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"She said, ‘Syreeta, I think there might be something for you in this form. You don’t belong doing classical ballet, what are you doing? You know, you shouldn’t be doing that because of who you are.’ "īut ballet also connected Hector to Alycia Long Allen, a Black dance teacher who recognized Hector’s talent and encouraged and supported her. "Some people in my high school said, ‘You don’t belong there. Hector was immediately confronted with the overwhelming whiteness and discrimination embedded in classical ballet’s institutions - right down to the use of pink tights and slippers to create the illusion of a longer leg - and encountered racism from her classmates. "It was a way to physicalize my emotions and, like, all of that teenage grit and gristle," she says with a laugh. She took dance as an elective in high school, drawn to the athleticism of it. Hector has been practising ballet since she was a teenager living in North Carolina. Syreeta Hector in Black Ballerina, which she calls her ‘proposal for reimagination.’ I’m a performer by heart." As a short, work-in-progress solo, Black Ballerina created serious buzz at Toronto’s SummerWorks Festival in 2019 and won the Stratford Festival Lab Award for Research and Creation. "I was like, OK, well, I need to take this off of the academic research paper and put it into performance, because that’s what I’m based in. Her research delved into her family history and heritage - Mi’kmaq, Black Loyalist and French Acadian - as well as her relationship to race and dance. The seeds for Black Ballerina were planted when New Brunswick-born Hector was working on her Masters thesis at York University in Toronto. So, I’m really, really curious about, what if we take all of these things and we make something, and we don’t deny parts of who we are and parts of our dance experience, and dance education and training, but what if we make it into something that actually invites all of the self?" All of these dance styles are within me and within my dance practice. Sometimes it’s influences of Martha Graham that you’ll see within the work. Sometimes it’s influences of krumping and Memphis Jookin, so street-style dance. "Sometimes it’s classical ballet and petit allegro. "It’s a very big mix of movements," Hector says. (At one point, she performs in one pointe shoe and one sneaker.) The genre-spanning, full-length work pulls inspiration from everywhere, reflecting all parts of Hector’s dance experience. The full-length version of Black Ballerina, which debuted virtually in 2020 to critical acclaim, will make its live Winnipeg première this weekend at the Rachel Browne Theatre, presented as part of Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers’ 2021-22 season.
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Syreeta Hector first began practising ballet as a teenager living in North Carolina. What does it mean to love an artform that doesn’t always love you back? Hector, 37, wanted to create a work that explored her identity as a Black Indigenous woman in relation to classical ballet, a Eurocentric artform that remains stubbornly white. "Yes - and it’s so interesting because there were actually Black ballerinas before Misty Copeland," the dance artist and educator says over the phone from her home in Toronto.Īnd that’s sort of the point. When you Google the title of Syreeta Hector’s groundbreaking contemporary solo work Black Ballerina, the search immediately returns results for Misty Copeland - who, in 2015 (yes, 2015), became the first African-American ballet dancer to be promoted to principal dancer in New York City’s American Ballet Theatre.