On a warm July afternoon, Princess Mhoon, the director of the Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project, sat in a bustling cafe on the edge of the University of Chicago campus in Hyde Park. She wore a purple-and-orange dress that fluttered around her arms and gestured out the window to show me where she went to high school: Kenwood Academy, not quite visible from where we sat, but less than two miles away.
“I was a theater baby,” she said, describing the Chicago art world in which she grew up. Her parents met at an African dance class and her father was a drummer for local dance companies. “I have memories of sitting in the theater during technical rehearsals,” she continued. “We were not allowed to eat sweets. In the Black Arts Movement, junk food did not exist. So we had cherry vitamin C – that was my sweet spot.
Mhoon, 47, talks about her early life moving through a who’s who of Chicago’s rich black dance scene. A neighbor learned the technique from Katherine Dunham, perpetuating the legacy of one of the brightest dance stars of the early 20th century. Mhoon trained in African dance at Muntu Dance Theater and learned techniques from the African American diaspora at Najwa Dance Corps, both near where she grew up on the South Side. And on trips home from college, she took classes with Homer Bryant, who has worked since 1990 to make ballet training accessible to all students at his studio in the South Loop.
Several of these companies are now brought together by the Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project, an initiative that strives to support black dance makers in the city and provide lasting recognition for their contributions. “The idea,” said Mhoon, “was to give all these companies their flowers while they were still here.”
The companies involved in the project – founded in 2019 by the Joyce Foundation and the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago – have all persevered despite significant differences in funding. A 2019 report entitled “Mapping the Dance Landscape in Chicagoland” found that organizations such as the Joffrey Ballet and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, in predominantly white areas of the city, have been the top recipients of grants, even as more than 30 percent of dancers and choreographers in Chicago identify as Black.
And while many black dance creators, including Mhoon, experience the scene as a vibrant network of beloved characters, companies can easily retreat into a sense of competitiveness due to the scarcity of financial backing.
“We’re such an isolated city,” Nicole Clarke-Springer, artistic director of modern dance company Deeply Rooted Dance Theater, said during an interview in an atrium above Bryant’s studios. “We’re all trying to get funding in our little parts of Chicago, we’ve all got our heads down. We know each other and we love each other and we share dancers, but there was never an intentional moment where we caught our breath.
The Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project aims to change that by addressing both the lack of funding and the resulting fragmentation. It brings together both established and newer companies and provides funding, help with archiving projects and organizational support. That support takes the form of improvement plans developed for each company, including guidance on governance, marketing strategies and executive coaching.
Participating companies also meet regularly to share knowledge with colleagues, and collaborate on group performances at least twice a year: the current cohort of 10 companies, brought together in early 2023, will share the stage on September 7 in Ravinia, the outdoor pavilion in Highland Park.
Bril Barrett, the founder and director of MADD Rhythms, a tap company that joined the Legacy Project this year, grew up dancing in community centers on the city’s West Side. But as he focused more on tap, he began traveling across the city for lessons, eventually performing all over the country. The creation of MADD Rhythms in 2001 was an opportunity to return to the city and share tap’s extensive potential with young dancers in his hometown. “Tap dance opened up the world to me,” he said in a video interview, “and I wanted to use it to try and open up the world to my community.”
While Barrett found warm support for his company in some circles, he often felt sidelined by the wider dance community. “I’ve always had to fight,” he said. “My identity as a black man in America has never been separate from my identity as a tap dancer fighting to be recognized by the dance world.”
But Barrett characterizes his experience with the Legacy Project’s other companies as one of relief and warm identification. “We had these watershed moments where we were in a room full of people who got it,” he said.
While the structural support the project provides has been critical to his business, the community the project has provided Barrett with has been even more valuable. “That’s the most important thing,” he said, “the shared knowledge base that comes from sitting at the feet of people who’ve done it.” He recalled a conversation with Regina Perry-Carr, artistic director of Muntu, about the challenges of taking over the management of a 50-year-old company. It led Barrett to think seriously about that question for his own company: “What happens if I hand over MADD Rhythms to another director?”
MADD Rhythms is now 22 years old. But even companies much older than Barrett’s have found the Legacy Project a valuable partner in ensuring the survival of their companies and their history. “My mission is a 200-year mission,” says Joel Hall, a pioneering dance maker who founded Joel Hall Dancers & Center in 1974. And one of the essential parts of securing his legacy, according to Hall, is supporting perseverance. of the field as a whole. “These are all my kids, period,” Hall said of the other companies. “It is my responsibility to take care of the herd as long as I can.”
A concern for longevity has motivated Barrett to create more sustainable structures for his company’s operations, but it has also spurred him to manage the group’s archives. When he learned that the Legacy Project was partnering with the Newberry Library, he jumped at the chance to store materials at the research facility. “This is great,” he remembered as he thought, “this gives people access to the history we built.”
Barrett loaded his car with large plastic bins full of papers and ephemera to take to the library. Newberry collections now feature rich black-and-white photographs of Muntu performances and glamorous portraits of Katherine Dunham, as well as radiant images of a young Barrett and custom sneakers with carefully applied Capezio tick soles.
Of course, archives are not the only way to record the history of these companies. The dancers do all the work to maintain and pass on their embodied understanding of their movement practices.
“We are dance historians,” said Sheila Walker Wilkins of her work at Najwa, though the same could be said of many of the companies in the Legacy Project. “We preserve dance styles that reflect our heritage and traditions.”
“But to add,” she continued, “our traditions are carried on as a group of people.” Bringing together such a wide variety of companies, practitioners of different techniques at different stages of their artistic careers, the Legacy Project offers a vision of black dance as a category whose boundaries refuse to remain static.
In addition to bringing other genres into conversation, the Era Footwork Crew has included footwork, the fast-paced technique developed in Chicago, in the Legacy Project this year. Like Barrett, members of the Era collective expressed their excitement at the opportunity to collaborate with artists they consider mentors. But they are also aware of the ways that the inclusion of footwork in the Legacy Project can push the older companies in new directions.
The co-founder of the Era Footwork Crew, Jamal Oliver, who goes by the name of Litebulb, said that each company brings its own knowledge base to the group, and that this solidarity is part of what makes the Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project effective.
“It’s a spinning circle: we need the OGs and the OGs need us, and we need the youth younger than us to make it all work. We all have advantages that we can give each other – that’s how you stay ahead.”