Dianne McIntyre: Showing Us How to Fly

By Veta Goler

Walker Publishing Filed to Performing Arts · Part of Conversations on Black American Dance

DIANNE McINTYRE Group: In the Same Tongue. Dancer: Shaquelle Charles. Photo: Paula Lobo.

With a career spanning five decades, African American choreographer Dianne McIntyre is one of the most important artists in the American dance scene. She has worked in concert dance, theater, film, and television, among other venues, first as a director of her own dance company, Sounds in Motion (1972–88), and then as an independent artist creating commissioned works for professional dance and theater companies, college and university dance programs, and recording artists. After early training in modern dance in her hometown of Cleveland, McIntyre earned an undergraduate degree from The Ohio State University and taught briefly at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. She then moved to New York City, where she began integrating dance and avant-garde Black music into a distinctive art form celebrating Black culture and history that spotlighted her artistry. She is known for her distinctive way of relating dance and music, for which improvisation is an important method of creation.

On October 5, McIntyre will return to the Twin Cities to premiere her piece, In the Same Tongue, at the Walker Art Center, co-commissioned and copresented with Northrop. This piece integrates her unique take on dance and movement with the poetry of award-winning playwright/poet Ntozake Shange and the music of celebrated jazz cellist Deidre Murray.

In a lively conversation via Zoom on August 11, 2023, McIntyre shared insights into her creative process for In the Same Tongue with me. Two things define her artistry—the way she sees the relationship between music and dance, and her use of improvisation as a creative tool. Of additional importance are her ongoing collaborations with the finest avant-garde Black musicians. Jazz holds a special place in her body of work. In viewing a Dianne McIntyre performance, one is struck by the beauty and intensity of both the movement and the music, and the power and eloquence of the dancers and musicians, who may be on stage or visible off to the side. But what contributes to the wholeness, the seamless communication between music and dance, is McIntyre’s stated desire “to meld dance and music together so they seem like they’re part of the same band.” In previous conversations McIntyre has said that she sees music and dance as essentially the same thing: music is movement made visible, and dance is embodied sound. Sounds in Motion, the name of the company she directed for 16 years, captures this perspective.

For McIntyre, this means that she doesn’t usually choose a piece of music and build her choreography around it. Nor does she create a dance and then find music to fit. In some cases, to ensure that both dance and music are honored and that they are connected deeply, McIntyre says, “how that happens, in my good fortune, is that often, usually, the dance and the live music are in the room at the same time, developing at the same time.” McIntyre, the dancers, and at least some of the musicians are in rehearsal together, developing the work through improvisation. She has said that she or the composer will have a seed of an idea, offering a sound or a movement. Others will then respond, and a give-and-take of responses will ensue. McIntyre’s dancers follow the improvisation that she is doing to capture the movement ideas she presents. After the rehearsal, she and the composer will review and refine what took place in preparation for the next rehearsal. This way of rehearsing with improvisation, McIntyre says, allows “a dialogue between the dance and the music—either with one on one, one musician, one dancer—or with a group of dancers, a group of musicians, all listening and seeing each other and responding to one another.”

However, even with this collaborative way of working, McIntyre still views things with the eye of a choreographer/director. “I do offer the dancers and musicians freedom to make that connection,” she says. “Even though I will give them notes. And usually, the notes will be that there is not a connection.” According to McIntyre, the dancer may be dancing without relating to the music, or as if they can only hear one part of the music. Or a musician could be improvising while the dancer tries to catch up.

It is important to note that another thing that defines McIntyre’s work is that she often makes space for dancers to improvise during performance. Although she finalizes her choreography, there are moments or sections within her pieces in which the dancers are free to improvise.

Throughout her career, McIntyre has worked with some of the most important musicians leading music toward new directions, including Olu Dara, Lester Bowie, Max Roach, Butch Morris, Amina Claudine Myers, Cecil Taylor, Don Pullen, Hannibal, and Ahmed Abdullah. Through her choreography, many dance fans have been introduced to jazz music and many music aficionados have been exposed to dance. She sees this music as incredibly powerful and important, saying, “that’s why I created a manifesto pledging to support that music through my dance, so people could see that music through my dance.”

Not only does McIntyre’s work utilize envelope-pushing music, but it also employs forward-thinking notions about what dance is—especially Black dance. The movement vocabulary McIntyre uses is primarily from modern dance. In discussing the movement to which she gravitates, she says:

I like swings. So, a lot of my movement is motivated from an impulse that goes into a swing . . . (E)ither the torso or an elbow or the head or the knee or the hips initiate some movement, and the rest of the body follows.

I also like to sculpt the space . . . The opposite of sculpting the space is that the limbs are just moving through the space, moving through the air without reverence to the space . . . and no acknowledgment about the space all around.

I also like long, stretchy lines. Long, stretchy lines from the fingertips to the toes . . . It could be in that sculpting and in the swings, but it’s often in what I call pulls . . . You do this movement and let it pull. Don’t just make a picture . . . I very rarely will like a picture. A picture is non-movement, and usually is what could be called presentational. When I do something that’s presentational, there’s a very strong purpose for it.

In other words, McIntyre prefers dynamic movement. Her dancers move with and through space, letting their elongated bodies carry them into pulls and swings that don’t pose in static positions—unless there is a specific creative need for that—but carry them into the next movements. Dynamic movement is also found in the social dance that McIntyre incorporates in her choreography, along with modern dance movement.

From this discussion of the elements that define her artistry, we might get an idea of what her work looks or feels like. But all dance tells some kind of story, conveys a message, even if it is abstract. What is the fundamental message McIntyre shares in her work? She says, “If I have to think of a message, it is the freedom of the human spirit. We could be going through, trudging through this or that, and then we are not just surviving or surmounting something, we’re flying . . . That’s a fundamental message. And I want the people to fly, too, who are watching it.”

In addition to wanting the performers and the audience to experience a certain kind of elevation, to reach a higher plateau of consciousness, one of McIntyre’s goals is to help others—artists and viewers—discover new ways of being. She remembers, “When I first started my company . . . some people were intrigued by the work that I was doing because it was a little different from what they’d seen with primarily Black companies.” McIntyre wanted other dance artists “to stretch out and do new ways of moving.” She wanted them to know,

"the new ways of moving are inside of you . . . I think from my early days on, people picked up on that. Not to copy what I was doing but doing their own thing. So, whatever you might expect from a company of Black people, be unexpected. That’s another thing that I want . . . another fundamental message: Be unexpected. Especially related to Blackness."

In my view, artists are seers. Each artist has a particular view of the world, and through their work, they share their unique perspective. A key purpose of art is to comment on what is happening in the world so that we can imagine different ways of being and living. With this in mind, and knowing that McIntyre is a long-time meditator, I asked how spirituality and politics show up in her work. For both, she stated that she doesn’t usually intentionally include them. One notable exception with spirituality is her piece Love Poems to God, which she created in collaboration with Hannibal, his poems and music. However, in other works, she may not include spiritual practices and messages, as with Love Poems to God, but she is aware of her own spirituality and the ways spiritual beliefs and practices can uplift humanity. She states:

"I wouldn’t say [spirituality] always shows up in my work. However, it supports my work. So, my spiritual teachers, my spiritual guides, and the Creator support my every rehearsal . . . I also try to remember the Ancestors as being part of the creative process, because the Ancestors are speaking to me and guiding me . . . It’s not that it’s always perfect. However, the intention behind it is an offering to the highest. Even if the people in a particular scene are in an intense struggle, that struggle has a purpose behind it, because through that struggle . . . there will be light."

As with spirituality, McIntyre rarely addresses political issues directly in her work.

"I wouldn’t say a whole work of mine is based on politics. However, I am a Black woman in America, an artist. All those categories are things that press against something to rise up. Artist, Black, female: you rise up. So that in itself is kind of a political move.

I read the news of what’s happening all around the world, and then I have the hopes that my dance does something to bring some kind of loving presence to the atmosphere that will help those situations . . . . I told a group of students, “Know that your dance has the power to shift some of . . . the ills in the world.” I said, “I can’t tell you exactly how I know that, but it’s true. So, you’re dancing this dance [that], though you may never know it, is somehow making a difference in the wide world and bringing some type of . . . gracious love to the world.”

McIntyre draws on various motivations to create work that offers gracious love to the world. In addition to live and recorded music, these include nature, literature, history, culture, social dance, and “dancey” modern dance. What is her motivation for In the Same Tongue? What message is she conveying through this work? McIntyre talked about the importance of communication and the challenges that arise when miscommunication happens. She says:

"So, this piece mostly is about communication between the dance and the music, and also about human interaction and communication—live communication or silent communication . . . We can have an awareness of our way of communicating physically and audibly with other people and with nature. We need to have that awareness."

A question she addresses in the work is: What are we putting out in the world in our communication with music, with nature, with other people, and how does that affect everybody and everything?

Another characteristic of McIntyre’s work is her use of the perspectives of African American culture to address universal human concerns and experiences. So, the piece includes a section related to enslavement and moments related to the Black Arts Movement and the Black Power Movement. McIntyre says she addresses these primarily through music that has “power” and “edginess” to it. She says the piece reveals “how language creates worlds of beauty, alienation, harmony, tension, or peace.” The intensity of the music captures the energy of liberation efforts.

In previous interviews McIntyre has shared that she imagined herself a choreographer as a child, and that she would dance in her living room with the curtains open, hoping that passersby would think that her home was a dance studio. When we spoke, she said, “One of my favorite things in the world is to be in rehearsals choreographing. It elevates me.” When I asked her about her experience of working on In the Same Tongue, she shared a story that captures how her Ancestors, spiritual guides, and the Creator all support her work. She had been working on several different sections and was incorporating poetry of award-winning playwright/poet Ntozake Shange. But she didn’t know how the various elements would come together. She said, “I was just experimenting.” She confided in a close, wise friend who encouraged her to write—“Just write about your connection with the dance and music; just write whatever comes out for you.” McIntyre says her friend didn’t know the reason for it, but she said, “Just do that.” “So, I start writing . . . I just wrote and wrote and wrote about the dance and music, even when I was a child.” Ultimately, she used her writings as autobiographical voiceovers in the piece:

"And the voiceovers are my voice about my history with the music . . . I talk about how I gravitate to this more avant-garde music, and then I go back in history. Like, I like the old-timey music, too. I like the blues and all that. How those all flow together with the more modern avant-garde, I have no idea. But I like that, too."

In wrapping up our conversation, I asked McIntyre if there was anything else she wanted to say about In the Same Tongue. After noting that 2022 marked 50 years since she started her company, Sounds in Motion, McIntyre said in many interviews that took place during the pandemic, people asked what her work was like and if videos or photos were available to view. She commented:

"What was it like? I did my work years ago, and there’s a whole generation of people who never saw it live, and videos are few and far between. So, one purpose of this piece is to reignite the presence of my dance/music work on the arts scene with a new generation of dancers . . . And one of the dancers who worked with me sent me a birthday card . . . that says something so beautiful . . . : “This has taken some time, but you know where and what you wanted to do. And this year is yours. Your vision, creativity, storytelling, and the production of your voice, that has been loud. And the world has to catch up.” I was so moved by that—“The world has to catch up.”

As an artist, Dianne McIntyre is both visionary and down-home. She is elevated and grounded. Through her work she leads us to be more than we think we can be; she leads us to fly! May we be inspired by her creativity and the beauty and power of her dance. As so many of us come out of our long pause, our self-quarantine and reflection, may we catch up to the vision she has of the world—sooner rather than later.▪︎

Experience DIANNE McINTYRE Group: In the Same Tongue for yourself at the Walker on Oct 5_7, 2023.