Anything associated with having or caring about bodies in Western society—for example: desire, pleasure, hair, fat, sex, emotions, lipstick, blood, fashion, house music, sensuality, dance, craft, beauty, singing, being looked at, perfume, gymnastics, ice skating—is feminine or feminized, devalued, and utterly suspect. The feminized body is only ever meant to be curbed, subsumed, disciplined—at the very least ignored! —by the will of genius. Hence, the perennial problem of dance…

Dance is a province embraced by women; queers of all kinds; and, of course, Black folks—all of whom are alienated from and feared/loathed by the American ideal. Dance is, nonetheless, all around us: TikTok trends, music videos and performances on live shows, competition-based reality shows, etc.

Maybe you’ve noticed that, as a society, we tell ourselves certain stories about art and artists.

Alexandra Barbier, a queer Black woman and Louisiana native of Creole heritage, makes performances today because of her thirst for education. As an itty-bitty child living with her grandparents (both educators) and mother (at the time, a student), Barbier insisted on going to school, too.

“It’s funny,” she shared with me. “I feel like a lot of people who start dancing when they’re young, their parents are like, ‘Oh, she wouldn’t stop moving, so we put her in dance school,’ and that’s not why I started dancing at all.” She was too young for preschool…but not for dance classes!

Now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Dance at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, arguably the best work environment in dance academia, there were actually several times she tried to jump off the fast-moving dance train. (Who could blame her? Ballet is an undeniably hard row to hoe!) But her family wouldn’t hear of it.

And Barbier shares that she felt proud that she stayed with dance when she was in her late teens, actually enjoying it. She went on to earn her MFA from the School of Dance at the University of Utah after deciding she wanted to “be really serious about dance,” a field she had already dedicated decades to.

Interestingly, this surfaces the complexities of pursuing any endeavor. Everything, in fact, is not always love; there’s ambivalence in or to making art.

“The role that dance plays in my life is always a very complex one. It’s very push-pull, love-hate. I think that I’ll be doing it in some capacity my entire life,” she expressed.

What’s more, an individual is not yoked to a singular (or even linear) interest or field. It turns out there is no inevitable arc of [art] destiny.  “Sometimes I don’t even tell people that I’m a dancer or that I’m a choreographer. I call myself a performance-maker or a performer because I think over time our definition of what dance is, especially in professional contexts, has gotten so narrow and limited. And I don’t want to be seen as someone who does just that because I do all kinds of things,” she continued.

Barbier is currently working on a long-term multidisciplinary project called Stations of Black Loss. The work has its beginnings in her 2022 NCCAkron residency during her postdoc year at University of Illinois. Through it, she explores the fallout from and complex feelings that are enmeshed in her family’s Creole of color legacy.

“It’s sort of ridiculous that ballet, a form only a few hundred years old, is considered dance’s default. That—and the fact that dance is considered a “skill rather than a behavior—” is thanks to white supremacy.”

Whilst in her MFA program, she realized the dance forms she had grown up with, that she’d been taught and worked with for decades, just weren’t giving anymore. Considering the thousands of years humans have been here on earth moving, as it were, it’s sort of ridiculous that ballet, a form only a few hundred years old, is considered dance’s default. That—and the fact that dance is considered a “skill rather than a behavior—” is thanks to white supremacy.

She then began working with Black vernacular dance idioms like bounce, twerking, and whacking that were invented by queer communities. Ushering these forms into a university setting is nothing less than queasy-making. The academy destroys everything it touches, homogenizing so that it can work as a commerical-ready cog in white supremacy’s death machine.

The first section of Stations of Black Loss “I’ll Never Be Beyoncé” was performed in 2023 in Dance at Illinois’s annual spring concert. Though fans are sure to know about Beyoncé’s connection (“My daddy Alabama/ Mama Louisiana/ You mix that Negro with that Creole/ Make a Texas Bama,” after all), the superstar’s younger sister Solange actually revealed more about the family’s Louisiana history in 2016’s award-winning album A Seat At the Table.

As the abovementioned section illustrates, Stations of Black Loss can be very uncomfortable—even threatening. The work, she explained, sprang from the sense of loss or alienation she experienced when she realized she could not relate to lyrics like “I love my Negro nose/with Jackson Five nostrils.”

One can tut-tut Barbier’s open admission of internalized anti-Blackness as the unsurprising vicissitudes of Louisiana Creole identity’s insistence on holding itself apart from/above other Black people easily enough…but reflecting even a little yields mortifying recognition.

The tropes like the paper bag test are (real!) clichés everybody’s heard, but the things she reports her family members having said stay discomfitingly close to the skin. Most Black people have elders in the same generations as Barbier’s. Comparatively few Black Americans have had the blessing of growing up in pro-Black surroundings. Barbier’s artless admissions jiggle memories of one’s own family’s internalized anti-Blackness.

Rebounding a little from the heaviness of “Beyoncé,” Barbier showed yESteRDaZe in Dance at Illinois’s Fall 2023 concert. Don’t get it twisted. Stations of Black Loss isn’t limited to performance modes. Part of the series It’s Still Mine is a visual work exhibited this past spring in her hometown in Louisiana.

In June, Barbier showed untitled work at Movement Research at the Judson Church. Based on research she has conducted on her maternal grandmother’s forebearers, it renders the weight of history heartbreaking in its specificity. Families like hers are storied if not controversial. These Creole of color communities resulted from the “miscegenation” that occurred between enslaved women of African origin and French and Spanish men—sometimes playing out over many generations—in present-day Louisiana. And, though some would argue otherwise, it is central to the myths, tropes, and archetypes that give the state its deeply ambivalent if not queasy-making glamour.

In the 2024-25 school year, she’s not set to perform in any of Urbana-Champaign’s faculty concerts. Though, this past December, Barbier set “a jazzy dance-theatre supper club type of performance on some students” who will be performing it with UIUC’s jazz orchestra.

Find out more about Alexandra Barbier’s work at www.abarbier.com and on IG: @hello_alexandra

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