Dance: Embodiology® with Dr. S. Ama Wray

University of California, Irvine |  April 12, 2021

Dr. S. Ama Wray is a Professor of Dance at the UC Irvine, and an improviser, choreographer, director, teacher and scholar. Dr. Wray is a former UK National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts and received an Emerging Scholar Award from the International Comparative & International Education Society in 2018. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Surrey, where she developed her theory and practice of Embodiology®, a neo-African approach to contemporary dance improvisation. In the 2011 TEDxTALK “Bodily Steps to Innovation”, she demonstrates how movement inspires her mind.

Dr. Wray’s creative work has always been inspired by jazz and multidisciplinary collaborations have been in abundance. She is the founding Artistic Director of JazzXchange Music and Dance Company, elevating jazz music and dance on the concert stage, and has collaborated with musicians and composers including Wynton Marsalis, Bobby McFerrin, Derek Bermel, Gary Crosby, OBE, Zoe Rahman and Julian Joseph, OBE. At UC Irvine, Dr. Wray leads The Africana Institute for Creativity, Recognition and Elevation, a multidisciplinary concern that focuses on solutions to problems encountered in populations that have been historically and contemporaneously mis-served. Emanating from her work with AICRE, she is a lead collaborator on the AI4Afrika initiative that is functioning as a content partner to the United Nations in Geneva to move the globe toward realizing the sustainable development goals.

Jesse Colin Jackson (JJ): What is the nature of your arts research focus right now? What is the subject of your passion currently?

Dr. S. Ama Wray (SAW): It is two-fold, but I will start with Embodiology®, which is my approach to analyzing, teaching, and performance of improvisation. It stems from a study of performance in West African context as applied to contemporary practice. It is a methodology that has a lot of capacity to move the arts. As a pedagogical method of teaching mind and body acuity, it is lending itself as a modality that could do many things as relates to looking at, broadly speaking, creating performance, realizing health and wellness, but also supporting contemplate pedagogy and even anti-racist work because it centers on not only knowledge yourself, but relationship with other people. It's a tool that can be used in various ways.

I am also interested right now in developing an interdisciplinary research project that brings scientists in that can help me with validating the outcomes that I am seeing in this work, because I am sharing it across various domains. Currently I have been speaking with some cognitive scientists and developing a program with Dr. Michael Yassa at UCI Brain. I have also done presentations with the medical school within their Art of Doctoring seminar. There is a great deal in Embodiology that awaits analysis from another lens to bring it into full effect.

I am mostly thinking about folks who work in positive psychology as potential partners, as well as looking at the kind of neuroscience aspect of their particular activity that I teach and how that is affecting the brain in a very granular way. It could also be looking at not just the structures of the brain, but the biochemistry of the brain.

I am very interested in doing an interdisciplinary study that is also aware of its cultural foundations, so bringing experts in from not only a disciplinary perspective, but that also have different cultural backgrounds. That is obviously not something that we think about when we talk about science, but science is also conducted by people who have a grounding, a positionality that may be opaque, but it nevertheless will inform or potentially a shade.

JCJ: Thank you for a wonderful answer to our question. You have connected and positioned it right in the heart of the bigger picture question, which is the value of arts research. It is not an antidote. It is a parallel universe of thought that compliments science, but allows for different questions. It is still difficult, sadly in 2021 to articulate the general-purpose value of that to a university that is fundamentally dominated by science. This is exactly the kinds of material that we are hoping to collect. We do not simply produce creative work, but we also are looking at the value of creativity and its implications for the world. Embodiology®, itself, could you give us an example of what that looks like or what it is?

SAW: I could turn your attention to jazz music because that may be something familiar to you. So understanding Embodiology® will enable you to understand jazz music on a much, I would not necessarily say deeper, but through a different understanding of the values that are inherent in creating music spontaneously and that being performed.

There are six principles within Embodiology®. Within each one of them, I have defined ways you can develop those sensibilities as a human being or as an artist or as a collaborator. It is ways of thinking. It is ways of attending to your body, your person, and ways of relating and developing the skills of paying attention and developing empathy, but also developing acuity as relates to rhythm is fundamental. You develop skills. You develop awareness. You develop capacities of connecting beyond yourself. Your own imagined version of whatever it is that you were doing. You push your boundaries.

I have created a way of teaching this not only just to artists and dancers, but that is where it stems from. I have taught classes for jazz musicians to help them really get beyond their paradigm of learning jazz music through a Western music lens. I also need to point out that oftentimes when we are talking about research and science, we are still creating a construct that is limiting. Even though I am seeking to work with the Western science, I am also seeking to trouble that methodology, as well to add to actually optimizing it because nothing is perfect. We often think about science as if it is perfect construct, and it is just that, a construct.

JCJ: Even outside of science, we think about Western musicology and how it analyzes all musical forms through an increasingly broad but narrow set of concepts - is that a construct that misappropriates when looking at phenomena from African cultures? If we think about how people study music, as musicians they are not incorporating an embodied sensibility. They are basically limiting it to a cerebral exercise and looking at music as an intellectual concern.

SAW: Absolutely, yes, it has become that. The study of music has become mathematics and devoid of connection to the body, and that is not how it was arrived at. Some of it may be now, but you know, the essence of music is to move people well, literally, metaphorically, emotionally and psychologically. It is not encoded specifically to produce a mathematical formula. But you can use mathematical formula to create and analyze music, I am not doubting that.

There was another element to my provocations, which is my interest in technology and artificial intelligence. It has been an area that I've been looking into recently. Although, I have not been making any work that has been using algorithmic principles, there are ideas and things that I very much want to realize in that area. I have been fostering my own understanding of this space through my own research and collectively through an international group of practitioners, thinkers and makers called AI4Afrika. We are looking at the proposition of technology through the lens of African peoples, wherever they are on the globe. The reason I am interested in technology based on AI because it is antagonisms. It is somewhat diametrically opposed to improvisation. The idea that technology uses data that is already in existence to then produce new ideas or create structures that enable predictions. It is interesting to me, and I think it can be generative in terms of art, but again, to put the cultural lens and look at the problematics of that. You know, in the arts, we can just say, “Hey, it's a new tool!” Nevertheless, it is a problematic tool when you look at how these technologies can distort human behaviors and perceptions.

I think issues arising from the mispresenting and harvesting of data needs to be illuminated through our art, to speak and create a way for people to understand these technologies in more pointed ways because we just use them uncritically and even unscrupulously. In general, just consume AI products, but we are not necessarily looking at their implications or evaluating them through the constructed lens of race. As a school, as we develop our engagement with technology, which is critical, we need not lead with the same philosophical foundations that have brought us here. We should be doing something that is critically mindful of the detriments and threats posed to our humanity rather than simply seeing these as new tools for extending our creativity.

Eden Phair (EP): I know you have also been doing a lot of work online since the pandemic started. Would you like to share how you have adapted and hosted your Embodiology® teaching and classes in the virtual world?

SAW: As a response to the pandemic over a year ago now, I felt the shunt of everyone having to close their doors and retreat, and I felt fear, palpable fear, extremes of anxiety everywhere. I felt like I needed to do something that would counter or be a foil to that. So I started to teach a class online in mid-March, and this was before we had to shift all our pedagogy online. I created a community-based space voluntarily because I wanted and needed to do it, so I think that is community feeling is still at the roots of my teaching at UCI now. Everyone is exhausted yet I do not feel that despair. I think it is because I chose to do it for the community around me and even far away that I needed to feel connected to. I started to teach a class three days a week at the beginning of the pandemic for an hour on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday. These 1 hour classes were taken up by people in my dance community, then my familial community, and then friends of friends started to come. They were not artists for the most part. There were so many excruciating things that were happening to us, and that we were witnessing and it seemed like the class was a haven. It was a space to collect, to be.

With that, I was also discovering how to teach online and how do I translate these ideas that are so much about community and connection to being in this virtual space. It taught me a lot about the values within Embodiology®, and then I had to reappoint and dive deeper. It has been a laboratory, if you will, where I have learned even more deeply about what the principles are and how to help people access them through new coaching methods that I developed in real time. It has definitely been a space of inquiry and I entered into it with the spirit of not knowing, but feeling compelled to do something.

I have committed to continuing this virtual class, and even when we go back to campus. It feels important to continue creating a space for people to come to, for them to  move together. They have affirmed me as they keep coming back! It continues to be is a very broad swathe of folk, many of whom are not dancers. At this point, most of the people that are coming to the class have very different backgrounds in terms of age, ethnicity, gender, occupation and geographic location.

This experience of building this community gave me the impulse to then speak to the Susan Samueli Integrative Health Institute. We created a short series of workshops for faculty and staff on campus, which ended about two weeks ago, which is called “Vim: Vitality in Motion.” The people that came were mostly from the STEM area and the medical space, which was super interesting. It gave me access to folks who are not engaged in art-making necessarily, but they found value in this space and it was freeing. It was enabling them to access joy in the moment where they may be feeling anxiety, social isolation and the strictures of sitting in a chair for seven hours a day.

JCJ: We go to university to learn and think about thinking, but there is a hunger among the scientists I think because they are the ones most steeped in it. I see this in participation in other cultural activities. The scientists are the first to show up and want to do something other than science, because they are coming around to the idea that is not a complete vision for human existence and their daily work and labs and paper writing is exclusively tied to that paradigm. Are you finding more and more people opening themselves to a more complete way of being?

SAW: Cognitive sciences have already told us about the embodied cognition, so we know that the mind is indeed mapped across the entirety of all bodies and the second brain is the guts and so on. We know that our emotions are not just simply held as psychological concepts in your head, but they're located in the body. We know that trauma shows up in many different ways. We have done the thinking about it, but it tells us in the embedding practices to bring balance, I think there is still a challenge there. As much as I was encouraged by the fact that there were attendees from STEM, I think there is a long way to go because we are still caught up in this Cartesian model and this notion that the body in poetic motion is somehow feminized, right? Like moving the body is something that is feminine, and that again is a Western construct. Unless it is in battle, fighting, or in sporting competition. If is somehow moving for its own aesthetic purpose, it is somehow disconnected to anything of cognitive value. There is still a grave disconnect there. Although, the science has told us differently. I think there is a big campaign that some people are coming to, through contemplative pedagogy, which is an interesting space. This is an educational movement that is bringing mindful practices into the classroom. There seems to be a kind of intersection between that and anti-oppressive pedagogy, anti-oppressive teaching. But it might take a few generations still to proliferate and be truly valued. I do not know the answer. But you are right that the foundations that we have are not complete.

JCJ: I had not thought of this connection. There is a group of mindfulness pedagogy, like teaching via mindfulness. We complain about students not listening and not being present, but we are not creating an atmosphere of presence for them.

SAW: I believe that what I am teaching can have direct implications in that area because it does many of the things that the folks in that field or talking about. It is about paying attention to your body and working with that knowledge to improve your experience of whatever it is that you are doing, so if it happens to be teaching or learning as a student.

JCJ: The traditional job of an Associate Dean for Research is to make research easier for faculty, whether through fundraising or facilitating collaborations or creating space. I am wondering where you see how we can help facilitate your creative research in these three areas: resources, space, and collaboration opportunities. You have done an amazing job of creating collaboration opportunities. What are the barriers to doing the work you want to do?

SAW: Time to pursue interdisciplinary research grant opportunities. They require time like the NEA Research Lab Grant. I thought that was an interesting potential. I do not know if they are going to have those opportunities again, but the idea of working up something as extended as that. That would take time, and so being able to have the time to step away from teaching to be able to focus in on the development of such projects.

JCJ: In the performing arts departments in particular, even when course release is a possibility, the programs are structured in such a way that it is very difficult for anybody to step away. Everybody teaches a specific thing that is necessary to the program. I would love to work on how to create more flexibility in the programs in art.

JCJ: I am learning more and more about how the three performing departments to varying degrees are in this intense, collaborative kind of vise that does actually limit what people can do independently.

SAW: I hope that within the plans that you are developing there are ways for us to be able to get course release without being on sabbatical and that we somehow develop the flexibility within our pedagogical structures that enables those classes to be taught by others or for the curriculum to be more flexible for students.

We also have to think about the larger societal problems that the arts are crucial to moving forwards. I am teaching a Critical Issues class for my colleague who is on sabbatical. She has given me a great mentorship. I want to bring a Native American speaker to talk about culture and arts. We have never had anyone, at the time that I have been here, do that. I have been doing some investigations for maybe about three or four years now. I found Tina Calderon, she is Tongva, and she is wonderful, so that is happening for my class, but I feel we need to do something significant when we come back to campus. We need a rebirth of UCI with a proper recognition of indigenous peoples. It fundamentally feels like just a huge disruption to my spirit to be in a place where there is not that recognition because I study indigenous knowledge. That is how Embodiology® became what it is. It is the indigenous knowledge that I am sharing, that I am translating, that I am giving other form to, and the recognition of that has to go hand in hand with the sharing of it. How can it be that I am in a place where there are indigenous knowledge bearers, and there be no sign of them? To me, that is wrong and it feels wrong every day. I just want to do something on our campus that is arts and cultural focused, and it helps people to come together in the first place. That could be a whole other research piece. That all of the arts, including music, dance, storytelling, sponsoring indigenous peoples and bringing them in as the researchers. Just doing the work, and doing it properly. Be at peace. Let us move our society forward, but you have to do it right. You have to put the first nation peoples first.

JCJ: I am going to take that under advisement because I agree. I will admit I am not doing the work on that front, partly because my indigenous knowledge is all from elsewhere. Let's keep talking about that. The arts specificity of it is interesting too.

SAW: There is more to be done, so we can contribute. My hope is to bring the people into a circle to talk, instead of us designing what we think. Asking them what do you think should come first and respectfully pay them for their time.

JCJ: Thank you so much, S. Ama. I think this a great place to end our conversation on a research challenge to the arts.