Kazu Kumagai: Catalyst of Tap [UPDATE]

Kazu Kumagai
(photo by Leslie Kee)

Kazu Kumagai: Catalyst of Tap

by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

It’s no small matter when a tap expert like Tony Waag, American Tap Dance Foundation’s Artistic and Executive Director, feels comfortable agreeing with The Village Voice who hailed you as “the Gregory Hines of Japan.”

“Kazu Kumagai is not just a great tap dancer,” Waag says. “He is also a very kind, conscientious and devoted advocate for tap dance and knows how important the art form is internationally.”

Kumagai--who lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn with his wife Mari, a singer, and his four-year old daughter--happens to be one of my favorite dancers of any kind. After last year’s Tap City festival, where he appeared in Waag’s popular Tap Internationals evening at Symphony Space, I noted that Kumagai “channels dissonance and passion, taking tap to a stormy place beyond the familiar sunshine,” and I included that solo performance, Journey to the Soundscape, in my list of “most memorable arts experiences of 2013” (InfiniteBody, December 24, 2013).

Born and raised with his older sister in Sendai–a moderate-sized coastal town, a little less than 190 miles north of Tokyo–Kumagai took an early interest in the arts. His parents owned what was then a rarity in Japan–a coffee shop, serving a Japanese clientele–and he played there, as a youngster, around what he calls “unusual people.” These were mainly artists, poets and musicians. But, then again, his parents were also, he says, “kind of unusual.”

“My father was the first person who started roasting coffee in Sendai, a pioneer in the café business, about 40 years ago.”

Kumagai saw his first film footage of tap dancers thanks to jazz musicians he met at the café. He started tap dancing himself at 15 but, he says, didn't have a session with a live musician until he came to New York at age 19.

Of all the arts, what drew him to dance?

“I think I liked physical movement. When I was 5 or 6, I saw Michael Jackson on TV, and that had a great impact on me. I loved how he expressed himself–not just singing but the whole energy. When he got the Grammy, he mentioned the great dancers that he was influenced by--Fred Astaire and Sammy Davis, Jr., and that was a first, small introduction for me. I wanted to tap, but I couldn’t find any tap class in my hometown. My mother called several schools, but there was no tap class. I kind of gave up.

“Then I started doing some martial arts and soccer, football. I was serious about those things. But when I became 15, I saw Gregory Hines's movie, Tap, on TV.

“I carried my passion for tap dancing since I was little and started looking again and finally found one school that included tap. It was impressive. Every student was older–maybe thirties or forties, most of them women.

“I was fortunate to meet a good teacher, in his twenties, who had studied in Tokyo and come back to Sendai. He also loved the style of Gregory Hines, but he couldn’t teach that style because no one wanted to do it at that time.”

Theatrical tap, such as we would see on Broadway, was more readily accepted.

“Students went for exercise but were not really serious about it. I was really serious from the beginning, and he saw that. We became close. I went there all the time, even when I had regular school. I just went to dance school!”

A new home

“My hometown was like.... Have you seen the movie Billy Elliott? A man was supposed to be a banker. Or you have to go to university. Now it’s looser. But when I was growing up, you had to have a certain image. Tokyo was more open, but Sendai was more suburban with an intense social pressure within neighborhoods. My sister went through a tougher time, being compared with other kids. But, somehow, I grew up more open. I was kind of lucky.

“I was in a strict school. One time I was in a meeting with my teacher, and I wrote which school I wanted to attend, and I wrote tap dancing as my hobby. The teacher really couldn’t understand what I was doing. ‘You’re not supposed to dance; you’re supposed to study.’”

The teacher gave him an ultimatum: quit dance or quit school. But then he asked him to dance “right now.” Kumagai did as he was told.

“He looked impressed, but he was a stubborn man. ‘You have to go to college, but maybe you can dance as a hobby because you can’t make a living as a dancer.”

Kumagai lacked role models for his dream. But through his determination, he would go on to serve as a role model for many up-and-coming dancers in Japan. The key? A decision to come to New York despite lack of any connections to the dance world here or much information about how he could get hooked up. He discussed the matter with his parents and told them that he felt ready to search for what he needed.

Acknowledging his love of tap, Kumagai's parents knew that Sendai could not support his goals. “I told them, ‘I’m going to college in the states.’”

He started with learning English in a language school on Long Island, not quite the New York City of his imagining. “Totally different from what I expected,” he says, laughing.

Moving into the city, then, and beginning studies at New York University, he started looking around for a tap school, finding ads for Steps and Broadway Dance Center, still not exactly what he had in mind. Little by little, he began to find his way.

“Charles Goddertz and Barbara Duffy showed me rhythm tap. I met Buster Brown--a legend in the field--when I was hanging out with other tap dancers in a restaurant, and we talked." At the time, Brown was launching his Sunday night tap jam at Swing 46, a jazz and supper club on Manhattan's West 46th Street.

"Gradually, I started finding the community," he says. "I went to National Tap Day and met Peg Leg Bates," who had been a celebrated tap dancer and Catskills resort owner. "I met Savion [Glover] on the street when Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk was running.  1996 was a great year. I was very lucky, a lot of things started to happen, an era of the rise of a new style of tap.

"Gregory Hines was doing a workshop, and I studied with him. I had met him at Fazil’s, a home for tap dancing, and he invited me to practice with him. That was amazing, and we became close. It was an adventure, discovering something new every day. We didn’t have cellphones or Internet back then, but it was much better!”

Young Kumagai's immersion in the New York scene did not permit time for much homesickness. He does remember crying for hours upon leaving Japan but, as soon as he landed in our city, he was ready for a new life. And, it seems, that new life was ready for him.

Kazu Kumagai
(photo courtesy of Kaz Tap Studio)

“There was a workshop called Funk University, a workshop for new dancers for Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk. Ted Levy was teaching, and he was amazing. It was basically for African American dancers because it was their history. But I went there because,” he says, laughing, “I didn’t know!”

“They were young African American dancers, but Ted saw me and gave me an opportunity to study. I started working with them at Fazil’s for three months, every day for seven hours, in the summer without any air-conditioning. But it was great education because it was so different from other schools. He showed not only steps but also history and culture. He spent so much time talking about how tap dancers carry years of struggle, and he sometimes cried because of the prejudice and the painful history.

“That’s when I discovered the meaning of the tap dancer. They danced from their own roots, and I am not from here. I felt a little distant, a little different, but they treated me the same, as a brother. Ted called me Sole Brother. S-O-L-E!"

Although one of the show's producers felt it wasn't appropriate for Kumagai to be in the school and asked him to leave, Levy invited him to continue taking classes.

Kazu Kumagai
(photo courtesy of Kaz Tap Studio)

"Kazu is an amazing musician," says Derick K. Grant, famed tap artist and one of Kumagai's early teachers in New York. "He tends to work twice as hard to be accepted and taken seriously, and it has paid off. He learned as much about us--African Americans--as a people as he did about us as dancers, and that gave him a level of respect for our people and our journey that is unique."

In return, Kumagai was so warmly accepted by Grant and his colleagues that they bestowed a "Black" nickname upon him: Kenyon.

Kumagai, Grant says, took what he learned back to Japan and offered his homeland's dance students an alternative based in authenticity.

"Following his return to Japan in 2002, we started to get an influx of students coming from there who were well prepared and already sound in their foundation." Grant says. "There were a lot of them, which led me to believe that he was inspiring many. That was great for us in tap. He was also very gracious in pointing students in our direction. I, and others like myself, had a great hand in the development of tap dance in Japan--something we are very proud of. Today, they are some of the strongest, most technically sound dancers in the world."

The artist who had persevered despite the lack of local role models not only became a brilliant one for his compatriots; he opened a pathway for them to get the kind of excellent training he had found in the US. Grant acknowledges that Kumagai's "new" style, while exciting the youth of Japan, put him at odds with established teachers there still promoting a lightweight, musical theater approach to the art.

Hank Smith, a tap performer-choreographer and educator, remembers Kumagai from the late 1990s as one of a number of Japanese dancers coming to Brown's jam at Swing 46. Something shifted, though, during the subsequent time Kumagai spent back home in Japan.

"I could tell he'd really developed, not only as a dancer but as a person," Smith recalls. "There was a maturity in his presence. Kazu just seems to be a committed artist and human being who uses his gifts to try and make a difference."

"Tap can be more than just hitting the wood as loud or as fast as possible," Smith says, citing Kumagai's solo work last year in Journey to the Soundscape, an intense, expressive piece that embodied his feelings for his hometown and the Tohoku region where, in March 2011, an earthquake and tsunami caused devastation and massive loss of life.

Devastation in Sendai, Japan, March 2011
Photo: Reuters/Yumiori

When Michelle Dorrance--Bessie Award winning tap artist who also won a 2014 Alpert Award in the Arts--recently danced with Kumagai in Japan, he took her to visit Sendai. It was his way to share with a friend what he had seen and experienced at the time of Japan's disaster.

"It was important for me to share this feeling with her. I hope she will talk to other people about it. My goal is to make a bridge from New York to Japan, to Tokyo and Sendai. People are still suffering in Tohoku district, and I want more people abroad to know this fact."

His parents stayed on in Sendai during the crisis and, like many people who have made a home in a risky environment, want to remain there. Luckily, they live in Sendai's inner city, away from the heavily impacted coast, although they did have to go several months without gas. Another ongoing concern for the region and nation--the only country that has ever suffered the devastation of atomic bombing--is radiation leakage from damaged nuclear power plants.

"And still they want to keep the nuclear plants," he says. "It's hard to understand."

Kumagai, present in New York during our own crisis, 9/11, draws a saddening comparison between Japan and the US, noting that disasters can swiftly turn people and their governments away from the ideals of peace. Japan's historic non-nuclear weapons policy, imposed by the US after World War II, could end soon, he says, as tensions grow between the nation and its regional rivals in Asia. There isn't yet enough of a vocal, coherent movement to divert Japan's conservative government from a proactive buildup of nuclear arms.

Kumagai, as his career unfolds, chooses to remain mindful of his homeland and hometown. "A lot changed [for me] after March 2011," he says. "What happened in Sendai, it has become myself. As an artist, everything I do becomes dedicated to my hometown--also dedicated to the [tap] masters. These two things are now the most important to me, and I want to keep doing positive things."

The challenges of coming home

After Kumagai's initial, life-opening training in New York, the return in 2002 to Japan's limited scene did not flow easily.

"When I went back, not much was happening in the tap community. However, a conflict between old and new was happening both in the tap community and in Japan in general. They didn’t know what tap really was. It was difficult to readjust. There was no place to practice."

"I had to start from the beginning. I had a part-time job and did street performances. There were some good small jazz clubs, and I started dancing there, a small community in Tokyo where musicians get together. It’s growing in popularity. People hear a rumor and come to see us. At first, many artists were interested in tap: musicians, DJs who liked to have tap dance at their parties or in their performances."

Japan's great jazz trumpeter Terumasa Hino, who had learned tap from his musician/dancer father, caught one of Kumagai's performances and invited him to appear in his shows.

"He saw that, in the past, most Japanese tap dancers couldn’t work with jazz musicians because the style was different. However, he felt a connection with me and knew that jazz musicians and tap dancers share a culture. We toured together in 2004 and 2005."

The exposure from touring with a star of Hino's magnitude drew attention and offers from others in Japan’s music industry.

“I began dancing everywhere–from small hip-hop clubs to concert halls," says Kumagai. "I collaborated with many different kinds of artists.”

A growing appreciation for the intricacies of music affected how Kumagai saw himself as an artist.

"Jimmy Slyde, Buster Brown, Savion Glover, Dianne Walker, they all have their own sound," he says. "I was inspired by their sound, not so much by the visual. Image is important, but always I connect to the sound. For me, that is the greatness of this art form.

"The first time I saw Gregory in Tap, dancing in the jail, he danced for himself. Not so much for performance. And that particular scene still influences me a lot.

"I've heard criticism that the way Gregory danced is not really beautiful, but to me, it’s so beautiful. Jazz musicians, when they play, it’s beautiful. Same as athletes like Michael Jordan. They don’t try to look nice. It’s not about their looks. They devote themselves to their art, and that’s a beautiful thing. I don’t try to impress with how I look. What I love about tap is that a lot of masters can show what’s inside through their dance.

"Tap is a language. When I go to Europe, I don’t speak to the audience, but they can understand. When I went to Senegal, we could communicate."

How to stay serene amid the busyness of business

"I tour a lot...Japan, Singapore. This month, I’m going to Milan. When I’m in Japan, I go to my studio [KAZ Tap Studio] everyday and practice and teach classes. Here in New York, I go to American Tap Dance Center and practice. But before I do, I take my daughter to school, and that becomes my ritual–an everyday morning walk with her. It gives me a peaceful moment. So many things I can learn from my daughter.

"She dances a lot. She was in my most recent performance. The last night (of a three-night performance), I wanted her to be on stage somehow, because I was showing my life. I just wanted her to walk around, but she started dancing!" Kumagai chuckles at the memory. "It was real nice!"

Perhaps she'll join in again when he finally manifests his next big dream, an evening-length show for New York, his first--to which I say:

Right on, S-O-L-E brother! It's time!

SPECIAL UPDATE

I have just received the following announcement from Traci Mann, Co-Chair of The New York Committee to Celebrate National Tap Dance Day:

The New York Committee to Celebrate National Tap Dance Day is proud to Honor Kazu for his talent and his contribution to the health and welfare of his tap community in Japan. Much like the late great Bill Bojangles Robinson, Kazu is helping people with his talent. He is helping them to over come the Fukashima Disaster with his tap dancing and teaching. I can't think of a more noble thing to do on his part and we hope that he gets the recognition he needs as it will up build what he has accomplished and continues to work at. 

Tap Extravaganza 

Norman Thomas Auditorium

Park Avenue

New York City

May 24th, 2014

7 pm - 9 pm

BIO

Kazu Kumagai was born in Sendai City, Japan. He started tap dancing at the age of 15 and came to NY at the age of 19. He trained in FUNK UNIVERSITY, the training workshop for the big hit Broadway musical Bring in da' Noise, Bring in 'da Funk. He studied with Ted Levy, Buster Brown, Gregory Hines, Barbara Duffy, and Derick K. Grant.

Since then, he has performed in many New York City downtown clubs, such as The Knitting Factory, Tonic, and the Puppet Jazz Club.

From 2002 to 2010, he performed in Tony Waag’s Tap City, the New York City Tap Festival nine times and was dubbed by The Village Voice as the "Japanese Gregory Hines." In 2006, he was selected as one of Dance Magazine's "25 to Watch."

After Kaz went back to Japan in 2002, he made numerous solo appearances all over the country and collaborated with many artists and musicians, and appeared in several television commercials, such as SONY CYBERSHOT. He also performed in a MIHARAYASUHIRO fashion show in Milan, Italy, where he succeeded in opening up a new field of the arts. In 2008, he opened his first tap dance studio--KAZ TAP STUDIO--in Japan, and has subsequently taught throughout Japan including in his hometown of Sendai City, site of severe damage in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

Kaz dedicates his passion and love for the art of tap dance to the great masters such as his mentor Buster Brown, Jimmy Slyde, Gregory Hines and others, as well as to the people of Sendai and the Tohoku region where his family and friends live.

Visit Kazu Kumagai's Web site here.

iele paloumpis: Craft of living, healing, making

iele paloumpis
(photo by Tei Blow)

iele paloumpis: The Craft of self and body

by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

[Editor's note: As a matter of respect, Dancer's Turn's style calls for the initial use of an artist's full name with subsequent references using the surname only. iele paloumpis, as a survivor of domestic abuse, notes that, "self-naming has been an important part of my journey, as a survivor and as a trans person." On their request, iele paloumpis will be referred to by their full name instead of the surname, "paloumpis," as a compromise between iele paloumpis and Dancer's Turn that will respect both the artist and the publication's style.]

iele paloumpis is many things–among them, a witch like me.

I knew I’d want to talk to iele paloumpis–a dance artist identifying as trans/queer–when I heard that their workshop in neopagan ritual, Witchcraft: a corporeal practice, would be hosted by New York Live Arts as part of its Shared Practice series this spring. I missed my chance to attend but wanted to hear all about it.

“We created a bodily circle and consumed salt and sage, taking this into our bodies to create that safer, sacred space together,” iele paloumpis told me. “Instead of burning herbs, we made herbal oil infusions for bodily healing.

“I base it on the lunar calendar. What’s happening with the moon, what sign it’s in, what’s happening with the planets astrologically guide what sort of ritual we will do and what sort of meditations we will have–if it’s about welcoming things and bringing energy into our bodies, or if it’s about expelling energy outward in different areas of our lives. The class is ever-evolving. That keeps it exciting for me.

“During the Shared Practice, Mercury was in retrograde, and the Moon was between Taurus and Gemini, void of course. A lot of witches believe, ‘Don’t do anything during Void of Course! And don’t do anything during Mercury in retrograde!’ But Mercury in retrograde--those interruptions that we experience--are telling us to slow down, telling us to go back to self-reflection and think about past experiences, our histories. Void of Course, similarly, is good for meditation, therapeutic things, in between worlds.

“We did a walking/moving improvisational meditation starting at one side of the room which we said was ‘Birth.’ When you got to the other side of the room, you were in the present moment. You were thinking about–and moving–your history and bringing it into the present.”

iele paloumpis in improv
(photo by JJ Tiziou)

For better or worse, our histories continuously permeate our present realities. iele paloumpis lives with a history that both challenges and stimulates the artist, educator and advocate they have become.

“When I was four,” they say, “I got into a major accident: a shopping cart fell on my leg, breaking my femur and cracking a growth plate in my hip–a spiral fracture, one of the worst fractures.”

The child should not have been moved, but a worried adult, not waiting for medical assistance, picked iele paloumpis up and ran through the store.

“The bone twisted, facing the wrong way, and there was danger of my leg never growing again,” says the dancer. “They had to fly in a special doctor who could set baby bones, and he did a good job. I was in a body cast for four months, from the middle of my chest, over both hips and then down to the tips of my toes. I don’t remember a lot from that time, but it was one of my first memories of a lot of pain.”

During their convalescence in the cast, their muscles atrophied. When the cast came off, they would need physical therapy to regain strength. On advice from their doctor, their mother enrolled them in dance classes–mostly tap with the Chicago Human Rhythm Project--and did volunteer work at the studio to defray the cost of attendance.

iele paloumpis continued to enjoy dance, never once considering it as a potential profession. Their future choice of a college, though, would tip them in that direction when, with a primary interest in literature and writing, they selected Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia.

*****

The young iele paloumpis had grown up just outside of Chicago in difficult circumstances, raised by a mother who suffered epileptic seizures and a conservative, Greek Orthodox father who was frequently abusive.

“My parents finally divorced when I was in high school," iele paloumpis recalled. "But at the time, there was this horrific law: if you’re going through a divorce, the first person who leaves the household gives up their rights to whatever monetary gains they would have gotten from the household. Since my family didn’t have a lot of money, paying lawyers fees almost caused the house to go up for foreclosure. Neither of my parents could afford to leave the house. It escalated things, and it got really violent.”

Their mother had placed some of the settlement funds from iele paloumpis’s accident in a CD. To help iele paloumpis escape the unsafe household, their mother advised taking half of that money to buy a car to live in. iele paloumpis used the remainder for food and gas for getting to school and work. Friends sometimes allowed the youngster to couch-hop, a chancy situation. Finally, the mother of a fellow dance student, a devout Baptist from an affluent family, opened up her home. She also guided them through the process of applying to colleges, taking advantage of resources available to students unable to depend upon parents for support. iele paloumpis would be the first in their family to attend college.

At the time, iele paloumpis’s mother–with her epilepsy advancing to a dangerous state, with numerous seizures per day--faced emergency, life-saving brain surgery. Within days after the surgery, iele paloumpis headed to Virginia and college with the gift of a Bible and a plane ticket likely paid for by their friend's mother.

Thanks to Donna Faye Burchfield, Hollins University had launched its first baccalaureate and graduate programs in dance in collaboration with the world-renowned American Dance Festival where Burchfield also served as dean. At Hollins, iele paloumpis was surrounded by exciting up-and-coming dance artists.

It didn’t take long for dance to work its magic. iele paloumpis attended a dance festival at Hollins where, oddly and wonderfully, things didn’t quite go as planned.

“A big windstorm cut the electrical power right before the show was supposed to start. No one could see anything. Donna Faye rallied everyone around. They got candles, they got flashlights, they got everything they could and put them on the stage. Chris Lancaster, the accompanist, got out his cello, and Donna Faye called forth Isabel Lewis and all these other people to improvise–the most amazing thing I had ever seen. There was spoken word poetry, too. And then, at this pinnacle moment, the lights came back on–and they did the show!

“I was like, ‘I have to know what this is!’ I had never experienced dance like that in my life!”

So iele paloumpis approached Burchfield. Although their training had been very different from the offerings at Hollins, they started taking dance classes and ended up with with a double major in writing and dance.

photo by Adrien Weibgen

At Hollins, a women’s college, iele paloumpis also began to question gender identity.

“I was very much identifying as a woman--and I still wholeheartedly identify as a feminist, even though I don’t identify solely as a woman now. But there was always something that didn’t resonate for me around the language about being a woman. It didn’t quite feel right. And I don't mean oppressive/homogenizing language that is often used to describe women. No one identifies with that!

"Moving away from conceptualizing myself as solely female has been a complicated journey, but there's something about how I related to my own body. It was visceral and nonverbal, and so it’s hard to put words to.

“There are many different ways to identify as trans. Some people identify within the binary, being assigned a certain gender and then crossing over–male to female, female to male--to better reflect their gender identity. Personally, a binary expression of gender is not how I identify. I feel that there are masculine and feminine forces within my body, and I think to a certain extent that’s true for everyone, but it’s also how I relate to my anatomy. No one knows my body better than I do, just as no one knows your body better than you do, and so on. Ultimately, it's about self-determination and supporting each other within that.

“Graduating from Hollins and moving to Philadelphia--which has a very strong transgender/genderqueer community--was the first time that I was exposed to trans-ness in terms of fluidity of gender, more expansiveness, which was what I identified with and how I came into my own gender identity.”

Using the pronoun “they”–instead of “she” or “he”--came to express that breadth, depth and fluidity of gender.

Defining self for self, and throwing off oppression, had long since led iele paloumpis away from their father's Greek Orthodox religion, as well as the born-again Christianity of their friend's Baptist household. And yet, the symbolic, ornate ceremonies of the Orthodox tradition seem to have foreshadowed the rituals they create in both witchcraft and dance. Both pursuits represent a deep call to healing from trauma.

“It came back to healing, the layers of getting in touch with my body through dance with my history of abuse and violence, and being around women who had experienced violence, too. That was a very strong conversation happening at Hollins, and feminism was a part of that. I was thinking about my body and all bodies in a way that’s complex and about things not immediately visible.

“The idea of invisible disabilities is an odd thing. It’s invisible some of the time...until it’s not. My mother could often walk about the world, and no one would know that she had epilepsy until she was seizing or there was some other indicator. That, and the ableism that she experienced and that was constantly causing her to be between jobs, was always very present in my mind.

“Very young, I innately had the sense of injustice around my family’s class background and how that related to my mother’s disability and the domestic violence, and how that connected to our bodies. As I got older, I became more and more politicized around disability justice, connected to my mother’s struggle.”

This concern for justice extends to iele paloumpis’s work as an educator for the Arts and Literacy Program of the Coalition for Hispanic Family Services, providing consistency and safe space for young people from low-income families.

*****

“Within the past two years, I’ve been experiencing various physical ailments that have not been able to be diagnosed by doctors until recently," iele paloumpis says. "I’ve been navigating those things in my own body. I have an impairment that causes double vision.”

A cranial nerve lesion causes the double vision, a fairly rare condition that falls outside the expertise of most ophthalmologists and neurologists. They now consult with neuro-ophthalmologists specializing in double vision. Corrective lenses help somewhat; physical therapy, so far, has not been as effective as it might be in children with the disorder.

“The condition is very disorienting and causes a lot of dizziness. It’s weird: Your body adjusts over time; your body wants to orient itself. I realized I was compensating in all these different ways: I’m much more of an auditory learner now than a visual learner. Then it was, like, ‘Oh, I haven’t been reading for like a year.’  I can pick out words here and there, but I can’t read paragraphs. Since writing has always influenced my dancemaking, that has been difficult. There’s audio software that can read things aloud and magnification on my computer, but they’re imperfect programs for sure, and it restricts me to only reading things online.”

They avoid the typical bestseller audio books: “I don’t need more of that in my brain!”

Motion heightens their dizziness and queasiness.

“When I’m moving and dancing, it’s way too much, and that inhibited me to large degree when I had this wonderful studio residence at New York Live Arts over the past year. A lot of it was working with a sense of limitation and a feeling of not being able to trust my body in the way that I had once known it.

“At the same time, I was thinking about how to integrate this new thing that’s happening in my body–and not in a way steeped in internalized ableism. This is my body. This is what I’m going through right now. How can I embrace that? How can I integrate that into my dancing and my life?"

Shadows of iele paloumpis at left and Jung-Eun Kim (aka J.E. Kim) at right
in Keening at New York Live Arts
(photo by Joanna Groom)

“Last year, as I was working with J.E. Kim and Joanna Groom, my roommate at the time, I started thinking about orientation through sound," iele paloumpis said. "I found singing to be really calming. Joanna taught us how to use our voices, and it became a kind of meditation and spiritual practice to sing together. There’s subtle movement–your vocal cords, your breath–but not the topsy-turvy feeling that I get when I’m doing large movements.

“I had this deep desire to map out the space. I didn’t feel that I could see it anymore, that I could feel it anymore. Part of J.E.’s role was her ability to do that. The locomotion and directionality of her movement was about outlining the perimeter of the room. At New York Live Arts, although it was still very frontal–and part of that was for me to not be further disoriented--we turned the orientation so that, for the audience, it was from a corner vantage point.”

The disorientation, therefore, was placed on the viewers.

“For me, I was feeling the dizziness within my body, going there, doing some deep work around violence."

Three scenes from my mother keening
(photo courtesy of Arts and Literacy)

This season, iele paloumpis will be further developing their work through a Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX) Space Grant. So, it’s onward, no matter what.

“The queasiness has made me not want to dance, but what my doctor has given me, recently, is the ability to patch one of my eyes, allowing for singular vision. It messes with depth perception, and I have no peripheral vision. I have to rely more on sound or craning my neck. I’ve been trying that out, and it’s actually been very freeing. I’m able to dance in ways that make my body feel good again. It’s a new form of navigation–both familiar and new–which is exciting!”

For a dance artist often improvising with others, could this be a challenge?

“I was very visual before in my understanding of the world around me. So that includes the way in which I watch work, how I come to understand it. I’ve been putting myself in my work a lot more recently because, despite all the physical difficulties, it has become less about watching the work and more about the experiencing of it. It’s been important for me to be inside of it. I know less about what it looks like but maybe more about what it feels like. For me, that’s very linked to improvisation.”

*****

iele paloumpis’s background as a survivor of adversity also guides how they view
the struggles faced by dance and dancers in an often uncomprehending and dismissive society.

“The only place I want to be is New York City because I have so many amazing people here, part of our dance community, that are deep friends. When the money goes away, it’s not like when I was in Chicago, when I’m not going to have a place to go. There are couches that I can still crash on here. When I first moved here, I wasn’t able to make the rent, and I was facing eviction and didn’t have the safety net. I know a lot of dancers who are on food stamps in order to survive and make their work, but I don’t know a lot who have contended with potential eviction and homelessness. So it’s hard to have a conversation with dancers around poverty."

"Within the last year, my class status has shifted quite a lot," iele paloumpis says. "I went from housing court to moving around a lot, collecting unemployment then luckily getting a steady teaching job--with health insurance!--and newly living with my partner and their sister who are from an upper-middle class background. It's very surreal. I'm coming to understand the idea of a 'safety net' in my chosen family.

"But, at the same time, my mom just got another pink slip while her current husband is laid up due to a work-related injury. I hope to one day be in a place where I can be her safety net. My mom loves dance, but she's never seen me perform in my adult life because travel costs are too high. We only see each other every three years or so."

Life experiences such as this make it impossible for this artist to be oblivious of social realities outside of the world of dance.

“For me, I think it’s important to think about accessibility, and I think that our dance community can keep itself very insular–you know, like the same people going to all the shows. The language we use is often very academic and sometimes inaccessible to others.

“We often will complain, ‘Why isn’t dance being seen? Why isn’t it considered important?’  Part of that is our own cycle of not branching out further, not thinking about accessibility.”

In fact, iele paloumpis says, the availability of dance as a healing and spiritual force becomes limited to the few. That’s one reason they remain dedicated to their work as an educator in underserved communities.

“I want to extend that to others. Those of us who do have safety nets, let’s do more and extend that conversation outward: What it means to be broke for a while because you’re not getting income as opposed to what it means to be in poverty. Of course, I think that, for most dancers, there isn’t a lack of interest in doing that. There’s a feeling of being stuck in the how of it because of a general lack of resources. But, as a community, we could work harder to extend outward.

“I think people are worried about ‘simplifying’ dance, because we’ve really worked to make it this thing that’s recognized in an academic setting. There’s this real drive to not let go of dance being an intellectual pursuit. But we’ve gone too far in that direction.”

*****

Witches learn early that words have limitations, but the right words-- combined with imagery, gesture and other sensory phenomena--can empower. By claiming the word “witchcraft”–which, they admit, is not taken seriously by a lot of people, iele paloumpis also lays claim to a history and feminist analysis of the oppression of women and pagan healers under patriarchal religion.

A rebellious thirteen-year-old iele paloumpis--influenced by their mother’s interest in witchcraft and psychic dreams, as well as by an idolized cousin, who was a survivor and healer–began to explore neopaganism. When iele paloumpis’s mother slipped a Tarot deck–the teenager’s first–into an Easter gift basket, their father grew angry.

“Him hating it made me love them all the more. It was a special gift that allowed for that sense of healing that I was needing. I still have that deck; it’s the only one I use."

Years later, while iele paloumpis was studying at Hollins, their cousin died from a drug overdose. Sara, who was more like an older sister to iele paloumpis, had struggled with addiction throughout the latter part of her life.

"Sara's body was found in a dumpster, and the coroner told our family that she would have likely lived had she been taken to the hospital. There was no further investigation into Sara's case. She and whoever disposed of her body were just chalked up as 'junkies.' And my world shattered. It is still incomprehensible to me--these acts of violence and people's indifference to suffering."

iele paloumpis found comfort in re-connecting to Tarot as a spiritual practice, learning what they could through reading, the Internet and just “acts of doing.”

“Doing ritual, more and more, gave me deeper knowledge, intuitive knowledge. It allowed me to feel connected to Sara and my ancestors. It's been life-saving in terms of my own emotional and physical well-being. Only recently have I desired to have more community around and to share these things. Within the trauma and physical impairments that I’ve been dealing with, I’ve felt the need to have healing connected to my neopagan, earth-based spirituality as a way to be inside my body. I’ve been thinking about it as a somatic practice and that there must be people out there who yearn for that or who already have a connection to it who can help me deepen my practice as well. So, I've been branching out more.

“It’s only very recently that I’ve been allowing this into my work in an intentional way--though it might have bled in before--based on the disability that I’ve been experiencing, as a way to orient myself and be inside my body. Joanna is open to doing ritual with me as part of our rehearsal practice.

“I’m studying herbalism right now, and a lot it is just about taking your time. Sitting and being quiet. I’ve been allowing for time to unfold. The seedlings on the work started at New York Live Arts. Right now, we’re finding movement vocabulary and language around our rituals. Wearing this patch, it’s going to be navigating through a half-sightedness–a new element coming into it.”

History subtly streams through the work-in-progress that iele paloumpis is conjuring and exploring this fall.

“my mother keening locates remnants of invisible trauma. The work explores various ways in which people heal themselves--through ritual and science and the magical nature of it all. Historically, acts of ‘healing’ or ‘fixing’ have often been used as forms of domination and control. my mother keening reflects this duality and complexity. It is a ritual, a celebration, a humiliation, a lament for the dead.

“While Joanna and I are still working with ritual and healing, our current emphasis seems to be shifting. We're now looking at the many ways we try to escape pain but are ultimately still bound to it. And recently we're approaching this heavy subject matter somewhat lightly, in that we hope to make the absurdity of it all visible.

“We're trying to find the levity in always trying so hard, but ultimately always failing. At the same time we are not putting the emphasis on failure alone. There's been enough of that in queer art over that last decade.

“With all sincerity, we are striving for a different outcome--something like euphoria, bliss or hope.

"We'll see!”

*****

See a free showing of a work-in-progress by iele paloumpis with Jen McGinn and Joanna Groom on Monday, November 18, 8pm (on a bill with Germaul Barnes, Amapola Prada and Daniela Tenhamm-Tejos) at Movement Research's at Judson Memorial Church. For information, click here.

iele paloumpis and Joanna Groom will also be showing my mother keening on Friday, December 6 and Saturday, December 7, both at 8pm, at Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX), 421 5th Avenue, Brooklyn. For information, click here.

BIO

iele paloumpis is a trans/queer dance artist, choreographer and teacher. As an educator of 9 years, they've taught movement improvisation and composition, as well as dance theory and critique. iele has also practiced various forms of neo-pagan spirituality since age 13 and recently began sharing this knowledge through workshops as a part of a bodily practice. In 2010, iele was a co-recipient of The Leeway Foundation's Art and Social Change Grant. This past year, they felt fortunate to be a 2012-13 Studio Series Resident Artist at New York Live Arts, as well as work under the mentorship of Trajal Harrell through the Queer Art Mentorship Program. iele is currently a 2013 Fall SpaceGrantee at BAX. At the center of their practice are ideas exploring body politics and artistic self-empowerment.

Joe Bowie, Jr.: The Stuff of Life

Joe Bowie, Jr.: The Stuff of Life

interviewed by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Joe Bowie, Jr.
(photo by Amber Star Merkens)

You can tell people, over and over, how much you love something, but when they see you doing it, they see the love. 

Bread is life, and it's living.

I'm a real bread nerd.

SUBURBAN DAYS

My mother ran one of the cafeterias at Michigan State University, and my father worked for General Motors. He started on the line and worked his way up to white collar, middle management--both very hard workers. I have one sister who is a year older, and we are thick as thieves and always have been.

I was a little bit of a strange and nerdy kid, loved school, loved learning. My parents taught us how to read at a really young age and how to write. I remember it very fondly. Basically having a good time and making good friends, though my sister was probably more social and socially at ease than I was.

I liked things on tv like The Brady Bunch. I liked anything with magic: Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie and My Favorite Martian. I'd play with my friends, and I'd be, like, "You can be Captain America, and I'm going to be a warlock!" I just wanted to be a big ol' witch!

I played tennis a little, but my sister was really athletic--better at baseball and things than I was. I wasn't bad, but they put me on the team because she wouldn't play unless I played.  So I was always like stuck out in right field where no one hit the ball. She was the best first baseman in our city at ten, eleven years old.

Tennis, though, was one of the things that felt natural to me. I liked all the things that felt graceful--ice skating, rollerskating. I watched all the conventionally clichéd gay male sports like ice skating and gymnastics.

In junior high, I was the “Smart Black Kid.” I liked coaching and teaching anyone who needed tutoring. I played volleyball and tennis. I played in our school symphony and our city’s junior symphony, playing the double bass. I was the smallest kid and played the largest instrument.

DOCTOR BOWIE?

When I was a kid, I had all the doctor toys, the doctor kits and a [Milton Bradley] game called Operation. My great grandmother used to call me "Doc," and my family would let me prescribe candy pills for them.

I was always going to be a doctor and loved science. And so it was really strange for me to love to do other things like art. I drew really well and wrote a story that won a citywide award when I was ten. But you kind of put those things away, and my parents were very practical.

For college, I settled on Brown University's pre-med program for African-American students. All summer, studying science--really, really fun.

It was strange to be away from home. You could make all your own decisions as far as what courses to take and whatever. I had always done what was expected. I'd never done anything that would cause anyone pause.  You'd never look at me and say, "He's going to rebel," because I never did.

THEN CAME DANCE

But, in freshman year, I had a friend who dared me to go to a dance class. So, I went. I took the dance class. And boy! It really threw me for a loop because I kind of liked it a lot.

I had danced around a lot when I was a kid, and I watched it on television and loved it. My mother used to take me to shows– Eubie! and Your Arms Too Short to Box with God, Ain't Misbehavin' and The Wiz. But my parents really weren't into the dance thing. There were all those stigmas attached to it.

I never enrolled in a dance class, but the head of the department--wonderful woman, Julie Strandberg, Carolyn Adams's sister--was the teacher, and she would just let me come in and take class. There weren't very many men dancing, and there were a couple of student companies.

I would just go to the studio and dance. My world was turning around. I had gone in with a plan, and now the plan was changing because I was changing, and I didn't know how to express that, how to articulate it to my parents.

My grades dropped for a moment, and I had always done well. It was partially rebelling. I didn't go to class as much as I should have. I had a physics class that I barely went to. (I never liked physics.) I was trying to be me for the first time, and it wasn't easy.

GETTING TO GOOD

Fortunately, Brown was, for an Ivy League school, very liberal and open. They told us early on, in the pre-med program, that you can major or concentrate in something else. You don't have to be a Bio major or Chem major. I could take advantage of a curriculum that allowed me to explore other things I liked.

I started taking literature classes--in particular, poetry. And still did the science thing, sort of on the side, and started dancing more and going to dance class more. I was in both student companies. I spent any time I could in the dance studio. I would even write my papers in the studio. I don't know who I thought I was or what I thought I was, but I was really kind of happy with myself for the first time. It wasn't about an achievement or an award. I really felt good in my skin.

At that time, my parents didn't know people who were actors and dancers in our city. People sang in church, had great voices, but we didn't know of anyone who was in a show. It was really frightening for my parents to spend all this money for me to go to college and then not come out on the other side with a degree and accolades and a profession that everyone expected.

After college, I spent the summer at Jacob's Pillow with The Jazz Project. I worked with Milton Myers and Otis Sallid and Lynn Simonson--all these great people--and then I went to New York and said, "I'm going to see what happens."

So, when I got into Paul's company, I remember my father asking me, "Well, do you have a salary?" And I said, "Yes."

"Do you have health insurance?"

"Yes."

And that's all they needed to know, even thought they didn't know who Paul Taylor was.

My first year with the company, we performed at the University of Michigan, an hour and a half away from my parents' home. So, my parents came. Paul was really great about making sure that, if you were in your home state or your home city, you were in everything. They were going to get to see you. I'm pretty sure I was in every piece in the program. I was, like, 23. Everyone wanted to meet my parents afterwards since they hadn't come to the shows in New York.

My mother, my great aunt and my dad came, and I walked out of the dressing room, and my mother looked at me, and she was crying, and she was shaking me, and she was saying, "You are really, really good. You are really, really good." And my dad was standing there as a proud papa. He wasn't the most emotional... And he was, like "You know, it was great to see you up there. That was really beautiful."  That was the first time they really got it.

You can tell people, over and over, how much you love something, but when they see you do it, they see the love.

And so my mother, she knew I loved school because of my grades. Saying I love dancing was like saying I love the clouds, to my mother. It didn't resonate at all, and then when she saw me up there with full joy in this company. I was the only Black face up on the stage in that company, and they were exceptionally proud. That's where it sort of turned, and they started to understand it.

I left Paul's company to join Mark's company. Whenever Mark saw my parents, he was so sweet to them, and our executive director Nancy Umanoff would always make sure that they had great seats at shows.

WHAT COMES NEXT?

They started to understand a little bit more about what I was doing, and I think that the only worry was, “How much longer can he do it?” With other professions, if you do something for twenty years or whatever, you've got a pension, retirement. For dancers, what comes after is not so evident.

There was a part of me that could have continued to teach for Mark and set pieces for Mark, be assistant director for operas and things--which is really fun for me--but I always loved to bake. It's stereotypical, but I won a Home Economics award when I was 14!

I once baked cupcakes for one of my colleagues in Mark's company because I didn't have time to buy him a gift. I had the Magnolia Bakery Cookbook and made cupcakes. They fought over them like five-year-olds at a birthday party!

I was, like, "Here, John. These are for you. You can do whatever you want with them." He said, "Thank you," and they were gone!

I was, like, Oh!

So, I started baking for people’s birthdays. I would try to figure out what they wanted or their personality. Or I would say, "Give me an ingredient, and I'll make something for you." I'd bring in pecan pies, something like that. Towards the latter part of my dance career, baking was always around.

I went on a tour of the French Culinary Institute for their pastry department. I even sat in on a couple of classes. But I said, "This isn't for now."

It was also $45,000 for six months, and I was, like, "Wooooo! Did anyone tell you what I've been doing for the past twenty years?"

I'd ask some people "What did you do before this?" And they’d say, "I managed a hedge fund, and I decided to bake." And I was, like, "I chose the lucrative career of being a dancer, and now I'm choosing the also-lucrative career of being a baker!" They’d say, "I work for JPMorgan during the day, and I come and take these classes at night." And I was, like, "I don't do that! I work for a dance company!"

In the company, all of my friends were gone or going. I still had a few close people. The toll on your body....  I'd danced for quite a few years, and it's not that they weren't beautiful. But you start to look at it and say, “What can I bring to this? I think you should take me out of this. Choose him. He's dying to do this, and I've done it for so long.”

So we started figuring out, how much I wanted to dance or go on tour. Sometimes, you won't go on tour; you'll stay and do this or go to such-and-such university and do this for the company. That’s what I do. I never had any designs to choreograph, but I am a very good rehearsal director. That's something I love and do well, and I like to coach people and nurture them.

THE MAGIC STAFF OF LIFE

Career Transitions for Dancers held a day at our center, the Mark Morris Dance Center, and showed us that we could apply for $2,000 grants. Knowing how little we make in our careers, they wanted to see if we could try something that we really were interested in without spending our own money and then deciding that it wasn't for us.

I'd found an interesting artisan bread baking class for five days at the French Culinary Institute, but I didn't have $1,500 to spend on it.  So I wrote my essay, sort of connecting baking to dance. I wish I had a copy of it! I was very happy that I had spent a lot of time with words up to that point in my life, because you can make connections--and, in the arts, you are more likely to make connections between things. I remember something about "a safe haven of baking and dance" or something! I don't know. But I submitted it, and that was that.

And then I got a call from Career Transitions: I was one of the finalists and had to interview. I wasn't in New York at the time, but they had just opened up an office in Chicago, and I was setting one of Mark's pieces in Milwaukee. So, they had someone call me and interview me there. Then I got a letter of congratulations. They gave me a check for 1,500 bucks! I think in my account I still have $500 left. You're given the full $2,000, and the rest remains available to be used.

Bread is the staff of life. Almost every culture has bread. It's not like having a cookie, which is a treat. Bread is life, and it's living, and it's different all the time.

I can let red velvet cupcake batter sit there. It will still make a cupcake, but it will ferment and won't be delicious. It won't be beautiful. [Bread making] had an aesthetic point of view, because you would score it and shape it and bake it and it would come out as this beautiful thing with varying colors and textures because they were naturally blooming out of the flour and yeast and the salt and water. The four ingredients were like magic. I'd always wanted magic.

When I put these things together, nothing that comes out of this oven looks like what I put in, and that's why I like baking more than cooking. If you put a chicken in the over, it's going to come out still a chicken. But baking was like alchemy, so fabulous.

That it's a living thing can also be frustrating. You can't control it, and that’s also exciting. In my career, I've worked in situations where it's really stressful, like when you work for Chef Daniel Boulud, and you have bread to get out, and it has to be perfect, because every French chef has an idea of what a baguette looks like–the one from his region or the one from his favorite bakery. And you have to appease all of these people. And if it doesn't come out perfectly, we put it on the family table, or we throw it away, and then there are people who would be dying for this piece of bread that I'm making. There are things like that that are hard for me at times.

It's arduous. You're on your feet. People are, like, "Oh, you've been on your feet all day as a dancer." But I was moving around. When you're in a bakery, you're standing there for nine, sometimes ten hours. It's tiring but not in the same way as moving or jumping around in dance. It's hard on your body. I'm not 22 lifting these things; I'm 49.

The actual bread making itself is pretty much always a joy, even though there's a routine to it. I like that routine. It's like taking class. You might not want to, but you need to go to class to do what you love.

I need to scale out and mix these ingredients to create what I love--a decent bread. That's part of it, not separate from it. People say, "Oh, I don't go to class." Different things work for different people but, for me, it was always that I liked the idea of maintaining so that, when I got on stage, I could worry about other things besides where my body was. The thing about taking a class was, "Let me feel where everything is."

When you get to take a loaf of bread from start to finish, you get to know where everything is moving. You get to check in all the time. I like that aspect of it.

It's endlessly interesting to me that I'm a nerd. I'm a real bread nerd. I watch videos on shaping things. I read about the proteins that make the gluten structure. I can't stop it!

My first job out of school, I was in a research and development kitchen in a little bakery run by Le Pain Quotidien. I always loved to teach; it was a natural fit for me. I got to do production and learn more about bread baking. The woman who ran it, an instructor at French Culinary, we hit it off. I knew how the bakery worked. We were a small team. I worked there for a year, then left because I thought I should go experience other things. And now I'm going back to help develop classes there.

It's a wonderful ride. I learned so much about myself. I learned a lot about patience. I can't control the bread. I can know all the variables around it that will help me have an idea. Dancing was a wonderful thing, but the idea of putting my hands in dough is gorgeous.

You know how it feels when it's not going right--also,when it's not doing what you want it to do. The same thing with your body: "Oh, I used to rebound more quickly after these shows. This didn't hurt as much."

In this profession of baking, you realize the process is so important. It echoes, many times, how you're doing personally--not that I bring my personal life into work, but some days I feel impatient, work is particularly arduous, or days when it feels like I'm as light and airy as the baguette I just baked. What a beautiful crumb!

Although a baguette is not my favorite bread! My favorite bread is called a miche–an old country French bread. Not everyone has an oven. So, you'd bring your bread to a communal oven, and you'd cut it or score it in a way that would mark if for your family. That scoring also helps the bread rise. They would bake them all together, and later you would come and get them.

You can get a lot of volume with miche bread, and they're full of flavor. They're all naturally fermented. I used to make this one with starter wheat and rye, cooked and fermented for a long time, and there are these coffee and caramelly kind of flavors in it. And it's just bread. The crust is dark, and once you let it cool, you taste so many different things. That is my favorite bread to eat and to make.

BAKING OFF-DUTY?

Do I bake off-duty? I do! I'm that crazy guy! My boyfriend always says, “I can't believe that, on your days off, you're baking!”

In the past maybe three and a half months, I've been making more sweets, but when I was baking more bread, I would bake sweets at home--and sometimes bread, but mostly cookies and cakes and stuff like that.

I have beer and cheese bread that people tend to like, and also I would make challah for Fridays, things like that. I love to bake at home.

I can usually tell when it's a job that I'm not loving, I don't bake at home. It's funny, when I'm happy at work and feel great about what I'm doing there. I tend to bake all the time. When I feel blocked in some way, I don't bake as much at home, and it feels like a chore. But when everything is sort of aligning, I'll bake all the time. I'll bake until the ingredients go away. No more eggs. No more chocolate. No more flour. I will.

OKAY, BUT THE PARENTS: WHAT DO THEY SAY?

I think they're okay with it. With this, at least. My mother bakes. My grandmother, great grandmother--incredible cooks! My mom is from South Carolina; my dad is from Mississippi. In South Carolina, where we would spend our summers, I mean, they would throw down! And they didn't have a lot of money. But the food...!

Baking, my mother kind of gets it. "Hey, you said you were going to send me that recipe." Or, I'd go home, and I'd get a list of things I'm supposed to make: "I want a red velvet cake, and your aunt wants one."

I remember when I was dancing and, at one point, my mother was, like, "Show me what you do." And so I taught her a little ballet barre. She was so sweet about it.

She really doesn't bake bread, but she knows that I also bake other things. So we have more to talk about in that way. And if I'm ever feeling down and blue--and I'm not necessarily a blue person--but if I get a bit worked up, she'll say, "Why don't you go bake something?"

They wouldn't have been happy if I had gone to culinary school out of high school: College was where I was going. But now they like it because they get to eat it in the same way that they had the joy of watching their son up on stage and being proud of him, which is beautiful. My dad loves to be the center of attention. I remember walking into a restaurant after a performance in Ann Arbor, and they applauded me, and my dad started bowing like it was for him. He takes pride in his kids.

I don't get to see them as often as I would like. It's more difficult with a baking career. When you're dancing, you have layoffs. With baking, it's pretty much all the time. You may have some vacation. My parents, though, have been great supporters. My sister is my biggest support in everything I do. She is my biggest fan in everything, and I am hers as well. We adore each other.

BONUS!

Here's my chocolate-chip cookie recipe. My friends and family love them. You'll need a small scale to make them; we rarely use volumetric measurements in the bakery.

Flour  639g
Baking soda  5g
Salt  7g
Butter (room temp)  340g
Brown sugar  569g
Eggs 125g
Vanilla extract  18g
Chocolate (semi-sweet or bittersweet)  551g, chopped

Whisk together the flour, baking soda, and salt in a medium-sized bowl.

Cream the butter and sugar together in the bowl of your stand mixer, using the paddle attachment or in a large bowl using the regular beaters of your handheld mixer, until light and fluffy.

Add the eggs and vanilla extract, and mix until just combined.

Add the flour, baking soda, and salt mixture in two additions, mixing until just combined each time.

Mix or fold in the chopped chocolate.

Refrigerate the dough for at least an hour to allow the gluten to relax.

Preheat your oven to 350-375 degrees, and line your cookie sheets with parchment paper.

Portion out the cookie dough into 75g balls (make the balls by rolling the dough between your palms).

Bake at 350-375 degrees for 12 to 14 minutes, rotating the cookie sheets halfway thru the baking time.

Let the cookies cool on the cookie sheets for ten minutes and then de-pan onto a rack to allow them to cool completely.

Store in an airtight container for 3 or 4 days. If you feel as though they're getting stale, warm them slightly in a toaster oven or at about 250 degrees in your conventional oven.

BIO

Joe Bowie was born and raised in Lansing, Michigan. He started dancing when he was a sophomore at Brown University, and graduated with honors in English and American Literature. Joe moved to NYC in 1986, and danced in the works of Robert Wilson, Ulysses Dove, and for two years with the Paul Taylor Dance Company, before he moved to Belgium in 1989 to join the Mark Morris Dance Group. He danced with the Mark Morris Dance Group for twenty-one years. In 2010, Joe received a grant from Career Transitions For Dancers to pursue his second passion: baking. With the grant, he took a five-day artisan bread baking class at the French Culinary Institute (now the International Culinary Center), and fell in love with it. Using this momentum and newly-found love, he enrolled in The Art of International Bread Baking, the French Culinary Institute's professional artisan bread baking course in 2011. Since graduation, he has worked as both a baker and instructor for Le Pain Quotidien, in its research and development bread bakery; for world-renowned chef, Daniel Boulud, in his Prep Kitchen's bread bakery; for Dean & Deluca, in both its bread a pastry kitchens: and as a baker for a small, but growing, Brooklyn-based bakery called Ovenly. He will soon return to Le Pain Quotidien to develop bread baking classes for their Bleecker Street Bakery.

Alberto Denis: On becoming GoGo Gadget

Alberto Denis...or should we say GoGo Gadget?
(photo by Mike Dennis)

Alberto Denis: On becoming GoGo Gadget

interviewed by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

About two or more years ago, I thought I was all but done dancing for anyone but myself...I'd considered that perhaps the dance world, for the most part, was done with me. – Alberto Denis

Ah, but all that was before GoGo Gadget!

On the second annniversary of GoGo Gadget’s boylesk debut, dancer Alberto Denis–now starring in Third Rail Projects’ acclaimed Then She Fell--recalls his liberating transformation into this sexy-nerdy character.

Alberto Denis
(photo by Gustavo Monroy)

Yaa Asantewaa: When you arrived at the idea that you were done with dance--or, perhaps, it was done with you--you eventually turned to burlesque.  What drew you to the burlesque movement?

Denis: Over the years, I rarely engaged in solo choreography and was pleased to learn that I might in fact have something to say. That my work was well received enough to warrant frequent remounting of the work was a surprise to me. XXXV spoke to my experience of time and moments in my life, my journey from infancy to the age I was then--35. While it was fleetingly rewarding to create work on my own, it wasn't what I'd envisioned for my dance career. I was left questioning what, if anything, lay ahead of me.

My struggles with body image are, somewhat unfortunately, inexorably linked to a very natural desire to build a loving, passionate relationship. I'd spent the past several years as a bachelor and continued to find that, in searching for a partner, I focused more and more on my body image. I believe this to be primarily driven by societal norms as well as behaviors within the various communities to which I belong--my identity as a gay male and as a self-proclaimed geek.

I wanted to make a new work, which I'm finally embarking upon now. I wanted to explore my struggle with body image and the concept of attraction. At the time, doing research on bulimia and anorexia, while valuable, was a bit too depressing. I decided to take a look at the resurgent burlesque community and do positive research on a field that celebrates the female form regardless of societal norms.

I went to a performance called Meaner, Harder, Leather which introduced me to the concept that men also participate in burlesque, in what is casually called boylesk. Over several months, I continued to attend performances and befriended a very prominent performer--Chris "Go-Go" Harder–and attended his five-weekend burlesque course.

In that setting, I fully let down my guard, embarking on the long journey of accepting and occasionally celebrating my sexually attractive body. Even thinking those words is still difficult; I'd like to believe that I'm attractive to at least a few. But GoGo Gadget, unlike Alberto, is overly confident, assured, sexual and provocative. I'm so grateful for him, as I truly believe he's directly responsible for my personal growth as a dancer/actor, and he contributes to my process with Third Rail Projects.

GoGo Gadget in action
(photo by Gustavo Monroy)

Yaa Asantewaa: Where did you see Meaner, Harder, Leather? How extensive is the male participation in the contemporary burlesque movement relative to female dancers?

Denis: Meaner, Harder, Leather ran for what I believe to be a little over a year at what was then the Vig 27 Lounge on 27th Street between Park and Lexington. In the few years I've been exposed to the burlesque community, I've seen the ratio of male-to-female participants spike significantly, in no short part due to Chris’s workshops. When I began there were perhaps half a dozen or so regularly performing men, whereas now--just from the performances I've been able to see--I've seen closer to twenty-five to thirty male performers engaging in boylesk on a regular basis.

Yaa Asantewaa: What helped you to let down your guard?  Let us in, a little, on the process of how you grew in self-acceptance.

Denis: I felt comfortable participating with a group as opposed to working as an individual, and also with Chris' very enthusiastic and well thought out process for leading the workshop. I'm still growing toward acceptance of what is physically attractive about me. It has been rewarding to rediscover my dancing ability within the context of a different community. To see it rewarded and celebrated has sparked a sense of "attractiveness" that I don't necessarily experience within the context of my dance community.

I believe that courage is also attractive, and I've had to learn to build my courage each time I build a new boylesk act and try it out, both to see if it works and the more basic fact that, by its conclusion, I become fully, physically exposed.

Also, for two years running, I've had an incredible collaborator in my gym trainer, Ray La Roca Grijalvo of SEEK FITNESS, who is genuinely invested in my success and achieving my physical goals. He and his wife have attended several of Gadget's performances. He's also developing relationships with many of my neighbors who also struggle with body image challenges.

Yaa Asantewaa: What’s behind the name GoGo Gadget?  How did this character develop?

Denis: GoGo Gadget references my own Peter Pan complex, directly linking the name to a cartoon from my childhood. Inspector Gadget, a cartoon character of the 1980s-90s, was very popular in my youth. He was often put in situations where he was ill-prepared to succeed, and yet he always prevailed. Gadget also references my love of all sorts of tech gadgetry. (I’ve been employed by a major technology company for the past several years.) Gadget's development is still very much in progress and grows with each performance and each new work.

Yaa Asantewaa: How do you go about bringing him out when it’s time for him to perform?

Denis: The best way to bring him out is through masks, makeup, costumes, music and glitter.  Lots and lots of glitter!  Oh and bubbles too!  Gadget loves candy, fun, sweating, dancing, cartoons, comic books, adventure heroes, men, and a few women too.  And most importantly, he absolutely loves getting naked and feels beautiful about his appearance.

Yaa Asantewaa: Does his personality influence you and help you in everyday life? Or is this something segregated to dance or, specifically, boylesk?

Denis: What a fantastic question! I continue to struggle to introduce his ever-forming personality within my everyday life. I can say that he continues to grow in boylesk, and now recently is certainly making his presence known within my dance identity.

Yaa Asantewaa: How does GoGo Gadget influence you as you prepare to perform in other dance work, including your work with the celebrated immersive theater troupe, Third Rail Projects?

Denis: I can say that Gadget has directly influenced my ability to take greater risks when developing another role. That courage I spoke of earlier is accessible to me outside of burlesque. My latest role creation draws a great deal from my nightlife experiences as Gadget, asking me to be sexually enticing to both men and women, an outrageous attention whore, physically provocative, as well as physically innovative. Gadget's regular activities on stage often explore these kinds of themes, and I'm drawing heavily on my experiences to create dance scores for my new role based on this kind of material.

Yaa Asantewaa: Would you recommend some training in boylesk to other male dancers? If so, why? What could they take away from it?

Denis: I believe if a male dancer wants to challenge both his perceptions of self- identity on stage as well as develop his choreographic skills, boylesk is an absolute must. It's a brilliant combination of dance and theater structured in a way that requires taking emotional as well as physical risks.

If you happen to be in Paris on October 5, you can see GoGo Gadget in action at The Lettingo Cabaret. New Yorkers, keep watch for news on the GoGo Gadget front for late fall.

Alberto Denis
(photo by Gustavo Monroy)

BIO

Currently a member of Third Rail Projects and featured in their production of Then She Fell, in 2008 Alberto Denis created [QuA²D] = The Queens Academy of Arts & Dance after leaving his position as Production Director/Producer for Dance New Amsterdam where he created the first ever staff infrastructure for their inaugural theater on Chambers Street in lower Manhattan, while co-curating their first three seasons of programming. Previously he created the Wight Room Dance Series presented at The Movement Salon near Union Square. Alberto Denis has toured the world (Dubai, Dublin, Barcelona, Bangkok, Taipei, Mexico City, Oslo and Prague and more) as a stage manager, audio engineer, assistant technical director and production electrician as well as a performer for many choreographers. He has performed for Arthur Aviles' Typical Theater for five years and in projects for Doug Elkins, Risa Jaroslow, Palissimo Dance Theater, Dixie Fun Dance Theater, ann and alexx make dances, Marta Renzi, Alexandra Beller, Michael Leleux, Heidi Latsky Dance, Lawrence Goldhuber, Luis Lara Malvacias, JoAnna Mendl Shaw’s Equus Projects and Mei Yin Ng’s Mei-Be Whatever. He was also a featured performer in the Whitney Museum's Christian Marclay: Festival performance of Prêt-a'-Porter. His choreography has been produced at Dance Theater Workshop's Family Matters, Danspace Project’s Food For Thought, Dixon Place’s Body Blend and Moving Men, BAAD!’s Boogie Down Dance Series and Out Like That Festival and Kinetics Dance Theater, Baltimore MD. He has also served on the Dance Theater Workshop Curatorial Advisory Committee.