In the Presence of Greatness: Jawole Willa Jo Zolla
2022 Conference Blog
Tram Nguyen
One of the great gifts of the GIA conference is exactly what planning committee member Anna Campbell, senior program officer at the Howard Gilman Foundation, said at the end of this keynote. We get to be in the presence of greatness—a truly great artist sharing live performance of her work, along with reflections from an extraordinary life.
It was just masterful how Jawole Willa Jo Zolla taught through a keynote that combined elements of storytelling with demonstrations of breath and movement, audience participation, and performance from one of her pieces.
Having never had the chance to learn about dance, I’m deeply grateful to experience the lessons she shared through a dancer’s lens of spatial organization and embodied awareness. This may be so basic for those already versed in dance, but I had never before considered that the space between dancers in an ensemble—just noticing the position of one person’s shoulder in relation to someone else’s head or arm, as she asked audience volunteers to demonstrate—was also the point. She asked everyone to rub their hands together and then hold the palms apart.
“Notice the energetic space between our hands, this charged space. The space of connection, the space of possibility. In dance, there is my space, your space, and this third space as a charged space of potential. One small movement, notice the change in the space. This is connection.”
As her keynote went on, she built on this theme, almost ineffably. The role of the arts in creating connections, and the need for us as human beings and for this country to connect across difference, were all topics she expounded upon later, but it all began with each of us feeling the space and the charged energy of possible connection for ourselves.
I was delighted to learn about The American Festival Project, and that Jawole Willa Jo Zolla had toured with its co-founders John O’Neal and Dudley Cocke. She described it as a consortium of artists working in communities across America—grassroots theater of the kind developed by O’Neal’s Free Southern Theater and Cocke’s Roadside Theater. She shared Cocke’s reflection about what they were trying to do:
“We were trying to create a new American story across dividing lines. Our performances were our most public expression of the search for that story. The question was, what happened to that story?”
In a post-Trump America, this question has become ever more fraught. From Jawole Willa Jo Zolla’s vantage point, part of the travesty for our evolving American story was that artists stopped working in small towns and rural communities connecting across divides. From her own experiences of seeing rural white poverty for the first time in Kentucky, along with strip mining and mountain top removal, she could connect to their pain: “I know this. I know this. And it hurt me to think about what these people were holding onto and also being oppressed by.”
Creating together and connecting together in these small white communities changed her, and with unflagging hope, she believes by extension some of them were also changed. That’s what shared humanity means.
The same way she began with a breath and with noticing the small spaces between us, Jawole Willa Jo Zolla asks us to imagine possibility, and connection.
“Maybe it’s naive to think that change could happen. But maybe it’s not.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tram Nguyen joins us from Oakland, CA for the virtual track of the 2022 GIA Conference.
She currently works in the Health Equity, Policy, & Planning team in the Office of the Director, Alameda County Public Health Department.
ABOUT THE CONFERENCE
The 2022 GIA Annual Conference begins on Thursday, October 6 and runs through Wednesday, October 12. In the meantime, get familiar with our virtual portal and check out the in-person sessions!
You can follow the convening and join the conversation using the hashtags #ConvergeTransform and #GIArts2022 on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. And, don’t forget to visit the Conference Blog for stories and reporting from the in-person and virtual conference tracks throughout the week.
