The Harlem School of the Arts, part one

Back in the cold grey heart of winter I told Q he was going to take dance lessons.

He was not happy.  His actual words were; no, I’m not.

For the first three weeks I spent Saturday mornings demanding put on your clothes, pack your backpack, get your coat, hat, gloves, we’re going to harlem.

It was for the dance and for the neighborhood and for the people that taught and volunteered and took classes there.  We are blessed to live in a diverse neighborhood, and his friends are a mix of colors and  cultures,  but having the opportunity, so close to home, to be envelped completely in  an African-American community was too good to be passed up.  And I believe a boy needs to know, at an early age that there is something besides sports.  That the body can move in unison with others as well as in competition.  I thought at his age he would benefit from it, the walking the halls where elders are respected and cultured.  Where reading music and respecting your teacher and the other students was essential.  Where a tall skinny black teenage boy in a black leaotard could jete in the hallway and declare with drama and love and hands flailing in the air “I’m thoroughly exhausted!”  and no one laughs or makes fun of or points at the boy for all they understand.   Life is good.   Dance is good.  Where else can that boy feel so at home in his own skin?

If only i could describe for you the energized, loving, creative, beautiful experience of being in the halls of HSA!  Walking in a few weeks ago there was a tall woman in West African clothing,  up on the low stage in the central rotunda just as you enter the door.  The audience of parents and siblings of students sat in a semi circle and listened to her play drums and explain the importance of them to her and to the culture.  The influence of African drumming in Jazz.

Behind the audience a long line of tables set up and soul food being dished out for the holiday Martin Luther King Day?  Black History month? I don’t remember. I do remember a line of people talking and laughing and scooping up greens and sweet potatoes as the drumbeat bounced all around us.  Behind the tables a glass wall looking into a snow filled courtyard.  Wait, maybe that week was mask making week and the next was soul food and a movie about Martin Luther King.  Another week they showed West Side Story on the movie screen set up on that same stage.  Q walking by with his friends stopped and looked at the screen.  Tough looking, cool looking men were dancing together, snapping their fingers, jumping , singing.  “What’s this movie Mom?”  Proof, men can sing and dance and still look cool, really cool.  You don’t have to be in class to learn things at the Harlem School of the Arts.   Another week a documentary on the large cats of Africa narrated by James Earle Jones played on the screen that magnificent instantly recognizable voice ringing out as children emerged from one classroom and then met their parents or often ran to their next class giggling and calling to their friends before dissapearing into one more magical room.

Each week Q and I walked in and past the center stage and then made a left at the glassed in courtyard.  the Dance wing.  Classroom after classroom of dance; African, modern, tap, ballet and hip hop.   A long line of classrooms with a long line of chairs lined up outside and parents sitting in the narrow crowded hallway with coats and bags and computers and who knows what else that you bring with you when you will be sitting for an hour or two while your child takes a lesson.  Parents are not allowed to leave the building while your child is in class because at HSA if your child doesn’t behave, out of the classroom they go.  The parents sit in a tumble of stuff,  and at a table positioned in the middle of this long line of chair sitting parents with their stuff, sat, each Saturday 3,4 or 5 divas  grannies some of them,  but diva’s too.  Dance grannie divas they are, along with one or two dance teachers and maybe a mother.  All women for whom DANCE is all capitals all the time.  DANCE!  One of them a short woman, skinny but with a roundish oval face, straight brown hair slicked back into a tight, tight, tight bun  pinned low on the back of her neck.  Wearing a black leotard and black  flowing pants and black gym shoes

standing up straight like a tall cattail reed in a pond.  That first week she came marching down the hallway, coming straight for us, me and two other mothers

who were anxiously looking into the classroom at our babies.

‘YOU, mothers, are not allowed to be down here.  There is sign.  You are to sit in the chairs near the lobby.”and as she made this declaration she moved her small body between me and the door which she then shut and i could no longer see my scared and timid son, because over the glass window she had put up brown craft paper.

It was her, I know it was – that taped up that brown paper

“….but, the lady on the phone told me that parents could watch the class…”

“THAT was last week.  Open house.  THIS is a class and there is no watching.  If you watch the class, your child will watch you and not the teacher.  This is the dance teachers hour.  He needs their attention.  And he won’t have it if your in there.”

I wasn’t finished.  The other two mothers had begun to slink away.  Maybe they hadn’t promised their children that they would be there watching for the whole class but i had, I had promised.

“…but upstairs, Baba Don let’s parents sit in on the class….”

The two other mothers turned around in shock when they heard me try one more time, the looks on their faces like those of bystanders who know they are about to witness a terrible collusion, fatal possibly, but are powerless to do anything more than stand and stare horror stricken

The dance general turns back toward me and trying (i’ll give her that) to hide a faint look of disdain she declares

“THAT is Muuuuuuusic!  THIS is DANCE!”

I had been told and so I took my coat and our bags of lunches and my computer and found a folding chair with all the other helpless parents.