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A Day in the Life of Dance: 651 Arts Finds a Permanent Home to Uphold Black History: Archival and Alive
By Hannah Lieberman
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Published on January 29, 2025
Lisa Helfert
“Revel in the luxuriousness of this brand new theater for five more minutes,” said 651 Arts Executive Director Toya Lillard. It was the organization’s first event in their new permanent home at L10 Arts & Cultural Center in Fort Greene.
651 Arts was born in 1988 out of a call to create intentional programming that reflected the already thriving Black arts community in Brooklyn. In its 36 years of presenting artists like Dianne McIntyre, Ronald K. Brown and Bebe Miller, the organization has not had a permanent space to call home until now.
From the outside, the building at 10 Lafayette Ave appears to blend into its surroundings in the increasingly gentrified neighborhood—tall, glass, modern. But inside, on the fourth floor, 651 Arts is actively resisting cultural erasure by maintaining their abundant archive—the work of contemporary artists of the African Diaspora in Brooklyn—and supporting Black artists of today.
I was fortunate to have conversations with Lillard and André M. Zachery, whose world premiere in collaboration with Ayinde Jean-Baptiste, Against Gravity: Flying Afrikans + Other Urban Legends, marked the official opening of the new space on January 16.
“Part of having a home is having a place to activate our archives,” Lillard explained, “to educate new Brooklynites about ways to support these cultural ecosystems and avoid becoming part of the problem. It’s so important. Otherwise, the kids will never know.”
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Lillard spoke warmly of Zachery’s connection to the organization. “The way he learned about the rich history of arts in Brooklyn was through 651,” she added. “That is where he, as a young dancer, learned about being an artist in Brooklyn. We’re inspired by the fact that André was inspired by 651 to create a life for himself as an artist. It’s important to us to continue to do that.”
Zachery recalls seeing Dayton Contemporary Dance Company in “Children of the Passage” by Ronald K. Brown and Donald McKayle, and “C-sharp Street - B-flat Avenue” by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, in his early twenties. He also remembers seeing Ralph Lemon’s “How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?” with a cast that included Djédjé Djédjé Gervais, Darrell Jones, Gesel Mason, Okwui Okpokwasili, Omagbitse Omagbemi, and David Thomson. It played at the Harvey Theater at 651 Fulton Street, which is the organization’s namesake and address where it once had an office space.
“[651 Arts] was what I was looking for,” Zachery said. “Black experimental artists working in the avant garde. I knew I was able to find it en masse at 651.”
He also remembers the support he received from Shay Wafer, former Executive Director of 651 Arts and renowned arts leader nationwide. “I take this with me as I move forward: She treated all of us with the same respect, she never talked down to me or any [young artists]. She took us so seriously… She shaped us to become professional with such care and intention… I’m forever grateful for that.”
The career paths of dance artists, their influences and mentors, are often opaque to the young people who look up to them, especially when systems contribute to the erasure of their legacy. The gentrification of Brooklyn superimposes homogenous apartment buildings and chain restaurants in places where Black artists lived and worked. In our conversation, Lillard shared that L10 stands where the BAM DanceAfrica festival was held decades ago. As an unfortunate illustration of the critical importance of archival preservation, I struggled to find evidence of this fact on the internet. Stories like Zachery’s are beacons in the fog.
Against Gravity: Flying Afrikans + Other Urban Legends is a solo performance, but Zachery is far from alone onstage. The work examines three seminal figures of Black Chicago: top high school basketball player Benjamin Wilson, activist and revolutionary Fred Hampton, and the city’s 51st Mayor, Harold Washington, “all viewed in their primes as messiahs.”
Benjamin Wilson’s legacy, as illustrated in Coodie Simmons and Chike Ozah’s documentary Benji, remains a powerful presence in Black Chicago. A seventeen-year-old basketball star, he was killed the night before his senior year season began in an argument that resulted in gun violence. Zachery expressed the importance of a segment in the film in which Wilson attends a Chicago House party.
“Me and Ayinde said to Coodie and Chike, ‘Thank you for including that. It added a fuller aspect to his humanity.’”
The stories archives tell preserve legacies. But what about the stories sustained by conversation? The act of gathering ensures that the important traditions rooted in imagination and community also survive.
Regarding Zachery’s inclusion of Chicago Footwork, a fast and complicated genre of House dance, in Against Gravity, he explained, “With Footwork, you could only learn it if you were at the party. It was always the dancers getting the DJs to bump up the BPM.”
The title of Against Gravity: Flying Afrikans + Other Urban Legends refers to “the legend of flying Africans—a story, existing on the edge of dream and memory, about enslaved Africans who could lift up and fly home” as described by experimental documentarian Sophia Nahli Allison in The New Yorker.
I asked Zachery when he first encountered the legend.
“Through Virginia Hamilton’s children’s text, The People Could Fly, narrated with James Earl Jones,” he shared. “It was the 70s or 80s… in after school programs, that’s what we listened to. The book was so enchanting for us as children.”
The legend, Allison writes, is “rooted in the history of Igbo Landing—a site on St. Simon’s Island, in Georgia, where enslaved people brought from Nigeria revolted and walked together into the marshy waters, rather than be sold into slavery—these stories became both a truth that enabled survival and an oral archive of resistance.”
“These figures [Wilson, Hampton, and Washington] were larger than life,” Zachery shared, remembering his youth in Chicago. “This notion of ‘the edge of dream and memory,’ that is it. Their lives and deaths, their mythology… Their legacies have flown beyond them… Some is fiction, some is true, some is made up, but myth-making and superstition are so important.”
Regarding Zachery’s own project fusing myth and history, Jean-Baptiste shared, "When I read the prospectus for Against Gravity, it made perfect sense to me…there was a specific movement phrase in the work-in-progress that I felt with my whole chest. The power told me I needed to get involved. Attempting to heed that call, I offered myself as dramaturg, but what the work required unlocked a deeper co-creation.
“That's how we made this piece, with our whole chests."
In October, Zachery and Jean-Baptiste held a workshop entitled, “black revival: A Movement Healing Ritual for Men.”
Regarding his youth, growing up doing ballet and soccer, Zachery recalled, “It was… different for a young Black boy to be doing that,” he chuckled. “Friends would always, not tease, but you know, like, ‘What brother is this?’”
“It is still a revolutionary act for men, Black men, to be in conversation with their bodies in a sincere way, outside of the realm of competition or labor,” he shared. “To say, ‘I'm in my body, I know my body, I love my body…’ So many Black men don't think they deserve to be gentle with their bodies… Being held was a big part of the workshop.
“I try to hold my son as much as possible, because once you mature, no one holds you… I want my son to remember that feeling as long as he can. Because who knows when someone will give that to you again?”
Against Gravity is a rigorous autoethnography; Zachery places himself among a “Revolutionary, elected official, [and] athlete,” and asks, as for The New York Times, "what does my manhood look like if it’s not one of these types? What if being an artist and a nurturer and an organizer of youth is also what being a man is?”
Artist, nurturer, organizer of youth, indeed; Zachery is also a protector of sacred storytelling that preserves Black history and culture, just as much as the now permanently-housed archives at 651 Arts.
“The Black imagination is a universal liberator,” Zachery said. And 651’s new state-of-the-art, well-equipped theater is a prime vessel for it.
“The more we erase [myth-making and superstition in order to] become more modern or rational, the more we suppress and dissolve our humanity,” Zachery said. “And I'm not interested in participating in that.”
