Lemme just begin this post with a big FUCK YOU DANCE DIASPORA AND ALL THE BITCHES INVOLVED!!!!! whew…I wish I could do that in person or scream it outside without turning a bunch of heads, or even in my own apartment, but this will have to suffice.
Those were agonizing months of dancing and drumming with this so called dance company (dance diaspora) in college, which was nothing more than a really, REALLY sad group of women that embodied the worst characteristics of a sorority—the gossip, the cattiness, the extremely low self esteem that manifests the previous issues, the hazing, the expectation that you were supposed to miss classes and study session and fuck up your grades for the sake of the group, the expectation that you were supposed to be the professor’s personal assistant, and the list goes on.
The people heralded as the best dancers, couldn’t even remember the damn choreography from day to day, didn’t know the lyrics to the songs, and often started what little choreography they did remember on the wrong part of the rhythm (which they also didn’t know). To add insult to injury some of them were so out of shape that they halfway through individual dances they’d get all winded, the steps would get sloppy, and because they’d be leading, we were expected to do what they were doing even though it was WRONG, AND they taught the next generation of diaspora members all of the steps wrong as well (totally lacking the form and the nuance that makes the steps so interesting)
So after a year of being shoved in the back behind people who couldn’t dance, being told I wasn’t good for any variety of nonsense reasoning (including being too middle class thus not poor enough to to be black enough to understand the what it means to embody the African experience; that my ballet training meant I was, once again, too bougie to do African dance; I didn’t have her ambiguous concept of “afro form;” that because I was a science major, I thought I was better than everyone else—-I know what you’re thinking…WHAT THE FUCK DOES ANY OF THAT HAVE TO DO WITH DANCING? beats me but that was my daily bullshit), I quit!
Now, to be told in the middle of a workshop, that the director of the company (also my teacher every week) wants me to audition for her company….even if I don’t get in…I’M FUCKING ECSTATIC! I wish I could kuku and tiriba and kotuba all over those bitches’— who ain’t doing SHYTE—faces! I would sing “ma-imbo” and do a little jig in Ms. Ade’s (*cough**cough**Miriam’s*) shop until I passed out.
~~wo kake le me re mumbe….*up a third*…wo kake le me re mumbe…
disclaimer: excuse my incredibly phonetic spelling of a song whose lyrics we probably never learned correctly but sang the hell out of
secondary disclaimer: this is in reference to diaspora after 2006, because before that, as a friend so graciously reminded me, diaspora was on point!
like black butterflies 