Walker Publishing Filed to Performing Arts

Image courtesy of Leslie Parker and Joshua B. Alafia.

On the Threshold: A Conversation with Leslie Parker

Returning to the Twin Cities after years spent in New York, Virginia, and Germany, St. Paul native choreographer Leslie Parker stages the world premiere of her new work, Divination Tools: imagine home, as part of the Walker’s 2022/2023 Performing Arts season. On the eve of its first performance, Parker and a group of collaborators will also create Threshold of Change, a processional comprised of divination, music, and visual elements held throughout the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and the public spaces of the Walker Art Center. With these projects on the horizon, Amanda Hunt, the Walker’s head of Public Engagement, Learning, and Impact, sat down with Parker to discuss the potential for change that lies within one’s environment, community, and collaborations.

Amanda Hunt

Leslie Parker, hometown hero, Sagittarius season. (laughs) It is a pleasure to be in conversation with you and hear more about your thoughts on collective practice and how that informs your ideas around movement and calling people into spaces. That aspect was a big part of what drew me to your work and to Divination Tools: imagine home, which will have its world premiere in the McGuire Theater at the Walker.

Leslie Parker

I tend to talk pretty lofty and have some pretty lofty ideas. (laughs) But that doesn’t mean that I’m not interested in being grounded in a place, understanding what the connection the soles of the feet have to the earth under them. What is this environment, Walker Art Center? What is the call of home in this space? That question requires me to be honest about my reference points, of where I come from, my history. What has moved me from my history to the present moment, and who I’m in conversation with in the present moment? What is their history? What brings them to that moment?

AH

You do ground people. It makes me think of when we met to look at the spaces at the Walker with all of the collective teams—your collaborators as well as the Walker’s installation crew registration teams, performance arts teams, and others—when you closed out our experience together by grounding us together in the space and the place.

LP

When I had the first residency at Walker Art Center in December of 2021, I asked for as many folks from different departments to come into the theater and have a conversation with me and my collaborators. I really wanted us all to be here together and to think about improvisation, how improvisation can be more a part of the way we all could work together. It could potentially be a way to see how this new work could unfold here in this space. What does that look like? Even if we were not able to think about it collectively or as a community, we at least had a collective moment of hearing each [other] voice thought about improvisation in their own work life. What does it mean to be there in that theater? It was a moment where I was also able to express myself about what it meant to be a kid from the Rondo neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota, growing up in a historically, predominantly Black neighborhood and feeling like the Walker Art Center was a very faraway place.

I’ve always danced and my background in dance was marching in the streets for drill teams, celebrating Rondo Days Parade, and performing in basketball game halftimes in my red, black, and green pom-poms. That’s my training and it always had this connection to community. To be in that moment with everyone at the Walker Art Center during that residency was a pivotal moment where I’m saying, “Okay, we are all here. This is an opportunity for change.”

AH

So powerful. I also appreciate how you quickly connect and thread personal meaning, historical meaning, and community. Do you feel like working within an institution or museum changes the way you work?

LP

The pandemic gave me moments to pause this project and ask questions. Then, we became the first work at Pillsbury House Theater when they opened back up after the pandemic. It was at a time when that theater was asking questions around audience building and what does that look like now. I took it as an opportunity to think about the theater’s internal staff, its building, and the energy of the place. A lot of the ideas around creating a processional started to bubble up then. How can the work I did outside and inside come together? How does community factor into it? My background performing in the streets as a part of a community? All of that was coming together.

When I came to the Walker, I was asking questions informed by all of this. Just walking through the hallways and around the building, drinking coffee by myself, getting to know the staff, and being in the archives. Really taking time to be grounded in the space and saying to myself, “I think that there’s a particular way I want to engage with this institution.” 

There are conversations I’ve had in the art community where some people have the feeling that the institution itself is larger than the artists and people [who] occupy it. I was curious: What does that mean, really? How can this space become a home that is welcoming?

Spending time at the Walker was about having time to reflect about how collective practice, being in collaboration, and being in community is important to my work. I want the experience at the Walker to highlight how the lobbies and corridors are active public spaces. People can take these kinds of spaces for granted, not only inside an institution, but in life. There are certain passageways we experience in life, but that we don’t consciously pay attention to how they transition our lives from one place to the next. Instead, we just focus on getting to the next place.

Sometimes there is this sense of powering through. For my community, that’s dealing with a lot of grief that has compounded over the past couple of years. The space at Walker Art Center was an opportunity to think about that compounded grief, and what does it mean to transition into a space where we can imagine something that feels more like home. That is where the processional really started to root itself.

AH

That is really beautiful. There is so much conversation around that right now: What are we doing? What is the relevance? How is our work accountable to communities? How are we defining those communities? How are we calling them into this experience and into this space?

LP

That journey is not just a singular, one-person journey. It is a journey that is shared, you know? I believe that there is a knowledge of sharing that can also take us into the unknown when we come together. This process of sharing may mean an exchange with the unknown and with people that we may not see on a regular basis or don’t have background information about. That opens the possibility for something more lofty, which is why I also like to talk about the more lofty and spiritual, because I believe that there’s energy in the sharing that extends beyond just our own physical existence.

AH

Threshold of Change will also have visual elements installed in the Walker’s public spaces. How did that become part of the work?

LP

Through a collaboration between me and Jordan Hamilton. I had seen this huge banner with symbols on it that Jordan had created. It had this sci-fi feeling for me, where I was trying to decode it. (laughs)

I’m not sure what it was exactly, but I could relate to some of those symbols without even really knowing Jordan or what they meant to him. I thought, “I have to get to know this person because I don’t see these kinds of symbols regularly done in this kind of way in public spaces.” I wanted to be in dialogue with him. When the opportunity came for the residency in May of 2021, it was right around the one-year anniversary of George Floyd Square. I knew that I needed to reach out to Jordan.

I am heavily into symbolism that stems from the African diaspora. When we talk about masks and divination practices, how different materials of the earth are integrated into certain artistic practices as mediums that integrate daily life from an African aesthetic, perspective, history, and culture. Mainly of the West African region and their orishas [Orishas are spirits that play a key role in the Yoruba religion of West Africa and several religions of the African diaspora that derive from it, such as Cuban, Dominican and Puerto Rican Santería, and Brazilian Candomblé].

Jordan did not have information about orishas and is not someone who practices those faiths. I do on some levels. There is a lot to that that I’m not going into right now, but I’m really, really wanting to do work that is initiated and inspired by images, thoughts, and feelings that I get from being in contact with this information. My mentors and godparents were like, “Go for it.” (laughs)

Babalú-Aye is one of the orishas that inspired me to create Threshold of Change because we were dealing with a pandemic, and Babalú-Aye is recognized during illnesses and pandemics. That informed my conversation with Jordan around the materials—burlap, shells—certain colors, and then some of my own ideas around how do we think about this not from such a literal lens.

That is a really important part of my practice: How can we experiment with these ideas and open them up? The question that Jordan and I asked was, “If we could see something that’s healing and beautiful for the earth, what would that be?” Then we just went from there and started creating things with these materials and these ideas. That is when the raffia came in as a material, followed by the practice of acknowledging your ancestors within the orisha faith. We started thinking about: How can we be experimental about this and honor the inspiration from which it comes?

AH

This collaboration with Jordan makes me think about how the processional can be a way of preserving stories and the energy in sharing those stories. You don’t have to understand all of these histories.

LP

You can feel it. That is what I want for this work and for the people who experience it.

AH

Absolutely.

LP

What also comes to my mind with you, Amanda, is when we did our walk-through of the space at Walker, talking about the art, the processional, the movement, and the dance, how important it is to acknowledge and capture those moments you’re able to connect with someone who has some understanding and knowing of history and how it impacts our present moment. How important that is within collective practice. For me, it is important to forefront Black female subjectivity [a critical examination of how a Black woman herself, as subject, sees her role, and how that role contributes to her identity and meaning] because that is a part of my work as well.

It is also important not making the work exclusive. The combined energies that participate in the work is what makes us a full community. As I work with Jordan it creates moments to talk about balancing energies around masculine and feminine. What is that spectrum? How does it expand and contract in what we’re doing and what we’re calling upon? I can remember when Jordan was working with cowrie shells for this work, he put reverence on those shells as something that had a feminine quality. That is an example of how connecting with people opens channels for this kind of information to flow through them. It creates a ripple effect that can bring a lot of healing to people everywhere.

AH

I love that. To take us full circle to this work, in this place, in this moment right now at the Walker: How important it is to create work in public spaces, whether inside the museum or outside, that is visible to more people, all kinds of people, as many people as possible. It is not about quantitative metrics; it’s about sharing and being generous. The experience of creating art together. How can we be a beacon, or a lighthouse, for people to come together?

LP

The drums in Threshold of Change have a history as a tool for calling people together. The drummers who are a part of this processional are one of the ways we call out and say, “We are here and you are welcomed.”▪︎

Experience the processional Leslie Parker & Collaborators: Threshold of Change along the Walker Art Center’s free public spaces on Thursday, May 11, 2023, at 7 pm.

Tickets for the world premiere of Leslie Parker Dance Project’s Divination Tools: imagine home presented May 11–13, 2023, in the McGuire Theater at the Walker Art Center are available here.

These works would not be possible without the many collaborators including Jessika Akpaka, Bayou Bay, Jordan Hamilton, Mame Diarra Speis, Dameun Strange, Nioka Workman, and Michael Wimberly.