Sticking To It

Talking X's and O's with Tar's dancer-choreographer Charles O. Anderson.


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Published: Aug 29, 2007

Photo By: Gabriel Bienczycki

Call it charisma, or charm, or simply stage presence. Whatever it is, Charles O. Anderson wears it like an aura at every single dance performance.

He seems huge, with his bare, muscled chest, shaved head and, usually, an African wrapped skirt at his waist. When his bare feet are slapping the floor and his arms are swiveling like a windmill, it doesn't matter if he's surrounded by his Dance Theatre X troupe, because he's The Man. If he seems physically huge, so do the topics he chooses to explore through movement: race, gender, sexuality and politics, sprinkled with literary references from authors like James Baldwin and Richard Wright. He is electric.

So, who is this pleasant, neatly dressed guy, rising elegantly to greet me at Café Ole? Surely the gentleman with dark hair, professorial glasses and soft voice can't be the high-voltage choreographer-dancer? Anderson laughs, "I actually am a very reserved person, but onstage all bets are off for me and I am highly theatrical." Lois Lane, meet Clark Kent.

This is Professor Charles O. Anderson. By day, he's an assistant prof and head of African-American Studies at Muhlenberg College in Allentown. Teaching dance is also part of his curriculum. "I love teaching," he says. "It is a real opportunity to find and teach those who are completely new to dance, very often white and always new to my technique."

Anderson himself was late to the dance world, having started out studying mechanical engineering at Cornell University. But one night he went to a party where there was dancing, and "suddenly saw the African, hip-hop influence of the whole club dance scene," he recalls. "It felt like being inside myself." He switched his major to dance and theater.

"I was 19 when I took my first formal dance class," Anderson says. "In the very first semester I choreographed a work and that was what hooked me. For me choreographing was a way to synthesize emotions. It was a way to be articulate and comprehensive, and to say so much with what really was so little while being so focused."

After graduation, Anderson worked in New York with a series of important African-American choreographer-dancers including Ron K. Brown, Sean Curran and Mark Dendy. He came to Philadelphia to get an MFA in dance at Temple, and stayed a year to teach before starting at Muhlenberg. In 2001, he founded Dance Theatre X, which is unincorporated and works from project to project. Thanks to a Pew Grant this year, however, he "can really start thinking about the company. Still, sometimes teaching takes over and I feel the need to teach."

When he worked with Brown, who bases his choreography solely on African sources, Anderson found himself wanting to take that notion even further, to call up moves and spirit out of other cultures. "So my dancers include Latino, Pacific Islands, Caribbean and white as well as African-American. I want to be multi," he says.

"I call the way I work 'conjuring.' I am pulling this out of me. These are things that are already there. Movement is connected to spirit, and if what I am trying doesn't awaken my spirit, I don't think it's interesting.

"What comes first with me," he continues, "is the idea, the concept, the metaphor — in other words, the context of telling. The concept comes from the other, the nonphysical side of me — books and movies primarily. But I am a serious comic book collector and there's a whole canon of reading in comics that I draw on, as well."

Tar, Anderson's full-length exploration of the Brer Rabbit Tar Baby, story gets its world premiere at Live Arts/Fringe 2007. Last year, Tar appeared in the festival's In Progress series. "It was beyond even reaching the level of a work in progress back then," Anderson says ruefully. "But Nick [Stuccio, Fringe producing director] asked me to pull out the solo for last year's Fringe."

"Tar is now significantly different," he says. "It is a full scale. I have a huge creative team with Amze Emmons coordinating video design, who's working with Rick Delaney and Zöe Charlton. I owe a lot of my ideas about the text to my colleague Troy Dwyer, whose conversation about his grandfather's plantation in the South opened a dialogue between us that ultimately brought me to the Tar Baby, an African tale, retold by a white author [Joel Chandler Harris] using the device of Uncle Remus, a slave, telling stories to a little white boy." Dwyer and Makoto Hirano provide the text, Heidi Barr did the costumes, and King Britt and Monica McIntyre provide the music.

"Most importantly, this last May, Vincent Mantsoe [a South African choreographer who has worked with Anderson in the past] came and was here working with me for two and a half weeks," says Anderson. "He brings a reality check and a flash reference point to my work. He helps me to rely on what is my authentic self. Vincent brings both a South and West African background, which helps me find aspects of this in myself."

"When I say I am the Tar Baby, this is the African-American way of talking about 'I.' In the culture, 'I' means 'us.' We are all the tar baby. Until we deal with the realities, good and bad, we will continue to be. The tar baby got a bad rap. It just is what it is. You, anyone, can choose to connect or fight with it and get stuck. We've all got tar babies, some of them are personal, some national. Iraq is a tar baby."

Conjuring up of his African sources fits perfectly with this year's Live Arts/Fringe lineup, the most international festival to date with performers from places as diverse as Poland, Belgium and Bulgaria. He also won't be the only locally based choreographer-performer in the fest with roots in other cultures (see also Cuban-born Marianela Boan and German-born Manfred Fischbach).

Tar currently fits 10 dancers, although Anderson expects scheduling conflicts will whittle the number down to six when he gets his planned tour together. Dance Theatre X "is a rotating group of 16 dancers, most coming from more commercial backgrounds — theater, video, television — than the concert dance I know best," he says. "But it makes sense to me. I need dancers with a high sense of theatricality, and they have it."

He was inspired to affix his company the X to remember the millions of African-Americans who were never taught to read or write. As a former mechanical engineering student, he likes the idea that X also is the mathematical symbol for the unknown. And as a comic book collector, he may be making a sly wink at the X-Men, or at Generation X in general. One of the things that makes Anderson so fascinating is his ability to seamlessly segue between the intellectual realm and pop culture.

Will Anderson shave his head for Tar or keep the glossy black curls? "I don't know," he laughs, "everyone keeps telling me to shave my head, but I kind of like having hair again. We'll just have to see."

(j_anderson@citypaper.net)

Tar runs Sept. 5, 6 and 8, 9 p.m.; Sept. 7, 10 p.m., $15, Painted Bride Art Center, 230 Vine St.