When Asiel Hardison moved to Los Angeles in 2004—bent on actually making a living as a dancer—he had red dreads. At auditions, he says, “I was wearing my African jewelry, bangles, earrings. I had a bone in my ear, shells in my hair. I was so like: ‘I’m African! It’s my culture! Take me, take me, take me!’ In LA, you hear from casting directors, ‘Give me you. Show me something different.’ I didn’t know how to do that any other way. But I learned I had to not be so in-your-face with it, not so specific—show I could be a blank canvas.”
Born and raised in Beverly, Hardison says his South Shore grandmother, Gloria T. Wells, is the reason he’s a dancer: “Thank God to Granny! She was a dancer, model, journalist, she had a radio show. She introduced me to African-American culture.” She got him acquainted with the ETA Creative Arts Foundation, where he went to summer camp, then continued with theater classes and the occasional play. Hardison got his first glimpse of African dance and drumming in middle school, at an Alyo Children’s Dance Theatre concert—and “that really ignited fire,” he says. Alyo artistic director Kimosha Murphy took him to his first Muntu show, “Fat Tuesday and All That Jazz,” which he saw as the ultimate expression of black theater.
Talking about his piece for “Rhythm Keepers,” Urbanization, Hardison says, “I don’t want to call it hip-hop. I feel our generation is so much more than that. Hip-hop was the 80s, it was MC Hammer. We’re more urban pop, soul, R&B. It’s everything we’ve learned from previous generations. We need to tell our story right now, without the older members holding our hands.” (Also, Payne told him from the beginning: “Us old folks are not gonna be in it!”)
Family and community, including the church (consider the African-American phenomenon of praise dance), incubate dance more than schools. As artistic director Payne puts it, “We didn’t go to school to learn how to swing dance. Instead, my uncle would say, ‘Come on, let’s do this dance.’ Even though we’re onstage, we must not forget the role played by community. Urban, swing, New Orleans second-line, African, Latin—it’s social dancing.”
“It’s what we do,” says Hardison. “With Lady Gaga, when we put shows together, it changes the day of. For the New Year’s Eve show, we learned that choreography, that song, the day of. It’s second nature to us.”
Muntu president Joan Gray, who started with the company as a dancer in 1977 and became an administrator in 1986, articulates a similar vision for transforming African-American communities—and, in the process, Muntu. “We have survived for 41 years,” she says. “But in the last year we’ve been talking about the need to challenge some of the assumptions we’ve made in the past.”
Sat 7/13, 7 PM, Reva & David Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th, 773-241-6084, muntusummer2013.bpt.me, $10-$30.
