Celebrating PURPLE

July 29, 2024

An Interview with Sydnie L. Mosley

BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT

Sydnie L. Mosley is a choreographer and the director of Sydnie L. Mosley Dances, a dance-theater collective based in New York City that works in communities to organize for gender and racial justice through experiential dance performance. Here, Sydnie, shares how her recent work PURPLE: A Ritual in Nine Spells celebrates and builds upon the work of Black feminists, and how all her work centers community building.

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Can you share a little of your dance history – what shaped you as a dancer?

I started dancing in a studio when I was four, like a baby ballet situation. I danced all growing up. My primary dance home as a teenager was with Ava Fields Dance Ministry doing liturgical dance. Classes took place in my local community center. We weren’t affiliated with a specific church, but we were getting dance training in a community space and performing a lot at churches, parades, and street festivals. We gigged all over the DC and Maryland area. I’m originally from Baltimore. Alongside that, I was heavily involved in dance at school. I went to a private all girls prep school with a strong arts program, and I was a leader in the dance spaces. I choreographed a lot, both in middle and high school. I also went to the American Dance Festival for the first time when I was 14 and, prior to that, I had gone to summer dance programs at various colleges and universities.

I went to college and knew I wanted to be a dancer. I had also made the decision to run a company and be a choreographer. When I was a senior in high school, my capstone project was producing my first dance concert. I was clear about that career path going into college. I moved to New York intentionally because it was a hub for dance. I went to Barnard College for undergrad. My goal at that point was to learn everything about the field. I’ve always been a fan of Barnard’s dance program because they use the resources of New York City to enhance students’ understanding of the field. I work-studied in the dance department and interned for Bill T. Jones, Brooklyn Ballet, and Jacob’s Pillow. In addition to choreographing, performing, and writing, I learned to run the lighting board. I did everything from A to Z. I ended up getting my MFA from the University of Iowa directly out of undergrad. The opportunity came up at the end of my senior year in college. I got my MFA really young, so that meant I was entering the field with a lot of clarity because I did the “what is my voice, what is my artistry?” thing in grad school. I came back to New York and hit the ground running. Within six months, I was ready to start my dance company.

How would you generally describe your choreography to someone unfamiliar with it?

I would say my work is dance theater. It is based in Black feminist performance practices. It is community engaged and community responsive. I’ll use the language of one of my big sisters and mentors, Ebony Noelle Golden shared with me: it is theatrical ceremony. That language of theatrical ceremony is an evolution of the work over the past 15 years, but what remains true across all my work is engagement with audience and what I like to call witness-participants, and an ethos that if you are in the performance space, you are part of the work.

What was the impetus behind your recent work, PURPLE: A Ritual in Nine Spells?

I got the idea several years ago. I was hanging out with a friend of mine who I call my little sister, and we were going to a lot of events around New York City: lectures, talks, performances. All the people we went to see were Black feminists. And the people who came to see the work more often than not were Black women. She and I started to call those events “purple events,” referencing Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. I had this aha moment that the culture I was creating inside my dance company’s work felt very purple. I asked: What would it mean to create a dance work that captured that purple in a bottle and shared it with those who chose to be present?

What was your choreographic process?

It was multipronged and long. I started working on it in 2017, and we premiered it in 2023. That development process had a lot of artists coming through and a part of it. I started with some movement ideas, which I workshopped over several iterations with my company as well as with educational engagements I did at high schools and universities. Another piece was dramaturgical research. I did a lot of reading of Black feminist texts, both fiction and nonfiction. I mentioned The Color Purple, but I also want to mention Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo by Ntozake Shange, The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara, and Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. The bibliography is long, but I’ll name those four top books that fed ideas I was working on. The choreography was also shaped by the people I was in collaboration with.

One significant collaborator is Dyane Harvey. She and I were put together by the writer and curator Eva Yaa Asantewaa for a program at Gibney called Solo for Solo in 2019. I had this idea with PURPLE to make a work that was multigenerational. I wanted to create with elders. One of the elders I was interested in working with was Ntozake Shange. I had met her several times before. She is also a Barnard College alum. She gave her archive to Barnard, and I am in close collaboration with the faculty who led that process. Long story short, one of Ntozake’s last public events was at Barnard, and I had the privilege of moderating the Q and A with the audience. A month later, she passed away. At the same time, I’m getting into conversation with Dyane. I asked her what she wanted to work on. She wanted to make a work honoring her friend Ntozake. I said, “No kidding, so do I.” It felt divinely aligned. We started this collaboration where I created a solo on Dyane that brought in Ntozake’s language and solidified this idea of the choreo-poem that she coined and pioneered.

At the same time, I was developing movement with my company members. In 2019, I put it all together in what I like to call a kitchen table version. From there, I started to edit and revise what story wanted to be told in this piece.

In my dreams, I would have tried to premier it in 2020 or 2021, but then the pandemic happened. It allowed us to fundraise significantly in order to produce the work at the level of production and visibility I was desiring. It also allowed us to deepen the dramaturgy. In 2020, I engaged the dancers virtually in the research and the themes in a way I never had before. It was a useful few years of building toward premiering the work in 2023.

Your company has recently performed PURPLE: A Ritual in Nine Spells in Washington, DC. What feedback or audience reactions did you receive?

The premier was last year at Lincoln Center. For our recent tour performance at Dance Place in Washington, DC, it was lovely to see the art do what it was supposed to do. It was lovely to share the art with this particular community. I am from Baltimore, so it was a bit of a homecoming. Several of my collaborators have connections to that region. The audience was warm, excited, and ready to participate. It was very special. My dance teacher from when I was growing up got to see the work. It was the first time she had seen my company perform.

It was also a huge learning curve. I’d never toured a production of this size. It was an opportunity to adapt the work to a different type of space. As I was building it, I had an A, B and C version in mind. At Lincoln Center, we had the audience on three sides. We completely stripped the wings so the whole theater was a black box. Dance Place has risers and is a smaller stage, so we had to reimagine the work for that kind of set up. I’m very interested in what it means for this work to expand and contract.

Your company works in communities to organize for gender and racial justice through experiential dance performance. How can experiential dance help bring about gender and racial justice?

I believe that the theater and performance spaces are one of the most fertile spaces to have conversation, to move people to action, to raise consciousness, to bring people together, and to build community. All that happens in the performance space of my work. Some of my works are more explicit about the political agenda. My work The Window Sex Project is about people’s experiences with sexual harassment. The community workshops we facilitate as well as the post-show dialogue intended to talk about what advocacy can be done, bystander intervention, etc. That is a piece where the agenda is more explicit.

Fast forward to PURPLE. The work is community-building and connection-building. The dramaturgical magic is that by the end of the work, everyone in the theater is dancing. That magic has been carefully scaffolded into the narrative of the work. By the end, there’s an energy, a vibrancy, and a level of connection between people who may not know each other but are sitting next to each other or across the way or with the performers that is palpable. When you have an experience like that, you want to continue to build connections with those people.

What’s next for you? Do you have an upcoming project or focus you’d like to share more about?

I’m going to continue to share this work in different ways as long as people are interested in seeing it. That’s absolutely next. And, I say this confidently: I don’t have any new ideas, and that’s okay. My company is celebrating 14 years, and in that time, we have created three evening-length works and several smaller works. All those works continue to need to be shared. The barrier is resources. I am committed to finding the resources.

Any other thoughts?

The soapbox I’m on these days is how we continue to cultivate resources on a larger societal or governmental scale to support artists. It’s very difficult to do this work under-resourced. I have personally reached a space where I cannot be under-resourced any longer. What are the steps everyone is taking to promote the economic environment to make it possible for us to do our work and live thriving lives while doing it?

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To learn more about Sydnie’s work, visit www.sydnielmosley.com.