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RAISING THE ROOF: Brides Valerie Vega, '06, and Debbie Burke, '05.
Glenn Matsumura |
THE BRIDE, groom, minister and adorably meandering flower girls
in the Tom Thumb wedding party were all of 4 feet tall.
In heels and lifts.
The students from Drama 157J: Black Social Dance Performance
Workshop moved like graceful gazelles. In diaphanous
purple, blue and pink gowns.
And the guests at the reception could not sit still,
boogying down the soul line from “Gumbo Soup”
into the “Electric Slide.”
Welcome to The Wedding Project and please sign the guest
book, thank you kindly.
“I could have picked a church picnic or a funeral
or a family reunion,” says choreographer Aleta
Hayes. “But somehow, a wedding seemed perfect.
It was a metatext for the idea of looking at things
in the African-American community that we don’t
even see anymore, like the way women stand in church
or the way they wear hats.”
Hayes, ’81, is an instructor with the Alvin Ailey
American Dance Center and a member of the New York-based
Jane Comfort Dance Company. She and Sekou Sundiata,
a poet and musician, are the artists-in-residence of
the Committee on Black Performing Arts Resident Dialogues
program, funded for three years by the Ford Foundation.
The “dialogues” are aimed at transforming
conversations with residents of surrounding communities
into performance pieces. Hayes’s students interviewed
women at the senior center in East Palo Alto for their
project. “It was wonderful,” says senior
Christina Knight. The woman she talked with “was
funny and warm, and not only told me stories about her
two weddings, but also how to make collard greens and
what I should do with my hair.”
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GETTING HIS GROOVE ON: Groom Louis Jackson, '91.
Glenn Matsumura |
Knight says she originally planned to do a verbatim
interpretation, “Anna Deavere Smith-style,”
where she would try to copy the voice and mannerisms
of her interviewee, taking the same breaths and pauses.
“But it evolved into playing with it, where we
would change it up a bit, with more accent here, and
movement there,” she says.
As the lead-off dancer in the January performance, Knight
recreated how “I Met My Husband,” a suitor
who worked on a remodel of her subject’s house.
Other dancers dreamed of five-carat engagement rings,
waltzing at their receptions and piñatas full
of goodies. One tossed her bouquet to the SRO house
of more than 400.
“The energy level was through the roof,”
says assistant vice president for campus relations and
special counselor to the president LaDoris Cordell, JD ’74, a founder of the Stanford Soul Line Dancers
who kicked off the reception. “I’ve never
seen anything like it at Stanford.” |
