I didn’t start off being a dancer but I always loved it.  Growing up in the segregated South of the fifties, the closest thing I saw to dance was the June Taylor Dancers on the Jackie Gleason Show on television.  I was fascinated!  Many years later, in the early seventies, I saw the Alvin Ailey Company for the first time.  I was thrilled—especially by Judith Jamison.  “I want to do that,” I thought.
 

And so, this lil’ educator started making her way up North in pursuit of the marvelous art of dance.  My first stop was Baltimore, Maryland, a short train ride from Washington, D.C. where I danced in the company of the enduring Erika Thimey for audiences of children and adults at the Kennedy Center, the Wolf Trap Center for the Performing Arts and other wonderful places. During the summers, I went to New York where I took ballet classes with Karel Shook at the Dance Theater of Harlem and classes in modern dance with the revolutionary and wonderful Eleo Pomare.  I was hooked!

Finally, I made the leap and moved to New York City in 1973 where I danced and danced and danced!  It was incredible! I studied with Thelma Hill, Fred Benjamin, Shirley Rushing, Harold Pierson, Melissa Hayden, Erik Hawkins, and Nadine Revene—I even took a workshop with the inimitable Judith Jamison!  I was in heaven!

I danced with the companies of Eleo Pomare, Dianne McIntyre, George Faison, in my own duet company, Take Two, with dance partner, Craig Moore, and for two delightful seasons with Opera Ebony.  In addition to performing the choreography of Pomare, McIntyre, and Faison, I also performed the choreography of Diana Ramos, Mickey Davidson, Abdel Salaam, Hope Clark, Frank Ashley, Michael Manswell, and Loris Beckles.  I danced with live musicians including Cecil Taylor, Bob Cunningham, Marion Brown, Mal Waldron, Sun Ra, and Warren Smith.  And something inside me awakened, a voice—a quiet, internal whispering—that spoke to me in the language of my imagination—that became poetry and songs, dances and fables.

I created T’n’T: A Dance Docudrama inspired by the lives of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth.  I created Rainbow Songs: A Letter to My Mother.  And I wrote the book and lyrics to Testify: A Musical Celebration about Love and Commitment that I co-produced at the historic Smalls Paradise in 1981 and which Dr. Barbara Ann Teer and Tunde Samuel produced at the celebrated National Black Theater in Harlem in 1996. 

I was enchanted.  For me, dancing was and is a way of thinking, a way of looking at the world—a way of being that was shared by those of us who were a part of the dance community of those times.  To preserve this history, Aziza—choreographer and founder of Def Dance Jam—brought together 78 choreographers and dancers in January of 2001 to take a photograph with the illustrious dancer/anthropologist, Dr. Katherine Dunham.  I was pleased and honored to be a part of this event. The result is a poster, produced by the Black Choreographers’ Project, entitled “The Great Gathering.” The poster, which includes a brief but informative paragraph on each artist represented, is available at http://www.defdancejam.org/prsRel.htm. It’s wonderful! Everything I do—teaching, speaking, telling my stories, writing—is influenced by and comes out of my artistic roots as a dancer.  Dancing is life for me -- it's the way I think about the world.