She wasn’t looking for a curatorial position when she got a call from Gina Gibney, the artistic director and founder of Gibney, a performing arts and social justice organization that includes Gina Gibney’s dance company and features classes and studio rentals. Yaa Asantewaa, who has mainly been known in the dance world as a writer, had dabbled in curation.
But “I hadn’t really thought that it would be something that I could actually pursue,” she said. Then came that phone call from Gina Gibney. “She had a whole plan mapped out,” Yaa Asantewaa said. “It took me about two minutes to just say yes.”
At an age when most people are considering retirement, Yaa Asantewaa, now 67, decided to tackle a new career. It helps that she has close ties to generations of artists in the dance world, and an unwavering focus: to foster their creativity. She encourages them to stand up for themselves, as she did at a recent heated discussion at Gibney about the lack of rehearsal studios in New York for percussive forms like tap. She told the artists to voice their dissatisfaction to Gina Gibney.
“When you show up, it makes a difference; it makes a revolution,” Yaa Asantewaa said. “It’s time to pounce.”
When the exchange was recounted to Gibney, she laughed. “Eva and I have found a really good balance,” she said. “I continue to be pushed by her, and she continues to rise to the challenge of being in an institution.”
Gibney, who has designated a studio at the organization’s space in Lower Manhattan to be used for percussive dance in the near future, realizes that creative people like to push boundaries.
“When she’s in the audience, people know they’ll be seen and they’ll be met on their own terms,” Gibney said of Yaa Asantewaa. “She treats work and artists with respect and has become a kind of truth teller in the field.”
The multidisciplinary artist Maria Bauman-Morales can attest that there has long been comfort in knowing that Yaa Asantewaa was watching and writing about dance. “It didn’t guarantee she was going to love the work,” she said. “It has to do with the fact that Eva is a black woman who is looking a little bit outside of the center to strategically place a spotlight through her writing.”
There certainly is a dearth of black writers in dance. But Yaa Asantewaa, who wrote for several publications including Dance Magazine and The Village Voice, forged her own path, including as the creator of the blog InfiniteBody. She made a curatorial splash in 2016 with “skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds,” an improvisatory evening at Danspace Project that focused on black women and gender nonconforming artists.
The event was part of “Lost & Found,” a series looking at the effect of AIDS on the dance community. The cast was awarded a 2017 Bessie award for outstanding performer; Yaa Asantewaa also won an honor for outstanding service to the field of dance.
That performance, Yaa Asantewaa said, was another form of demonstration — of community and collaboration. She was struck by “the quicksilver ability to think and to feel one another and the space,” which she called “the base of the black way of improvisation — whether it’s through music or the visual arts or spoken word or hip-hop or dance. It was unassailable.”
This season at Gibney, her first as the senior curatorial director, she has characteristically sought out choreographers with big ideas: Her choices include new works by Ita Segev, in an examination of her life as an anti-Zionist Israeli trans woman; Nia Love, in a look at the lingering traces of slavery; and Brother(hood) Dance!, in a meditation on the identity of black men.
“I’m an ally to the artist,” she said, “not only in terms of their audiences but also in terms of what they’re doing within institutions. My main mode of doing that is simply to bring them in.”
Yaa Asantewaa, whose family is from Barbados, was born and grew up in the East Elmhurst neighborhood in Queens. She was studious and always loved to write. “I did not come from an adventurous background in terms of my family,” she said. “The whole upbringing was safety. And here we are in the society and there’s a lot of ramifications about what it means to be safe.”
She added, with a laugh, “My mother would say, ‘You don’t want to grow up to be like Angela Davis,’ and of course Angela Davis is one of my heroes.”
Yaa Asantewaa’s entry into dance was as a child; there were parties featuring all kinds of music — jazz, calypso, Latin music. She was shy, but she loved to move. “That’s what I would do at these parties and that’s when I would feel comfortable,” she said. “When I think back to those parties, I think about the age ranges and how everybody’s engaged together and also the generosity — the food for days.”
She never danced professionally but began writing about the art form in 1976 for Dance Magazine. The critic Tobi Tobias, the reviews editor at the time, encouraged her to see everything, including ballet. She found herself sitting around conference tables with people like Tobias and dance writer and historian David Vaughan.
“They’re talking about all this stuff,” she said. “Where the hell did I come from? But what I did feel was I knew I could write and I knew I could feel and absorb what I was sensing from what I was looking at. I could translate it somehow.”
That early childhood experience of being surrounded by different generations has stuck with her. “Yes, maybe elders have a certain knowledge, but the young folks also have a perspective,” she said. “They have questions that are interesting, and for artists, questions are where it’s at. It’s not always we know this. It’s the flow, it’s the change, it’s the opportunity to explore.”
She sees dance as a way to explore social issues and trauma, a way to both transform and heal. That means “putting in a lot of folks who are dealing with identity — with issues in a forthright way,” she said. “They are saying, ‘We are not going anywhere, we recognize the atmosphere in which we’re working now and the urgency of speaking up and of taking very forthright stances.’”
Yaa Asantewaa hasn’t given up on writing, but it has taken a back seat. “I’m kind of praying that it’s not going to go away totally,” she said. “But the way I see it, being a curator is an extension of what I was doing all these years. I’m still connected to the artists, I’m still telling their story. I’m still making it possible for them to be visible. It’s in a different way and in some ways a more direct and more powerful way.”
She paused. “So hey,” she added with a laugh, “if I have to stop the writing, at least I’m still doing the work.”
This article originally appeared in
.