photograph by Ariel J. Cobbert
Rickey Flagg II and guest artist Erica Lall perform in Firebird. Lall appears courtesy of American Ballet Theatre.
“It was like a flute song forgotten in another existence and remembered again,” writes Zora Neale Hurston in Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel that went out of print shortly after its 1937 publication, only to be rediscovered nearly 30 years later. Since then, the novel has established itself as a classic and Hurston as one of the most significant writers of American literature. And now, her book is about to be adapted into a ballet and remembered in a new form, thanks to Marcellus Harper and Kevin Thomas, co-founders of the Collage Dance Collective, one of the largest, if not the largest, Black-owned ballet companies in the South.
While the literary canon has grown more diverse since Hurston, narrative ballet rarely centers around protagonists who aren’t white, but Collage Dance’s project will revolve around an African - American woman from the South as a protagonist. “We want our shows to be stories of different interests and different cultures — not just the same old stories that aren’t inclusive,” says Thomas, artistic director.
This project, inspired by Hurston’s novel, has been a decade in the making. “Years ago we reached out to the Hurston Trust and got permission to do it,” Harper, also Collage Dance’s executive director, says, “but the company is very small. We’ve always had more ambition and vision than we have resources or capability to do it. We weren’t in the right place to do the work justice, to honor the significance of the work.” But now, several years later, after completing a capital campaign, opening a new 22,000 - square-foot space, growing their professional company, and doing more challenging artistic work, they have secured a $15,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to bring their project to life.
photograph by Mohammed Al-Taher
Company artists Santiago Castañeda and Kendall Lockhart rehearse in Studio ONE.
“We’re very honored because it means that from a federal level someone has looked at our project and our work and believes that the work and the organization are worthy of support,” Harper says. “It’s very gratifying to receive that type of national recognition.”
The show will feature original music, choreography, and costume design. Harper says, “We are building this from scratch.” As such, before opening in the fall of 2022, the collective will take over a year of work and multiple creatives to build the architecture of the show, to explore relevant and accessible themes, and to experiment with movement. “That’s what excites us about this kind of work — being able to be creative and to figure out what is going to have an impact,” Harper says. “We can’t wait to share our work with Memphis. … We’re also creating the work with the idea to tour it and take it outside of Memphis.”
“We are very proactive in engaging people who have felt like ballet is not for them or doesn’t represent them. We are passionate about engaging people in those communities, engaging young people, engaging young boys, basically engaging anyone who has not historically been included [in ballet narrative].” — Marcellus Harper
Given the powerful and beautiful material of Hurson’s work, Harper and Thomas expect their project to resonate well with their audience, to move them, and to engage them. “There’s a nice arc about this woman [protagonist Janie] finding herself, becoming empowered through various relationships, taking claim of her own identity and worth through it all,” Harper explains. “That’s beautiful messaging, very timely.”
The group also plans to use the Hurston project as an opportunity for educational engagement to partner with schools , since students often read Their Eyes Were Watching God as a part of their curriculum. “Students can see the work,” Harper says, “but there can be kind of this educational learning backdrop — they can reflect on the performance in regards to what they learned in the classroom.”
“We are very proactive in engaging people who have felt like ballet is not for them or doesn’t represent them,” Harper adds. “We are passionate about engaging people in those communities, engaging young people, engaging young boys, basically engaging anyone who has not historically been included [in ballet narrative].”
Collage Dance originated in New York in 2006 before opening in Memphis in 2009. “Memphis has a very large African - American population, much like Harlem,” Thomas says. “I used to be a principal dancer and dancer in Harlem, and my time dancing there taught me a lot, made me rethink ballet and how I saw myself in that way.” But with a mission to grow ballet as an art form and to grow its audience, Collage moved to Memphis, where they saw a need for a more diverse ballet scene. “New York has a million companies,” Thomas adds, “so the next place we thought of was Memphis.”
photograph by David Roseberry
The state-of-the-art, 22,000-square-foot Collage Dance Center opened in December 2020.
Since its opening, Collage’s professional company has presented 11 full-length seasons in Memphis and has toured locally, nationally, and internationally. Just last week, Collage received a $3 million contribution from philanthropists MacKenzie Scott and Dan Jewett, and most recently, the collective performed Stravinsky’s Firebird. “But it’s a different story because this story takes place in Africa,” Thomas says. “It usually takes place in some Russian forest.”
Meanwhile, Collage’s its conservatory trains more children of color in classical dance than any other nonprofit in the Mid-South area, teaching ballet, tap, jazz, and West African dance. The students, as Thomas says, also learn through dance “discipline, patience, learning to do things over and over, coping with boredom, and passion — passion that makes you want to work harder.”
Thomas, who began training at 7 seven years old, retired from dancing at 47. “Dancing was all I did,” he says. “That’s what I’m giving to the students — I want them to know that this is an opportunity. I also trained with other dancers who did not become professional dancers but became a CEO of a ballet company. Training brings you a long way.”
Since the pandemic, the group has been able to teach in-person (thanks to their new spacious studio, masking, hand-sanitizing, and touchless surfaces) as well as virtually. “Because our classes were hybrid, we found that kids outside of Memphis were able to participate,” Harper says. “We had kids from Seattle, D.C., Detroit, Cleveland. [The pandemic] opened up opportunities that we didn’t even know would present themselves.” With this realization and the mission to make ballet more accessible, Collage plans to continue to offer virtual classes in addition to its in-person classes.
“We firmly believe that for people to be more engaged in ballet, they have to be educated about the art,” Harper says. “There’s a lot of misinformation, a lot of stigma about ballet, a lot of myths, so we’re constantly working on communicating and sharing what is true about ballet and what is not. It’s like watching a football game and not knowing the rules. Of course you can, but the more you know about the sport, the more you are engaged as a spectator, as a participant, and the same is true for ballet.”
Thomas adds, “We really want our audience to understand that dance is a language.” After all, dance is a form of storytelling, a form of communication, and much like language, it carries power and must evolve, or else it will die, for to remain unchanged is to disregard reality. And by pushing for this evolution of dance, Collage follows the example of Zora Neale Hurston who once wrote, “I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.”
For now, Collage Dance looks forward to the grand opening celebration for their new studio on September 23rd-25th. “The new building has dramatically expanded our footprint,” Harper says, “and creating a work like this wouldn’t be possible without a space like this.” To find out more about Collage, visit collagedance.org.
