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Pole dancer voiced by Cynthia Nixon turns heads

Pole dancer voiced by Cynthia Nixon turns heads

A pole dancer gyrating in a window turned heads in the Meatpacking District this week — but the spectacle was part of an experimental new play rather than a return to the area’s grittier days. As part of a new production called “Seven Deadly Sins,” a dancer appeared behind glass doing acrobatic moves including “splits, fan kicks and martini spins,” a source said. But it turned out that the…

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Go go dancer

Downtown LA, CA

every time someone goes thru my rm tag im like ah hi. welcome to my fucked up mind

Adam McKinney, photograph by Andrew Eccles. 

Where to even begin! I believe I shall let McKinney introduce himself, via the medium of his comprehensive Texas Christian University bio: “Adam W. McKinney is a former member of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Béjart Ballet Lausanne, Alonzo King LINES Ballet, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, and Milwaukee Ballet Company. He has led dance work with diverse populations across the U.S. and in Benin, Canada, England, Ghana, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Palestine, Poland, Serbia, Spain, and South Africa. He served as a U.S. Embassy Culture Connect Envoy to South Africa through the U.S. State Department. Other awards of note include a Mid-America Arts Alliance Interchange grant for Fort Worth Lynching Tour, an augmented reality bike tour and dance performance around Fort Worth to remember a history of lynching; the NYU President’s Service Award for dance work with populations who struggle with heroin addiction; grants from the U.S. Embassy in Budapest and The Trust for Mutual Understanding to work with Roma youth in Hungary; a Jerome Foundation grant for Emerging Choreographers; and a U.S. Embassy in Accra grant to lead a video oral history project with a Jewish community in Sefwi Wiawso, Ghana. He was a School of American Ballet’s National Visiting Teaching Fellow, an opportunity to engage in important conversations around diversity and inclusion in classical ballet. Named one of the most influential African Americans in Milwaukee, WI by St. Vincent DePaul, McKinney is the Co-Director of DNAWORKS (www.dnaworks.org), an arts and service organization committed to healing through the arts and dialogue. He serves as President for Tarrant County Coalition for Peace and Justice, a Fort Worth-based social justice organization. He holds a BFA in Dance Performance with high honors from Butler University and an MA in Dance Studies with concentrations in Race and Trauma theories from NYU-Gallatin.” 

I could not have conveyed all that excellence nearly so concisely! Today mainly a choreographer and teacher, McKinney seeks above all to interrogate shared humanity, spur connection through conversation, and “create art from a place of questioning inaccurate oppressive historical perspectives of others and, in turn, ourselves.” 

McKinney does this by engaging deeply with place and embodied memory. The above-mentioned project on lynching draws out the buried histories of locations within Fort Worth, Texas via the body, thereby connecting the past to the present through the dancing body. Meanwhile, his “HaMapah/The Map” revisits the sites of his Jewish ancestors’ lives in Poland and the U.S., crossing national borders and, in his own dancing person, revealing the coherence of memory and descendance. Similarly, McKinney’s work with the Surdna Foundation at the U.S.-Mexico border engages with related questions about nationality and connection, and what the arts might do to ground political will in the body. The theory and practice of his dance reveal the specificity of McKinney’s own Black, Jewish, and Indigenous (Blackfeet and Cherokee) family history and heritage, while also inspiring questions and dialogue about human complexity and connection.  

Much of McKinney’s work can be found online --the wonders of profiling a modern choreographer-- and it is well worth seeking it out to help configure the jigsaw pieces of the past into a more just, and beautiful, present. You can also support DNAWORKS here. 

Further reading: Academic CV,  Times of Israel interview, TCU faculty profile, MoBBallet entry, Shelter in Place (aka the sukkah ballet) review, long interview with Caroline Calouche & Co. / CLT Cirque & Dance Center, McKinney discusses his relationship to Indigeneity at Indian Country Today

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