This month, in honor of the film’s release on HBO and in festivals across the company, we are revisiting contributor Alex Barbier’s conversation with the filmmakers behind Uprooted: The Journey of Jazz Dance.
After watching Uprooted (reviewed here by Kathy Adams) contributor Alexandra Barbier sat down last spring with Khadifa Wong and Lisa Donmall-Reeve to discuss the movie and the larger significance of jazz in dance, the USA and the UK, and global culture.
Lisa Donmall-Reeve (left) and Khadifa Wong (right front) produced and directed Uprooted. They’re pictured here with crew members and dancers from Holla Jazz. Photo by Daryl Getman.
Says Barbier, "The opportunity to interview Khadifa and Lisa was perfectly timed. I had just been asked to teach a university-level Dance History course for students studying ballet, jazz, and contemporary dance. I was annoyed when I received the proposed course outline and discovered that only one week of the sixteen-week course focused on "Minstrelsy and the evolution of jazz dance," a veiled way of saying "Black dance." It was placed in the eleventh week of an otherwise chronologically accurate timeline of the western concert dance canon, which I found baffling considering that Minstrel shows "crystalized" between 1850 and 1870, and week ten of this course addressed José Limón (1908-1972). I began my conversation with Khadifa and Lisa by asking if they'd had similarly misleading experiences when studying dance history, and if this inaccuracy (which is not unique to the program that hired me) played a role in their decision to make this film."