{"id":306,"date":"2021-10-25T23:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-10-25T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fullrenovations.com\/?p=306"},"modified":"2025-04-08T15:22:52","modified_gmt":"2025-04-08T15:22:52","slug":"jennifer-archibald-responds-to-the-tulsa-race-massacre-with-a-multimedia-premiere-for-tulsa-ballet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.fullrenovations.com\/index.php\/2021\/10\/25\/jennifer-archibald-responds-to-the-tulsa-race-massacre-with-a-multimedia-premiere-for-tulsa-ballet\/","title":{"rendered":"Jennifer Archibald Responds to the Tulsa Race Massacre With a Multimedia Premiere for Tulsa Ballet"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Jennifer Archibald&#8217;s professional roles almost mirror the breadth of the dance field itself. A Canadian now based in New York City, she runs her own dance company and its ArchCore40 Dance Intensives; is a guest artist at several universities and teaches at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University; has commercial clients like Nike and MAC Cosmetics; and is resident choreographer at Cincinnati Ballet.<\/p>\n<p>This month, Tulsa Ballet premieres her multimedia&nbsp;<em><a href=\"https:\/\/tulsaballet.org\/breakinbricks\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Breakin&#8217; Bricks<\/a><\/em>&nbsp;after a yearlong creative process. Made for the company plus eight Black dancers hired for the project,&nbsp;<em>Breakin&#8217; Bricks&nbsp;<\/em>reflects upon\u2014and responds to\u2014the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, which terrorized the city&#8217;s prosperous Black community of Greenwood. The piece is, Archibald says, &#8220;one of the most difficult projects I&#8217;ve ever done.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong>You&#8217;ve called&nbsp;<em>Breakin&#8217; Bricks<\/em>&nbsp;a &#8220;documentary-format ballet.&#8221; What does that mean?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong><\/strong>I went into the field with a videographer, Guy de Lancey, to interview people about what life in Tulsa is like today from a racial perspective. I put myself in a journalist&#8217;s shoes, in a way. What was challenging was getting people to talk transparently. It was hard to peel back the layers and get answers to &#8220;What&#8217;s the difference between North and South Tulsa? Do you cross the tracks? Will Greenwood be prosperous again?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>When Marcello [Angelini, Tulsa Ballet&#8217;s artistic director] approached me, the only ways I could see this being authentic and successful were, one, if we hired Black dancers and, two, if we brought local voices into the story. I didn&#8217;t think I would be able to honor the spirits and authentically commemorate Black people if I didn&#8217;t have film and audio sharing space with the movement onstage. That&#8217;s why documentation has been so attractive to me, because I feel like, when we watch ballets, they can be so abstract. We don&#8217;t usually know who these people in front of us are.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-vimeo wp-block-embed-vimeo wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Breakin&#039;Bricks by Jennifer Archibald\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/541760763?h=717bec413f&amp;dnt=1&amp;app_id=122963\" width=\"1080\" height=\"608\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<p><strong>There was an audition in June to hire Black dancers for&nbsp;<em>Breakin&#8217; Bricks<\/em><\/strong><strong>. What were you looking for?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Initially, I wasn&#8217;t sure if I wanted ballet versus contemporary movers, so I said, &#8220;Let&#8217;s keep it general and see who&#8217;s interested.&#8221; What was great about that process were the dancers who reached out to say, &#8220;Listen, I&#8217;m really interested in this, but I&#8217;m concerned about&#8221; this or that. It was eye-opening in terms of my responsibility to make sure the Black dancers I chose felt supported.<\/p>\n<p><strong><\/strong><strong>All while ballet itself is reassessing and metabolizing its relationship to white supremacy culture. How will you bring this history and this art form into meaningful dialogue?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I do not have a black-and-white answer, but it is something that has kept me awake numerous nights. It&#8217;s important that we all know that, in this process, we can make mistakes and make amends and learn from it. I&#8217;ve tried to be as transparent as I can be with all of the dancers, who sometimes email me questions about this process in the middle of the night. It&#8217;s a learning curve that extends to how we&#8217;re going to market the show, and how we&#8217;re going to do outreach during the residency for these Black artists, because they&#8217;re interested in teaching workshops and reaching the community that never shows up to the ballet. I really, really want to make sure the audience is diverse and that we&#8217;re not just presenting to a predominantly white audience, which is what I do all the time.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Ideally, it&#8217;s a productive process.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s the thing: The company has to realize this is not like any other commission, and all of the departments need to realize they are included in that transformation. These dancers can&#8217;t come in, as guests, and feel isolated. The residency for the Black dancers we&#8217;ve hired is just five weeks. That in itself is a testament to why ballet companies need to be more diverse, so these stories can live for more than just three or four nights.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"et_bloom_bottom_trigger\"><\/span><\/p>\n<p>The post <a href=\"https:\/\/dancemagazine.com\/jennifer-archibald\/\">Jennifer Archibald Responds to the Tulsa Race Massacre With a Multimedia Premiere for Tulsa Ballet<\/a> appeared first on <a href=\"https:\/\/dancemagazine.com\">Dance Magazine<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jennifer Archibald&#8217;s professional roles almost mirror the breadth of the dance field itself. A Canadian now based in New York City, she runs her own dance company and its ArchCore40 Dance Intensives; is a guest artist at several universities and&#8230; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":305,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fullrenovations.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fullrenovations.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fullrenovations.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fullrenovations.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fullrenovations.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=306"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.fullrenovations.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":307,"href":"http:\/\/www.fullrenovations.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306\/revisions\/307"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fullrenovations.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fullrenovations.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fullrenovations.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fullrenovations.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}