What a Body Can Do
I have gone clubbing exactly twice in the last three years, both during the annual Amsterdam Dance Event. The crowd in 2019 for the future beats sounds of LA based DJ collective Soulection was fly. Everyone came looking good and ready to dance, the energy flow between the DJs and the crowd was exactly what you show up to ADE for.
By ADE 2021, my desire for a good party post double vax was outweighed only by the stress of being in a thick crowd for said party. When a friend turned up with an extra ticket to the Cloud 8 x Ziongate amapiano bashment at Paradiso, I said fuck it. (I mean yea Paradiso was entirely too packed and COVID was having the time of its life and I got so overwhelmed and hot I had a mini panic attack partway through the night and left early but them deep-house bass lines coursing through my body made it all worth it. I regret nothing.).
Then there was the Delta variant, another 4-week lockdown, Omicron, Autumn, Winter… you know the drill.
So it was with a level of voyeuristic giddiness that I showed up for Christian Yav’s dance performance at the Bijlmerparktheater in Amsterdam at the tail end of 2021 with my fellow Blacker Blackness classmates as guests of the theater. My 10-year-old son, natty light-brown dyed locs, red Nikes and a navy-blue hoodie, my date for the evening.
Christian Yav is a Congolese born, Belgian raised, Amsterdam-based dancer and choreographer. In a binary world, watching Yav move feels like a window to an otherwise, a space where the embodiment of masculine and feminine energies are in constant motion. As someone who dances for the twerk of it and not for the craft of it, I was confronted by the physicality of Yav’s movements. How his ligaments, cells, muscles, bones and organs harmonized. His breathing. Our breathing. I was in the front row so couldn’t see but felt us all holding our breaths—surrendering our individual corporealities to become collective, an energy, a breath in service of his. A Black body, its possibilities, its vulnerabilities.
I suffered for years being Black, femme and excellent in a corporate tech job ruled by white, masculine aggression and mediocrity. I was the first to do blah blah, and the only to do yaddy ya more times than I cared to keep track of. I was hurled through the glass ceiling. Prove yourself, prove yourself, more, be better, be better, be better, more more more. I collapsed in on myself. I became smaller. Everything was a trigger, my stomach churning at the mere mention of certain words, the presence of certain bodies. Morning panic attacks, midday cries in the bathroom, afternoon migraines. Burnout.
As Black people, our bodies become shock absorbers. On the regular we take in all levels of harm, systemic oppression, the spectacle of black death, casual and constant interpersonal aggressions. We absorb it all, everything, through our skin, bones and flesh, into our cells.
In writing about Jean-Michel Basquiat, bell hooks contextualizes his 1988 painting “Riding with Death” within the tradition of Haitian vodou; calling possession a process “that makes revelation, renewal and transformation possible”. I don’t know Yav’s spiritual orientation but watching him perform invoked memories of growing up in a Haitian household, where spirit dancing and possession were normal. There’s a charge in the air, the scent of Florida water fills the room, goosebumps my body over.
Dancing takes the yuck settled deep inside us and spits it out. Digging deep enough to excavate the ugly, deeper still until he reaches gold, tapping into a space they don’t have access to, a space of Black aliveness. Dancing is grabbing hold of something else, creating something new and sending it out into the world. Yav’s performance was a necessary reminder that taking up space can be dynamic, can and should alternate tempos, conjure/channel more to meet the demands of being in our bodies.
My son didn’t want to leave the theater that evening; he wanted to stay for the Q&A with Yav. Wanted to see more of this dancer who had expressed, through his body, a language of freedom he hadn’t seen before. But it was past his bedtime so I took him home and in describing the performance to his dad, he rolls his head back and around, arches his back, pokes out his butt, stretches his leg back, arms up reaching, creating, possessing something otherwise.