From Boston to Bogota, in dance
My arms and legs swing on stage to the rhythms of Afro-polyrhythmic music, but not any more at the Dance Complex in Cambridge. My stage these days is in Bogota, Colombia, in the 250-seat historic redbrick theater named after a pioneer of research into Colombian dance: Delia Zapata Olivella, a black woman, like myself.
Whether it's Boston or Bogota, my body jumps, a visual instrument that translates personal stories of discrimination and injustice . As a student in Bogota, I'm about to debut my work ``Amor Por Mi Alma: El Territorio," or ``Love for my Soul: the Territory". The 75-minute piece joins love and loss, Colombian traditional folk music with contemporary dance. Twelve other dancers and I move to songs by Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone and Plumb, as well as the haunting melodies of African music. This fusion demonstrate s my perspective on the intense social challenges of land displacement and political conflicts of Colombia -- an ecologically and ethnically diverse, violence-torn nation.
It feels so far from the South End of Boston. There, I concentrated on political statements through dance, protesting the war in Iraq . I worked in a soup kitchen , serving men struggling with systemic diseases, mental illnesses, loneliness, drugs, and alcohol.
Bogota is different, and yet it is the same. My dance performance here is part of a quest to learn history and show it through movement, to bring about cultural, political, and social awareness.
Zapata Olivella also founded a folklore institute , which has become my artistic refuge. I can learn about my history and the groups of people within my genealogy. I started with what I knew, West African culture, and immersed myself in diverse cultures, focusing on Mali, learning about cooking, housing construction, traditional dances. I then studied beyond African cultures to African heritage, including Cuba, Dominican Republic, and Central America . We are all connected.
The Zapata Olivella theater in the colonial center of Bogota, opposite Colombia's largest modern library, provides a friendly venue for dancers, actors, and audiences. It reminds me very much of Boston Center for the Arts on Tremont Street and the Wang Theatre . That's why I chose to stage my production there.
One of the seven sections of the work focuses on women's experiences. A man falls in love with a Catholic woman. He seduces her, and they conceive a child; he leaves her, and she is left to figure out what to do.
This a country where abortion has just been legalized in cases of rape, incest, danger to the life of the mother, or if the fetus is deformed. Religion plays a huge role in decisions on such matters. Women are seen mainly as sexual objects, and men often reject any consequences of their sexual conduct . I end the section with Maya Angelou's poem ``Phenomenal Woman," translated into Spanish.
Bogota is an education, but then Boston was too.
My fondest memory is walking on the bricks in the South End, and passing street performers on Mass. Ave. and seeing the same guys that I served in the soup kitchen at 5:30 a.m. And listening to my clients encourage my dance, many of them waiting for me to return to dance for them.
I knew then that what motivates me the most to dance, what gives me meaning and purpose, is to bring awareness of injustice in the world through movement.
And that is what brought me to Bogota.
I wanted to experience first-hand this country with its political and social conflicts . I wanted to understand how dance can reflect social and political paradigms, and how those paradigms change the culture of dance.
Joy Williams, formerly of Boston, is in Bogota, Colombia, as a 2005-2006 Fulbright Scholar. Her original work ``Amor Por Mi Alma: El Territorio" was to be premiered in Bogota last week. 
