By Christina Xan
Tanya Wideman Davis and Thaddeus Davis
Dancers, creators, professors, directors. Columbia couple Thaddeus Davis and Tanya Wideman-Davis have many titles. In their newest project, however, not only are they exploring a novel medium to them – film – but are stepping back from titles and stripping down to question what it means for them to inhabit the bodies they are in, where those bodies came from, and what those implications mean for all who migrate within America.
“We've been really thinking about patterns of migration and thinking about our families…how the shaping of the way we eat is different than the way we may have grown up,” Wideman-Davis reflects, “How we can figure out new pathways to merge old and new ways of thinking about food and have those communal experiences still be nurturing.
We Dance is a 12-minute experimental film that combines documentary, dialogue, imagery, and dance to share, less a narrative, and more a story—or perhaps more accurately, a series of stories. The film has three parts: in part 1, “Spin,” Wideman-Davis reflects on her grandmother’s home in Chicago; in part 2, “Rise,” Davis reflects on his grandmother’s home in Montgomery; and in part 3, “Hold,” the two reflect on their lives together.
“A big part of this didn't start out as a love story, but in the end, it was that. But it wasn't just about the love between the two of us, but the love for these pivotal women—Tanya's grandmother and mother and my mother and grandmother” Davis intimates, “People in our families who sustained us like food and allowed us to have these careers that we've had in dance and beyond.”
In the first two segments, each of the pair’s grandmothers are seen baking a staple in their history—pound cake and sweet potato pie. This focus on food is in many ways the hinge of the stories being told. Food is more than a substance for staying alive – it is life-defining. The process of sourcing and consuming food, the accessibility of food, and how food shifts across region and culture all define our bodies. For certain groups of people, like the black adults and elders featured in the video, food is a distinct way of finding, creating, and asserting identity.
While the women bake in the background, Wideman-Davis and Davis narrate, speaking words related to the cooking process, themes of their life, and dialogue they recall from these inspirational women. Stitched within the cooking and the words are images from the cities and surrounding areas these families call home – houses, cityscapes, rivers – as well as extemporaneous dance from the married pair.
Throughout the film, the two dance and speak their histories. And though this intimate portrait allows you to know the duo better, it is not only their story. “It's not just the black migratory patterns. That's what it references, but this is a part of the migratory patterns of people around the world,” Davis emphasizes.
One of their hopes in creating this film is that the viewer will be able to understand more about where they come from, their own migrations, and how each individual history is in some way interlaced with collective histories. What foods do you eat? How did what you ate shift as you moved from place to place? What did you take with you or leave behind? How does your body express what you consume? How do you dance?
For if food represents a part of our identity in which we take within us what is part of our culture and selves then dance is how we reveal outwards what is part of our culture and selves. In the migration process, wherever and whatever the reason in moving, we are doing just that—moving. Sometimes the world moves around us while sometimes we move around the world, but this film asks us to acknowledge and embrace the movement, learn how and when flow versus resist, all the while being grounded by what always moves with, in, and out of us—food.
This is exemplified in a scene towards the end of the short film where Wideman-Davis and Davis stand, completely still, hands clasped around each other’s, in white garb, as an Alabama river rushes fast and hard around them.
“There’s something about being in that water, at that specific space that was a segregated space,” Wideman-Davis ruminates, “To come back to it and to have to anchor yourself in the water with this current, knowing that it has all the racialized history and the deadly components that it could have had 20 years ago, us being there.”
It is this stunning tension that has gotten the attention of film festivals nationwide, with We Dance being accepted to the Oxford Film Festival, the Fort Myers Beach International Film Festival, the Experimental, Dance & Film Festival, the WorldFest Houston International Film Festival, the Ouray International Film Festival, and, most excitingly, the Tribeca Film Festival, where it will premiere Saturday, June 18th.
The two’s hard work could not have been possible without director and cinematographer Ethan Payne and director and writer Brian Foster, all of whom met when Wideman-Davis and Davis were sanctioned by the Southern Foodways Alliance.
If you’d like to see the culmination of all their efforts and dive into a world that not only teaches you about the vulnerable movement of others but of yourself, starting June 8th, you can purchase a $25 ticket to all Tribeca shorts here: https://www.tribecafilm.com/films/we-dance-2022