[by Mad Dog] To me dance is how I get free. Growing up in Altgeld Gardens housing project, urban dance was something that was part of our culture. The death of disco at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in 1979 inspired the Chicago House scene, which grew into the Chicago Juke/Footwork community, which is centered around House/Juke music. In Juke/footwork there’s a constant syncing up of the movement and the music, a constant rapid-fire exchange. Juke music and movement is a direct reaction to violent and under-resourced living conditions. The Chicago footwork cypher allows dancers to express their traumas, and communicate their stories through movement. This dance movement allowed youth to build community and challenge the negative narrative about young black and brown youth in the city of Chicago. EDITOR’S NOTE: Brenda Butler and Christopher “Mad Dog” Thomas first met in 2020 through For You’s A Bridge, A Gift, a project that paired artists and elders with ties to Chicago’s Southside neighborhood and offered them creative prompts for their exchange. For this In Dance issue I invited them to reconnect. The following linked reflections were written in response to their recent conversation.
Chicago Public Allies where I had an opportunity to work and develop skills in the corporate not-for-profit field. My dance background and years of youth advocacy really helped me navigate the space. During my two year internship, I became a board member of the Chicago SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) History Proj- ect. Led by Dr. Fannie Rushing, the proj- ect really believed self education works best when you work in an intergener- ational setting. Here I learned so much about my history and the elders who were on the front lines of the civil rights movement, like Willie Ricks and Fannie Lou Hamer. This opened a new scope of work for me that is centered in liber- ation and reimagining a world without police and systems of oppression. Dance has always allowed me to bridge the gap between any form of adversity that I have ever faced. I’m dyslexic and struggled academically, but because of my ability to dance peo- ple were willing to invest in me and wanted to see me succeed academically and artistically. [by Brenda] I wish I could dance better. I wish I could dance well. But that is not/was not my profession. Nor my inclination. Though I was a disco queen. Growing up I never saw my parents, a schoolteacher and postal worker, dance. They worked a lot. In high school and college, the Twist, the Boogaloo, the Monkey, the Twine were easy to approximate. And my homies Archie Bell and the Drells of Houston, Texas (“we dance just as good as we walk”) were so smooth that the Tighten Up could be danced standing in place.
Footwork means the world to me! This art form has allowed me to be in places that I couldn’t believe I would be. In 2016, I took an internship with
Easy.
Temptations, J-Lo. En Vogue. Give me Beyoncé. And Bruno Mars.
Disco era was a matter of doing your thing but you had to learn certain dances to choreograph with your dance partner. Hey, stepping, Chicago-style, bring it on.
Through memories of late-night old movies in elementary school and junior high: Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor. Eleanor Powell. Bill “Bojangles” Robin- son. The Nicholas Brothers. Those splits. And most recently correcting history or embracing it, we are learning of the influencers and trendsetters like John “Bubbles” Sublett and Katherine Dunham.
The dance floor was the stage. It was electrifying. It was a ball far beyond that disco ball.
I despise the anti-disco movement that originated in Chicago. I wonder now what that was a precursor to? Slamming the music and clubs that brought all kinds of people together. Sound familiar? After the so-called death of disco, dancing as a release and a fun time migrated to the neighborhood clubs or
private dance sets. And slowly, the clubs fell away. Now, I feel the urge to dance again. To explore.
I watch other dancers: Like you, Mad Dog of Kuumba Lynx.
To move like all that.
And the Alvin Ailey dancers, the Dance Theatre of Harlem, Michael Jackson, Gregory Hines, Savion Glover, Janet Jackson, Broadway musical theater, The
Simply watching is cathartic, a release, pure enjoyment. This must be a kind of
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