By Steve Sucato

Continuing GroundWorks’ artistic relationship with The National Center for Choreography – Akron (NCCAkron), the company’s dancers engaged in a 2-day creative exploration, October 17 & 20 at Cleveland State University’s Department of Theatre and Dance, with Urbana, Illinois choreographer Alexandra Barbier as part of her Ideas in Motion, Community Commissioning Residency at NCCAkron. 

Barbier, a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is an artist, educator, and performance maker whose practices emerge from dance, performance art, Blackness, and queerness. She promotes whimsy, humor, and playfulness while also inspiring critical thought and cultural/societal commentary and inquiry.

NCC-Akron says they selected her for a residency for her choreographic research involving queer Black dance vernacular that includes a refreshing perspective and exploration of queer Black dance vernacular such as twerking, waacking, and voguing and how it operates outside of the academic dance community.

I talked with Barbier after the creative exploration sessions about her time with GroundWorks’ dancers.

Why did you choose to work with GroundWorks during your residency?

I have been so steeped in academia the past several years and working with college students, I really wanted to work with GroundWorks to give myself a different population to interact with. I also thought it would be interesting to engage them in dance forms that were different from the Eurocentric dance forms they present on stage.  

What happened on day one of the creative exploration? 

I invited my vogue-mother mentor Jazzmine Pike from Salt Lake City, Utah to be a part of this residency and she led day one. She worked with myself and GroundWorks’ dancers in the improvisation practice of Freestyle Theory and how we embody different personalities and moods through our movement. The company really responded well to that. 

What was one of the movement exercises Jazzmine used in her teaching?

One of the things she started with was having us think about an out-of-body experience and imagine that a part of us had escaped our bodies (like the soul) and we had to look at it and see it moving outside of ourselves and decide how we felt about it. Were we accepting of it? Were we fearful of it? Then we invited it back into our bodies and were asked if there was any change in us because of the experience.

Why was it important for you to have GroundWorks’ dancers experience Jazzmine’s approach to movement?

A part of my research is figuring out how all of the dance forms I know including ballet and modern work together. We [the dance world] have a tendency to put into hierarchies certain dance styles as having a greater importance than others if you want to study to be a professional concert dancer. I really believe all styles contribute to all other styles. So the more dancers stretch their movement vocabularies, the stronger they are.  

You led day two of the creative exploration, what did you work on with the dancers? 

I taught them a solo I am creating for myself. It is really complicated to make a solo on yourself and I had been watching only myself do it up until then so I wanted to see how it looked on other bodies to see if I liked certain parts. I also had this idea of creating a fabric bubble for myself in the solo so the first part of the day I had the dancers move around wearing fitted bed sheets to simulate the bubble and get feedback from them about the experience. The second part of day we worked on the second part of the solo that is inspired by elements of vogue femme, waacking and a little bit of jazz dance.

What did you take away from your time working with GroundWorks’ dancers?

Knowing how frequently GroundWorks’ dancers train and that I primarily exist as an educator and choreographer on others, the biggest realization for me was that I am out of shape. I watched GroundWorks’ dancers perform the choreography I made and I realized how much better others do my dancing than I do my own dancing. They really inspired me to step up my training regimen. They were able to move their bodies in ways I currently cannot and they made movement decisions I hadn’t thought of. 

What is your impression of GroundWorks dancers?

They were very open and giving as well as incredibly skilled movers. I also had the chance to get to know them as people and learn why they dance. One of things I felt really connected to them about was a mutual interest in what dance can do beyond just this virtuosic practice for performance. How can we use dance as a tool in our daily lives beside just training to be a good dancer? What else can dance do for society, community and ourselves? 

Photos of Alexandra Barbier working with GroundWorks DanceTheater dancers. Photos by Madison Pineda