Sekou McMiller's ‘Urban Love Suite' celebrates social dance with Jacob's Pillow world premiere

Boston Globe

2 days ago

With the support of NAACP Berkshires, McMiller — a Chicago-born and New York-based African Diasporic dance and music scholar/educator — immersed himself in the Berkshires' robust Afro-Latin community. He led workshops at a local elementary school and dance club. During a 'cultural exchange,' McMiller combined his own choreography with the celebratory traditions that local workshop participants offered him. McMiller incorporated some of the movement generated in this Pittsfield engagement into the new work, and it will live on in the choreography after it leaves the Berkshires.
'It's a love letter to the Black and brown communities,' McMiller said in a phone interview this week, 'the beautiful music and dance that has been created from hip-hop to samba to New York Mambo.'
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So, despite the formal venue, you can expect this Jacob's Pillow performance to feel like a party.
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'Urban Love Suite' celebrates the relationships between different African diasporic communities through their dance and music traditions, 'their nuanced differences, their similarities and their shared roots from the continent of Africa,' McMiller said.
To develop the work, with the support of the NAACP Berkshires, Sekou McMiller immersed himself in the Berkshires' robust Afro-Latin community. Pictured, Sekou McMiller and Friends' Sekou McMiller and Marielys Molina.
Elyse Mertz
The work also celebrates how a dense city can bring many cultures into close proximity, he said, creating opportunities for exchange that are unique to the urban experience. It can, as he put it, yield 'amazing fruits of music and dance.'
'Like New York City Mambo, which was done in New York, Harlem, where you had that cross pollination of Lindy Hop and jazz and tap dancers, with the Latin dancers coming directly from Cuba, but then [they] create a new way of doing the dance that only could have been done in an urban city like New York.'
McMiller's point is that proximity can be challenging yet generative. You might not always be in the mood to listen to your neighbor's playlist, but after the fourth or fifth time through, you might find your hips moving to the beat, reluctantly familiar with the rhythms your neighbors prefer.
McMiller, a classically trained flutist and jazz musician, is also the curator at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem. He reveres the intimate entanglement of music, movement, and social gatherings, and collaborated with music director Sebastian Natal on a score grounded in Afro-Latin jazz to be performed live alongside the dancers.
'Love Suite' draws parallels between parading traditions like Uruguayan candombe and New Orleans' second line, and layers party dances from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Chicago, and New York.
It also highlights the roots of these movement forms in cultural traditions from Nigeria, Senegal, and Burkina Faso — the region the colonialist machine favored for the capture, export, and exploitation of human beings as a resource, who became the ancestors of Afro Caribbean, Afro Latin, and African American communities.
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'They're social dance in nature,' McMiller said, 'so they're not born of a studio. They're born from culture. They're born from parties. They're born from celebrations. They're born from traditions and rituals.'
After noticing a lack of social dance in the Jacob's Pillow archive, artistic and executive director Pamela Tatge has made efforts to uplift dance artists working inside those traditions — with the help of her curatorial team.
'If we are charged with representing the breadth of dance in the world, to not center social dance would be a mistake,' said Tatge in a recent phone interview.
It's complicated to bring these dances to the stage because social dance is a participatory art, and The Theater fosters an inherent separation between the audience and performer.
McMiller is up for the challenge, and his solution: improvisation in both music and dance.
'It's call and response from beginning to end. I allow my choreography to be a call to the dancers to then respond … so at some point you won't be able to tell the difference between improv and choreography,' McMiller explained. 'So every night, it's same format, different show.'
'Love Suite' will also disrupt the performer-observer relationship by dancing among the audience and inviting attendees onto the stage.
Performance is a call too, that asks the audience to respond.
'I hope this pushes people to get out there and come join us,' McMiller said, 'to not just spectate with us, but become an active participant in this life.'
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URBAN LOVE SUITE
At Jacob's Pillow's Ted Shawn Theatre, Becket, July 30 to Aug. 3. Tickets start at $65. 413-243-0745,
Sarah Knight can be reached at [e-mail].