Where My People At? is an ethno-visual series integrating intimate portrait photography and conversations of Black dance/performance artists living, resting, dreaming, and creating in the time of a global pandemic and U.S racial tensions. It aspires to hold the Black dance community with love as it honors their living presence and artistic contributions, by poetically weaving in their personal voices through a Black gaze critical framework.
Ricarrdo: What is your name and how did you arrive to 2021? Courtney: My name is Courtney J Cook or Courtney Jené Cook and how did I arrive to 2021? I arrived here through prayer, and a lot of support, a lot of love, grace, allowing, accepting, and just continuing to insist on living...my family, my friends, my sisters, Black women I would say is why I'm here."
Ricarrdo: What do you want people to know about you? Christal: What do.I want people know?...I don't know. I want people to know that I am a real person. I want people to know that my goal or my intention whenever they've met me is to leave some residue of who I am in their reflections of themselves. I want people to know my goal is LOVE.
Ricarrdo: Robin, when you think of the word, rock, what comes to mind? Robin: Home. I love rocks. (Robin smiles) Smooth. I think of rocks like I think about trees. They stand there through it all. Rain, sleet, or snow, they persist with grandeur and a pride and knowingness that outlives all of us.
Ricarrdo: Cameron, the year is 2080, Dancing While Black is...? Cameron: I don't feel that quite optimistic. Maybe we'll get past race, but I there will always be something. I think humans need something to compare themselves against, ya know?. Maybe by 2080 animals and shit will be talking and we'll probably say we're better than animals We already say that now. I think by the time we get there [2080]], the might not be so much of a race issues, but there will be some other socio-political issue that'll probably stem from race back in our day that becomes the driving force. In terms of Black dance, I think imagining that world in a post-race world. Black dance is trying to serve as a reminder to where these socio-political issue that they're fighting against in that time come from.
Ricarrdo: Cue, why do you think joy is important? Cue: I think joy is important always. I have a strong essence physically, kinesthetically, aesthetically, muscularly, spiritually, I am strong and a lot of times that can look like a fist. And what joy brings is a loosening of that hand, so I can receive more. I can heal more, myself and others. Joy is helping me find a softer side of me.
Ricarrdo: Tendayi, have you been able to rest during the pandemic? Tendayi: I've been doing other things to reset like meditation. I don't know if you ever had a moment when you have so much stuff to do, but you don't do anything and you just king of get stuck in the bed thinking about the shit you should've been doing and so when I find myself in that position, I'm like where lemme meditate. Even if I can't focus on the meditation, at least let me try to do it by using an app. I've been getting rest. I reset in my rest.
Ricarrdo: Juan Michael, how do you want people to remember you? Juan Michael: I don't want them to. My entire life have been like "when I die, I want there to be this moment where everything that I've done, every person I touch, all the memories and images of me just disappear, and I return to breath of the wind and that's it. It's not if the harms and wrong I've done stop existing, I just don't want it be attached to me as if some how I was the reason it happened. I was there. I was here and now I am gone, and let everyone else move on with that and do what they're doing instead of focusing on who or what I was.
Ricarrdo: Samantha, the year is 2121, Dancing While Black is...? Samantha: Dancing While Black is something that doesn't have to be explained. It's all that we hold, it is carried, it is shared, it is planted, it is inherited. It offers opportunity to continue being inside of expansion. Dancing While Black is being inside of choice. Not contained by anyone, anything, any structure. It is being able to make the choices that you want to make with no inhibitions. To be a creator of whatever it is you desire.