Notes on Tell

The thirty or so people who have gathered together on this cold fall evening face each other in a wide circle enveloped in warm light. Above us, a flock of trapezes rests suspended from the ceiling. On one side of the room large exercise balls float like bubbles on a shelf. On the other side, the wall’s white surface holds the memory of a media projection that has just ended: dancers swathed in billowing turquoise fabric in motion on a beach. In the circle, Sheila Russell, one of the dancers, is leading us - audience and dancers alike - in a massage. We are pressing our fingers under our clavicles and moving our hands across our chests to manually drain our lymphatic systems. Soon we will be guided through a series of gestures that can create an energetic boundary of protection when we are out and about in public. In here the room smells like tea, there are snacks; it is warm, inviting, casual.

We’re here for an in-process sharing of Tell an experimental dance-offering exploring racial healing. Co-directed by Sarah Crowell who is Black and Keith Hennesey who is white, Tell features three additional Black dancers and three additional white dancers: Larry Arrington, Samara Atkins, Amber Julian, Sheila Russell, Ainsley Tharp, and Shaunna Vella.

The impetus for Tell came from The Space Between Us a dance-film featuring Sarah and Keith (directed by Gabriel Diamond), the film is a radical experiment in the power of bearing witness, inviting vulnerability, and sharing movement, in a time of social distancing and racial reckoning. In the film we see Sarah and Keith facing each other, Keith asks Sarah “Who are you?” Sarah was one of my first dance teachers and I’ve known her for over twenty years, this question - “Who are you” - echoes an exercise that Sarah has been facilitating for as long as I’ve known her (and probably longer than that). In the “Who are you?” exercise (but not the film), two people stand, facing each other and Person A asks “Who are you?” Person B answers the question, Person A asks again. As Person A repeats the question, Person B must answer it in new, sometimes surprising ways. It is an exercise in listening, in expansion, in vulnerability, in witnessing, in repetition. Each of these elements extend into both The Space Between Us and Tell.

Prior to this October evening, the dancers spent many months working together. At first they started in two separate groups, the Black dancers and the white dancers, without knowing if they would ever dance together. They slowly built a rapport, dancing for each other, cooking for each other and retreating together. Samara described the process as “slow enough for me to take my armor off.” The showing we’d been invited to was a snap-shot of this process with no intention of likely ever performing a “definitive” piece on healing but rather, a desire to share what the group had committed to together.

We meet the dancers through a series of solos set to music that amplifies each individual personality and style of movement. Then Samara grabs a piece of paper and climbs onto a loop of silk that has descended from the ceiling. As Samara settles into the silk, the other dancers pull a rope that raises her into the air. “Welcome to Tell” she says, “where we tell ‘n stuff.” She reads a litany of shared identities: “1 of us is…” “3 of us are…” “2 of us are…” (“All of us teach dance”) before she is lowered down and returned to the circle.

What is the work of racial healing? What kind of telling serves it? Keith notes that “rarely does anyone heal in isolation. Healing is an act of community.” In his memoir, Heavy, Kiese Laymon writes, “The nation as it is currently constituted has never dealt with a yesterday or tomorrow where we were radically honest, generous, and tender with each other.” To want to heal is to believe that something else is possible, it is a sort of precarious leap of faith, it is also a reckoning. And this is the act, the gesture, the movement that really feels like it is at the heart of the piece: the desire for collective healing. Tell integrates interaction throughout the evening, inviting audience members into light facilitation and group conversation, extending the focus on healing in real time to include the people in the room. The process is, after all, about being with each other.

Although they do move together, the dancers also dance in their smaller groups: the Black dancers and the white dancers. Here we get a glimpse into their initial separate meditations on healing. The white dancers begin their piece with a buzzing sound, moving like a slow melting, their heads down-turned or raised with mouths gaping. This, they later named, is an exploration of grief. For white people healing requires an acknowledgement that there is something to heal from which is at odds with what we are taught: to deny racial violence while simultaneously perpetrating and benefiting from it. The Black dancers - exploring joy - face the audience as though on a catwalk, each shift in movement accompanied by deliberate formation, the movement includes West African dance and closes with the four dancers standing in circular embrace.

At the near end of the evening, Sheila cocoons herself in a long piece of turquoise fabric and in the blue fabric, she slowly bends so far backwards I am stunned she doesn’t fall; disbelieving that she can bend this far and then disbelief all over again when I realize she isn’t bending backwards, but forwards. This realization repositions how I am seeing a body move, it reorients me and fills me with awe: through this sequence my sense of knowing is interrupted and refigured.


We’ve come to the end and we’re back in our big circle when Keith asks if five people will share how they are feeling. The moment feels uniquely tender. One person says that they are proud of the dancers and that being in the space that night felt like being in their grandmother’s living room. Another says they want to “dance, feel my body, I am ready to create.” Another person says they are struck by how “art is magic, alchemy, an ask we don’t know the answer to.”

After the showing, I do the cliche thing of looking up the definition of healing which is the process of making or becoming sound or to make free from injury or disease : to make sound or whole

To make free

To make whole

The process of making sound

The process of becoming sound

The near-final sound of the evening, the one that sticks with me for days, is the recorded sound of Fred Moten speaking which Sarah and Keith have laid over an instrumental track. It’s just a snippet of his honey-thick voice, repeated over and over:

“What we’ve been trying to figure out how to get to is how we are when we get together to try to figure it out. What we’ve been trying to figure out how to get to is how we are when we get together to try to figure it out. What we’ve been trying to figure out…”

Repetition is central to Tell in part because Tell is process-work; the repetition of gathering, of sharing, of movement, of conversation. Sarah and Keith have repeatedly been making dance, asking questions through dance and gathering community with dance for decades. Repetition creates both legacy and transformation. When I recognize glimpses of Sarah’s long-term dance and facilitation practice, glimpses of those exercises that I’ve seen her lead for decades, it is evidence of the repetition of practice. If you know Fred Moten’s work, you know that he is a theorist, a poet, a scholar of performance studies and that his writing focuses on the Black radical tradition and seeks a theoretical and literal space outside of the nation-state/white supremacist capitalism. In one of my favorite interviews, Moten again distills the complex into the tangible through repetition: “You have to pay attention so you can learn how to pay attention.” This seems to be what Tell is saying: You need to heal together so you can learn how to heal together. Or, to riff on another Moten favorite, “The music is the making of the music”: the healing is the process of the healing.

the healing is the process of the healing.

:: PERFORMANCE DATES & TIMES ::
Fri-Sun November 3-5
At Dance Mission Theater
Tickets $0-$30
URL: http://circozero.org/tell