Uprooted: American History Through Jazz Dance

https://www.youtube.com/embed/k_ccANnYCFU

hi my name is kadeefa wong and i'm the director of uprooted hi my name is zach nemerin and i am the original concept guy co-creator and i did additional choreography for the film jazz is in a place of flux at the moment there's a little bit of confusion about whether or not it's necessary or whether it's relevant what is jazz in the 21st century where is it going is it still holding on to the values of where it came from the aesthetic has changed so much that we don't recognize it today i think it also wears the support for the community that this art form comes from and when people would say this dance is cool but i don't want to mess with you as a person there's danger in that we go to these studios you go to these universities and you get one side of the pitchfork and there's a whole other side that y'all don't even know that is the trailer for the recently released documentary uprooted story of jazz dance and this is factual america actual america is produced by alamo pictures a production company specializing in documentaries television and shorts about the usa for an international audience i'm your host matthew sherwood and every week we look at america through the lens of documentary filmmaking by interviewing filmmakers and experts on the american experience subscribe to our mailing list or follow us on facebook instagram and twitter at lmo pictures to be the first to hear about new productions to find out where you can see our films and to connect with our team the history of jazz dance is the history of america that history is not well documented however especially when it comes to the leading role played by african americans in uprooted the journey of jazz dance filmmakers khadifah wong and zach nimron trace jazz dance back to its roots in africa and follow its evolution up to the present along the way khadifa and zac address difficult subjects such as appropriation racism and sexism within this uniquely american art form and in the process shine a light on this chapter in america's history but in the end their film is a celebration of this most human of art forms for as they say what all people have in common is rhythm and a basic human need to get down we join khadifah and zach from their homes in london england khadifah wong and zach nemerin welcome to factual america cadif and zach's film is uprooted the journey of jazz dance and first of all what i should do is congratulate you all on the release of your film thank you very much thank you it's quite an accomplishment these days uh we've got a lot of people on here who haven't been able to get their films uh released because of kovid but uh uh is it was that a premiere at the dance on camera film festival it was yeah it was the first first public screening in the world premiere so we were very lucky kobe hit just as we finished all the major components so we were very fortunate in an unfortunate situation yeah well you've already got uh reviews and uh i've seen in hollywood reporter mentions the new york times so um so well done and any other festivals that you're scheduled to be at um in august we're at the rhode island international film festival so that's going to be fun and we're looking forward to that again it's going to be virtual but we'll get that's our second stop on the uh on the promotion tour so that's good okay and our so at this stage it's limited to festivals it's not showing anywhere yet yeah but we can we can talk a little bit more about that later in the uh our in our chat uh so well as you've just said you uh finished this just as uh or did most of the finishing just before uh kovid hit but how have you guys been doing zach how are you both in london i'm in leeds so you know in theory we could have met up someplace maybe oh i didn't really yeah but uh how are things uh how are you faring down there in london i think things are things are okay and and this particular film is keeping us very busy at the moment and we're we're just beginning our little promotion uh tour for the film festival circuit and and i think we're just in dialogue continued dialogue which is to do from home strangely enough it's been rather comforting being able to do it at home you're a bit more flexible and you're a bit more comfortable i think the first time i've ever really done interviews it's been really nice to be somewhere happy yeah or not yeah not exactly not having to rush to a studio someplace or or whatever so uh i mean it would be nice to be going to our premieres like flying out to the lincoln center in new york and rhode island it would be lovely to go and visit and kind of you know get the red carpet feel and experience but you know this is the world we live in yeah it is and and uh i know you already feel uh you're very thankful for the fact that you've been able to get this film out and uh out in front of people now thanks for mentioning lincoln center i forgot to mention that that's that's uh seems like quite a quite an accomplishment so uh um so that's that's all it's all going very well and uh just to remind our listeners we're talking about jazz dance now uh as i've already alluded to before we uh started this recording as i was going to ask you some very basic questions so so bear with me but um what is jazz dance this is that is a question that every single person will ask and no one can really give a definitive answer um as an educator sorry for jumping but as an educator i would always you know attribute jazz dance as a teacher to having rhythm syncopation dynamics use of isolation so the different parts of the body using different parts of the body in isolation to the rest um have us also have a sense of improvisation and almost it doesn't mean a thing if ain't got that swing it's got a half swing gotta have that essence of coolness to it as well so it's like a lot of things you kind of you know it when you see it is that kind of it is that we tried very hard to get a definition in the film we asked a lot of people that we interviewed what the first question that we asked was what is jazz dance and that never sort of set the interviews off right because people would go um ah we got rid of that question after about six interviews and we're like this is proving harder to answer than we thought um and that's part of what the film is about trying to answer that question because there's you know very set sections of dancers and practitioners that have varying ideas for various reasons what jazz dance is and and we decided that we weren't going to be able to answer that question definitively we had to get a lot of people to answer that question for us you know what i was going to say is someone who um i mean my formative years were 70s 80s in the united states i mean i had my own you know you say jazz dance i had my own idea with that what that meant and i mean it's what struck me watching the film is that that the definition has changed each decade has hasn't it it's it's this evolving form yeah absolutely it's more of a popular dance format that was happening at the time and the music that was happening at the time but it started in the jazz age and in the jazz era and hence that name jazz dance i think is just stuck but depends who you speak to it will be a very different definition yeah i think um well as as we kind of explore this a little further uh maybe this i think this one still for for zach i mean let's do a little uh zach uh do let's do a little dance glossary here uh because it comes up because it's it because i was watching this and so for first of all for the rest of the show if you just say jazz we know you're talking about jazz dance because that i had to think keep thinking because i'm a big jazz music fan and uh and i kept thinking wait a minute oh i see you know kind of kind of thing social dance so social dance what's social dance okay so i'm gonna take it i'm gonna i'm gonna deviate ever so slightly please do there's there's a wonderful image that um kimberly tester drew um of a tree and this is the easiest way to kind of explain the different stages and different eras of gemstones so if you think about the roots of jazz dance the roots of the tree being in african social dance and then by way of the transatlantic slave trade those various peoples were taken past the middle passage into the americas and we think of all of those kind of culminations of different religious dances social dances um coming together in the americas and then we begin to call that vernacular the vernacular jazz that's my next question yeah okay so so social dance really is authentic jazz vernacular jazz the roots of american the american version of the african diaspora right okay and then so that takes us so it becomes this and and we will i think we'll explore a little bit more about about the roots of that tree but uh other terms that get thrown about in the film you talk we hear jazz versus modern versus contemporary so what's is is briefly you're the teacher i can tell so uh we are your students tell us what uh if you simply and what is the difference between those so if i just continue with the tree a little bit it makes it so much easier to explain so there was a definite european influence to that vernacular form that uh and in essence that's the ballet influence right um so the offshoot from that vernacular trunk of the tree would become theatrical jets which is what many people or most people consider to be jazz dance and the founding father of that kind of people who people attribute right funding father as jack cole right many different people have different observations and different thoughts upon that but there's also tap that's there as well so at that same kind of era we have the tap um starting from its africanist roots and we also have theatrical jazz which is the europeanist influenced root uh tree trunk that offshoots from vernacular which then splits off even further into the modern into the all of the things that you mentioned okay um which are just influenced by many of them are influenced by cultural um circumstance and different cultural identities and different cultural movements that come from various different you know parts of the country various different parts of the world uh and i think that's the beauty of jazz dance because it is a cultural thing it comes from so many different parts of the world um not always by means of goodwill i mean and then again this gets to this one quote you have uh jazz dance history is the history of america i mean and i think that's uh i think the film does an amazing job of uh of of documenting that i think it's uh i i think what was it hollywood reporter certainly said it was uh uh extremely illuminating uh this film and i and i have to agree i i uh i didn't just watch it twice because i had all this extra time on my hand i think it i found it very i i don't remember i mean and this is very honest with you in this particular case in this your film i don't remember learning so much is going to make it sound boring and like really old-school documentary stuff from like the 40s 50s or from our school age but uh it it is i think and something we'll get to more in terms of the timeliness i i think it was very illuminating things that i did wasn't aware of like where even the term cakewalk comes from you know these these kind of things not that that's why you would watch this film we can give that away there's no spoil you know spoiler alerts here cakewalk is one of the early forms of that the african-american slaves uh a form of dance that they that they engaged in which actually was them without the the slave owners realizing it mocking the the slavos it was their one outlet yeah but artistically yeah so i mean so as we're talking about this these these roots of jazz dance they're they're they're in africa aren't they they that's and that's where you you you take us back there don't you yeah we we wanted because not a lot of people recognize that as being the roots of jazz dance and that's it's not it's slightly been it's always been sort of there but they've never really acknowledged it properly and so we thought that's the best place to start the film and that gives us that kind of linear um path to follow um and so that was a really good place for us to start that film we thought start it with the roots and move upwards um so yeah we definitely started it there but we wanted to start it before slavery because you know things were happening in africa and on the african continent yeah way before you know slavery happened and all of those all of that rich history informed it because the people were taken so we felt that was an important place to start was just before slavery and what was happening just before that happened okay and what you know again what i didn't realize is uh i mean i was aware of the lindy hop i didn't realize personally i didn't even realize it had roots in in certainly the harlem renaissance in black history i think i mean is it is it a very simplistic thing to say that sort of juba which was this form of early dance in in in the african-american slave culture sort of led to lindy hop and the cakewalk kind of i think one of your um i think it's the guy at duke even talks the cakewalk became the roots of broadway and musicals and these sort of things so um so again it's it's this very uh i mean it it is it just shines a light not only on jazz dance but on a on a particular uh not just even epic i mean it's several centuries of american history that's reflected in this um and um so once we got so we get to sort of you know past ragtime and to lindy hopps and the the sort of broadway how does it progress from there is it is it fair enough to say it's sort of appropriated by hollywood is that would be for yeah yeah i think one of one of the things that happened because and uh we had a contributor called karen hubbard who said basically it's there's a point where it splits and so the ballet dancers the modern dancers the people that were influenced by the ballet of martha graham and and ruth st dennis and all of those people they started to take jazz dancing so they took it on one path and that takes us to the hollywood musical that takes us to the broadway um even though there was the presence of people like shuffle along that black musical that we're on broadway the kind of real golden era as it's defined gets taken and is separated but then social dance lindy hop falls along another path leading us down a path towards hip-hop dancing and all of the dances we see in clubs and so there's two very separate distinct worlds that at various points intersect but throughout history we only tend to remember the white sort of people that orchestrated that because they had the access and the ability to kind of uh what's the word i'm looking forward to codify thank you exactly because they had the legal means to do that um and so that's that's where you know the politics interplays with the arts because there were black people qualifying there were black people doing a lot of those things but they just didn't have the legal means to put that out into the world yeah and it was even uh is it um what's his name is it thomas is it le france um yeah duke who um uh for clarity's sake i went to duke so that's why yeah but uh um he seems to is also a cultural thing isn't it i mean i yes it is an opportunity and not having access to um see put it the courts but i understand where he's going from you know this ability of being part of you're not part of the establishment so you're not in a position to codify uh but there's not even it's not really even part of african-american culture to want to do something like that is it i mean it or it tended not to be to claim ownership i i i that's a strange one and that's that was a quote we kind of struggled with because not everyone felt that way about that which was interesting but we we put it in there as a kind of direct comparison to show well there are some sections of african-american society that wouldn't have done that and it was just about here's my dance let's share it and everyone puts it into the into the pot as it were the same with cooking and the same with cuisine that you know these recipes were just passed down from generation to generation so these dances were passed down from generation to generation and you would see your parents and your grandparents do it and you would learn it and you would adapt it but sometimes people named their moves so we had to be clear there were some tap dancers that had steps and had vocabulary but as an overall cultural thing yeah it wasn't about individual ownership it was about well i'm just putting this out there to my community and everyone can do what they want with it and we see it now with music and sampling and things like that right right but what i find interesting too is i mean and i mean i guess it kind of makes sense but a lot of the people you talk to you have a lot of um we have a an amazing an amazing cast of of people uh that you've got to access to uh it's not just academics although there's a sizable number of those you've got all these choreographers famous dancers um that even like um um even the sort of black uh african-american hip-hop uh dancers say they're influenced by seeing things like uh west side story or you know singing in the rain or these sort of things so it's this kind of um it's it's a it was a it's a very difficult nuanced subject to to put into an hour and 30 minutes i think yeah it's hard yeah which is of yeah well that's what kept coming back to me i mean and i've actually gone and uh the probably put some things in the show notes uh who's the fellow at usc who's the hip-hop uh artist uh i mean the expert um yeah um yes yeah yes yes um so i mean he i he's i've found uh youtube clips with him and he goes into more detail it's very interesting you know people ask questions and he's like no no there is an irish influence on tap and you know it's not just the irish actually there was english clogged dancing and there was scottish highlander moves that were incorporated and area and things like that yeah it it's just and then and then even the you know again we don't want to give away too much the film but you even had uh some of these people who started codifying they themselves were influenced by um eastern hugely well when you when you consider jack cole who many consider as the founding father of the actual jazz yeah but theatrical jazz you know he he studied east and indian um classical indian dance um temple dance if you were uh if you will and uh that is very very much part of his technique which was passed down to the likes of mathematics and then that gets passed down to the next so so yeah it's really worldwide and and i think in fairness and i think you know um i think it comes out in this film that uh people like well certainly maddox and others uh i don't think coley colt you didn't they didn't even call it jazz dance themselves did they i mean that's just what it got termed but that's if they weren't trying to claim that it was you know jazz dance necessarily this is where you get on that slippery slope of try of of not being you know a lot of the people aren't there to speak up for themselves yeah no longer with us so we had to be very careful and we wanted to be very respectful of what they actually did do because they did a lot of good and they were influenced and you have to work out that not all influence is appropriation not all taking of other people's work is appropriation sometimes it's admiration so there's a very kind of slippery kind of definition and so there are clear kind of moments of appropriation throughout history and it is clear in jazz but there are also a lot of moments of people loving something and bringing it into their work and for us it was really hard to work out how to identify when to identify what was appropriation and what was something essentially was called transmission which where people just kind of exchanged ideas and exchanged dances and you're right there's a i mean there's i can i can we won't go down the list but there's other american art forms i can think of where there is this man from texas originally there's music there that's all influenced by german and polkas and spanish and some african-american it all gets mashed up and uh turns into this uh i think one it was the one quote uh america uh american culture just steals all these things and then just met from these different cultures and then matches them up and that's what you get you know make something new yeah absolutely hey so um so i feel like well we've obviously moved from a bit of a background on jazz dance and sort of the heart of what the film is is about um i mean uh khadifah i mean i usually ask our guests certainly the directors uh and i think we're kind of already getting to it but you know we're talking about the history of jazz dance um i don't think what maybe you can give us a little synopsis of what the film is and what it's what it's about sure so it's yes it's the story of jazz dance and that is the driving force but it's also a kind of artistic exploration of american history because the two are intertwined and i find that you need to understand the social and political context of art to understand why it was created and why it is the way it is and why it's been disrespected and you can only do that by acknowledging the kind of systemic racism and the the way america was founded on genocide slavery you can't unless you acknowledge that you can't sort of understand jazz dance and you can't understand why it is such a disparate art form that that is up for so much debate so that was why we kind of had those social and political elements in there too and in your i mean going through this if you've is is it more than just um uh a few people saying this is there you know is there evidence that p a lot of people really don't know where where jazz dance um emanates from is that that's true it's it's just not taught and if it is taught expect talk very broadly so they'll just say it originated in america in x time period without going into the detail of what happened in slavery the horrors of slavery and how that led to it because there is direct correlation so if you think about the slave act of 1739 when they had a rebellion organized by drums and said well any african coupling john your hands will get chucked off so they move the rhythm inwards that's a direct result of a political act that created an artistic form and started that journey so if they just say broadly oh it came from america in the 1600s 1700s 1800s whenever they want to date it from all the 1920s which a lot of the time they do from the jazz era right you don't get an understanding of what it really is you just think it's a dance in a nightclub for fun but it was about so much more yeah and so yeah that that that's why we kind of had to tie those things and why they're intrinsically linked okay so so zach you're the concept guy um what did you start off oh well you had the concept so what did you start off wanting to document or how did this you know how this project kicked kick off yeah i'll try and be brief with this answer so around five years ago i'm 38 now around five years ago i decided to do a degree i didn't have never done a degree because they weren't i didn't want to do one when i was 18 years old so i decided to do a degree in my mid-thirties uh that was about five years ago and um i was in a i've been a west end performer in west end shows for nearly 20 years now and i was having debates um with people just going what do you know about this what do you know about this and it just so happened that i've known khadifah for a good old 10 12 15 years or however long it is as well it just so happened that khadifah started working in the same building as me at the savoy theatre in london and i was like no way so um we were having a debate um in the quick change area and i was like i really want to do a film about jazz dance because i'm head of jazz dance at millennium performing arts in london um and and i really want to do a film because there's a lack of there's a lack of resource for students out there there's also a lack of resource for professionals obviously i was having conversations with but who knew nothing about it so that's kind of the original kind of like spark and then and then khadifah and i were just in in conversation for a good i'd say what two years before production like doing research going going to places visiting different countries kind of like just trying trying to find you know the genesis point the starting point uh so it really wasn't about my original concept it was about khadifah and i co-creating from an original kind of like spark of an idea if that makes any sense he hadn't said i want to do a film about jazz dance it was like i was not looking to do a dance film i was you know had my sight set somewhere completely different and then he just said i want to do this and i thought well actually it would be nice to mix the love of dance and film because i hadn't done that yet and so i wouldn't have ever thought that there was anything even possible had he not asked me that one question on that one day which is incredible when you think about it and and did you set out to make the definitive history of jazz dance if that was or what was this what were you originally thinking about not really because we we start we did a little trial run on zach's thesis um for his degree and it was defining himself as artists so we we were more interested in lineage weren't we zach we both sort of realized actually we could trace our path as dancers and artists from these really big names you know six degrees of separation from jack cole we realized we weren't that far away from him and then we met lisa john marie who's the film's producer we said look we wanted you know we sort of came to her with our sort of few ideas and she said it's good but it's not big enough you need i don't know the history of jazz dance and i think that's more interesting than just keeping it small about your lineage and and things like that jazz dance she just said that she gave us that focus to kind of go okay the history of just dance what does that mean and it was bigger than ourselves obviously and that i think was the second moment of genesis when we met with lisa and we're like oh okay this lady's given us a challenge and now this is a very clear direction in which to follow and that's when you know the rest the reading and and we suddenly became alert to conversations that were having happening in the american jazz dance world that we weren't having in the british jazz dance world and we probably wouldn't have found out about that had we not sort of researched gone down that path and what were those different differences in conversations that um there was a book that was being published around about the same time that zach and i were first having our conversations and by lindsay garina wendy oliver and they were two university professors um that wanted to find more research for their jazz dance students and were just sick of photocopying articles for every class so they were like we need to do a book so they started getting together various jazz practitioners a lot of whom were in this film because we sort of just ripped those those great voices um and they sort of came back to them and said well that's great if you want to do a book about jazz dance i do know that there's a lot of black artists that are feeling ignored that the roots aren't properly acknowledged and so they did that work um before us in sort of actually putting down the roots and that's where the tree came from they got that the tree that zach beautifully used that's where that image came from and that's what formed the basis for our film was the sort of tree growing and evolving um so they were the catalyst to that within the jazz dance community and we were able to read this book and use it as our starting point so it was the best jumping off point that we could have had as filmmakers and also nothing had actually been made visually i guess that we could we could show to people or i had really seen there are documentaries and and there are things that you can research and look up uh about different sections and different parts of the jazz dance world but nothing that kind of encapsulated all um encapsulating all turned it out turned out to be quite it's it's it's quite defeat it's quite we i don't think we got it all i think we got a lot but i wouldn't say that we got it like a hundred percent of it all right they've asked i think you've got the visual equivalent of that of that book basically it's a you know any good you're never going to capture it all so you've got a good jumping off certainly an excellent jumping off point um i mean one thing i picked up on and maybe it's wrong but i in it maybe kind of goes back to some of these definitional issues but and i think you've kind of alluded to um this uh point you made about a lot of the um uh black um uh people in the field of feeling a bit uh aggrieved or maybe i'm trying to find the right words for it but is there is there this conflict basically between the sort of codified and communal performance versus vernacular establishment elite versus protest and is this kind of way back when now is that where hip hop is born yeah it all comes out of protest and comes out of a need to have your say and have your voice however that happened whether it was jazz whether it's hip-hop they're all cultures that stem out of oppression and out of wanting to speak out and jazz was just an iteration of that um and you see it happen over time various music and art forms over time so yeah it absolutely is born out of that and um i think uh i think this is we've been going for i think about a half an hour now i think we'd it's maybe a good time to give our uh listeners a bit of a break um and uh besides giving them a break and a chance to hear about our uh sponsor uh we'll also give them a chance to listen or and or watch if they're on youtube uh an alternative uh trailer uh they've already seen or heard the uh the the first trailer but this uh kind of gets back to this uh this conflict this tension that you've alluded to and it's also kind of i think sets us up for when we come back which is sort of looking forward into um the the the future of of jazz dance so uh uh let's uh listeners you can have a break and uh do do stick around though and listen to that uh trailer you're listening to factual america subscribe to our mailing list or follow us on facebook instagram or twitter at alamo pictures to keep up to date with new releases or upcoming shows check out the show notes to learn more about the program our guests and the team behind the production now back to factual america a great jazz dancer has a strong sense of self a great jazz dancer isn't afraid to get dirty jazz is an opportunity for everyone to bring their own culture their own style and it's really what they feel in their heart and their soul great jazz dancer knows how to focus how to get the audience to look at them and say this is what i want you to look at it's like the great jazz musicians a lot of people that can hit the notes but can they put it together can they make gumbo with it can they judge you you know that's jazz dancing welcome back to factual america i'm here with uh khadifah wong director of uprooted the journey of jazz dance based on the original concept and idea of zac nemeron who's also provided many other aspects to the film including some choreography um i want to uh read a quote from the hollywood reporter actually i think it's an excellent one um uprooted couldn't be more timely a thoughtful and impassioned look at the often ignored roots of a quintessential american art form one that can be traced back to people enslaved by the nation nation her documentary offers because they referred to you in the previous sentence her documentary offers an enriching corrective to the official story of jazz dance taking it beyond its already fascinating and complex showbiz luster to profoundly political terrain uh so that's the film uprooted the journey of jazz dance um oh by the way zach did i recognize a cameo by you in the in the film oh yes i i have appeared i i took part in a in a couple of classes that um where was it steps on broadway so i went to police class i went just as a dancer myself just because i wanted to kind of immerse myself in the experience yeah no i think i think it was great i didn't notice it until the second time around i just kind of happened to look up i was like wait a minute i think i'm going to be talking to that guy uh later today um what's so what's the future of jazz dance i mean um um i don't want to go into all i mean your film i hope you know we'll talk about how people are going to be able to see this eventually but uh um and i don't want to give anything away but i don't think we are but if if you don't mind where do you see the future of jazz dance going or what's what's the next hip-hop basically gosh that's a very difficult question i don't think hip-hop much the same as vernacular jazz will ever die because it's a cultural thing so uh monsell says it very well in all of his you know all of his seminars that he gives and everything and he says bits you know in our film you know hip hop is culture debbie allen said that it's culture and you know it will never die it will just morph and transition into something else and and his jazz dance um it's just come to me i mean is jazz dance sort of like jazz music i mean because jazz music i mean i'm a big fan of i was actually saddened in a way to hear that it was the death of the me but i'm a big fan of bebop right so um you know i love miles davis and all these people and then i find out that it was the death knell for this relationship between jazz music and jazz dance but um but it goes through these waves and there's all these people know it needs to be 1920s 40s period or oh no it's b but bebop's now over 60 almost 70 years old almost coming on um and you know the there's this risk that things become art forms become sort of uh to use the british expression you know uh sort of coded an aspect and just kind of preserved instead of um evolving you know and is is it possible maybe that's kind of that's essentially it's sort of something similar with something like yeah it's funny because they did leave each other but they did also come back because i remember doing a lot of my dance training in the jazz dance classes to acid jazz and groups like and new jersey kings and grover washington junior and in a quartet so we did it in both my jazz dance classes and my contemporary dance classes so i think you find that they just kind of morph into whatever is the music of the day but you can as artists change and some of those modern jazz artists started looking back for inspiration so did the dance the choreographers and the dance teachers would look back for inspiration at the music and the jazz music so it just never it's always been a kind of exchange and a kind of a relationship where i guess they just break up and get back together again and it will continue to do that depending on what the musicians are doing yeah yeah and i guess um i mean you guys can tell me better than than i can say uh uh i guess like any art or art form it's just you can't maybe you can't really manage these things can you they just kind of they're they're products of their meloo and things change well more things change more than remain the same unfortunately in some cases but um i mean maybe that brings us back this to a question i was going to have in terms of the current context because i don't think we can talk about this in uh in the july of 2020 and i think this will air at the end of the month or early august of um we're only a year to remove from me too and now we've got black lives matter and uh hadifa is a woman and a woman of color i mean what you know it's uh as i said the hollywood reporter referred to this as it couldn't be more timely um and i agree um how do you i mean uh maybe your own personal views of how things are going and how you see your your project your film fitting into this this discussion yeah because that quote in itself was that quote in itself was a very strange one because we finished the film like the edit pretty much it was finished last year in august right so the long way before the events of this year happened and for me have sort of a lot of the subjects in that and a lot of the issues that we tackled were my way of having a voice because when trump was elected in 2016 we had brexit as well i could feel the shift of racism xenophobia nationalism already and i remember being silenced by so many people telling me trump was harmless but even from the sort of birth that when he started sprouting the birth of conspiracy about obama it's like that's an over act of racism and everyone is okay with this like he's getting air time and and those were the signals and the warning signs then for me so it feels like it's a little bit too late because we're we had the warning signs and that this film was my way of issuing a warning sign and showing look what's happened in the past look at what we're trying to say these black lives do matter because look at the art forms that they've created so it was a very interesting quote to say that it's timely when we're like oh you know we were thinking these things before it became i don't know what do you want to call it mainstream or the news change the way they describe things because before that no one would describe describe donald trump and boris johnson as a racist when they are and they're not just their words their actions actually state that and and prove that beyond any reasonable doubt so it's a very strange thing for me but it was a very interesting one um that the film all of these things happened as the film came out because it's like i wonder how this has changed people's perception and whether they would have been so willing to accept what we were stating was the history of jazz dance and the roots because we know that there's been huge debates and even just some of the dance conferences i attended hearing people resist this message that a lot of the dancers and and practitioners were trying to say and talk about the roots of jazz dance they weren't willing to listen but i think they're willing to listen now so i think maybe we debuted this film with some kind of ears which i think was a thing and a good thing for the film because it meant our message was heard with a bit more of a favorable kind of understanding and a willingness people were willing to hear what we had to say i mean you have a there's a great quote from the film uh that you pointed us towards and i think happy to share it's uh america we don't teach aspects of history particularly the eras areas in which african-americans have had a vital participatory role that was professor robin gee now um i think she's at uncg i believe uh but uh the uh you spend a lot of time in north carolina i think i noticed that a lot of the professors are in different places around there um but um i mean i think that's i mean we've had other uh we've discussed other documentaries on the podcast we've looked at the uh james baldwin documentary that came out a few years ago um some other discussions i mean i think it's true they were um they raised points they're very illuminating and i think you just for whatever reason fall on um certainly in the u.s they fall on deaf ears many times and maybe it just unfortunately is society sometimes we need a a kick in the rear end sometimes to take to rear up and take notice uh of things um but i thought it but all that said i mean um i you know i'm not here i don't usually just read quotes but uh i mean you just discuss yours as being an honest conversation about jazz dance we've already talked about that it's not about um it's not all about its appropriation it's all about understanding where uh i think is this very subtle very nuanced argument and i think you do extremely well in terms of what was admiration and what people were doing adding to the sort of creative creativity um of the art form so um um but if i may so to both of you let you know as we're actually i'm hard it's hard to believe this has been going very quickly and i've really enjoyed this uh we're starting to get towards the end of our time together but how did you two get into jazz dance what or is that are you were you kadif were you into jazz dance as well or is it or just sad well we both zach and i both trained under the same lady the late great jackie mitchell um and she was a descendant of mathematics's teaching and she brought his isolation technique to london correct me if i'm wrong so that was where i first started doing jazz dance because i was a contemporary dancer um all of my life ballet and contemporary and then i came into jazz when i started my professional dance training but i didn't feel like that was where i was welcomed the most ironically and we weren't because we weren't taught about the history and the roots and how it related to me as a black woman i didn't really wasn't really interested in it because it was just a lot of hair flicking and superficial it's basically yeah um so i moved into contemporary dance because you know we were getting more of an internal journey and what we were being taught and and i was interacting more with choreographers of color from the quintet world so it was more important for me that way but i always loved jazz dance and i always wanted to do it and i was kind of raised on those dance films of staying alive flash dance forest line um all these you know that's that was what i wanted to do but i was just never able to do it because there just wasn't the opportunity in the uk to do those kind of dances there was no there's dance companies there was all those very few and so it was really hard to do that so i had to go into contemporary but that's how my jazz journey went and then meeting zach and seeing his renewed you know he renewed my love for matt mattock's technique and my love for jazz dance as all and that was because zach was teaching it and i would do his class and like that okay and interestingly enough i i had a very similar journey again taught by the late great jackie mitchell uh but my journey was very different as a as a mixed race guy um you know i i just took to it like a duck to water and you know subsequently had a almost 20 what still have but have a kind of almost 20-year performing career in musical theater so which is jazz dance incarnate really and i was lucky enough to work with so many a very different group of choreographers and directors not just kind of like a select few that i kind of sponged every bit of information from so many different people that i worked with so i just feel lucky and grateful to have worked with so many people which has informed me as a as a more of an emerging choreographer in life to to to create informed jazz dance rather than just the flicky of the hair jazz dancers as katie for may have been talking about earlier on what i mean yeah there you go i mean i think or well i mean actually this brings me something comes up in the the film too this idea of where i mean we talked about what's the future i mean i wasn't aware that there is this whole situation where now that i know what jazz dance is uh there's this whole situation where there's so few companies now um and um uh one of the i think one of your guests talks about uh what did you call it um um there's the uh get a job kind of uh you know you do and then people are talking about it it's all about uh it's becoming trixie it's all about how many flips you can do and things like that um and uh yet everyone you've got on there even the ones that are choreographers they all sound like uh professors in the best sense of the word you know they're very studious and very uh intellectual and have really thought through this it's a it's very it's a very interesting um uh dynamic i think you've caught there i think the reason why they're successful because they are informed or more informed than most i mean we haven't uh oh sorry let's go ahead you just don't want to make you know doing that kind of entertainment dance is a skill set in itself and creating dances that the crowds like is a skill set in itself and there is a gift in it you know people are seeing jazz dance maybe they're not seeing the type of jazz dance you want them to see but they are looking at it good starting point as as fixy and as flippy is as it is but there's still some merit in in that kind of dancing i think well i think one of them one of the one of those talking heads does mention the uh yes there is that element but the flip side is more people again are getting interested into into dance so um which um is interesting we've had a quite a few uh very different subjects nothing related to dance but we've had a lot of you know it's funny or it's interesting how much the 80s particularly the 90s keep coming up and i know we're in a period where the 90s are very hot right now and things like that but uh this was you know they were saying dance was everywhere in the 80s and 90s and i mean you touch on that too what you know what's happened there as well uh but um it is uh it is it is interesting to have gone through this sort of period and you know maybe there's a there will be this time of renewal and and and uh rebirth um now you've i was so kadifah you made the switch to filmmaking this is your feature debut right yeah so um um and documentary filmmaking at that uh i mean but both of you what do you think you've seen that as an um that maybe an american filmmaker might have missed because we uh um the producers of this podcast is alamo pictures and the remit is documentary films from a european or a national perspective so do you think there's an outsider's what sort of what was your unique viewpoint or sort of insights that you were able to provide being uh at least by british origin uh yeah i think it was that we could step back and look at it as a whole um and we weren't tied to any bias or any allegiance to anything american because i know in england when we interviewed people in britain i had certain allegiances like oh let's interview that person because they were instrumental or this institution because they're there so you have those you have those little implicit kind of moments that you want to favor whereas going into the states i went i didn't go as a dancer so the dance world was everyone was on equal terms with me so i didn't need to favor anybody it was about what you had to say and i think that was allowed me to be impartial um and just things like the universities dance programs and systems i didn't really know exist and the level of funding that they get and the sort of facilities it was it was incredible we just don't have that in the uk so i i you know yeah it opened up my eyes to something completely different the way that they approach dance and i know it's not perfect but you know over here with the academy system that we have it was it was very very different so yeah i think we just brought a more open-minded view to it that we and it would have been maybe different if we made a film about the uk jazz dance while zach i don't know if you agree no absolutely i think i think i think we it's definitely important as documentarians to step back and listen to everyone and take in everyone's views i mean we how many what 51 interviewees four countries 11 cities and actually that's only 51 interviewees that made it into the final cut of the question so we i think we got 75 to 80 interviewees in total so interviews in total so it's i think as brits it was very important for us to just miss it and not let anyone dictate anything to us yeah and you got i mean that must have been amazing to interview cheetah rivera oh let me tell you a little story so oh yeah she is one of my all-time favorite artists since i was a child i'd love cheap rivera and then when i found out that i actually was going to interview cheetah and my heart stopped love the woman after the interview happened she walked out i think i nearly fainted in the chair oh yeah i actually one of the first oh my god but um but yeah no wonderful and and graziella danielle as well who who was with her in the same interview it was just i mean i may have not not been there like you could just turn on the camera and let them peek because they were day yeah there's one you go ahead oh it's a stroke of genius on our producer's part that i think that was our first new york interview she scheduled it and it was like right for new york we kicked off with cheetah rivera and you're like that's brilliant that was the best of new york so i think she scheduled us well for that because it just set the pace for the rest of the the shoot yeah that's been an awesome so later on down the line we had debbie allen as well which is one of one of khadifah's kind of queens see we see i'm old enough i remember the tv show fame and you know you know and and things like that and that's again gets back to this 80s 90s uh zeitgeist basically where dance was not realizing at the time but dance was so readily available absolutely fame was the first tv show i think i was actually allowed to watch i was like three or four when it first came out and okay just you know it was like this woman came on and was just incredible and the way she was so disciplined and every dance teacher i had if they were like lydia grant i was like that that's it that's the dance teacher i want so i i really responded to any dance teacher that you know and was really harsh on you and stuff and it's like oh this means they care it was absolutely amazing to interview her and luckily didn't gut and i wanted to say like you made me but didn't thankfully kept my call and um the uh and and some oh again we don't want to support there's some great stories that come out of this the these these interviews besides the commentary and the the history um uh but i want to say would you give a shout out to your uh your director of photography because the way you capture the the dance is i mean if even if you don't care about the story or whatever i think just watching some of these scenes of the of dancing is just absolutely amazing yeah matt simpkins is uh he and he's a dancer too so i think it was one of the things when we sort of met him and found out he was a dancer and lisa introduced us it was like he was so on board with what we wanted to do because we just said we don't want to film it front on and have from the audience because it did start off as a documentary about dance for dancers originally we were only targeting dancers at the very very beginning so we were like you know matt we wanted to look dancers and he was like say no more and i think the first time you know we got to chicago he had no rehearsal no set up they said oh we prepared this dance number for you and he was like okay it's 11 minutes long so they can only do it once and he had to just get in there and just move around and i've never seen anyone look you know like the color had been drained down to them but he had to go filming like a continuous thing for like 11 minutes all these dancers rushing about but yeah his visuals are absolutely incredible and it was just exactly what we wanted for the film this immersive this is how dancers see class this is how we see rehearsal this is the little bits of body parts that's how we focus and hone in on things to learn and that's what we wanted to mirror and he he got that from day one you know it was brilliant as a brilliant collaboration and i liked how you also went to you know you're in calgary you're in all kinds of places that wouldn't normally think of for uh for certainly for jazz dance or at least to the layman's uh uh knowledge and uh and i think the people you capture there they're all they all seem so so genuine and um it's it's it's it's beautiful it's actually that that and of itself i think that some of those segments are it can be or works of art you know very very compelling stuff i have loads of questions but i'm going to wrap think i'm going to try to wrap things up um um for those i i just want to also say whose idea was the uh i don't want to give too much away because it came as a quite a surprise to me when i was watching but there's this white knights cameo whose idea was that okay no it's all say no more yeah no go ahead but we wanted gregory hines is so influential and so key and it was like how do we get him in this film because sadly he's no longer with us it was like when i saw i remember going back to watch white knights as part of research and that monologue i was just like well this is just everything in a nutshell in whatever 30 seconds of whatever however long it is this is everything and i don't know if this it felt like he when i watched it if i'm like he gregory hines himself had gone off script and and i thought that's perfect this is how we get gregory in the film and then your producer's trying to remind you how much that archival footage is gonna cost and uh but somehow you still got it in there somehow we did and big thanks to taylor hackford for saying yeah sure absolutely he was very generous and very kind so we say mad props to taylor hatford for allowing us to appropriate his work a little bit hey so well we've already kind of you we've already talked about some of the challenges now of uh being filmmakers and uh uh in terms of what's going on now with covid and things like that but uh i know you're concentrating on the project at hand and long may you enjoy it but what what's next for for the both of you well i'm doing a um teaming up again with a few of the people from uprooted and we're um the editor specifically joan jill amaram um she's an american as well and lives in the uk and she used to be a football player and she and i really enjoyed um capturing you know the way we edited matt's movement and stuff like that so we wanted to do something movementy again so we're looking at something about women's football um yeah all soccer as the americans would say legitimate word that's in early stages and we're hoping that we're going to sort of get the ground and then we're exploring some other options and zach and i will always be working on something together um joined at the hip that way creatively so we're we're exploring a few options um and we've got a few things in the pipeline okay zach zach i've seen your bio i know you're busy man but what's uh what's next for you i i continue to be head of jazz dance at millennium performing arts that continues every single year um i i would like i'm gonna put this out there i would like to start my own jazz company we have very few in the uk i can think of maybe one or two i would like my own company so that's that's kind of where i would put energy in the future okay yeah well if anyone with means is listening or watching this podcast and has been motivated by this to uh by uh to learn more about jazz dance we'll put you we'll have links to your different uh social media accounts and things like that in the show notes so they can reach out to you but uh i think that sounds like that sounds like a great idea um um and i think um you know i think that's i think that's excellent i think also if you wanted to leverage the what you've already done i think there's a lot of individual subjects that you could even out of this film explore further you know uh some of the people let me i g first of all i actually just have to make a mention because we haven't even mentioned her uh but you could eat you know i don't know if there's a katherine dunham um doc out there or not and it'd be difficult my hope is that anyone now that we've opened the door for any dancers to turn filmmakers and start making individual stories because every sort of five minutes go by in this film and you're like that's a film in itself and that was what was so challenging to edit was trying to work out how much air time you gave when you knew each moment was a film yeah that could be you know you could film 90 minutes with just this one subject right and so the hope is that now that they've seen it can be done that there is an appetite for it that other dancers will now start making films about these subjects because it needs to come from a dancer's perspective i think um along with you know filmmakers and stuff but you know dancers need to sort of take hold of their narrative and their stories and and really put them out there in the in the film world to preserve them for legacy because we don't often we can't often hold on to it because it happens on stage or happens on the streets and it's not always filmed and if zack if you don't mind i think i'm going to let khadifah have the last word on that i think that's a great way if if you're okay with that um all right i see the thumbs up um so i just want to um thank uh khadifah wong and um zach nimmeron the filmmakers behind uprooted the journey of jazz dance for coming on to the podcast it's been a a pleasure having you on um i want to give a shout out to this is distorted uh studios here in leeds england and to remind you to like us and share us with your friends and family wherever you happen to listen or watch podcasts this is factual america signing off you've been listening to factual america this podcast is produced by elmo pictures specializing in documentaries television and shorts about the usa for international audiences head on down to the show notes for more information about today's episode our guest and the team behind the podcast subscribe to our mailing list or follow us on facebook instagram and twitter at alamo pictures be the first to hear about new productions festivals showing our films and to connect with our team our homepage is dot co dot uk

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