A pointy wind was blowing in Washington, DC, on the morning of Monday, February 17, as 36 dancers processed single file across the John F. Kennedy Middle for the Performing Arts. Threading in entrance of the modernist white marble edifice, then throughout a plaza with views of the Potomac River, they danced the spare however significant gestures of the late choreographer Pina Bausch’s “The Nelken Line,” from her 1982 work Nelken (“carnations”). One participant pulled a conveyable speaker taking part in Louis Armstrong’s brilliant “West Finish Blues,” Bausch’s selection of music. It was each a efficiency and a protest, a response to the orchestrated takeover of the nation’s performing arts middle by just lately inaugurated President Donald Trump.
When Kelly King, who directs DC’s Contradiction Dance, heard earlier this month that Trump had been made chairman of the Middle’s board, she felt compelled to behave. “Why aren’t we within the streets but? When are we getting within the streets to march?” she remembers asking herself. On Friday, February 14, she put out a name on social media, inviting dancers within the space to a protest on the Kennedy Middle the next Monday.
“As dancers,” King says, “we all know easy methods to rapidly, successfully pull our neighborhood collectively. Typically we simply confidently make selections and transfer.”
Fellow choreographer Keira Hart-Mendoza reached out to King. In 2020, in the course of the peak of the pandemic, her Bethesda, MD-based UpRooted Dance Firm had used the easy repetitive gestures of “The Nelken Line” for a socially distanced outside dance occasion. “I really feel prefer it’s such a relaxed, delicate, and helpful solution to make an announcement,” says Hart-Mendoza. Previous to the protest, King and Hart-Mendoza convened two weekend Zoom conferences to show the choreography to the group of volunteer dancers.
Whereas King and Hart-Mendoza have been in communication with Kennedy Middle workers, King famous they didn’t ask permission. On the morning of the seventeenth, with no exhibits within the constructing as a result of Presidents’ Day vacation, safety outdoors was excessive, King stories—however by the tip, these despatched to observe the dancers have been chatting and sharing movies of the protest dance.
The 30-minute efficiency was meant to foster solidarity amongst dance artists, and to reveal their visceral response to President Trump’s latest firing of all Biden-appointed Kennedy Middle board members and subsequent takeover of the board. Dance artist, director, and educator Jessica Martiné Denson says her option to protest was private. “Having lived within the DC space for nearly my whole life, the Kennedy Middle holds a lifetime of reminiscences for me and so lots of my buddies and colleagues,” she says. “I can not idly stand by as it’s underneath siege—not taking part was not an possibility.”
Longtime Washington choreographer and dancer Deborah Riley, director emerita of Dance Place, obtained an electronic mail invitation from King to take part. “It actually sparked one thing for me,” Riley says. “No matter assertion we may make collectively about this nook of the world—the Kennedy Middle and the humanities—I felt was vital.”
Kelly is planning one other dance protest for Saturday, March 15, this time on the Lincoln Memorial, one in all Washington’s grandest monuments. She hopes this second spherical will go nationwide. “We invite dancers across the nation and world wide to satisfy of their communities, select a culturally important landmark of their metropolis, and be taught ‘The Nelken Line,’ ” she says. “Let’s do that as a simultaneous eruption of dance as protest.” Tutorials on the Bausch choreography will be discovered on YouTube.
After seeing the Kennedy Middle protest video on social media, Chicago dancer and choreographer Ramón Muñoz made his personal model, recording himself dancing the Bausch choreography in entrance of Chicago’s Trump Tower. “I’ve to see the Trump Tower daily after I go downtown,” he says, “so I knew in my coronary heart that somebody needed to be in entrance of that constructing echoing the message of the DC dancers.” He plans to convene a gaggle of Chicago dancers March 15.
“I need dancers to really feel very empowered to take this into their communities and to get in observe with protest,” King says. “Who higher to peacefully protest than the dance neighborhood?” She provides: “We may have to do that for the subsequent 4 years.”
