This past weekend, Ben Hart ’11 performed “Dancer as Insurgent,” the performance component of his African-American Studies senior project on Vogue, a form of black and latino queer competitive street dance. The show was incredibly popular, selling out its two performances, and with reason: Hart’s precision, grace, and command of both the form and the theory of Vogue are incredible. Both pseudo-biographical and intellectual (with readings from some of his senior paper’s sources), the show was a rousing success. The Argus was lucky enough to sit down with Hart not long before his show.
Argus: What made you decide to do your project [“Dancer As Insurgent”]?
Ben Hart: I really wanted to do a creative project, because other creative theses have really had an influence on me, on both an emotional and a political level. The ability that creative theses have of acknowledging and empowering alternative forms of knowledge is amazing. I have a lot of respect for them, so doing something like that for a final project that took a political stance and that could be shared with my peers and not just faculty members meant a lot to me.
A: Why did you do decide to do this [particular] project?
BH: It’s something I’ve been thinking about, and I’ve been messing with some of the ideas for a little while. I knew I wanted to do a creative project but not a full-blown thesis. In the fall I wrote a senior essay in the English department, which was a collection of poems. Right now, I’m doing a tutorial with a professor that is both allowing me to put on this short show in the ‘92 and to write a short essay that explains the political and academic underpinnings of the performance.
A: What are the underpinnings of your performance?
BH: A lot of the academics that have been most influential to me in doing this project are black and third world feminists, as well as a lot of queer theorists and economically radical theorists. I definitely see this project as a feminist work, a work about queer voices of color and a work that is really about reminding all oppressed bodies that are part of [Wesleyan] that it’s not our duty to cater to this institution but to radically demand change and to challenge its purposes, which are purposes that promote systems of oppression around the world. It’s our job not to be satisfied with our incorporation into this institution, but instead to think about ways to take down the current set of values that govern it.
A: What purposes do you think are promoting systems of oppression?
BH: I think the two areas that I am most invested in are public education and equal access to resources and opportunities for all people. I think privatized forms of education inherently go against those two things. This is not a space for the vast majority of people, let alone the vast majority of oppressed people. It has to be challenged actively, which is not an easy thing to do collectively but we must try to do this as oppressed people, but also as all people.
A: How/why did you come up with the idea of using Vogue in your performance?
BH: Vogueing is an art form that means a lot to me. I’ve been doing it since I was in high school. Some of my greatest struggles [at Wesleyan] have been with reconciling my identities inside of it. Being a queer person of color within this institution (that I believe is at its core very conservative), it’s been difficult to reconcile my identities. I cannot say I’ve felt at home in this space. I wanted to do something that acknowledges the voices and the bodies that tend to be silenced in institutions like this one and to remind other people repressed by institutions like this one that we can and must express ourselves.
A: How do you think your project accomplishes this?
BH: I’ll admit I don’t know if my project is actually doing this. I think one short performance piece doesn’t do a lot to really address these issues, but what I want to do is share some of my ideas and experiences, which I hope will be useful to other people in understanding their experiences here and how we can collectively challenge the purposes of this institution. I hope it’s a start. I hope by sharing my own thoughts I am actually giving some of what my time here has meant for me. I hope I’m helping other people. But to create real change, I think there has to be a dialogue, not just one person’s ideas.
A: What voices and bodies are you acknowledging that you feel are oppressed?
BH: I hope all voices and all bodies that are oppressed in this institution, which I think are a majority of us once the numbers have been counted. But I am speaking with my own voice, so primarily people of color and queer people but I hope also to include economically oppressed people, women and others. Even though I can only speak from my own experience, I believe that these systems of oppression are interlinked, and I believe effective advocacy can only occur when we acknowledge the links between these oppressions.
A: What are your final words on your Wesleyan experience? What have you learned here?
BH: That is the question of the year. I think I’ve learned to trust people’s wisdom over the wisdom of authority. I’ve begun to learn how to speak and advocate for myself when the systems I’m a part of will not. I’m still working on those, but I think I’ve gotten a lot better at them being here.
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