Dance Department Chair Nailah Randall-Bellinger Performs at Boston’s ICA
For a week in July, dance teacher and department chair Nailah Randall-Bellinger took part in a collaboration of movement, music, and spoken word workshops at Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA), culminating in a powerful improvisational performance in front of a live audience.
For a week in July, dance teacher and department chair Nailah Randall-Bellinger took part in a collaboration of movement, music, and spoken word workshops at Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA), culminating in a powerful improvisational performance in front of a live audience.
“That’s what we do here in the dance department at CSW,” say Nailah. “We teach students to feel comfortable in their own skin, and that every BODY can dance. I don’t care what size you are, what skills you come with, what ethnicity you are, what type of training you have or haven’t had. You can dance here at CSW.”
“The idea was to bring black women from New York and black women from Boston together into a week-long residency, which would discuss our identity, our admirations, our frustrations, and the injustices against us as people of color,” shares Nailah. “All of this was discussed in different workshop exercises and activities we conducted from 10:00 a.m. in the morning to 6:00 p.m. at night.”
Many of the residency’s performers were members of Skeleton Architecture, a collective of Black women and gender-nonconforming performing artists from New York City. The movement was originally established in 2016 by dance writer and critic Eva Yaa Asantewaa for a performance examining the losses sustained from the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, specifically in African, African-American, and Latino communities. This original performance, inspired by the essay “Poetry is Not A Luxury,” by Audre Lorde, was titled, the skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds. For the residency at the ICA, the dancers from Skeleton Architecture were joined by black women dance performers, instructors, and students in the Boston area.
Participants began each day with the African tradition of pouring Libation to honor their ancestors, and specifically those in the dance realm, such as Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, and Chuck Davis. Throughout the day, different participants would then lead the group in exercises or workshops exploring issues of identity, discrimination, inequality, and self-expression. In addition to sessions on specific dance styles and techniques like Haitian dance or hip/hop, artists offered opportunities for expression and collaboration around themes like social justice, name identifying, and body awareness.
In one such activity, each performer described their neighborhood and identified the inequities within that neighborhood. Later, the group gathered to choreograph around the themes that emerged, such as police brutality, lack of diversity, gentrification, and more.
Nailah describes the experience as “open,” “organic,” and “honest.”
“These women will be in my life for the rest of my life,” she shares. “I know that I can depend on them and that they can depend on me to talk about, and help work through, issues that affect black women here in the United States.”
On the final day, the group came together to offer a public performance, a 90-minute, largely improvisational representation of everything they had experienced together over the past week, followed by a question and answer session during which audience members praised the dancers and thanked them for their bold, and unfiltered honesty, some of them moved to tears by the exhibition.
“I think the most significant element of the whole project was that these women came together, day in and day out, and were honest,” says Nailah. “They were open and willing to transform. We created a space without judgment where we could nurture ourselves without question or self doubt.”
As a result, Nailah says she and the other dancers were able to dance their very best that week. It is an atmosphere that she and the other dance instructors at CSW strive to emulate on a daily basis with their own students.
“That’s what we do here in the dance department at CSW,” say Nailah. “We teach students to feel comfortable in their own skin, and that every BODY can dance. I don’t care what size you are, what skills you come with, what ethnicity you are, what type of training you have or haven’t had. You can dance here at CSW.”
The Cambridge School of Weston is a progressive high school for day and boarding students in grades 9–12 and PG. CSW's mission is to provide a progressive education that emphasizes deep learning, meaningful relationships, and a dynamic program that inspires students to discover who they are and what their contribution is to their school, their community and the world.