Music Credit: “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T from the cd Soul Sand, used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

Tracy K. Smith: What I like about poetry is that it asks us to listen in many different directions and to put pressure on our own impulses, our own assertions.

Jo Reed: That is poet Tracy K. Smith and this is Art Works, the weekly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed.

Here’s some background on Tracy K. Smith: she served as poet laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She is the author of four prize-winning poetry collections, including Wade in the Water and Life on Mars, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Her 2016 memoir Ordinary Light was a finalist for the National Book Award. In 2018, she curated an anthology called American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time—bringing together contemporary writers to create a literary sampling of 21st century America. She’s also written the librettos for two operas and serves as the director of the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton where she teaches creative writing. And honestly, I could go on…but of course, it’s the writing itself that’s most important. And Tracy K Smith is a writer of rare distinction…her work is lyrical, accessible and crucial—combining honesty, engagement and imagination as she explores issues of family, loss, race, history, desire, and the wonderous. Her work sings to us of possibility while demanding an acknowledgment of what was and is. Given this, it was fitting that I spoke to Tracy K Smith before she was to do a reading organized by the Folger Shakespeare Library to mark the birthday of Abraham Lincoln….here’s our conversation

 

Jo Reed: How are you and how have you been doing through all this?

Tracy K. Smith: It’s such a different question than it was a year ago, right. Thanks for asking. I think I’ve learned a lot in the last really year and a lot of it has come through difficulty. My family is safe and sound but I’ve felt a lot of the trauma and the collective trauma that I think many Americans and certainly many black Americans are feeling more palpably. And one of the things that’s helped me has been turning to my work and amplifying that practice with a meditative practice which I feel has opened up a sense of community, even of history that’s been useful through a time in which I feel like we’re moving both forward and backward in time constantly.

Jo Reed: I wonder if there have been any poets or poems that you’ve been leaning on through this time.

Tracy K. Smith: Well, Lucille Clifton is always there. <laughs> I feel like I have her bible by my bed and at my desk in my office and her work, her words remind me that this is a struggle that has been going on for centuries and when I feel like oh, I need us now to solve the problem, the conundrum of racism and denial in this country she reminds me we’re contributing to a kind of work that may take longer than we will be here and that’s-- that scale shift somehow is useful. She has lots of scale shifts in her work and another that’s useful to me is the way that she’s able to zoom out to the cosmic so easily and so purposefully and allowing or asking my own imagination or my own beliefs to help me get out of that muck not as a way of escaping from it but as a way of putting it into a larger frame of reference, even as a way of saying, “What am I here for? Am I here right now to fight this battle with my colleague or do I want to claim allegiance to something that’s larger and more ongoing?” And to be honest that’s a question that I think many people regardless of what kind of affiliation they have are grappling with so she’s been amazingly helpful to me throughout this time.

Jo Reed: On February 11, you’re doing a live virtual reading to mark Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, which does seem particularly pertinent this year. Can you tell me why you decided to participate and what is it that you want to provoke in people?

Tracy K. Smith: Well, as I was saying the sense that we are alive in our own moment but we’re constantly being reached if you will by history feels literal to me. I think the stakes that Lincoln faced and the lives that the Civil War was fought to let’s say change the status of-- I guess there were some who wanted to maintain the enslaved status for blacks in this country but I’m one of those people who believes that the Civil War was absolutely fought about slavery; I know very eloquent scholars who are able to suggest otherwise but I don’t buy it. And so I am interested in that conversation. I’m also interested in the fact that there is some way that that perspective, perhaps not about something as abhorrent today as slavery but about a mind-set that says privilege and even a sense of superiority, can be designated by race. That’s something we need to talk about. That’s something that poetry can help us close the distance on. I have a long poem in “Wade in the Water” that’s derived from Civil War letters and deposition statements. Many of those letters were written to Abraham Lincoln out of a sense of urgent desperation: Please help me. Please get fair pay for me. Please help my son. Can you tell me am I free or not? Those voices feel relevant to me. They don’t feel foreign, they don’t feel historic, and I think that the mind-set that allowed people to storm the capitol is proof that this nineteenth-century perspective isn’t gone. I feel like I could say more but there is something really startling about the fact that Abraham Lincoln is probably one of the most relevant Americans we can think of at this moment.

Jo Reed: I was going to go to those poems in “Wade in the Water,” I will tell you the truth about this; I will tell you all about it. Tell me how you came both to these letters and the idea of simply using only their voices.

Tracy K. Smith: Uh huh. Well, I was invited along with maybe a dozen or more other poets many years ago now to write poems that were marking the 150^th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War and I mentioned the argument about was it or was it not about slavery. That’s always bothered me enough that I’ve often kind of distanced myself from conversations about the Civil War and the opportunity to write a poem in or toward that subject matter seemed important to take up. And so I thought what I would do was-- would be to research what black people alive at that time had to say about their own sense of what was at stake and I found two really wonderful sources that had a number of primary sources. The books were “Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction Through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files” by Elizabeth Regosin and “Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African American Kinship in the Civil War Era” by-- edited by Ira Berlin and Leslie R. Rowland, and so those books I thought were just going teach me and somehow enable me to metabolize all of this information, all of these different perspectives and write a poem in my own voice but of course what happened was I sat down and I was just copying down quotes, citing letters and building for myself a sense of what seemed like a kind of gospel version of this history, all these many different voices telling their versions of a single story and in some ways it is the single story of this country. And with all of those notes and these amazing resources it seemed senseless to try and do some sort of jujitsu on that and make it a poem in my own voice so what I chose to do instead was to just kind of curate a listening session to think about what people chose to say, how and to whom and with what hope in mind. That seemed like an important thing to ask other readers to pay attention to.

Jo Reed: In your work, history is often a shadow that shapes the present. It’s not as though the figure shapes the shadow; it’s the shadow shapes the figure. I wonder if you’d mind reading your poem “Declaration” and then telling us a bit about it.

Tracy K. Smith: Okay, yeah. “Declaration”:

He has

 

              sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people

 

He has plundered our—

 

                                           ravaged our—

 

                                                                         destroyed the lives of our—

 

taking away our­—

 

                                  abolishing our most valuable—

 

and altering fundamentally the Forms of our—

 

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for

Redress in the most humble terms:

 

                                                                Our repeated

Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.

 

We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration

and settlement here.

 

                                    —taken Captive

                                              

                                                                    on the high Seas

 

                                                                                                     to bear—

 

So that poem is obviously drawn from the text of the Declaration of Independence which I was reading as a way of trying to listen to history a little bit differently than I habitually had or maybe had even been taught to and trying to see if there was another story or another message within a document like the Declaration of Independence that could be useful to my understanding or even our collective experience of the twenty-first century. And what I found when I looked at it closely was that this narrative of the nature of black existence in this country leapt off the page, and I wrote that poem now maybe three or more years ago but reading it in 2021 after the summer that we’ve endured with so much violence against blacks and so much violence heaped on top of violence because of the fact of outcry and protest that poem is very haunting to me.

Jo Reed: yes. It does so speak to this moment and the nation at this moment is also struggling with its historical narratives, which is something that had to happen because if you’re sanitizing the past it’s like putting a Band-Aid on a festering wound. I’d like you to speak to how poetry can be key to opening up historical narratives since poetry, your poetry, insists on holding up and acknowledging not just various views but often contradictory views. It speaks with a multiplicity of voices.

Tracy K. Smith: Well, we’re drawn to poetry I believe because the most emphatic moments and experiences in our lives are often characterized by some sort of ambivalence. I know that motherhood is characterized by a simultaneous joy and a feeling of loss or fear or constraint, I think love is characterized by warring feelings and implications, and so poems help us take that apart; poems help us find language that illuminates those dualities or multiplicities that live within things that we think are supposed to be consistent, coherent and unified. What I think poetry does is it begins to make us brave enough to do that even when we’re looking up away from the pages of books. As somebody who writes poems as a way of making sense or finding clarity, I also understand that much of what we see is what we choose to see and unless we put pressure upon ourselves we could stop there and we could lose sight of so many other and perhaps truer details and realities or details and presences, and history seems like one of those things that you can get into a particular mind-set about and that mind-set can prevent you from being open to other versions of fact. What I like about poetry is that it asks us to listen in many different directions and to put pressure on our own impulses, our own assertions, even our own wishes or recollections or the things that we cook up out of just thin air. The formal rigor of poetry urges us to think more rigorously about language and that I think urges us to think more inventively, rigorously and honestly about meaning.

Jo Reed: Your title poem, “Wade in the Water,” is such a beauty and that is a poem that picks a journey beginning in one place but really ending for me in a place that made perfect sense but was unexpected when I began the poem. Will you read it?.

Tracy K. Smith: “Wade in the Water”

 

for the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters

 

One of the women greeted me.

I love you, she said. She didn't

Know me, but I believed her,

And a terrible new ache

Rolled over in my chest,

Like in a room where the drapes

Have been swept back. I love you,

I love you, as she continued

Down the hall past other strangers,

Each feeling pierced suddenly

By pillars of heavy light.

I love you, throughout

The performance, in every

Handclap, every stomp.

I love you in the rusted iron

Chains someone was made

To drag until love let them be

Unclasped and left empty

In the center of the ring.

I love you in the water

Where they pretended to wade,

Singing that old blood-deep song

That dragged us to those banks

And cast us in. I love you,

The angles of it scraping at

Each throat, shouldering past

The swirling dust motes

In those beams of light

That whatever we now knew

We could let ourselves feel, knew

To climb. O Woods—O Dogs—                       

O Tree—O Gun—O Girl, run—

O Miraculous Many Gone—

O Lord—O Lord—O Lord—

Is this love the trouble you promised?
 

Well, that poem marries an experience that I had that it’s kind of transparent in the poem. I went to a ring shout, I walked into the space, I was greeted by one of the performers who said, “I love you” and gave me a hug, and I was also in the midst of doing all kinds of research in the American South about antebellum history, and I was deeply troubled by what I knew I would find but, finding physical archives of enslaved existence and seeing plantations celebrated as though they were these destinations when in fact they were labor camps, that gesture of love transformed all of those feelings. It didn’t erase the fact of the past but it gave me another tool with which to live with it and I just needed to write the poem to go back into that space, that experience and slow it down, render something of it that might also invite a reader to see the beautiful life-enlarging choice that love is. And it’s not about everything is sweet and easy; it’s about we are here in the muck and the only way that we can get through to the other side, which is I think the very same mentality or understanding that had helped people survive slavery, is love.

Jo Reed: There’s a sense of the holy if you will from the idea that moves through your work, certainly in “Wade in the Water” and your collection “Life on Mars,” which just looks at the vastness of the universe among other things. Is that something that you explicitly seek to explore?

Tracy K. Smith: I don’t think I’m seeking it out but it’s such a part of my imagination that it’s hard for me not to bump up against the sense of the holy. I see it in different terms in my own vocabulary. It is at once sacred and it’s an extension of my upbringing, somebody with belief, but I think it’s also connected to the beautiful mystery that I’m equally fascinated by that can be understood in other terms as well, that the light, the surprise, the persistence and also the agency of the world beyond the human that seems uniquely aware of us, patient with us, purposeful toward us, it’s the very same thing that I think animates the creative impulse for so many artists but maybe we call it different things, that feeling that allows you to say, “If I sit here and go inward, I can find something that I know I myself do not possess, that miracle of creation.” To me that- that’s alive in so many different places and so many different vocabularies and it’s very difficult for me to separate it from my own process as a poet. In fact, it’s become even more critical to the way I think about language and experience in the last year.

Jo Reed: How do poems tend to begin for you, with an idea, with an image, with a sound?

Tracy K. Smith: Often it’s with a question or a preoccupation, something that makes me feel at least partly worried, and sometimes it’s love, the delight. Like I said, love is this wonderful thing but it’s so astounding because it somehow has power that isn’t yours and it’s-- it can be a reason to stop and think wow, what’s going on here? So for me it’s just the impulse to stop and say, “What’s going on here?” or “I don’t like where this is going” that leads me to the page. I rely on images because I need to be able to see myself in a place and in the presence of something in order to build a poem, and once I can see something images begin to take root and then I can feel myself almost engaging with them, being in physical proximity with them, and other capacities become easier for me to muster, sound, momentum. Form is often a tool that helps me keep going forward in a poem by setting parameters, and somehow all of those things if I’m working correctly create a momentum of their own whereby I’m no longer preoccupied with what I’m doing and I’m just moving forward into understanding or revelation.

Jo Reed: You certainly stopped and you paused and I think it was a joyous and wondrous moment when you wrote the poem, “When Your Small Form Tumbled Into Me,” which is such an intimate poem but it’s a wondrous poem. It made me smile; it makes me smile when I think about it. Do you mind reading that?

Tracy K. Smith: I’d love to. Thank you for asking.

“When Your Small Form Tumbled Into Me”

I lay sprawled like a big-game rug across the bed:
Belly down, legs wishbone-wide. It was winter.
Workaday. Your father swung his feet to the floor.
The kids upstairs dragged something back and forth
On shrieking wheels. I was empty, blown-through
By whatever swells, swirling, and then breaks
Night after night upon that room. You must have watched
For what felt like forever, wanting to be
What we passed back and forth between us like fire.
Wanting weight, desiring desire, dying
To descend into flesh, fault, the brief ecstasy of being.
From what dream of world did you wriggle free?
What soared — and what grieved — when you aimed your will
At the yes of my body alive like that on the sheets?”

Jo Reed: That’s a wonderful poem.

Tracy K. Smith: Thank you. It’s another example of my tendency to imagine that the events of my life bring me closer to this other dimension or realm, the holy or the whole as opposed to the human, and so that’s a poem that is helping me to imagine what it was like for my daughter’s spirit to perhaps choose me.

Jo Reed: You wrote a memoir in 2016 called “Ordinary Light.” Can you tell me about the decision you made to do that?

Tracy K. Smith: Well, I had been given the opportunity to work with a mentor through Rolex Mentor Protégée Arts Initiative and I was coming to the end of “Life on Mars” and I knew that I wanted to have a project to work on with this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I was talking to my husband one night in bed. I was pregnant with my daughter, Naomi, and I said, “You know what I really wish I could do at some point is to write a book about my family, write a book about my parents so that my daughter could know them”; they were both already passed away by the time that she was born. And the fear that that articulation struck in me, just the fact that I admitted this thing and the work that it seemed like it would require, just caused me to go into this panic and that panic just assured me that this was exactly what I needed to do. And so the memoir was really-- it started as this desire to tell the story of my family, to tell the story of my parents, but of course it’s my story that ends up being told; it’s my perspective on a whole number of things that connected with my family and me when I was growing up that the book allowed me to name and explore.

Jo Reed: The home that you described growing up in and your mother and your father it felt so real to me that I felt as though I could touch them. I’m just so curious how you brought up such precise memories.

Tracy K. Smith: Well, I guess there are a few different ways to answer the question. The one that comes to mind or to heart is I have spent every day of my life since my parents died thinking about them and they’re present for me and so returning to the feeling of togetherness with them was not difficult to do. Returning to the small details of our shared life in a lot of ways wasn’t difficult because so many of them were connected to different really palpable senses like we ate together and that was a big part of our family ritual and so food and smell and a sense of happiness and appetite those things were exciting to conjure and sometimes it was easy to get back into an earlier memory by eating something, cooking something—

Jo Reed: Like your mom’s pound cake?

Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, exactly, that hearkens from that time. And then there were other things I had to spend more time and do more work upon. Music helped, even smell helped, but I also understand just like I was saying you go inward and there’s something inside of your mind and imagination that’s not just you. That thing once it understands that you are working in earnest it will help you and so when I was sitting down trying to remember well, it was 1980, what did we eat, what did we wear, what did we say, I remember a little bit of this one story, dwelling upon that in earnest somehow I found that this other thing came to my aid and memories became clearer as I sat with them and that- that’s one of the miracles I guess of the imagination or of memory or whatever else you want to call it and language is a great tool for kind of capturing that and so it was a really beautiful process of reunion.

Jo Reed: I wonder how you compare the process of writing prose, an extended piece like that, with writing poetry. The first thing I think of is of course you know you need to sustain perspective with something as big as a memoir.

Tracy K. Smith: Yeah. I had to sort of learn as I went. I love writing prose, I’ve always enjoyed writing essays and letters, and I’ve never balked at that process and I understand that my thought process in prose is different from my thought process in poetry and I’ve always really been grateful for that, but it was a hugely daunting proposition to spend years writing this narrative and I didn’t really know how to do it at first. I had a lot of vignettes that I had kind of tried to write at different moments in my life, some beginning as early as in the year or two after my mom passed away, but I couldn’t ever get to closure somehow and so I returned to those and that helped me and then I thought well, maybe if I can tell myself what this book is about that can help me; that actually didn’t help me. What I had to let myself do was keep writing these chapters, keep writing stories essentially of this happened, this is what I felt, this is what my mother did when I was in the second grade, let me write about that, this is where my father worked when I was in the third grade, let me write about that, and I was telling people, “I’m writing a memoir.” They’d ask what it’s about and I couldn’t really tell them and it seemed like I always only had about 75 pages for years and years because as much as I would write then I would feel compelled to get rid of other things and then five years later I realized there is a path that can be charted through these things and chronological order helped me. I always thought I wanted to resist that and write something that was-- moved more associatively but chronology helped me in terms of filling in gaps. And then the really exciting thing was that language helped me to understand oh, there is a story, there is a path that I’ve followed even though it’s felt haphazard to me, and that was really beautiful. And the other thing that it helped me to do was to forge a connection between myself as a mother and my own mother and I don’t think that I could have planned that. I hope I write more prose. I hope having written “Ordinary Light” I’ll know a little bit better how to get started or maybe the process will feel more familiar but it was also something that exerted its own force and I had to learn to respond to that.

Jo Reed: You were poet laureate from 2017 through 2019 and you focused a lot of that work on rural America. What inspired that?

Tracy K. Smith: Well, I got that phone call from Dr. Hayden at a time when it felt like America had cracked in half and I felt like speaking about our political situation in the vocabulary of politics was in some ways exacerbating that sense of division and I would often find myself thinking oh, if only we could talk to each other through poetry we would actually maybe listen better; we would understand that there are nuances that the language of political debate sort of eschews. And well, the opportunity to do something, to do a national-scale project, made me really want to return to that idea that maybe poetry could do this bridge building; maybe poetry could make us behave as our better selves when we are together with others. And since most of the work I’ve done as a writer has been in cities, in book festivals or college towns I thought maybe rural America would be a new context for thinking about all of the things that poems urge us to think about, which is everything, and what I found on that-- while I was on the road during those two years was that my theory was correct. <laughs> Poetry made strangers who probably had wildly different values and experiences confidants. I’d read a poem or I’d ask somebody else to read a poem by another poet and say, “What do you notice? What does this poem make you remember, feel, think, wonder?” and then we would just go places together. We would go to real places and vulnerable places and places where that feeling that I am like you in more ways than I’m inclined to assume that feeling kind of became present and I’m really grateful that I got to do it when I did. During this past summer, even though everybody was on quarantine I often thought oh, gosh, this would be a great time to get back out there with poetry and see what we could help each other to ask and say and see.

Jo Reed: And you’ve written opera librettos and you had an opera that was supposed to premiere in 2020--

Tracy K. Smith: Yeah. We’re hoping it’ll be this summer or the following, whatever is I think safest and most realistic for the audience members and performers, and there’s another opera libretto that I’ve written with my same collaborator who is Gregory Spears, a composer, and we also work with Kevin Newbury who’s the director and it’s exciting. I just finished a draft of this other libretto yesterday and so I’m on a high of achievement or deadlines met, but it was really exciting because there is such a powerful relationship between poetry and song and there’s such a powerful way that opera reminds us that we live with mythic stakes, even us ordinary folk, and telling story through the voice, telling story through dialog is something that I’m realizing is really exhilarating and so it’s something I’m looking forward to continuing to do and I hope the world will allow these things to be performed once all the restrictions are lifted.

Jo Reed: The one that you’re hoping will be performed this summer is that “Castor and Patience”?

Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, that’s “Castor and Patience,” which will take place at the Cincinnati Opera, and it tells the story-- it’s a fictional story about two black cousins, one who is living in the South where their family descends from and one who has moved to the North, but they share a common inheritance, which is about 30 acres of land that have been owned by their family since Reconstruction and there are a lot of people in that position in this country. There’s a long history of black-owned lands but that history is just about one minute older than the history of legal land theft and many different forms that have encroached upon the autonomy of black farmers and landowners and that continue, and so our story is really thinking about legacy, history, inheritance, change and we’re also hoping to call attention to something that I think most people don’t really know about.

Jo Reed: You’ve been working and you have three kids so I’m not sure that you’ve been on anything that looks like a pause but I also assume you’re home more and not traveling. Have you been able to use this time to work on your next collection for example? You finished the libretto, yay--

Tracy K. Smith: Yay. Yeah. It’s really interesting. As demanding as this time has been, it’s asked a lot of me that I’ve needed to kind of refuel by way of writing poems and so I have a new and selected poems called “Such Color” that Graywolf will be publishing in October and it’s got about 30 new poems that were written during the pandemic, which is-- I’m really grateful for.

Jo Reed: I’m going to ask you to read one more poem if you don’t mind. It’s a short one called “An Old Story.”

Tracy K. Smith: Oh, sure.

Jo Reed: I think that’s a nice place to end.

Tracy K. Smith: Yeah. It’s the last poem in “Wade in the Water” and the title for the next book is taken from this poem. I wrote it as an attempt to write a new myth for us in this country, something that allows us to look forward with courage and maybe a new sense of what the goals are.

“An Old Story”

 

We were made to understand it would be

Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge,

Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. 

 

Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful 

Dream. The worst in us having taken over 

And broken the rest utterly down. 

 

                                                                 A long age 

Passed. When at last we knew how little 

Would survive us—how little we had mended 

 

Or built that was not now lost—something 

Large and old awoke. And then our singing 

Brought on a different manner of weather. 

 

Then animals long believed gone crept down 

From trees. We took new stock of one another. 

We wept to be reminded of such color.
 

Jo Reed: That is a wonderful place to leave it. Tracy, thank you so much for giving me your time.

Tracy K. Smith: No. It’s been a real joy. Thank you.

Jo Reed: That was poet Tracy K. Smith, her books include, Wade in the Water, Life on Mars, and Ordinary Light.

You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Subscribe to Art Works and then please leave us a rating on Apple because it will make us happy because it helps people to find us. Keep up the arts endowment by following us on twitter @neaarts or by checking out our website at arts.gov. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Stay safe, and thanks for listening.

###

Jo Reed: On February 11, you’re doing a live virtual reading to mark Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, which does seem particularly pertinent this year. Can you tell me why you decided to participate and what is it that you want to provoke in people?

Tracy K. Smith: I think we’re constantly being reached if you will by history feels literal to me. I think the stakes that Lincoln faced and the lives that the Civil War was fought to let’s say change the status of-- I guess there were some who wanted to maintain the enslaved status for blacks in this country but I’m one of those people who believes that the Civil War was absolutely fought about slavery; I know very eloquent scholars who are able to suggest otherwise but I don’t buy it. And so I am interested in that conversation. I’m also interested in the fact that there is some way that that perspective, perhaps not about something as abhorrent today as slavery but about a mind-set that says privilege and even a sense of superiority, can be designated by race. That’s something we need to talk about. That’s something that poetry can help us close the distance on. I have a long poem in “Wade in the Water” that’s derived from Civil War letters and deposition statements. Many of those letters were written to Abraham Lincoln out of a sense of urgent desperation: Please help me. Please get fair pay for me. Please help my son. Can you tell me am I free or not? Those voices feel relevant to me. They don’t feel foreign, they don’t feel historic, and I think that the mind-set that allowed people to storm the capitol is proof that this nineteenth-century perspective isn’t gone. I feel like I could say more but there is something really startling about the fact that Abraham Lincoln is probably one of the most relevant Americans we can think of at this moment. 

Jo Reed: In your work, history is often a shadow that shapes the present. It’s not as though the figure shapes the shadow; it’s the shadow that shapes the figure. I wonder if you’d mind reading your poem “Declaration” and then telling us a bit about it.

Tracy K. Smith: Okay,

“Declaration”:

He has
               sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people
 He has plundered our—
                                            ravaged our—
                                                                          destroyed the lives of our—
 taking away our­—
                                  abolishing our most valuable—

and altering fundamentally the Forms of our—
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for
Redress in the most humble terms:
                                                                 Our repeated
Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.

We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration
and settlement here.
                                     —taken Captive
                                                    on the high Seas
                                                                                                     to bear—

 So that poem is obviously drawn from the text of the Declaration of Independence which I was reading as a way of trying to listen to history a little bit differently than I habitually had or maybe had even been taught to and trying to see if there was another story or another message within a document like the Declaration of Independence that could be useful to my understanding or even our collective experience of the twenty-first century. And what I found when I looked at it closely was that this narrative of the nature of black existence in this country leapt off the page, and I wrote that poem now maybe three or more years ago but reading it in 2021 after the summer that we’ve endured with so much violence against blacks and so much violence heaped on top of violence because of the fact of outcry and protest that poem is very haunting to me.

Music Credit: “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T, from the cd Soul Sand, used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

Amanda Morgan: I think I realized that the basis of everything that I have always wanted to do is being there for my community, making art for my community, speaking out for my community

Jo Reed: That is ballet dancer, choreographer and activist Amanda Morgan and this is Art Works, the weekly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed.

Amanda Morgan is in the corps of the prestigious Pacific Northwest Ballet based in Seattle—it is one of the largest and best-regarded companies in the United States with a deep commitment to racial diversity. But although its dancers are comprised of 26% of people of color, Amanda is its only black female ballet dancer--add to that her height of 5 foot ten inches and you have someone who stands out. But Amanda decided long ago that “if you don’t see what you want to see around you, create it…” and so she has. Finding herself not picked by choreographers, she began to create dances herself, she co-founded a mentorship program between company dancers and students at Pacific Northwest Ballet School, she began The Seattle Project an interdisciplinary artist collective that presents performing art to the community, and she spoke at protests in Seattle about pervasive racism—calling out the ballet community for its lack of racial equity. Amanda is talented, determined and outspoken. She also loves ballet and loves being part of the Pacific Northwest Ballet family and it does feel like a family to her —but she’s also forthcoming about some of obstacles she’s faced as a black ballet dancer--for example, as much she was thrilled to be in the Pacific Northwest Ballet School, she was troubled when as a student she watched the company perform and saw no one who looked like her….

Amanda Morgan: It was during “Swan Lake” specifically, which already is such a classical ballet, everyone’s in white so it’s just very <laughs> obvious if someone stands out, and I didn’t see anyone that looked like me and everyone-- in the intermission all of the girls in my class they were saying, “Oh, she’s this one” or “I- I’m like this dancer on stage” and I literally went to the bathroom by myself and cried because I was like “I’m not like anyone. I don’t think I’m going to end up being able to be in this company because it always seems like you have to be similar to someone in order to kind of get to that level” or at least that’s what I saw at the time, but luckily Karel Cruz who’s in the company he was one of the first dancers I saw and I definitely saw part of myself in him, him being someone that is Cuban and Afro-Caribbean. So I- I’m lucky that I had him and also Lindsi Dec because they are both tall too, I’m also very tall, so I was trying to not let it get too much in my mind but there was definitely hard moments.

Jo Reed: You have been dancing since you were a child. What was it about ballet that not only drew you in but made you stay?

Amanda Morgan: So <laughs> I started dance when I was two and a half, which is quite young, but my mom tells me ever since I could basically walk I was always just dancing and super active, super hyper, so she thought to put me in ballet because when she was younger she did ballet but then it inevitably stopped so she’s like “Ballet’s a good thing for her to start in” so I went and I just loved it and I stayed in it ever since.

Jo Reed: It is an enormous commitment for a child who moves into a professional track as you did, such a commitment not just for you but for your mom as well.

Amanda Morgan: Yeah, definitely. I think anyone that does this profession really has to kind of sacrifice certain things when they’re-- when they get to be a certain age so in high school I wasn’t always going to the football games or all of the little hangouts that I would maybe want to have during that time. I was going to ballet class instead and taking the city bus every day, going to school-- high school at like six thirty in the morning--

Jo Reed: You grew up in Tacoma, Washington. Correct?

Amanda Morgan: Yes, I did, proud to be from Tacoma, born and raised there,

Jo Reed: You ended up at school at the School of American Ballet during the summertime.

Amanda Morgan: Yeah. Basically my friend that ended up moving to New Jersey-- I was still at my old dance studio during this time, I was about 13 years old, and my friend was like “I have an audition for the School of American Ballet” and I was like “Oh. I don’t really think I know what that is but I know it’s in New York” and so all my family’s actually-- lives-- they all live in New York, they all immigrated there from Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic, so I always wanted to go to New York, always wanted to dance in New York. So I heard the fact that it was in New York and I auditioned and it turned out my friend didn’t get in and then I got in and I was like “Well, I think I should go” <laughs> and then I went and it was really an-- such an amazing experience. It was so great to just be in the city and also be at such a high-caliber school. I ended up meeting-- a few of my suitemates/roommates in summer course were from Pacific Northwest Ballet School so they told me that I should go and audition for the school because they knew my mom wasn’t going to let me stay year round at the School of American Ballet so right after that, I guess a month after the summer, I auditioned for Pacific Northwest Ballet and got in and started at the school.

Jo Reed: You apprenticed at Pacific Northwest Ballet and then you were asked to join the company. Can you tell me about that moment? That must have been so big.

Amanda Morgan: Yes. Honestly, with my apprenticeship-- getting my apprenticeship was-- it’s an insane story because <laughs> the day that Peter told another colleague of mine that she got her apprenticeship I broke my foot and that--

Jo Reed: Peter is the artistic director.

Amanda Morgan: Yes, Peter Boal. So Peter Boal told another colleague of mine after a school matinee show that we were doing as professional division students that she got hired and I was like “Oh, well, there is the apprenticeship contact and I’m getting it,” and that same day I actually broke my foot so I was like “I think I’m going to have to quit” so I was like “All of this work and for what? I just think that nothing is going to work out because I would-- I had a broken fifth metatarsal and I really-- I landed it really, really badly. So they thought they were going to have to do-- put a screw in my foot and all of these things and they put me in this red cast <laughs> so that’s kind of what happened in-- around March in 2016, and that same day I decided to walk on a broken foot and go see Bernie Sanders speak because I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity <laughs> but-- it’s just a funny story to me-- but I-- basically I e-mailed Peter and Denise Bolstad who’s in charge of the school and asked them, “Is there a way that you can talk to artistic directors for me or see if I-- there’s a possibility that I could get a job somewhere?” because there are other companies interested in me at the time. And so then I went in a week later to Peter’s office, cast on my foot <laughs> on his desk and he said that he was going to save an apprenticeship contract for me and that he was just waiting for the right moment and that he would let me start when I healed up, which was honestly the most amazing thing especially because there were so many people in my class that were so talented-- so, so talented. So to take that risk of hiring me even though I was injured, not knowing when I would get back-- when I’d be able to start with the company he still did it and so it’s one thing that I appreciate so much about him and I know that he believes in me because of that moment especially. And then with the corps contract I think it was just-- at PNB we have a-- he’s a little bit more-- you’re not going to just fire an apprentice I think. Peter is very-- I don’t know-- he’s just very kind and really wants-- people that he hires he’s intending for them to stay in the company. He’s not intending to fire them; he’s not testing them like that. So I think that I wasn’t as scared to hopefully get a corps contract but once I finally saw it in front of me it was kind of just this “Okay, whoo. Now I can kind of calm down. I can kind of start my career and get into it because apprentice year is kind of-- it can be all over the place for some people kind of trying to figure out where you fit in and how you’re going to do and just learning the law of the place <laughs> so-- yeah.

Jo Reed: How was it for you fitting in because while 26 percent of the dancers at PNB are people of color you’re the only black female dancer--

Amanda Morgan: Yeah, that—

Jo Reed: --and you’re five foot ten.

Amanda Morgan: <laughs> Yeah. It was definitely a process and around that time I wasn’t five foot ten; I was I think like five foot eight and a half but I grew an inch and a half in my apprentice year so I was falling all over the place <laughs> my first year in the company. It was so embarrassing but I was like “You know what. I’ll just have to let it go.” I kept getting taller and I was like “All right. We’re going to just have to honestly retrain everything.” There were definitely moments I wasn’t cast as well as the other two girls that got in with me because they were shorter and they fit in the corps more; they fit in with the other dancers. I stood out a lot so I think that was hard for me because I was like “I’m-- I joined this company and I’m not really dancing that much. I want to dance” so that was certainly hard but I was really grateful. My apprentice year I was even closer to Lindsi Dec and Karel Cruz. I even went to their house for Thanksgiving and things so they really just-- really supported me and looked out for me in the company and it’s something that I really appreciate in the beginning of my career.

<crew talk>

Jo Reed: It seems to me that you join the corps and you have two tasks. You obviously want to be the best dancer you can be and in order to dance you need to fit in as part of the corps so I wonder if those two things are not always aligned.

Amanda Morgan: I think for someone like me it’s definitely not. <laughs> I think eventually I learned how to tone down my dancing in a way that didn’t necessarily tone my artistry down but it just made me look cleaner so that I would fit in a little bit more with my lankiness, but then when it comes to just looking different and choreographers coming in there were a lot of times that choreographers didn’t even cast me at all because I just stood out too much and they said I wasn’t right for the part; I wasn’t right for this. So that was kind of what I was experiencing the first two years in the corps. Even now to this day I still experience it but especially during that time it was just hard because it was-- I kept getting all of these nos or you’re not enough this, you’re not enough that, and I kept seeing other people who have passed me and I was like “I don’t know if I’m going crazy but I think I’m really talented and it doesn’t-- it’s not adding up to me why I’m not getting these opportunities when I finish a show or something and I have audience members coming up to me and saying, “Oh, you were so wonderful. I could pick you right out of the corps. It really just made my night.” And so I was like “If I’m able to do that for audience members, why don’t they want to give me more featured roles or why don’t they want to showcase me more?” and I think it was from there that I kind of started thinking if people aren’t going to make stuff for me I can’t lay around. I know I’m young but I’m going to just make it myself.” That’s kind of where I was at. <laughs>

Jo Reed: You didn’t waste any time. You became a member of the company in 2017 and in 2018 you choreographed your first work for PNB.

Amanda Morgan: Yeah, definitely. That work is-- holds a big place in my heart because I think that-- it was titled “Cages” and it kind of just-- I made it with a lot of PDs but I was only a year older than them-- some of them so a lot of them I kind of either grew up with or they were my friends so I kind of got to really make a piece on my friends and showcase them, and something about that experience felt so good and so fulfilling because I’d wished that someone would have really done that for me being in the company. And there’s been moments but I don’t think to give someone a narrative and say “I want you to put yourself into this and what is it that you kind of want to tell an audience” it hasn’t happened to me yet. So it- it’s a fulfilling thing to be able to do that for other people, especially people younger than you.

Jo Reed: What’s a PD?

Amanda Morgan: A PD is a professional division student so basically the school goes from level one to level eight and then after that there’s the professional division, which is students from all over so it’s not just the PNB School, so usually it’s about 40-some students and from there that is the pool of people that Peter picks who will get hired into the company. So for me there were four out of about eighteen people in my level-eight class. There were four of us that were chosen to be in the professional division and the rest were people from all over the country-- all over the world, and then after that I did that program for two years and within the second year he hired me and another one of my colleagues out of the 40 people.

Jo Reed: Can you describe the difference in the way you feel when you’re creating a dance and when you’re dancing a work created by somebody else?

Amanda Morgan: That is a great question. <laughs> I think that I feel somewhat more fulfilled because I know that even though the audience is not necessarily seeing me when I’m creating a work, they’re not seeing me on stage, I-- they’re seeing what I want to say; they’re seeing my ideas, my brain, the way I think. I think a lot of people were somewhat shocked with my pieces at first because they can be a little bit more toned down; they’re not as kind of wild as I can be in the roles I’ve been given. And so people are like “Oh, it’s a little bit softer or a little bit less movement-wise” and I was like “Well, I’m a multifaceted human, I’m not just this wild dancer that attacks everything,” but also with being a dancer I think that it’s wonderful-- it feels wonderful to have someone look at you and want to make something on you; that is-- I think every dancer can agree with that. So when that time happens it feels great but I would love eventually to have someone want to make something on me that shows my more vulnerable side, my softer side, my more feminine side. I think that black women especially we tend to get kind of pulled in in being strong and fierce and all that and then we can’t break out of that so that’s part of the reason why choreographing feels really nice too because I can work around anything I want. I can have it be more harsh or more soft or whatever it is.

Jo Reed: How do you work with the dancers that you make work on?

Amanda Morgan: Aah. Okay. So I’ve always done this: Whenever I start a piece I have an interview session so when I say “interview session” it’s basically I just ask them questions about either something that’s on my mind, a topic, whether it’s “What does it feel like to be an adolescent during this time?” That was one thing I asked all the students and I asked them well, how they were feeling, how they felt like people saw them and how they wanted people to see them and we kind of just talked about that, exchanged ideas that way. It was very collaborative in that sense because I think that a lot of times especially in ballet companies or in companies that you kind of have to rush and just learn the work or just make it there’s not enough talking about what we’re actually doing and why we’re doing it and the ideas that are there, at least the dancers. They don’t get enough time to really always talk about that type of stuff and really indulge in that so I wanted to be able to give my dancers a space to talk about that and to do that as much as they could because I think that really takes a piece from being good or great to being excellent.

Jo Reed: You wrote very shortly after you began your first work as a choreographer that, and I’m quoting you, “Life has shown me that if you don’t see what you want to see around you create it”-- and you’ve done this in various ways both in and out of dance.

Amanda Morgan: Yeah. I’m just trying to do what I would have wanted when I was younger, what I would have wanted to see and also all of us being artists even though it is very much a personal individual thing when it comes to our careers I think that we have to really think about the community, the arts community, the community in general especially during hard times; the arts is what always brings a community out of hard times in a way. It gives them hope, it lets them contemplate what’s going on, it lets them reflect on what’s going on, and so personally I want my career to be that for whoever and whatever I can.

Jo Reed: You’re an artist and you’re an activist. I think that’s fair. Correct?

Amanda Morgan: Yeah. It’s so weird hearing “activist” because I’ve always-- I think I’ve always just grown up-- I’ve been the type person that I get in trouble when I stand up for other people like in school or-- I’ve always been the one <laughs> so when hearing “activist” I was like “I guess I am but it just feels like”-- I’m like “I just feel like it’s important to stand up for people that can’t necessarily stand up for themselves and to really believe in justice and all of that.” <laughs>

Jo Reed: You’ve spoken at rallies and you’ve also called out the ballet world for a lack of racial inclusion.

Amanda Morgan: Yeah.

Jo Reed: Has PNB been supportive of you in your outspokenness?

Amanda Morgan: No. Honestly, they- they’re probably the best company that’s doing this work in the United States at least ballet company-wise I will say because I-- in the beginning I was a little disappointed, I’m not going to lie. After George Floyd’s death and all the protests, there was a hesitation before PNB responded. I think they didn’t know what to say, they didn’t want to offend anyone or people were thinking too much about the donors or what people are going to think. And I remember I yelled. I yelled at Peter Boal, I yelled at Ellen Walker because I started a whole mentorship program for the school with one of my colleagues, Ceci Iliesiu, so we were talking to students almost every day for an hour, different levels, just checking in on them, checking in on their mental health, giving them any resources that we could. And so for me to be doing that and volunteering so much of my time and this was during lay-offs at PNB; it was honestly a slap in the face for them not to say anything, and it took me going out into the streets for the first protests when literally everything was on fire basically <laughs> for people to even contact me and ask me if I was okay. But luckily, there’s people in the organization that are part of the DEI committee, which I am also part of, but they’re doing a lot of great work. They’re reaching out to not just people with NPB but community members that actually do D&I work and they’re listening-- they’re actually listening. They’re not speaking on behalf of, they’re listening, and I don’t think I can say the same-- that that’s happening in the same way in other ballet companies. I don’t think it is.

Jo Reed: I’m sure you’ve thought about this. What do you think ballet companies need to do going forward to address issues of diversity, of inclusion, of equity?

Amanda Morgan: Yeah. The thing is it’s so layered, right?

Jo Reed: Yeah.

Amanda Morgan: So I think everyone just keeps thinking oh, we’re thinking we need to have more dancers of color and I was like “That’s not enough honestly.” It’s not enough. It’s not enough to just have a D&I coordinator or whatever. I think that’s a good start—

Jo Reed: And that’s diversity and inclusion.

Amanda Morgan: Yes, diversity and inclusion, but I think that we need to actually have people of color in the front of the room. How are dancers of color that are coming into these companies going to feel when everyone in the front of the room, everyone that is either choreographing on them or telling them what to do is still not a person of color? Nothing is going to really change because still all those people that are there are upholding white supremacy in a way, not directly obviously, I hope not, but you know what I mean. There’s not going to be a big enough shift. There needs to be a bigger shift.

Jo Reed: Instead of white being seen as normative.

Amanda Morgan: Yes, exactly. So I think that obviously we need to have more board members of color. We need to have artistic directors of color, executive directors of color—

Jo Reed: Choreographers.

Amanda Morgan: Oh, choreographers I think is probably one of the most important ones in my opinion because I think still the majority of people creating work are white men; even if it’s about-- even if it’s work that’s about a different type of person or culture or whatever it’s still usually made by a white man, and I find it really odd because I’m like “How do you have the-- how can you make a work about something when you have- haven’t even experienced that, haven’t even done research on it?” So I think it’s so important to have just a very diverse group of choreographers and not just-- I think a lot of people they’re like “Oh, we just need more women choreographers” but at the end of the day most of the women choreographers are still white” so is that really-- yes, that’s a little bit going ahead but it’s still holding back so many other people, still not giving the opportunity to so many other people. So we need more women of color choreographers, we need more men of color choreographers, queer men, queer women, all of it. <laughs>

Jo Reed: It really strikes me, and I’d really love to know what you think, that we’re in this moment of pause because of the pandemic and we all know the way it’s been devastating to the performing arts because that’s what we’re talking about, but it’s also a moment of pause and obviously things are going to have to shift even when we get to the other side of this. I think things are going to look very different so I think it can be a really fertile moment to address these concerns.

Amanda Morgan: I definitely agree. I just think that because of this pause, because of the fact that we’re not able to just go and do whatever we want, it’s helping us rethink how we approach everything, what type of work we’re making, what we were even doing in the past-- thinking about what we were even doing in the past. I think ballet companies especially they’re just always rushing, getting out all these different works or works that they’ve already done, well-known works because it’s what makes them money. Obviously, it’s also-- they’re also great works but I just think they do what works for them and when this happened it kind of shut all of that down and I think when we get back they’re not going to be able to do that same thing because we have to think about what is this next generation going to be like, even my generation. We have TikTok; we have social media. We have all of these access ports to social media in a way that a lot of the generations before us never even had so if we continuously make works that are just straight white narratives or are just old classics all the time we’re going to lose money. Ballet’s going to slowly die; it’s not going to become relevant because every other art form-- literally every other art form has adapted. They have a broader sense of stories and narratives and ballet doesn’t; they’re still so far behind other art forms and there’s no reason that we should be when we have all the resources to be.

Jo Reed: You have choreographed work that was performed onstage in front of an audience but then you’ve also choreographed a piece like your piece “Musing” and that was choreographed to be filmed so I’m very curious about how that changes the way you conceptualize and work.

Amanda Morgan: Yeah. I think that’s something I’ve really been realizing a lot in this pandemic but even before the pandemic so a show that I had at Northwest Film Forum in February of 2020 I also-- I had live dance but I also had a dance film in the middle of the live dancing because it was in a theater so I just kind of had the screen rolled down and then this dance film was played so that was-- it was really fun to play around with that but I actually realized through that that I really liked making dance for film because I think there’s actually more freedom in a way of getting the audience to feel a certain type of way because there’s so many tricks that a camera can do and so many ideas that a camera can convey that sometimes being on a live stage you can’t. So that’s been a really fun process to kind of just learn and work and kind of explore that type of world that a lot of us aren’t used to at all. Also film I think it just reaches more people so that is part of the reason why I- I’m more drawn to film because I want more people to see it and not necessarily have to pay as much money <laughs> to go to a theater like looking back in the past because then I had all of these different people from different communities reaching out to me and saying, “Hey, I saw your work. Thank you so much for making that” and I was like “I’m just happy you were able to see it. I’m happy you were able to see dance in a different way, in a way that you feel that actually represents you” because I think it’s super important.

Jo Reed: Also with “Musings” I was wondering with that piece you were overtly expressing your activism and your politics through that dance.

Amanda Morgan: Yeah. I I think I realized that the basis of everything that I have always wanted to do is being there for my community, making art for my community, speaking out for my community. With “Musings” it was-- especially in the time <laughs> that we were in I felt I couldn’t make any other type of piece. I couldn’t just make something that was pretty for no reason; it just didn’t seem right to me to do that. And I specifically wanted to work with Nia Minor because I had never choreographed on a black woman; I’d never worked and collaborated with a black woman because PNB doesn’t have any other ones. So it was such a great moment to be able to really collaborate with her and she’s honestly just amazing, so incredibly smart, so incredibly talented, equally as talented with dance as she is with film and all of that so it was just a great process.

Jo Reed: You also created an organization called The Seattle Project.

Amanda Morgan: Yeah.

Jo Reed: Tell me about that.

Amanda Morgan: Yeah. So it all started actually when I was 17, turning 18 so my first year in the professional division program. I was with my roommate and I was like “We should just make some works in different places in Seattle and make a video and share it with everyone” because at the-- a lot of professional division students they don’t get to perform all the time because it’s-- usually you perform corps roles with the company but only a few people do so I was like “I’m going to just-- let’s just dance-- let’s just go out and dance and show people dancers because” I was like “I’m not seeing enough live dance in the streets. It would be good to see it in public places.” And luckily the studio that I grew up at, which is Dance Theatre Northwest, so it’s in University Place right outside of Tacoma, we used to dance at farmers’ markets, at nursing homes, at schools so my teacher was very, very-- saw bringing the arts to the community as a very, very important thing and I think-- I’m happy that I grew up in that kind of environment because that’s still instilled in me, that idea of bringing the arts to the community and making sure that every type of person feels welcome in the arts and can see themselves and can see it as a career, can see it as important-- just as important as any other career. So that’s kind of where the budding started but then it wasn’t until I took an art-history class in I guess that was 20-- late-- December of 2018 and I just kept thinking about-- I worked with making a piece-- a small piece off of a painting in class because we had an assignment that we could do and my teacher allowed me to just make a choreography piece instead so I just did that and I realized how fun it was to kind of think about-- be inspired by other forms of art and also share with people that process. And I was like “What if I actually worked with different types of artists in Seattle and kind of interviewed them and just created this type of project that there’s new work being made that can be shown live outside for people hopefully for free and then on top of that then it’s also highlighting all of the incredible artists that we already have in Seattle and not just showing the major companies or the mainstream type of artists.” So that’s kind of where that idea came and it’s budding slowly. I feel like I have a lot of work to do to try and build it especially during this pandemic obviously.

Jo Reed: Your first presentation was in February 2020.

Amanda Morgan: Yes. Yeah, and that was great honestly. It was really such a special moment for me and I’m really grateful that I was able to kind of have that happen before the pandemic because none of us knew that that was going to happen obviously so it made me even treasure that moment even more so.

Jo Reed: In the fall, you were in a virtual performance of “Red Angels” at PNB but you also danced that on the stage in front of an audience three years ago and I’m so curious to know what the difference in those experiences was.

Amanda Morgan: Oh, man, it’s different. <laughs> I think well, for one “Red Angels” the first time I did it around-- it was my first year in the corps so that was the first major principal role I got to do and it was amazing to even be considered for it. I think I was fourth cast and I wasn’t sure if I was even going to get a show so I got one show but only and I got to perform it with my best friend, Chris D’Ariano, and we did the whole thing through so there was the duets and then there was the four of us dancing together at the same time and then it was the solos, but this time around it was just the solos. So three years later, we did it virtually, just the solos, but I like the way I approached it more this time because I felt like I had the same type of energy but it was more this kind of controlled energy, not giving it all away, and I think my focus was a little bit more intensified on one thing because I knew that it was going to be on a camera rather than focusing out somewhere and trying to focus on all these people sitting in chairs. Some dancers say that it’s a little bit sad because at the end there is no one out there in the audience and you hear maybe a couple claps but you’re just bowing in silence, which is sad for sure, but I also think about this kind of moment of reflection and experience within myself during that time not having the audience there, which has been nice to kind of revisit in a way that’s remembering why I really love what I do and why I’m doing what I do.

Jo Reed: That’s a great place to end it, Amanda. Thank you so much and thank you for all the great work you do.

Amanda Morgan: Oh, of course. I mean thank you for talking to me

That is ballet dancer, choreographer and activist Amanda Morgan—

You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Subscribe to Art Works and then please leave us a rating on Apple because it helps people to find us. Kept up with the arts endowment by following us on twitter @neaarts or by checking out our website at arts.gov. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Stay safe, and thanks for listening.