I answered the e-mail, inviting her to a rehearsal.
Her response was to contact the 92nd Street Y, the parents and the owner of our rehearsal space in an attempt to get “The Welcome to The World” Project cancelled.
Creating a dance is more than taking bodies and designing steps to music. I spent hours on my back, eyes closed, listening to the music and waiting for the dance to appear…like a dream. The miracle of consciousness and the mystery of creativity worked its alchemy and the dance just popped in from… who knows where.
It begins with group of dancers, all lifting their arms to form a peace sign. A homeless woman comes on stage. A seven-year-old boy gives her some money. A human being is swept across the floor. With each musical change, the scenes, one after another, are a montage of unrelated events all about the constantly shifting world. A bell rings! The dancers form a line where each dancer merely looks at one person after another. The dance ends when a clump forms stage left while one dancer after another is lifted up and lowered.
The destruction of the World Trade Center and the Boston Marathon bombing resulted in an opportunity for people to become their best selves — to help each other. My vision for the end of the dance was to bring a moment like that to the stage.
I choreographed “Welcome To The World” 17 years ago, before I had ever even thought about prison or prisoners. Events which had no meaning at the time but mysteriously were remembered, even small vignettes of conversation, a sentence in a book, in this case a dance about redemption, were stored away like a trinket hidden in a box, taken out years later revealing its purpose — a message from the past to enlighten the present.
I am lucky to have such talented beautiful dancers to perform “Welcome To The World.” The joyous process was momentarily obliterated when I shared the e-mail with them.
One of my students, speaking for her fellow dancers, responded, “We are highly insulted by her assumptions that we are naïve sex-crazed teenagers ruled by our emotions and subject to flattery. These men have treated us better than any older men we have ever come into contact with. This is the fourth year we have performed in concert with the men of Figures-In-Flight Released. This person doesn’t know them and doesn’t know us.”
The dancers from Figures-In-Flight 4 were quickly unfazed. The men, who are committed to changing perceptions of the formerly incarcerated, were somber.
The first man in the Woodbourne Prison Dance Program to achieve his freedom was Andre Noel. He began “Figures-In-Flight Released (FIFR).” As each dancer got paroled, he joined the dance company which Andre directs. FIFR has performed all over: in colleges, public schools, the National Dance Museum in Saratoga Springs, the 92st Y, churches and many more venues.
Andre Noel’s response
“The world is full of ignorance. Some people procure opinions based on their own particular personal experiences without any knowledge of who they are slandering. The person who wrote this does not know Figures-In-Flight Released and what we are accomplishing. We are a group of previously incarcerated men commissioned by our own selves to give back to a community which we had harmed when we were much younger. We use dance as a medium to reach out to teenagers who are at risk of following the same pattern that had led us on the path to incarceration.
Some people will always look for the bad within the good. This is the reason why successful stories about ex-prisoners are rarely publicized. One cannot accept the fact that once you have disobeyed the law, get sent to prison, that there’s no hope for redemption. Well, there is redemption for previously incarcerated. We are husbands, fathers, uncles, brothers and sons to our own families, as well as our extended family of Figures-In-Flight 4. Families protect each other, care for the other and trust each other.
FIFR is honored for the opportunity to collaborate with these young professional dancers. Dancing with them is an inspiration to dance harder and better during the course of rehearsals for our upcoming “Welcome to the World” performance. After knowing these kids for the past few years, I’m honored to be dancing amongst some of the best dancers in this country.
On June 7, 7 p.m., at the McKenna Theater on the campus of SUNY New Paltz, we will debut “Welcome to the World.” We know who we are and nothing can stop us”
