and subordinate to the mind. So Roberto Strongman writes in this book, he recently published called Transcorporeality, I think.

He writes that the real tragedy of the Atlantic slave trade, while, of course, it is also the inauguration of plantation based agriculture, um, grounded in, um, enslavement, Um, discriminatory racial practices, et cetera, et cetera.

Um, he says the real tragedy of it was that it forced, or attempted to force, a closure [00:22:00] onto bodies that had always been open by shutting down the ability to maintain these traditions, right, and to maintain these ritual practices. And I find that super fertile, you know, as a way to think about, you know, Well, on some level, how the body knows, how the body communicates, how the body transmits, what it knows.

And so I've been thinking about that with respect to Kumina, that, you know, in myal, the body is unbounded temporarily and also materially, you know. You hear all these stories about what people do when they're in myal, or you see them do it. You know, things that cannot be done in like ordinary relations of time and space and cause and effect, like no way are you swallowing fire and not burning your mouth, you know, or no way are you walking on glass and not cutting your feet, you know, these things that people actually do.

So [00:23:00] in a way, in myal, then, in that space of unbounded. The unbounding is temporal and it's also material, right? The bodies can do things they can't do within the sort of normative structures of modern time and space, right? And so that's, I think, what I've been thinking about. That in a way with the festival, you know, it's a public ritual practice.

It's a public performance of, of all the different things, you know, not just Kumina, but also other drumming collectives and other traditions like Jonkonnu and Dinki Mini and Bruckins and all of the kind of quote folk forms. That's often what they're called in educational settings in Jamaica. Um, like I think what we're trying to do is create an unbonded space, you know, to, to create that opening [00:24:00] where for the moment and then we won't know the effect afterwards, but in the moment of opening people can be exposed, you know, to these traditions with them. To diminish the stigma that's still sometimes associated with these traditions, um, and also talk about something that's going on, you know, that's important and to, to think together, to problem solve together outside of the legislative boundaries of state institutions, outside of politics, you know, and so I think that's what we're, that's the intention, right, to unbound, you know, the body for that moment in that space.

OreOluwa: Azsaneé, I remember you talking about how your training in ballet has influenced how you see different movement styles.

Azsaneé: Yeah. I mean, ballet is obviously from Europe, and it's [00:25:00] wrapped up in notions of European spirituality, where heaven is above us, um, and it prioritizes being lifted and almost floating while you're doing these really, really demanding movements.

You're attaining this sort of God-like perfection through discipline. But with African diasporic movement, there's more of a focus on being grounded. There's something spiritually valuable and being connected with the earth.

OreOluwa: Hmm. And we talked about the importance of not only relegating discipline and rigor to those more European forms of movement, because these African diasporic movement practices and systems are also organized and they demand skill prowess and dedication. This isn't something you just wake up. one day and do because you think it's cool.

Azsaneé: Absolutely. Dr. Thomas gives us an example.

Deborah Thomas: If you think about like in the case of Kumina, right, you're born in it. You know, you're born in a family that does it. So, you know, you attend and you learn, you know, as a kid, you're sitting on the outside of the circle.

You learn, you [00:26:00] watch, you see the bodies, you internalize the rhythms. If it is seen, however, it is seen that you have an aptitude, then you will be apprenticed to a drummer, to a dancer, and then you will begin the long process of learning, you know, the way that we apprentice in graduate school and begin the long process of learning how to read, how to do research, all of that kind of thing. But, but of course, it is a discipline that takes many, many years.

Azsaneé: We closed out the interview with one of the questions we ask all of our guests. What are you grooving to these days?

OreOluwa: And Dr. Thomas mentioned that her children influence her thinking and learning as well as what she's groovin’ to.

Deborah Thomas: In a way, it's also what I'm listening to, right? Marley has playlists, Oliver has playlists, so in the car, it's all their music. So that's, we went to the Daniel Caesar concert two weeks ago. Cause Marley, that's, you know, her favorite, one of her favorites. [00:27:00] Um, which was super fun.

Uh, reading, I just finished, uh, Sophia Sinclair's How to Say Babylon, which is devastating. And I'm really interested in talking with people in Jamaica about it and how especially Rastafari are responding.

Um, I also listened to Mary Louise Kelly's book, It Goes So Fast, which is about her son's last year in high school, which is what I'm about to experience. Um, so just really interesting, clearly about You know, being a working mother and all the tradeoffs, all the decisions, all the times you weren't there, how that has worked out.

Um, and also, you know, how life changes for women in middle age and, um, There were many times reading [00:28:00] that book that I was like, laugh crying out loud, you know, in my house, walking down the street, you know, in the car. I'm sure people thought I was crazy, like literally laugh crying, you know.

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Azsaneé: This episode of Groovin' Griot was a production of the Digital Futures Institute at Teachers College, Columbia University. It was produced and edited by me, Azsaneé Truss. And my co host, Ore Badaki. Our theme music is Unrest by ELPHNT and can be found on Directory. Audio.

OreOluwa: You can email us at groovingriot@gmail. com. That's g-r-o-o-v-i-n-g-r-i-o-t at gmail. com. And you can continue to listen to episodes of [00:29:00] Groovin' Griot wherever podcasts are found. Thanks for groovin' with us.

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