The Utah Arts Festival has long hosted local and touring companies. This weekend I jumped on the opportunity to watch the Jamal Jackson Dance Company, a New York City-based company that works to raise awareness of the connections between African and American cultures. Their piece, 846, is Jackson’s take on The Rite of Spring, the well-known Stravinsky score that was originally used to tell the story of a pagan ritual that ended with the sacrifice of a young girl. 846 was choreographed in 2021 and produced as a film during the pandemic, but has taken to the stage on tour.
The dancers moved fluidly through West African, European, Modern, and street dance techniques, demonstrating how beautifully they can coexist in one body and making me question why we tend to draw such sharp distinctions between them. They wove together grooving, polyrhythmic steps and Krump gestures with Graham contractions and striking ballet attitudes. Their impressive use of these vocabularies clearly demonstrated how Eurocentric and Afrocentric techniques are in no way mutually exclusive. Moments of vague unison in unclear group forms and solos weaving throughout connected them to expectations of community dance more than codified performance structures. It felt more like a conversation than a speech. Their collective energy expressed how the impending sacrifice affects everyone in a community, not just the person who is killed, and – on the flip side of that coin – how everyone is also complicit in the act of the sacrifice.
Jamal Jackson Dance Company.
The richness of this choreography resonated throughout the gestures and technique of the dancers, referencing the stories of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Andre Hill, Trayvon Martin, and other Black victims of police violence from the last few years. As with many Rite of Spring performances, there was a red cloth, this time a red hoodie. It began on top of a male dancer on the ground as we heard the story of his death and was passed through the group as the Stravinsky score began, building fear and tension in their bodies. Despite the many hands it passed through, eventually it made its way back to him, pooled beneath his head in the final image of death. As Jackson mentioned after the performance, we might describe many incidents of police violence as random tragedies, but in fact the violence is quite directed.
Stravinsky’s score was extremely loud and agitating, making the movement at first appear underwhelming in comparison, but over time I became drawn into the nuance of the gestures and tone. The dancers flowed through images of hands-up in innocence, taking a knee in solidarity, reaching to the sky in prayer, and hiding the face to block out the incessant reports of death. The red cloth at one point became like an umbilical cord, falling from the center of a dancer’s body between her legs as she slowly wrapped it back up as if in mourning for her lost child. Toward the end of the piece the group gathered behind the identified sacrifice, pounding their fists into their hands like a gavel, but at the same time like a stabbing motion creating a sense of inherent violence in the judgement being made. I could feel the last two years of police reports and protests washing over me.
Juxtaposed with the fear, violence, and drama of the music, were the voices of those who had lost someone to police violence, telling stories of their life, what they loved, and how they lived during a pause in the music. Jackson expanded on this moment after the show saying that he wanted to disrupt the trauma and be intentional about who tells these stories. He wanted to avoid only knowing victims as a hashtag and find more connection to who they were in life. There was a moment where the dancer who was chosen to be sacrificed walked through the group with the hoodie over his head, revealed his face and erupted in an energetic and powerful solo, expressing his fear and joy before he went towards his death. This moment in particular rang out with the love for Black life that we heard in the stories from victims’ families and that Jackson clearly strives to share with this work.
I really resonated with Jackson’s statement during the Q & A that, “If you’re not talking to me about something [with your art], I don’t want to hear it.” There is a certain enjoyment in aesthetics, but at the end of the day, art has the potential to support real change. It is clear that Jackson fully embraces this potential with his work and 846 provided ample material for starting conversations, moving mindsets, and shifting cultural attitudes about police violence in America.
Kara Komarnitsky grew up in Salt Lake City and recently graduated with a BFA in Dance from Ohio State University with minors in Environmental Science and Business. Her work approaches the complexity of human interconnection with the planet, pulling inspiration from the natural world and environmental research. While her primary medium is dance, Kara regularly uses projections, film, sound, and interactive technology to create immersive performance experiences. Her piece Tales of the Deep (2018) recently won third place in the Midwest Climate Summit’s Climate Stories Competition and her thesis, Interconnect (2022), received an Honorable Mention at the OSU Denman Research Forum 2022. Other places her work has been presented includes the OSU Student Concert, OSU BFA Showcase, and the Ohio Dance Festival Professional Concert.