Ntozake Shange – On Clark Center
I’ll never forget a seemingly ordinary day, when my new found friend, Bernadine Jennings, suggested I come with her to dance class at Clark Center. And I said, “Well, I don’t know. You know I haven’t danced in a year and so I’m not sure I need to go to a new place”. And she said, “This is not a new place. This is a place that will prepare you for all of the places you’ll ever be.” And I said, “Well, how can that be?” And she said, ‘Oh, you have to come with me.”
So she took me on the train to the 8th Avenue train and we got off at 50th Street and we went up into this building. and low and behold, there were all of these sweating women. I had never seen so many dance-sweating women in my life. And I looked through a door and saw a whole class of people in exact unison, doing these marvelous turning jumps and I said to Bernadine, “Oh, I can’t do that”, and she said “Maybe you can’t do it now but you will be able to do it.” And I said, “Well, I can’t take this class, it’s too hard.” And she said, “There are beginning classes”. I said, “Okay, I’ll take a beginners class. So I went with her the next day to take Thelma Hill’s class. Little did I know that it was Thelma Hill’s class for beginners. Well, what did I find out? That I was before the beginners. I was the person who was antediluvian, compared to the dancers in the beginning class plus, I couldn’t find my balance in the Horton technique so I kept thinking that I was going to fall on my face and break my front teeth. But little did I know that I’d find Thelma Hill to be one of my most revered characters in my life of teachers and I found out that I too, could lean forward with my leg stretched out in attitude and not fall and have a good line between my head and my knee.
Shortly after my first experience at Clark Center, I moved to California and immediately decided to reinvigorate my new found discipline and joy in dance with Raymond Sawyer, Samarie, Sandy Peterson and Ed Mock. I danced with these remarkable choreographers in California for my remaining four years in California.
When I returned to Clark Center in 1974, I discovered, that low and behold, I still had no technique!
I was a good performer but I had no technique. I discovered this by taking Pepsi Bethel’s class in Jazz and beginning again, as always behind. Then, I started again with Thelma Hill I still couldn’t get my knee any higher than I had before, but I was doubly determined this time because I knew that it could be faked or it could be done.
[New York] had changed since going to California as had Clark Center moved to a new building and discovered Pepsi Bethel, Titos Sompa, Loremil Machado and Fred Benjamin. So many different styles of dance, and all so very exciting, all so challenging to different parts of my body yearning to make my body elastic and steel at the same time. But oh, the classes were so different. So different were the rituals of each teacher.
Besides the quiet murmuring of a class about to begin, there was the flapping of the shades in the window and the bright sunlight racing across the floor as we would race later in the hour.
People chose their spaces seemingly according to skill, so that beginners ended up in the back and those more studied in the front, as you were lucky to know later on. As we quietly inched about our spaces we had coveted, we learned who we all were by looking across the room with curious or confident glances. So that I knew that the brown-haired girl was three steps away from me and the blond was three steps in front, or maybe four. If she moved herself another foot she’d be out of my way. And then, as if from nowhere, the class would start. The teacher had not been announced, there had been no gong, there was not a chiming of bell, but class had begun. And the teacher had begun without a word. The steps would just be followed. That’s when I learned that many teachers at Clark Center began their classes with a movement series that everybody already knew except the beginners. So that, we’d be behind from the beginning hoping to catch up and our limbs weren’t even warm yet. We didn’t realize this was the warm-up and we were hardly ready to begin to walk.
And Pepsi Bethel was no exception. His sliding feet led us down many a tried and true vaudevillian combination and quickly moved to modern jazz where our feet could not travel as fast as his limbs could and we were left falling over ourselves as Pepsi gently and blithely swiveled himself from one end of the room to the other. Oh lord, how to catch up; how to keep up and yet he was at least 75 years older than anyone else in the room (which is not true) but was true of a man whose body was that of a 19 year-old and whose mind had digested so many different forms of dance that he was an encyclopedia by himself.
The combinations in Fred Benjamin’s class were so much more intricate; every step had different dynamics only learned by repeated executions, which meant that I had to come to class more regularly. The front line in Fred’s class always looked as if they had just come to do a show. And perform they did. The rest of us may have been in class, but Fred’s front line was in a spectacle. My body, in Fred’s class, came uncharted territory for sexual impetus and reflection that I had never experienced.
“always knew when it was time for Tito Sompa’s class because the drummers would start filing in. All different sorts of drums, different kinds of drums, conga drums, djemba drums, bongo drums, bells, cow bells, bells, every percussion instrument that I could recall from the African Diaspora would start to pile up in the rehearsal hall and then, Titos would stand in front of the drummers, walk towards the class that had assembled in great anticipation and begin some kind of jumping combination to start off with. Maybe not high, just a foot over an ankle but, nonetheless, a jump. And, in time, we’d be leaping at least half way up the walls with our hips swiveling, our bosoms jingling. Titos was a great believer in jumps, leaps and hips and breasts. Going across the floor, we would be leaping and clapping and singing.”
Before the end of class, we were sure we were not only Congolese, but were the best Congolese drummers in the village. Titos’ jumps were complicated because they not only required leaps to height but complicated footwork. So, a leap would come in the middle of a sashay or in the middle of a turn instead of just a flat out leap. At the end of class, Titos would draw us from across the floor towards the drummers and we would pay homage to them.
Where else to be on New Year’s Eve? In a lover’s arms, you say. Or, maybe at a fabulous champagne New Year’s Eve party. No, the place for me was Loremil Machado’s class for the end of the year. It was as important as midnight mass. The class was full to the corners and we were all ready for our athletic, jumping, twirling, kicking, giving much quick knees and feet- Loremil Machado and his panape of drummers. In this Brazilian class, we learned what suave and coquette meant. At the same time that we learned what our bodies were physically capable of in terms of gymnastics and time-challenging footwork.
Across the floor, Loremil challenged us to be more women than we knew we were and to be as precise in movement as we could be. Toward the end of the class he led us again, in front of the drummers, where we paid homage by slapping the floor three times behind Loremil and letting out a huge Ashay. Happy New Year.
Ntozake Shange June 22, 2012 © 2012