The bride, groom, minister and adorably meandering flower girls in the Tom Thumb wedding party were all of 4 feet tall. In heels and lifts.
The students from Drama 157J: Black Social Dance Performance Workshop moved like graceful gazelles. In diaphanous purple, blue and pink gowns.
And the guests at the reception could not sit still, boogying down the soul line from “Gumbo Soup” into the “Electric Slide.”
Welcome to The Wedding Project and please sign the guest book, thank you kindly.
“I could have picked a church picnic or a funeral or a family reunion,” says choreographer Aleta Hayes. “But somehow, a wedding seemed perfect. It was a metatext for the idea of looking at things in the African-American community that we don’t even see anymore, like the way women stand in church or the way they wear hats.”
Hayes, ’81, is an instructor with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center and a member of the New York-based Jane Comfort Dance Company. She and Sekou Sundiata, a poet and musician, are the artists-in-residence of the Committee on Black Performing Arts Resident Dialogues program, funded for three years by the Ford Foundation.
The “dialogues” are aimed at transforming conversations with residents of surrounding communities into performance pieces. Hayes’s students interviewed women at the senior center in East Palo Alto for their project. “It was wonderful,” says senior Christina Knight. The woman she talked with “was funny and warm, and not only told me stories about her two weddings, but also how to make collard greens and what I should do with my hair.”
Knight says she originally planned to do a verbatim interpretation, “Anna Deavere Smith-style,” where she would try to copy the voice and mannerisms of her interviewee, taking the same breaths and pauses. “But it evolved into playing with it, where we would change it up a bit, with more accent here, and movement there,” she says.
As the lead-off dancer in the January performance, Knight recreated how “I Met My Husband,” a suitor who worked on a remodel of her subject’s house. Other dancers dreamed of five-carat engagement rings, waltzing at their receptions and piñatas full of goodies. One tossed her bouquet to the SRO house of more than 400.
“The energy level was through the roof,” says assistant vice president for campus relations and special counselor to the president LaDoris Cordell, JD ’74, a founder of the Stanford Soul Line Dancers who kicked off the reception. “I’ve never seen anything like it at Stanford.”
