Dimensions Dance Theater celebrates 50 years of presenting African dance
As an art form based on moving bodies through space there’s something deeply satisfying about artistic director Deborah Vaughan celebrating Dimension Dance Theater’s 50th anniversary in Mills College’s Lisser Hall. The two-night engagement Oct. 22-23 completes a circle that brings Vaughan back to the campus where the longest running Black dance company on the West Coast was born.
Growing up in Oakland, Vaughan was still in middle school when she started taking classes in Afro Haitian and modern dance with choreographer and actress Ruth Beckford, a disciple and biographer of legendary dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham. Before she started running the Black Panthers free breakfast program in 1969, Beckford founded the Oakland Department of Parks and Recreation’s pioneering recreational modern dance department, where Vaughan discovered her passion for movement. She went on to study with Beckford while earning a graduate degree in dance from Mills College, immersing herself in ballet, modern dance and an array of dance traditions from across the African continent.
When Vaughan co-founded Dimensions Dance Theater in 1972 with Elendar Barnes and Shirley Brown, who were also Beckford’s students, the Black Arts movement was cresting and they sought to create works that connected African Americans to kindred diaspora cultures across the Caribbean and the motherland.
“We weren’t seeing ourselves on stage,” said Vaughan, who as the company’s artistic director has become a towering figure responsible for mentoring generations of dancers and choreographers. “That was the purpose, to create and explore African-derived dance forms. When you look at Africa and all its influences throughout the globe, our goal was to bring that to the stage. We started a company and we have tried to continue focus on the experiences of Africa and Africa America.”
The 50th anniversary program embodies that mission with new works by Dimensions collaborators Laura Elaine Ellis and Liberian choreographer Nimely Napla (both performances include a Q&A with the artists and company members). The latest iteration of Ellis’ “ruminations. (re)visited” speaks to the company’s resilience at a particularly challenging time. The work was originally conceived for Dimensions’ 2020 season, but Ellis, working with filmmaker Desiree Galves, transformed the dance into a film in response to the pandemic
Created in close collaboration with the dancers, “ruminations. [re]visited” was conceived in the months before the pandemic, but Ellis’s intention seems prescient. “I asked dancers to write about fear, forgiveness, loss, and other topics, diving into their own memories,” she said. “They created writings that became the source material for the movement, which became the five parts: ‘Run,’ ‘Witness,’ ‘Cycle,’ ‘Ash,’ and ‘Fly.’ People have asked, are we running to or from something? No, we’re just running from centuries of trials.”
Last spring she reconceived the piece as a site-specific work in San Francisco’s Minnesota Street Project Atrium with Tiersa Nureyev’s textile-art costumes. And now she’s reimagined it again for the proscenium setting of the historic Lisser Hall featuring 10 dancers and text recited by poets Jordon E. Dabney and Atiya Ziyad. The collaboration with Dimensions builds on a relationship forged over more than three decades.
Like Vaughan, Ellis is a Mills graduate, and she connected with Dimensions in 1986 when she “was looking for a home as an artist,” she said. “I felt like I found that home when I first came by that first Dimensions rehearsal. Over the years I’ve had to chance to work with incredible artists through the company, Garth Fagan, Hugh Masekela, Omar Sosa. I’ve toured to places I never dreamed I’d get to.”
With Vaughan’s support and guidance Ellis went on to launch the Black Choreographers Festival: Hear and Now in 2005. She’s one of several dozen Dimensions alumni who have gone on to international careers. “The legacy is super deep,” Ellis said.
Nimely Napla’s “Dai Zoe Bush — The Breaking of the Poro & Sande Bush” represents another significant facet of the Dimensions legacy. The former director of the Liberian National Cultural Troupe, Napla is a master dancer, craftsmen, costume designer, and choreographer steeped in traditional Liberian culture. In recent decades his work has focused on celebrating and preserving music, dance and rituals nearly lost in the wake of the civil wars that killed hundreds of thousands there between 1989-97 and 1999-2003.
He first collaborated with Dimensions before the bloodshed, presenting an early version of the folkloric ballet “The King’s Only Daughter.” In looking for a partner for a Creative Work Fund grant, he sought out Dimensions again for a new work based on ceremonial dance rhythms of the Vai and Gola people from Liberia’s northern Grand Cape Mount County on the border with Sierra Leone.
“He lost quite a few family members during the war,” Vaughan said. “This is a way of keeping these rituals in his memory, presenting it so it’s not forgotten.”
Defending cultural by imagining it anew, Dimensions Dance Theater is still leading the way after half a century.
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
DIMENSIONS DANCE THEATER
Presents a 50th anniversary recital
When: 7:30 p.m. Oct. 22, 4 p.m. Oct. 23
Where: Lisser Hall, Mills College at Northeastern University, 5000 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland
Tickets: $15-$50; www.eventbrite.com (search for Dimensions Dance Theater); more information at www.dimensionsdance.org.