[Jump to Sydnie L. Mosley interview]
Margaret Fuhrer:
Hi dance friends, and welcome to The Dance Edit Podcast. I’m Margaret Fuhrer.
Courtney Escoyne:
I’m Courtney Escoyne.
Lydia Murray:
And I’m Lydia Murray.
Margaret Fuhrer:
We are editors at Dance Media. And in today’s episode, we’ll unpack TikTok dance star Addison Rae’s problematic appearance on Jimmy Fallon’s show. We’ll discuss two interesting alternative models for paying dancers that don’t rely on performance. We will talk about how burlesque performers, who are too often overlooked in the dance world, have fared during the pandemic. And then we’ll air our interview with Sydnie L. Mosley, who is the artist-activist and educator and writer—she’s an incredibly thoughtful voice in dance and beyond it. And if you’ve read her articles in Dance Magazine or Essence or The Brooklyn Rail then you already know just how powerful her voice is. Sydnie got into why dance folks have to allow themselves to stop producing just for the sake of producing. We also talked about what’s wrong with the way the dance world allocates resources. And we even got an update on how her garden is doing right now—we found out about her tomato plants, this year’s tomato plants, which was delightful. It’s a great interview.
First though, just our usual housekeeping, before we get into all of that. If you are not yet following us on Instagram @the.dance.edit and Twitter @dance_edit, please get on that! We are having some great discussions and a not-insignificant amount of fun on those platforms. And then of course, don’t forget to sign up for The Dance Edit newsletter. That will bring you daily dance news updates instead of weekly updates. You can subscribe to that at thedanceedit.com.
Okay, now it’s time for our dance headline rundown, which is just…a lot this week. It was a really busy dance news cycle.
Lydia Murray:
“Dancing with the Stars” has announced that it’ll return for its 30th season in the fall with Tyra Banks continuing as host. Also coming back to the ballroom will be longtime judge Len Goodman, who couldn’t fulfill that role last year due to COVID travel restrictions—he was in the UK. Details about his position this year have not yet been specified. But judges Derek Hough, Carrie Ann Inaba, and Bruno Tonioli will also return. Contestants, pro dancers and a premiere date are still to be announced.
Courtney Escoyne:
It’s just…30 seasons.
Margaret Fuhrer:
It’s pretty incredible.
Courtney Escoyne:
American Ballet Theatre has announced that longtime artistic director Kevin McKenzie will retire after the 2022 season, at which point he’ll have been at the post for 30 years. A search for his replacement will begin this summer. Obviously there is so much to get into here, and the fact that like he and Helgi Tomasson are stepping down around the same time, and also Karen Kain still doesn’t have a successor at National Ballet of Canada. In the next couple of years we’re about to see massive shifts at major North American ballet companies.
Margaret Fuhrer:
It’s almost hard to overstate the potential impact of this big changing of the guard. We all have a lot of thoughts about it, not surprisingly, but we know that Dance Magazine is planning some thoughtful coverage about what this could all mean for ballet, so stay tuned—we’re going to have plenty more discussion about all of this in the weeks to come.
Lydia Murray:
And congratulations to Queen Misty Copeland on being awarded the Spingarn Medal at this year’s NAACP Image Awards. The award honors the outstanding recent achievements of a living African American. Some of Copeland’s many notable accomplishments of course include her status as the first African American female principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre, and her time spent on former President Obama’s Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition
Margaret Fuhrer:
Not a lot of people got to see Misty’s award presentation—it wasn’t part of the televised show—but she deserves all the roses. So we will be including footage from that presentation in our newsletter this week probably either the day that you’re listening to this, Thursday, or Friday. Keep an eye out.
Courtney Escoyne:
Misty Copeland for everything.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yes!
Lydia Murray:
Indeed.
Courtney Escoyne:
New York City mayor Bill de Blasio announced plans to open a COVID-19 vaccination site near Broadway, reserved for and staffed by industry workers, in order to aid with getting Broadway back in business by the fall. Also announced: a mobile vaccination unit to serve theater workers beyond Broadway, and pop-up testing sites at or nearby Broadway and off-Broadway theaters to ensure that ample testing is available during the rehearsal period leading up to reopening. While there’s no mention of other performing arts workers in this announcement, according to The New York Times, the mayor’s office did say that other performing artists would not be turned away once vaccine eligibility expanded, which as of next week will include anyone over the age of 16 in New York. So while the story was taken somewhat out of context as vaccinations for theater workers when it was announced, with more clarity about when folks will be eligible for the vaccines this seems significantly more viable. I just hope that industry workers includes front of house staff, stage crew, wardrobe department, all the people who make Broadway actually happen, other than just the people on stage.
Margaret Fuhrer:
We actually almost made this a roundtable segment because there’s a lot to be discussed here, too. But we’ll link to some informative coverage of the whole situation in the show notes.
Lydia Murray:
Very important for sure. Most of us have probably seen the iconic poster “Leg Warmers” by Harvey Edwards—it’s the image that may have been on the wall of your ballet studio. It features a dancer’s legs and feet in fifth position covered by a tattered leg warmers. Well, the original C-print, which is a photographic print made from a color negative, is going up for sale at a Bonhams gallery auction in New York City next Friday, April 9th.
Courtney Escoyne:
So I feel like a bad nerd for having left this out of my rundown of the Royal Opera House’s season announcement on last week’s episode: Wayne McGregor will be premiering a family-friendly show for his company based on The Dark Crystal, a beloved 1982 Jim Henson film that was adopted by Netflix into a television series in 2019, which sadly only got one season. Puppets and props for what is being called The Dark Crystal: Odyssey will be provided by Henson’s Creature Shop. So it’s kind of cool that Jim Henson’s whole team is apparently really involved in this production, whatever it turns out to be.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah, it will very much be a Henson world that we’re inhabiting. Looking forward to that.
Lydia Murray:
Chicago’s Mayfair Performing Company, formerly Mayfair Academy of Fine Arts, has been forced to close after more than 60 years in operation due to COVID-19. The organization was founded by the beloved tap dancer, choreographer, and teacher Tommy Sutton, and it was renowned for producing highly successful dancers and nurturing generations of diverse dancers.
Courtney Escoyne:
English National Ballet announced its 2021–22 season, which is to include the long-delayed premieres of Akram Khan’s Creature and Tamara Rojo reimagining of Raymonda. And while Alina Cojocaru, as previously announced, is departing from the company, Maria Kochetkova will be joining as a lead principal at least for the season, which is very exciting news.
Lydia Murray:
I’m excited for that. Bard SummerScape is set to return this summer from July 8th to August 22nd, presenting both indoor and outdoor performances. The season will begin with the debut of I was waiting for the echo of a better day, which is a site-specific full-length piece by choreographer Pam Tanowitz, who is also Dance Magazine‘s April cover star, and music by composer Jessie Montgomery.
Courtney Escoyne:
All the love for Pam. And so curious to see what the rest of the lineup is going to be which is still to be announced.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah, stay tuned.
Courtney Escoyne:
And hopeful, I think, news: As of Monday this week, residents of Sydney, Australia can dance again at weddings, pubs and nightclubs, as locally acquired COVID-19 cases have fallen to zero. Also of note, in the newly-eased restrictions, entertainment venues including theaters can seat at 100% capacity. I think Australia has been really on top of quarantining new arrivals and contact tracing and making testing easily available. And all of that is still very much in place, and as a result I think they’re getting to see some hard-earned easing of restrictions.
Lydia Murray:
Congratulations to them.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Seriously. Cue all of us just like gazing longingly in the general direction of Australia.
Lydia Murray:
I know, we’re kind of like the Squidward meme, looking out the window right now.
Margaret Fuhrer:
That’s exactly it! [laughter]
All right. So we’re sort of continuing our headline roundup into our first roundtable discussion, because our first topic is a story that’s been making a ton of headlines recently. TikTok star Addison Rae appeared on last Friday’s episode of “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” She walked Fallon through a few of the app’s popular dance challenges, and the segment was honestly pretty awkward and bad to begin with, but it was made much worse by the fact that none of the dances’ original creators were credited, and nearly all of those creators were people of color. Twitter, bless Twitter quickly took both Rae and Fallon to task. Rae issued a strange kind of half-apology to TMZ—she said that the original creators were named in the YouTube post of the clip, and that “It’s kind of hard to credit during the show.” But this is yet another example of a common problem on TikTok and also well beyond TikTok, of art created by BIPOC artists being co-opted by white influencers.
Courtney Escoyne:
Well, and I think it’s fairly easy to see what happened here or at least to make an educated guess, right? Probably Addison Rae’s team was in touch with the Jimmy Fallon team. They want to promote her new single, and since she’s got an audience on TikTok, they were probably like, “Oh, hey, let’s do something on that.” And they had the idea for this teaching TikTok dances bit. That seems like a much more likely sequence of events to me than “The Tonight Show” saying, “Let’s do a segment about TikTok dancers, who should we get?”
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah.
Courtney Escoyne:
Because them starting from that place would imply that they actually care about dance and nothing that has happened here has convinced me that is the case—not least because they failed to see what the segment would ultimately be about, which is, yet again, Black creators having their work swept under the rug and appropriated. And also, didn’t we just have this conversation a year ago?
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. We’ve been over this.
Courtney Escoyne:
I feel like I am having the worst deja vu right now.
Lydia Murray:
Yeah. It just seems to never end. I’m concerned about why Black creators aren’t achieving the popularity that artists like Addison Rae are finding, and it seems to be part of a larger trend in entertainment of Black celebrities having more difficulty achieving mainstream popularity. As much as I would have loved to see the Black artists who created these dances on this show, as Courtney said, it wasn’t really about showcasing TikTok dances, it was about promoting Addison Rae’s new single. But I am curious about why Black creators aren’t gaining the followings that can be leveraged to launch careers in fields like music or beauty, the way Rae has in the first place.
I suspect some of this might have to do with the TikTok algorithm, which according to Hootsuite shows content to users who are already likely to be interested in it, and then the interaction that receives determines its future distribution. I’m afraid that that might be contributing to a feedback loop that keeps Black creators from building large followings.
I also wonder how much of this might simply stem from the racial empathy gap as it relates to entertainment. IndieWire referenced this phenomenon in a 2014 article titled “Why White People Don’t Like Black Movies.” Essentially, it tends to be more difficult for white audiences to identify with Black film characters than it is for Black audiences to identify with white characters. And this seems to at least partially be because we’ve had no choice for so long that we’ve developed that ability to be more flexible in who we relate to. So similarly, I suspect that white social media users may find it easiest to relate to white creators, while POC users might be able to relate more easily to both white and POC creators, which then again puts Black creators at a disadvantage.
And based on a recent report from Iconosquare, of the top 10 most followed TikTokers, only one is Black—and that’s Will Smith, who’s obviously a long-established icon in entertainment, unlike the rest of that group who rose to fame through social media. And even if you just look at Instagram, only four of the top 20 most followed Instagram accounts belong to Black artists, and everyone on that list of the top 20 is a celebrity.
So, how much of what created an Addison Rae, so to speak, is due to these kinds of deeply rooted biases? And if that’s a factor, what should we do to change it? Because I’m just so tired of this happening, but also we do need to recognize that getting to the position that she is currently comes from basically a culmination of individuals liking that kind of content. So yeah, I would really love to see Black artists, Black digital content creators, just getting to the point where they too can have pop careers and launch successful makeup lines. Just getting credit is like the bare minimum. So yeah, I want change.
Courtney Escoyne:
Well, and I think there is something to be said about how swift and immediate the backlash to this was. People were calling out, like, “Hey, credit the creators. Hey, these are Black creators that are being swept under the rug here and not being acknowledged.” I think the swiftness of that, I think really does say something about a shift in the cultural consciousness around this that I hope is going to keep making change at least from the ground up. But also on some level, hey, TikTok, you are complicit in this, hello? Hello?
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. At a certain point we can’t rely on the creators—this isn’t the creators’ responsibility, when it comes down to it, to fix this problem. Tagging creators when you’re doing their choreography is a good start, but that’s not enough. This goes way deeper and it needs a deeper solution.
Lydia Murray:
Yeah, absolutely. And I do hope that the backlash that we’re seeing online is a sign of kind of the changing of people’s mindsets, and kind of an increase in awareness that this is happening. But I also don’t want it to be the case that people say this, and then don’t actually do anything themselves to fix the problem—don’t make an effort to seek out Black creators and follow them, and that kind of thing. Because it can be really easy to kind of say things online for whatever reason.
Margaret Fuhrer:
And then feel that because you’ve yelled about it, you’ve done your part, when in fact you haven’t contributed in any meaningful way.
Lydia Murray:
Yeah.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. So in our next segment, we’re going to talk about two stories from the past week highlighting two ways to get dancers paid even in the most extreme circumstances—like say, a global health crisis. First we have the city of San Francisco, which is rolling out a guaranteed income program for artists in recognition of the financial strain they’ve faced during the pandemic, and also in recognition of the fact that the arts are an essential part of the city’s economy—which, yes, hallelujah, finally, yes. The program was announced March 25th and it is now accepting applications. So let’s talk about what this program is and what it offers.
Courtney Escoyne:
Right. So essentially what this is, it’s a pilot program that’s going to be running for six months where 130 San Francisco based artists will receive guaranteed $1,000 a month. So qualifications for the program include being a resident of San Francisco and being an artist “whose artistic practice is rooted in a historically marginalized community.” The idea of that is not to exclude anyone but to try to encourage artists from underrepresented communities to apply. Artists can also be expanded to include teaching artists and arts educators as well as culturally-based craft workers and makers. From what it looks like, they’ve really done their research here in terms of figuring out what the household income maximums will be, so that this will be going to where it’s most needed. Also in terms of making this really accessible and hopefully really represent a multiplicity of voices and backgrounds. Also worth noting: It’s already fully funded. Which is huge.
Margaret Fuhrer:
A big deal. Yeah, it’s being paid for by the city’s Arts Impact Endowment, which was established by a measure that reallocated a percentage of the base hotel tax to arts and cultural services. So yeah, there’s already a funding plan in place, and nobody can yell about that, that’s fantastic.
Then, in a different corner of the arts universe, Pointe ran a piece this week about Ballet Co.Laboratory, which is an artist-led company in St. Paul, Minnesota that has kept its dancers paid throughout the pandemic. And it’s done that with this interesting dual-contract structure, which provides dancers with administrative employment as well. So each company member has an artistic contract and then also an administrative contract.
Courtney Escoyne:
I really kind of love this whole thing conceptually. The idea is you have your artistic contract, where you’re in the studio 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM, five days a week. And then you have, like, depending on what specifically your admin duties entail, you have in the contract that states what they think the minimum hours per week would be, but it’s really left up to the dancer to figure out how to make that work with their schedule. I think that’s really insanely cool. It also means that when they’re in a period of time where they can’t physically be in the studio—like, hello, global pandemic—they have these admin gigs that they’re still doing, that they are going to be able to get paid for.
And then I also think just philosophically the way that this decentralizes power within this company I think is phenomenal. I think it’s Co.Laboratory as part of the name, collaboration is implied in the name. And so the idea of the person who takes on artistic director duties is also one of the dancers, the people who are working in fundraising are also the dancers. So not only is there a sense of ownership from the entire company, there’s also, at least I would guess, a sense that decisions are being made not just, like, someone makes a choice and passes it down to you and you have to live with it. It’s really empowering these dancers, and I think it’s a model of leadership that is really compelling and potentially—it doesn’t get around, doesn’t automatically fix a lot of the issues that exist within the dance world and the culture, but I do think it sets dancers up to better be able to advocate for themselves with their colleagues, because they are all each other’s peers.
Lydia Murray:
It’s a great way to nurture the whole artist, too, I think, acknowledging and supporting the reality of our career beyond dance in a uniquely direct way. And some companies have had dancers do admin work after the pandemic hit, but the fact that this company was prepared already is important. And yeah, like Courtney said, this is a leadership model that I think can be really important and relevant going forward.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. I think it’s worth noting the history here. So Zoé Emilie Henrot, who’s the director, and the other Ballet Co.Laboratory dancers, they were all formerly members of another ballet company, they banded together after losing those jobs at the same time. So it sounds like that crisis really shaped Ballet Co.Laboratory, it provided some context for this artist-led structure, because they wanted to make sure that they had the power to protect and support each other. So it’s a system born out of emergency, and now it’s proved its ability to withstand another emergency. I think it’s interesting that the idea of a company as a collective rather than a hierarchy isn’t just kind of a beautiful, productive artistic philosophy—it can also be a more sustainable business model. Which is kind of fascinating and wonderful.
Courtney Escoyne:
I feel like I could have a whole capitalism rant here, but I’m not going to get into that.
Lydia Murray:
Yeah. We could do one of those for pretty much every segment in this episode I think.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. Capitalism gonna cap, as Lydia says.
All right. So our last roundtable topic today concerns the burlesque scene. The New York Times recently ran a story talking to 12 of the city’s burlesque performers about how they’ve coped with the pandemic. And all performers are suffering right now, of course, but burlesque depends so heavily on intimacy and proximity and that specific chemistry between the audience and the performer—like this is not a screen-friendly art, this is not a reduced-capacity-house-friendly art. So how is burlesque going to come back? And what is it going to look like when it does?
And actually, when I said roundtable topic at the beginning, that was a little misleading. Because what I’m going to do now is see the floor to Lydia, who is our resident burlesque expert.
Lydia Murray:
Well, first of all it was great to see some familiar faces in this piece. I crossed paths with some of the artists who were profiled when I was starting in burlesque, and they were so kind and helpful. But I won’t position myself as too much of an expert since I went on an indefinite hiatus pretty early on. But it’s great to see these artists get some overdue recognition.
Burlesque performers have been underrepresented, I think, in more mainstream conversations about the pandemic’s impact on artists. So it’s meaningful that this article happened, and it was done with such care and respect and painted a portrait of these performers as multidimensional people. So much of burlesque I think involves this balance of vulnerability and strength and reality and artifice in a particularly pronounced way. Regardless of the style of burlesque you’re performing, whether it’s classic or nerdlesque or what have you, you’re typically still using some sort of crafted persona to express something true to you at your core and something universal about being human.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Lydia, I’m so sorry to interrupt you. Nerdlesque. Can we…
Lydia Murray:
Oh, yes.
Margaret Fuhrer:
I need to know more.
Courtney Escoyne:
I love that this just got brought in here. Oh my gosh. Yes, Lydia, go off!
Lydia Murray:
Yeah. Well, nerdlesque is essentially a burlesque with kind of nerdy themes I guess, video games, comics. I don’t have the…
Courtney Escoyne:
There is a Star Wars one that’s incredibly popular, or it was prepandemic anyway.
Lydia Murray:
Yes, yeah.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Thank you for introducing me to this world. I’m going to go Google frantically right now.
Lydia Murray:
Yeah, it is fantastic. I don’t know if that’s a technical definition of it, but hopefully I did some justice to what that’s like! Yeah there’s so much creativity and so much diversity in burlesque in terms of people’s interests and approaches and…yeah.
But, yeah you’re typically, either way, still using some sort of crafted persona to express something that’s genuine, whether you’re doing that by literally portraying a specific character or by assuming an alter ego, even down to having a stage name. So hearing about how the pandemic has affected these artists as people and creators along with having them photographed in the venues that they used to frequent illustrated that so well, I thought. Some of the artists featured mentioned how the time away from burlesque has affected their mental health or body confidence or created a feeling of having to start over after years of struggling to achieve their goals.
And then there’s also just the difficulty of losing that live energy of the crowds. And as Margaret pointed out, this art form does tend to rely heavily on touch and close in-person interactions. So all of these issues are similar to things that we’ve talked about in the dance world too, but even though arts and entertainment venues in New York will be able to reopen at 33% capacity at least starting April 2nd, there’s some apprehension among burlesque performers about going back to such close contact with audiences. Nyx Nocturne gave the example of putting money in your mouth, which artists used to do in performance sometimes. And also just from personal experience things like dressing room areas at most venues tend to be very small and crowded—how might that shift in the future?
The pandemic seems to have exacerbated some long standing issues within burlesque. Like, pay was an issue. Pre-COVID, a lot of performers didn’t necessarily make much money relative to the investment that they made on their acts. And at one point Jo Weldon, who’s one of the foremost authorities on burlesque and founder of the New York School of Burlesque, mentioned that since pivoting online the school is only generating about a quarter of the money it used to, and it was only nearly sustainable before.
And then the last thing that I’m going to mention is for burlesque performances, it’s not as simple as going virtual as an alternative to being on stage—even though that’s also a complicated process for other kinds of dance artists. The social media platforms tend to limit performers’ ability to share their content, due to its typically sexual nature. Like, during the pandemic a sizable number of artists shifted from Instagram to Twitter, for example, due to changes in the terms of service.
But as some of the artists also mentioned, the limitations are fueling creativity which has been great to see. And the New York burlesque scene is resilient. It’s been stamped out before and come back, and I have hope that it will return.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Lydia, it was such a privilege to attend your burlesque TED Talk. Thank you for that.
Lydia Murray:
Thank you. Thank you for coming to my burlesque TED talk.
Courtney Escoyne:
I wish the audience could see me and Margaret both just kind of sitting back from our mics, just nodding along like, “Alright, yeah!”
Margaret Fuhrer:
All right. We’re going to take a break now, when we come back we will have our interview with Sydnie Mosley. So stay tuned.
[pause]
INTERVIEW WITH SYDNIE L. MOSLEY
Margaret Fuhrer:
Hi again, dance friends. I am so excited to be here now with Sydnie L. Mosley. Sydnie, thank you so much for joining today.
Sydnie Mosley:
I’m really glad to be here. Thank you for having me.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Sydnie is many things. She is an artist-activist. She’s a writer. She’s an educator. She produces experiential dance works—”experiential” being a key word there—with her dance-theater collective, Sydnie L. Mosley Dances, or SLMDances. You’ve probably read her beautiful writing in Essence or The Brooklyn Rail or Dance Magazine.
That’s a super abbreviated version of her bio. Sydnie, we’ll include links to your website and your social pages in the episode description, too, so people can find more information there. But can you actually start off by sharing with our listeners what you think they should know about who you are and your relationship with dance?
Sydnie Mosley:
Sure. Yes. Who am I? I am Sydnie Mosley. Sydnie Lyanna Mosley, if you ever wondered what the L stands for. I’m born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, but have been in New York City ever since I came here for college at Barnard College. I lived basically half my life in each place, so both places are considered home to me. My relationship to dance, I’ve been, like many people, dancing since I was four. I am in the dance world not only as a performer, but as a choreographer. I have worked as a producer, I have worked as an educator, both K–12, as well as in colleges and universities.
I think probably the most important thing to know is that I process the world through dance. I use both the choreographic process as well as a collective building of an organization to try and create a better future, I think.
Margaret Fuhrer:
We’re not going to mess around today. We have a list of questions that’s very involved, and I want to get to as much of it as we can, because as you are already hearing, Sydnie is brilliant. Let’s dive right into the deep end: You recently wrote a piece for Dance Magazine about why you’re waiting for the pandemic to end to produce a performance, and about how dance artist should give themselves permission to rest right now. You expressed feelings that clearly resonated with people—a lot of people are feeling these kinds of feelings. How did you put words around those feelings? What’s the story behind that piece?
Sydnie Mosley:
I think I was feeling a bit frustrated in a lot of different ways. I felt like as soon as the pandemic hit, we got smacked with all of these online dance classes and online performances, people trying to figure out how to salvage what they were planning to present in real time and real space to the virtual space. People were grieving, because all of a sudden all their work was lost. There was all these things happening and it felt like no one had taken a beat to process what was happening and just be present with that. It just felt like people felt the need to continue this go, go, go, when clearly the powers that be were asking us to take a moment and stop and rest. I remember those first few weeks of the shutdown and they were getting all of these environmental reports about like, how the dolphins were swimming and the trees were regenerating, and it was like, oh, because people stopped, and they stopped polluting.
I was definitely feeling a frustration around that. I think the energy in the dance field has gone up and down since then, in terms of how much people have chosen to engage or not engage. But I still feel this overwhelming push, push, push to reopen, push, push, push, to keep producing, push, push, push. I’m not sure that what people are pushing for is actually in alignment with what they really need, or is in alignment with their artistic practice. It just feels like pushing for the sake of pushing, which is unnecessary.
Margaret Fuhrer:
That’s such a classic dance thing too, to always be on the treadmill—if you stop moving, you lose momentum, everything’s over. Which, I guess maybe part of that is the sense of maintaining a connection with your dancer body and maintaining that kind of conditioning. But that doesn’t have to be reflected in your creative process. They’re two completely different things.
Leading a dance collective—figuring out how to keep not only yourself but also your creative partners activated and inspired and, most critically, paid—it was hard enough in the before times, before COVID changed everything. How have you approached that work during the past year with COVID as this huge, additional stressor? How has dealing with the pandemic changed you, maybe, as a leader?
Sydnie Mosley:
The pandemic actually has not changed me as a leader. It actually has fortified me and affirmed me as a leader in a lot of different ways. One is that this year I realized that, oh, I actually built a container that could withstand crisis. Part of that is because we’ve never had a lot to start with. We have had very few monetary resources over the past, almost 11 years now of making work. The fact that we figured out a way to sustain one another, and to sustain our relationships and our art-making, means that we were ready for a really lean moment in the general economy.
I also just want to name that we took the time to honor our grief. We took the time to be there for one another and to really be a soft place to land at the end of the really up-and-down dynamic days, the rollercoaster days that 2020, and now even into 2021, has taken us through. We literally started to tell—at that point in pandemic, where all the day started to run together, we were all keeping time by, SLMDances day or not SLMDances day. We meet twice a week, and it was like, “Okay, that’s how we’re telling time together.”
I think for us—I said to my co-leadership, my co-leaders, we’re going to pay people until there’s nothing left. I’m not going to end these contracts. I’m not going to stop supporting people in their time of need. I was actually really frustrated at how bigger institutions that had way deeper resources than we did really didn’t consider that, or maybe they did and struggled with it. For me, it’s always about the people. How can I keep supporting my people to the bitter end?
Margaret Fuhrer:
I know, it is strange. It’s like the larger the organization is, the less likely it is to prioritize its artists. It’s more about sustaining the organization as this larger thing, which it’s missing the point. And I love the idea of—you talked about this in your Dance Magazine piece, too—about rehearsal as a sacred ritual. It’s not just about the product. It’s about the process. As a way of marking time, as a way of continuing something that you’re building on, even if it’s not building toward a performance.
All right, speaking of getting artists paid: I want to talk a little about dance fundraising, because you’ve written a lot about this. And more specifically about fundraising for Black dance and for Black bodies, this idea that if Black lives matter, then we need to be funding black dancing bodies now.
We’ll link in the show notes to the piece that you wrote for essence.com and then the followup you wrote for The Brooklyn Rail. But can you talk a little about your approach to fundraising for SLMDances, and about how the dance ecosystem should rethink the way it shares or allocates resources?
Sydnie Mosley:
For SLM dances—I mean, those are two kind of very big and different questions that sit side by side with each other. I’ll tell you a little bit about SLMDances, which is that in terms of our income pie, most of our income is actually earned income through our education programs. I think that it’s really important to name that. Then, there’s individual donor fundraising, which we really look at as a grassroots effort, that it is a people-powered. The people who we are in relationship with, we are asking them to be a part of our community by sustaining us through fundraising. Then, if we happen to get a grant, praise the Lord and thank you. But we also know, we understand how the granting system works and so are very clear that we cannot count on that.
In response to your question about dance funding systems, that is the part, I think, that becomes frustrating. Because our communities that are often Black and brown, that are often women, queer people, immigrants, any number of other marginalized identities, they can only give so much. There’s a ceiling. And so when we were talking about the broader philanthropy and funding systems, we’re talking about folks who need to be thinking through a reparations lens—like, how many big philanthropists, that the money that they have is direct descendant of slavery systems. Come up off the money. It’s very simple, actually.
There are a lot of great people who are doing work around it. I want to shout out DéLana Dameron and Red Olive Consulting. She’s been doing a lot of work about talking to funders about how to support Black artists and to fund Black art. Then, I also want to shout out Sonya Renee Taylor, who’s a poet and author. She has a project called Buy Back Black Debt where she is encouraging people with privilege to literally buy the debt of Black folks. Because honestly we shouldn’t have any debt in this country.
I think that when people are thinking about funding systems for the arts and specifically funding Black artists, we cannot detangle that from the history of imperialism, the history of slavery in this country, the history of taking land from indigenous people in this country. Any person who is a descendant of those atrocities should have what they need without question. Funders just need to engage with that in a very real way and come up off the resources.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Have you seen any change, either positive or negative, in the world of dance fundraising, especially during the pandemic? Has anything shifted on that front?
Sydnie Mosley:
Oh, yeah. I mean, there were what I had started calling consolation prizes, where, if you apply for a grant but didn’t get the grant, but because of the pandemic, the funder said, “Here’s $200, here’s $500, just an acknowledgement of your time and effort in putting this grant application together, and we know that it’s hard right now.” So they were giving that money. There were other funders who were like, “You know what? We’re just going to do a lottery for who should get this.” There were other funders who were really just talking to grantees or potential grantees: “What do you need right now?”
All of that should have been happening already. As we move away from … or I’ll say, as we move toward herd immunity, we’ll remember, and they can’t go back on it now. They can’t go back on it now.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Because there’s so much labor in the grant application process that just often goes completely unrecognized unless you’re the prize winner that gets that grant.
Can you talk a little bit about what you are working on with SLMDances these days? What sort of creative frequency are you vibrating on?
Sydnie Mosley:
I love this question. What creative frequency? We are actually vibrating high in our creative space. We have been working on an evening length performance called Purple. We’ve been developing that work since…the idea came in 2017, and really like feet-to-studio-floors working on it since 2017. We finished a kind of big rough draft evening-length work in progress in December, 2019. Then, going into 2020, I was like, “And now, no more studio.”
But what the past year gave us was time to let all of that settle, what we had made. Now, what we are doing actually is working on scripting the work. We’ve been doing a series of workshops and learning around what it might mean to script a dance theater work, how we want to develop our dramaturgical process, working with all of the additional production collaborators, musicians, and set designers, et cetera, et cetera. We’re really actually in a deep space of getting this—doing basically everything we can without being in the studio together, to get this work ready for eventual stage presentation and touring.
Margaret Fuhrer:
I love the idea of scripting dance work. I feel like every dance should have a script. We should do this for everything!
Actually, that sort of ties into the next question, which is about your work as a writer and your work with language. Because a lot of my questions have sort of centered that side of your creativity. Partly because I’m a words person, that’s where my brain goes. But also because it does seem to be central to your practice. It does seem like, as we’ve been denied physical spaces, a lot of artists have been exploring that kind of creativity during shutdowns. How do you think about the relationship between dance and writing, or even more broadly, dance and language?
Sydnie Mosley:
I love that you asked this question. I really appreciate it. Dance and language, dance and words, dance and writing, go hand in hand for me. They are two sides of a whole for me. I think back to my first dance concert that I ever choreographed and produced, which was actually when I was in high school. I was a senior in high school and the title of the show was Dance and the Written Word.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Prophetic!
Sydnie Mosley:
Right? That is how married those creative practices are to one another for me. I fully honor that dance is a language of its own. I also fully honor that writing is a practice of its own. I love what they add to one another. One of my big creative influences is Ntozake Shange, who is very famously known for her stage work For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf. She coined the word “choreopoem.” I very much see my work in that legacy, building on that legacy. But people don’t—I feel like our broader public is not aware that she’s a dancer. She was a dancer, and that was an integral part to her writing practice was movement.
I just name all of that to contextualize that I have had both practices, and what the pandemic has allowed is for me to spend more time focusing on my writing practice in a way that I wasn’t always able to when I was in a consistent studio practice.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Here’s a really large question. Or maybe it’s not that large—maybe they’re small things: What is bringing you joy right now? Either dance-related things or not dance-related things?
Sydnie Mosley:
I appreciate this question, too. You have such great questions. What is bringing me joy right now? Joy is being able to read in a way that I haven’t been able to in a long time. I’m in particular doing a lot of rereading. Rereading books that have been really foundational to my thinking, foundational to my understanding of black feminism. Reading is bringing me a lot of joy.
The sunshine is also bringing me a lot of joy. Warmth, being out on my fire escape, that is bringing me so much joy. There are several TikToks from the internet that are joy, in particular that one where the guy’s giving choreography coaching of the Cardi B “Up” challenge, like, “backabackaba, boogieboogieboo“—okay, I can recite the whole thing! It really brings me joy to watch those videos.
What else is bringing me joy right now? Oh, I am someone who, generally all my life, has loved to cook. After a year of having to only cook for myself and no one else and being responsible for feeding myself, I actually quit cooking two weeks ago.
Margaret Fuhrer
Oh, congrats!
Sydnie Mosley:
My joy that I feel in giving myself permission to quit cooking and that people are feeding me. There is joy there. I could go on and on, but I feel like those are the top of mind, things that are bringing me joy.
Margaret Fuhrer:
I love that, because I’m so tired of people talking about how they’ve become like Michelin-star chefs over the pandemic. It’s like, whatever, man, I can’t do it. I can’t do it.
Sydnie Mosley:
It’s okay!
Margaret Fuhrer:
It’s all right. It’s alright to release that.
Related question: Can we talk a little about your garden? Can we talk about your plant babies and how they’re doing? Is Mama T still around? Is she okay? We followed her on Instagram. Listeners need to know!
Sydnie Mosley:
Okay, yes. Mama T, her season has ended, but we are growing new tomato plant babies. I am very excited because I have a lot more sprouts than I did last year. I’m also excited because I started them way earlier because last year—I didn’t know we were going to be in a pandemic and I was going to start gardening. But this year I was ready, and I planted on February 28th. The thing that I’m actually really excited about is I actually think I might be able to give a few starter tomato plants to friends, so it won’t just be me raising tomatoes, but some other folks might be able to do it, too.
Margaret Fuhrer:
An extended tomato family, I love that. Sydnie, thank you so much for coming on today and making the time to do this. Thank you for being a good friend to The Dance Edit—days when we have Sydnie comments or DMs on Instagram are good days, I appreciate that so much. How can listeners support your work and support SLMDances at this time? What can we do?
Sydnie Mosley:
There’s so many things you can do. The first is that you can sign up for our newsletter. If you go to our website, SLMDances.com, you will see a pop up that helps you to sign up for our newsletter. You can also follow us on social media, both Twitter and Instagram. My personal is @sydmosley and the collective is @SLMDances.
Then, we are actually going to be opening the circle of our collective in April this year. We will be looking for new creative partners who will come on to join us for the next few seasons and hopefully be a part of our creative process and sustaining our collective. In particular, we are looking for a third person to our three-person leadership team. We’re having a leadership transition. Nia Austin Edwards, who has been our stewarding strategic visioning partner, will be leaving, and we’re looking for someone to fill that role and help us take SLMDances into the next stage of our collective.
Margaret Fuhrer:
We’ll include links to all of those pages, all that information, all the things, so people can get there. Sydnie, thank you again. Wishing you lots of sunshine and reading and TikToks and plant babies.
Sydnie Mosley:
Thank you!
[pause]
Margaret Fuhrer:
Thanks again to Sydnie. As promised, we’ve included all those relevant links, all those ways to support SLMDances, in the show notes, so please take a look. And then the TikTok she mentioned—that choreography tutorial? I just want to say for the record that that is choreographer Sean Bankhead in that clip, he is the genius behind “a bockabockabock…” I just butchered that, but you know what I’m talking about—we have absolutely included that link in the show notes as well. Because Sydnie’s right, it’s just a font of joy, it’s fantastic.
All right, thanks everyone for joining us. We will be back next week for more discussion of the news that’s moving the dance world to keep learning, keep advocating and keep dancing.
Courtney Escoyne:
Mind how you go, friends.
Lydia Murray:
Bye everyone.