Andrea E. Woods Valdés

My guest this week is my dear friend Andrea E. Woods Valdés.  dancer, choreographer, assistant professor, multi-Instrumentalist, writer, producer, poet, and doctoral candidate. She currently is the head of the dance department at Duke University and she is the creator of SouloWorks dance company and Calabasa. I am delighted to have worked with her on collaborations and so very honored to have her on my show. 

www.souloworks.com

http://danceprogram.duke.edu/

Duke Dance For The Camera Blog - https://dukedanceftc.wordpress.com

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Transcript

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Andrea E. Woods Valdés - recorded on 10/16/2020

Tia Imani Hanna: Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let’s talk about it right now. I’m your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Welcome to Tia Time. I am so very honored to have Andrea E. Woods Valdés on my show today. Thank you for coming to join me. She is a choreographer and a dancer and a videographer and an assistant professor. Welcome to the show.

Andrea E Woods Valdés: Thank you. 

Tia Imani Hanna: So, I wanted to just talk to you about just experiences and inspirations and things that got you started in the arts and things that keep you going in the arts and, like, why do we do this stuff? Start back at the beginning, was dance the first thing? Or was there music first? Or was there writing first or poetry? Or what was it that kind of made you think ‘I might want to be an artist someday’?

Andrea E Woods Valdés: First of all, very happy to be here, especially in these kinds of times. It probably makes us think more uniquely about how we can still connect to each other and find each other because we're separated on demand now. So, I'm so appreciative that you reached out to me. But yeah, so the beginning seems like a long time ago and sometimes it seems like just yesterday, but my parents I think is where it all comes from. My mother grew up in the fifties in central Pennsylvania in a pretty conservative environment in that there wasn't musical theater and the opera and living in a small town, those kinds of things. The library and books brought the world to her and she had a vivid imagination, even though she wasn't really traveling, or her parents weren't traveling and those kinds of things. So, she moved to Philadelphia from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, which is considered the big city. It was like when I grew up in Philadelphia, I graduated and for me, all I could think of is I got to move to New York. I got to move to New York. So, Philadelphia was her New York then. My father when she met him, was an artist, a painter, a sculptor, and most of his, a lot of his friends, were jazz musicians or people who were involved in the arts. I couldn't speak for her, but I'm sure she was drawn to his artistic nature. And she went to nursing school, finished nursing school. They got married. Three kids come along. And so, my father is a contractor and an electrician and does things with his hands artistically, but his soul is still that of an artist, a working artist. He still painted at home every once in a while. And my mother took us to see black musical theater, like “Purlie,” “Don't Bother Me ,I Can't Cope,” “Your Arm’s Too Short To Box With God,” “The Cotton Club,” when Judith Jamison said was in it. And those things had a huge impact on me. Back in the old days in the seventies, we had I think two televisions in the house. My father repaired televisions. So sometimes he'd be working on a client's TV, so we would have three or four TVs in the house if he was working on TVs and testing them out. But PBS, the public broadcasting station, was a big deal. And so, if Alvin Ailey, or ‘when’ Alvin Ailey came on PBS, my mother would come running through the house, “Girls! Come on!” She would gather us and that was a big deal. I think of it now, like you can just use your thumbs and one, two, three, see footage of pretty much anything you can imagine, you can hear or see at the tip of your fingertips. But those were momentous events in our house that, first of all, somebody black was on TV doing something credible and encouraging and not buffoonery or… I love comedy though, but not comedy, but so to see Alvin Ailey that was a company that I would never see in Philadelphia at that… at late, later, I did get to see the company, but Philadanco was our hometown, black dance company. We had Opera Ebony, black opera company come through. And my mother insisted on taking us to see Opera Ebony because she wanted our first experience with the opera to be black opera so that we could realize we own and claim our Leontyne  Prices and singers and actors and theater and all of this as well. It was “The Marriage of Figaro,” and I didn't understand anything. I didn't know what was going on. We were in the last seat in the theater where our backs, and most people have never seen what the wall looks like in the theater, our backs, my head was like on the wall. We were up on the third tier and my knees were up in my chest. There was almost no space between the seat in front of you and your seat. And we scuttled past everybody into our seats with winter coats pushed under the seats and my mother insisted on those experiences for us. So that was happening very early as I was taking ballet classes, say a typical kid, a lot of us do the Saturday morning ballet classes, but the ballet was my mother's idea. She was an avid newspaper reader, the free newspaper, the regular newspaper, and the black community paper. And she saw an ad for a ballet school, Jean Williams Germantown Dance Theater, Jean Williams School of Ballet. And she said, “Look, Ani, you want to take ballet?” And I think that was really her desire that if she was a young girl, she would have loved to have taken ballet. So, there was a strike in the Pennsylvania school system. And my mother was a school nurse, and that was one thing she would not stand for, us as us being home and not getting our education. And so, I can imagine what people going through COVID-19 are dealing with their children right now, being home. It's wonderful if you are a homeschooling, active parent, and that's what you do, but if you're just trying to figure it out for your children, I don't have children, but I can imagine if you're trying to figure it out between what are they doing online? What am I responsible for? How do we… how are they home and at school at the same time. These kinds of things. So, my mother had to work all day. So, what are we going to do? So, she found a private school for… there are three of us, brother, sister, I'm the middle and a little sister and my big brother. And she put us into, I think my sister was still in when you go to the babysitter, not preschool, but like daycare, I guess. My little sister was in daycare. So, my brother and I went to a private school, they had a on the list of activities. Pottery sewing, cooking and karate. And I was like, “Yeah, I want to go to this school. Cause I saw karate. I was like karate, I'm gonna do  karate in school.” I liked this idea, and it was a parent teacher run school. So, the parents participated. The parents were often the teachers. The parents, you had your weekend where we had to clean the school. You participated in the running of the school. It was that type of atmosphere. Our parents were very integral in what went on and I think the karate was somebody's mother or father probably taught karate and that's how there was a karate class. But when I got there, there was no karate. So, I spent eight years waiting, like when is the karate teacher coming? When am I going to learn karate? So, I had this idea about karate. So, when my mother came to me with the ballet thing, I was like, okay, until I get my karate on, I could do… I could try ballet. I guess it's all the same. I'm going be in a class doing something. So eventually the karate, like, drifted by the side. I lost my, you know, thrill for karate. But my dance teacher, I studied at that school from age eight to 18 until I went to college and she was integral in also helping me find an appropriate college when I needed to transfer in my sophomore year. So, my teacher worked with my parents, in her way, not directly, but in her way of understanding that  expectation for my parents was not that I was going to go to Vegas and be a show girl. It was that I was going to go to college and get a college education. And I remember my teacher, she said something. I was tall for my age as a teenager. I think I'm still a tall woman, almost five eight. And my teacher said, she had a background in the circus and showbiz as well as classical ballet. She taught everything, clogging. She was white, Irish, German, English woman. We were introduced to jazz music and Scott Joplin and Anansi stories from Africa. And she had this very eclectic sense of what we were doing. Bach cantatas and just, just the whole world lived in that studio with us. But at one point she said to me, “With legs like those you ought to go straight to Vegas. You'll make a killing.” [laughter] I don't know, I was about 16. And I looked at her and I said, “Jean, I think my parents want me to go to college.” Cause I gotta consider… I was like, “Ooh, Vegas. Alright let's do it.” And I said that my parents want me to college, and she paused to a very vivacious, very vivacious woman. She paused and looked at me and she went, “Oh, okay.” And it was like, I could see the lens that she put on me shift. And she was, like, I see where your destiny… I understand what your parents want for your destiny. And she began, I think, to look at me differently from that point on. So, those are the roots of some of it. There are other things in there where the arts peeked out at me, but it was always dance from… I guess I started with her around eight or nine and by the time I was 11 I got to perform in my first show, which was outdoors at the art museum in the Azalea garden in Philadelphia Art Museum. And that was… there were, I guess you could say ‘stairsteps’ in the company, so I was a little girl, and we did a thing where we walked around with flower with water kettles and we just had basically a move to tiptoe in, take the water kettle and pretend to pour water on one of the dancers who was, like, balled up on the ground and they would blossom, and they would do this dance of flowers. And so, our job was, like, we woke the flowers and then we tiptoed off basically, like a little parade of teeny kids. And I was in heaven. I was in heaven and I… only thing I had to do was bring my ballet slippers with me. And I wore my tights. My mother and father came. We did not live downtown. It was a pretty long drive. And when we got to the museum, you get there a couple hours early. I realized I left my ballet slippers at home and I was devastated, I was crushed. What am I going to do? How am I going to tell my teacher? My dad got in the Chevy Nova and drove back home to our house in Germantown, found my ballet slippers. And the whole time I'm there, like trembling, like I won't be able to be in the show and my teacher's going to be mad and whatever, and he comes back with my little ballet slippers. And after that moment, like my dad has been my hero. Like he is the ultimate. Nobody tops my Dad. Cause he came back, just in time with the slippers, and I did the show, and nobody shouted at me and so I have, that's the small, the micro metaphor for him seeing me go on tour and be in Brazil and Japan and Germany and go to Africa and him being so proud of me and watching me teach and coming to visit me when I got a position at Duke. I'm an associate professor. I'm chair of the department now. And my parents came to visit me, and we took pictures outside the dance studio. They have had a lot to do with it. I always thought around college age that they were going to say, okay, the fun and games are over. Not that dance was fun and games, but they were going to say, now you better think about… is it journalism? Is it real estate? Is it economics? Is it political science? Is it literature? What are you going to study? And they let me be a dance major. I convinced them that I was going to study health and nutrition and economics at the same time, but I knew I wasn't. I'm getting in there and I'm changing the schedule. I’m go right to the registrar and changing schedules, so this I got. Which is what I did. I danced all day and all night. I think I took, psychology philosophy, French, some other courses, but those are the beginnings. There's a lot more, but… 

Tia Imani Hanna: That's what I wanted to know. Thank goodness for those parents that you had and the teachers that you had, the ones that they help find for you. That makes such a difference. So, for any of those parents out there listening, you do matter, you do count, keep doing what you're doing because you end up turning out amazing artists like Andrea here. So, just keep that in mind, parents that might be listening to this show, pass this onto your kids. Keep at it. Don't  give up.

Andrea E Woods Valdés: Yeah. Yeah. And my mom, she always says, being in the public schools, being a nurse for 35 years, she sees a lot of parent-student dynamic and she would say things like, “You become what you're told you are”. So, when a parent says something like, “Pick that up stupid!” That ingrains something in a child's heart and in a child's mind and it's so painful to hear, but we witnessed a lot of that growing up in a working class… not necessarily, I'm not talking about my neighbors in Germantown, but we're in the black environment, we witnessed a lot of that. So, that positive reinforcement, which was ‘everything you do is perfect and good’. It was definitely not like that. We had a very critical high standard, you know, about the way we're supposed to conduct ourselves and the things that were expected of us. But my mother always spoke well of us in front of others. And to us. She fed that back to us, like you're worthy. You're just. her father told her, “You're just as good as anybody else who comes down the Pike.” And that meant the Pennsylvania Turnpike. You're not better. You're certainly not worse. You just as good as anybody else. So that really had a lot to do… cause that spirit, you may have witnessed this or experienced this too. That spirit gets broken when you leave home. There are so many forces out there that start breaking that down and it shouldn't… they shouldn't have been able to do that to me. But they did. And then you rebuild. And you are a stronger person who can help others. I guess there's a reason for it to happen, but I was surprised at how, when I'm… the further… the more time I spent away from home, the more challenging I felt it was to be a woman, to be an artist, to be black, to be all three, and feel sometimes as somebody was trying to cut you down at the knees before you even got started. Yeah. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. You have this incredible background that you started out with, and then you develop that even further. So, tell me how you transitioned to be a principal dancer, for Bill T. Jones, Arnie Zane Company at some point. So how did… where did that happen and how did that come about? 

Andrea E Woods Valdés: Yeah, I love it. We don't call ourselves ‘principal dancers’ in the modern dance field, but I love it. I’ll take it. Yeah. So that was a long, circuitous route. I've never been… so I went to college and I was a dance major at Delphi University where I graduated from graduated Magna Cum Laude, and education has been the key for my career that a lot of what I did was out of education or for education. I love teaching and higher education. I started teaching when I was 14 at the YWCA. I did gymnastics and I was the coach’s unofficial assistant. Like she would… she was always late, so I would warm up… she gave me the job. Like, “You warm them up, I'll be there in 10 minutes.” And so, then it became an official thing and she paid me, I remember $4, to do that. I was like, “Ooh, I like this warm up, come on, get in line, stretch to the right, stretch to the left.” So, that was my job quote-unquote to warmup the team and put us through our calisthenics. My dance teacher also taught me to teach. One day, I guess I was probably an intermediate student and she pulled me aside and said, “Next week you come in early.” And there was a little teeny studio upstairs and she said, “I'm going to give you, four or five.” It was really like three or four of the beginner baby students and she taught me how to teach the first elementary basic movements that you do at the bar: plea, etendue, little movements. And then at the halfway point in the class, we would all go back downstairs and join the big class. And so, she taught me to teach. And I had a similar circumstance... I didn't talk about how I got into Bill, but when I did get in, Bill noticed, I think, that I was very systematic about the way I prepared for rehearsals., I would come in, I would do my exercise, my warm-up exercises, which were the same. And one day he said, “Why don't you do the warmup for the company before rehearsals?” And so, then he gave me some commentary about the things I were doing. They weren't quite all adequate for the company. And so, he was, in his way, apprenticing me for how to teach a professional company, how to warm them up. Would be like, if you had the orchestra, you don't just let anybody come in and say, “Let's practice now.” It has to be someone who understands the repertory, someone who understands the development of a musician, how long you're going to be playing, how not to, you know, blow up everybody so that by the time you're ready to really dance, that they're all exhausted or hurt or something. So, that went on for a while. And when a dance company goes on tour, you have to do a lot of residency activities. So, we get to Oshkosh, Wisconsin and Kenosha and Green Bay. And we did a… I remember a six-week tour through Wisconsin. And we do classes at schools, classes at ballet schools, classes at public schools. And so, we divide up as a company. Two people… like as a team, two people will go to each, you know, school and then we probably have rehearsal and the show in the evening. But when Bill would go to a school, he said, “Andrea, you come with me.” And so, I was watching the master, so to speak, how he conducted a masterclass, how he interacted with people, how he taught it's about his own work. And so, I was riding on the heels of Bill T. Jones, learning that process. And that's what developed me as a teacher. By the time I started working in the university system, I had this real, practical experience, not necessarily a book learning, how to teach, pedagogy experience and not a coursework experience. Mine was live. And it happened from my first years being 14 and working at the Y WCA and then they gave me a class of teaching exercise. They wanted a teen to teach teens. That was their… one of their, campaigns was young people teaching young people. So, I went to a training course for that to teach my peers. I did that in high school. I taught my own high school. In high school kids don't respect each other. When a teacher leaves the room, you can’t say, “Stand in line and do the exercises” with boys and girls. That's like ridiculous. But I had the command of the class, I really did. And they knew not to mess with me. I knew what I was doing, and I would tell them, “Shut up!” Or whatever. I did my own discipline, but I had that class because I had to answer to my teacher when she came back, she wanted to see what we did. I had to answer to Bill T. Jones. He wanted to see what the company… that everything was in order. But I got in the company because someone saw me perform, one of the company members saw me perform. And that was back in the days before cell phones and one of the company members saw me perform and he went to the phone. I love the story. Went to the rotary dial phone, like [makes sound of phone ringing] area code first. [makes phone sound again] He called Bill and said, “I just saw…”  like 10 minutes later, the phone pick up. He said, “I just saw this beautiful dancer and you should see her.” And Bill said, “Invite her to rehearsal”. And so, the dancer, Arthur Aviles, I call him my godfather, ran to the dressing room, and knocked on the door and said, “Hi, I'm Arthur Aviles. I dance with Bill T.” I was like, “I know who you are.” Be like if Michael Jordan knocked on your door, “Hey, I'm Michael Jordan.” So that's who he was for me in dance. I knew who he was. And I had previously auditioned for the company and been cut. I don't even think Bill knows that I was graciously cut. He says, “Thank you very much” when he cuts people, he sometimes he touches you on the shoulder and says, “Thank you very much.” So, I had been ‘thank you very muched’ out of an audition earlier and so he said, “Come.” And at that time, I was almost 26, or I was 26, and I had been in New York for about three years doing a lot of things. I won't go into all of them cause it's a very long story, but I'm freelancing, teaching, a few jobs that I didn't like waitressing and bus girling,  bus boying and hostessing in restaurants, but mostly I tried to teach because it was better for my spirit than for me to be at the service of other people. I was not really meant to do that kind of service, but not that kind of service, babysitting and that kind of thing. I have… was really burnt, close to burnt out, at that point, after being in New York for about three years, doing… I worked with other small companies that was fulfilling, but they just weren't consistent. And I really want… I really had that concept of myself as being a company dancer on tour, 100% saturated with that lifestyle. And so, I was… my spirit was tired at that point. And so, I had actually stopped going to class, which is, class is where life is for a dancer. It's like a musician who doesn't practice; and this is not a forgiving field. If you don't… if you don't go to class, you start looking crazy, you can't do it. So, I had found other classes to take. I would move to myself from my peer circle. I didn't really want to see my friend base. I started being critical about what the dance field was. Some of it was race-based. I'd go to all the auditions and see the same people and the same type of people chosen and the same type of people not chosen. And that wasn't always black, but a lot of the times it was, or it was people who didn't have a typical Western European look about them, whether they were black or white or Asian or Latino, which there were not very many. It was mostly white, some black, and even the companies that professed some kind of multiculturalism or an eclecticism in terms of the personnel, it was still the same old thing over and over. So, I pulled away from it and I actually made a little, not little, I made a piece of choreography of my own. And that piece was by music by Sweet Honey in the Rock. And I made something and that was very close to my heart and very dear and very personal to me. And that's the piece that my friend, that Arthur saw. He didn't just see my choreography. He saw something personal about me. It was… the piece is called “No Images.” An east side Maria Barnwell, with the woman in Sweet Honey with a very deep voice sings the song and it's by a poem by Warren Cooney, so that set the tone for how I entered Bill T. Jones. I entered as a choreographer. I entered as someone who had a personal voice. I was not chosen from an audition, which is very much like… the mentality at an audition is ‘pick me’’, or ‘I'm better than the rest’, or ‘I really want this’, or ‘you need me’. There's this, like, supplication feeling in an audition proving yourself. But that was not my relationship with Bill or the company. And I went to the audition. They were working on an opera at the time, a separate project from the company. And so, Bill asked me to do some stuff on the side. My friend Arthur taught me some moves and I did it. And then Bill changed the, like, texture and the tone of it. And I did it. Like that. And then we sat down in this little window box seat and he asked me a couple of questions. One of them was, “How old are you?” “Are you married?” and “Do you want to be in the company?” And I was like, “Sure.” He was like, okay, go downtown go to such and such address and fill out the paperwork and start rehearsing, start rehearsal. And a few weeks later we left for Germany and then Brazil. And I was like, “Wow!” And I felt, like, when I tell my students this story, I say, “Basically, I packed my suitcase. And for six years, my suitcase was in my bedroom. And all I did was come home, replenish my shampoo and conditioner and toothpaste, wash the clothes, pack them back in a suitcase. And then I was gone again.” So, it was like six years of a whirlwind of being on tour and so that's that. 

Tia Imani Hanna: That's amazing. That's amazing. So, you came in more as an equal choreographer then as a dancer then in that point? 

Andrea E Woods Valdés: Yeah, I wouldn't say ‘equal’, but as a choreographer. And bill considers himself, he's a choreographer for sure, but he's also a director. He does musical theater, and he was a theater artist when he was younger before being bit by the dance bug with his partner, Arnie Zane, and their collaborative partner, Lois Welk, in the, I think, early in the  seventies. Yeah, I came in the company as an artist, you would say, and that's the type of people Bill likes to work with. There are still people who graduate from college and are like the hot, young, spunky thing and are very open in that way. And he likes to work with dancers like that as well. There are multiple different types, but I was a type who was forming a voice and who had a sense once we had a rehearsal and I contributed something to the class that I taught, and he really liked it. So, when we had rehearsal, he said, “Andrea, what's the movement you were doing from class?” And he put it in the piece, and it was one of the signature movements in the piece. And I was like… but in that rehearsal, we name things, in modern dance, you name stuff. I guess like in sports, like you have a play like ‘Kick the Bucket’ or run downtown or I don't know, I don't really play football, but I know that they have names for the plays. So, in dance we have the same thing. We have… cause it's not like ballet, where stuff has a specific codified name. So, we name our passages. So, we might name something like the ‘Janet phrase’ or we made up something and Ringmer, England. While we were in England, Ringmer, England, and we call it ‘Ringmer’. So, if you say ‘Ringmer’, everyone knows just jump into ‘Ringmer’. You don't have to say, ‘kick to the left and kick to the right and jump around’. So, he said, what are we going to call it, the thing that I made up? And my nickname in the company, it’s a long story, but my nickname was ‘Toots’. So, one of my friends was like, “Toots. Toots on Parade” or something funky . And everybody laughed. And Bill, who didn't have the kind of sense of humor that the company members had… he had a sense of humor and he was still dancing, still a dancer in the company… he paused and made everybody stopped. And he said, “Andrea, never let anybody make fun of your poetry.” And it was like an E. F. Hutton  moment. Ooh, Andrea's deep. Don't mess with Andrea's poetry, which they probably made fun of that for two weeks about anyway. So, I don't remember what we called the thing, but I do remember that moment to never be self-effacing. To… which is still, I struggle with that. I still struggle with that… to take myself seriously and assume that everyone else is taking me seriously to not underestimate my contribution. So those are the kinds of things that were growing in me while I was with Bill. I would say the potential for that, and the seeds were there, but that had definitely not formed in me. And if I had been in a different kind of dance company, I would've… you're basically a dance company, it's almost like military. You take orders, speak when spoken to, and you don't really contribute. Modern dance, we have more of a collaborative, contributive nature in the way our companies work. Not always, but quite often. So, I was fortunate in that I landed in the place where my soul needed to be. Alice Walker says, “What is the w the work my soul must have?” And I landed in the place where I could do the work my soul had to have and everyone in the company didn't have that relationship. Everyone who finds a dance company as a job, I had a job, a full salary with benefits job does not have that relationship. And sometimes those relationships are fraught with a kind of tension that makes it impossible to be in. But I didn't have that, working… I always say Bill was my Alpha and my Omega. When I left the company, in 1996, I was the rehearsal director. I had been injured and then Bill asked me to stay on as the rehearsal director, which I did. I should have recuperated longer. I didn't. So, I had back pain and I was the rehearsal director on tour, teaching the choreography and… but eventually that healed, a long healing process. And I think, maybe you and I were working together through some of that healing process when I left the company and started doing my own choreography and meeting you in Brooklyn and us making, doing collaborative pieces of video, and working with Giselle Mason and me directing and choreographing. So, that was all part of my healing process. It was a long, that was like a five-year process. Now I have other things in my body that are breaking down, by my back is ok.

Tia Imani Hanna: I wanted to let you know that you speaking about your work was something that is very inspiring to me. Watching you do a couple of different interviews; I think I caught that you did. And I was like, “Alright Andrea, you got it going on.” Cause you… it made me so proud to… “I know her!” because you were, it was that quintessential thing, watching PBS, “See! That should be on PBS. She's a PBS person. She's got it going on.” Because you were very clear and very determined and very eloquent about what you were doing and how you thought about it, and that you had spent so much time thinking about it. That was the thing that got me. It was like, “Oh gosh. If somebody asked me that question, I wouldn't have an answer.” And, but you had really thought about it and developed an idea and a vision, and you were able to articulate that so clearly. That was like, “Oh, that's okay. That's my next level right there. That's my next level.” So, thank you for that. So, thank you for doing that work because it really inspired me to do the same. 

Andrea E Woods Valdés: Okay. I got to live up to my own… the bar I set, okay. 

Tia Imani Hanna: You have definitely. So yeah, it was… we were working together on the pieces that we worked together and then you created your Soulo Works company. So, during that time, I don't know how long you had the company by the time we started to work together, but you developed Soulo Works. So, tell me how that came into view. Is that because of the recuperation time? 

Andrea E Woods Valdés: Yeah, no. And the interesting thing is, so much goes back to Bill. If it's not my mom, it's Bill or Jean, my teacher, but the… while I was in the company, I had a… I wouldn't say reputation, but I was knighted as a choreographer, as were other of the company members. I was not the… I don't want to give the impression I'm the only one, but… so Lincoln Center had a summer series, they still do, Lincoln Center “Out of Doors,” hopefully, COVID related they will come back. And the… if people know what Lincoln Center looks like, it has that fountain in the middle of the three buildings, the State Theater, The Opera, and Avery Fisher Hall. And they cover… they turn the fountain off and cover it with a platform and there's a… they put a stage out there and chairs on that outdoor Plaza. It’s quite beautiful and they have free performances in the summer, music, dance, maybe theater too. So, Lincoln Center did a series where they wanted major choreographers, to have the company members who choreographed sort of their offspring perform. I don't remember exactly what the series was called, for Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors, but Bill said, “Oh, Seán Curran choreographs, Arthur Aviles, choreographs and has a company quote unquote, and Andrea makes work.” And so, I was like, I think Sean and Arthur were involved in putting that together. I don't know all the nuts and bolts of it, but I was brought into that fold with the two of them, which is exceptional in that the choreographers who come out of most male identity companies are other males. And that's just the way it goes. That's something that I work for is mentoring and supporting women choreographers, particularly women of color and black women, but, put their name out there. There's always more than one, but you'll see one name and that's it. And there has to… there have to be more people making work. There have to be more people doing this. This is an aside. We can go back to Lincoln Center and Bill T. Jones, but I, for women's history month, I curate and produce with the Hayti Heritage Center here in Durham, North Carolina, a production called women at work. And its spelled W I M M I N at work, Wimmin@Work, with the ampersand and it's to celebrate women's history month for interdisciplinary, black women, artists, performers, and the work that they do. Many of us, like yourself, are educators, but we're also artists. So, for instance, if you were at Wimmin@Work, I would ask you, like, what is the work your soul must have? Maybe it's bringing your children's ensemble, but maybe it's you, working elect… maybe you want to work electronically with a vocal piece that you hadn't tried, that you’re afraid you might fall flat on your face in front of people trying this. Just bring it to Wimmin@Work. What is the thing you want to do? And bring your audience and bring your peers and bring your students and have them in the audience to celebrate you. So, that's what I want to do, is build audiences for black women's work. That's the integral thing that my soul must have right now. I want everyone to see our work, but I want us to do our work in front of black people. That is the rare, rarity, I think for us, when you leave the nest of the community, which I love and will never want to part from, but I want to be everywhere, and I especially want to be in front of black people. That was 1994, I believe, when I did the piece with Bill T. Jones, 92 or 94. And that's when I formed what I consider a company. That's when I formed what I consider Soulo Works. And I did a solo to Randy Western's music, and we formed a long-term relationship based on my work with him. And I did a quartet with live music by David Pleasant. Carolyn Web, percussionist. And I think Robert Jackson. David brought the three of them together as percussionist and a friend of mine, Andrea Michelle Smith, as the vocalist who read a poem that I wrote. And we did those pieces, and I got a beautiful review in the New York Times for my own work, my first review, in that way. And so that kind of… when I went to do more work, I asked the dancers in the piece, the choreography, were they available and they all said “Yes.” And so, then I think that's what made me think, “Oh, I think I have a company because the same people keep saying yes to do more work.” It's called Soulo Works. S O U L O works because originally, I thought it would be a solo company. I did one solo concert, and I was miserable. It's so lonely. It's only back in the dressing room by yourself. And if you mess up, you have no one to say, did you see me mess up or if you do  something good? You have no one to say, did you see out how fierce I was?  And if you are bored, you have no one to say, “Let's crack some jokes.” It's so lonely back there and I didn't feel the need to be the only voice on stage. So, what I decided is I would make solos and develop other solo artists. I work with Pleshette. She was one of the early artists that I worked with and I saw her as a person who could hold her own onstage. She could dance with me in a duet. She could dance at a company work, but she could also hold her own. So, the solo is not only doing a solo, but like in jazz music, when you take a solo. So, the dancers in my company, I always wanted everyone to be able to have that spotlight moment where they take a solo, whether it's embedded in the choreography, whether we step back or sit out, or something. But I love working with people one-on-one. It's a certain type of… it's like a marathon runner or a swimmer, people who do individual sports. You have to develop a certain type of discipline and a certain type of relationship with yourself and the work when you do something as a solo. And it's that mental, cerebral, spiritual, kinetic time that you have to put in, besides working with the director and the choreographer. And I like coaching people through that. There's a solo company called Annabelle Damson and she does is an Isadora Duncan early turn of the century, modern dance works. And I had seen some of those pieces and I knew some of the dancers, and I think I wanted to emulate like a black soulful version of that. So that's how the Soulo Works came about, but what it really developed into was more group than solo ideas. But I have restaged some of my solos on other dancers and that was very difficult because the pressure. What I found when they perform, they were not happy. The way that I'm happy doing a solo. The way that Coltrane is happy, doing a solo. The way that Nina Simone is being on stage, doing a solo, like having the band layout, laid back. They were not happy. They were stressed. One of my dancers was like trembling and her hands were cold, and we were backstage, and I touched her hands, and she was just like, I was like, I'm really making this person suffer. So, I held back on that, but I still see a future for that. There might be a future for what that can be, coaching solo artists, but people have should… maybe I should have people come to it rather than me go to people and say, “This is something I think you're capable.” I haven't really worked that out, but everyone who dances with me does a solo at some point, whether it's eight counts of eight or a piece that you do, but the solo still in there. The last big project I did is called “The Amazing Adventures of Grace May B. Brown.” And it's the name of a sort of entity or character, Grace May B. Brown, and it's Grace May M A Y middle initial B Brown and that's a piece that I wrote. It's a music theater piece and I wrote and published a small book, and my dancers perform the work. We were at the National Black Theater Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which was a dream of mine and very few dancer choreographers have had the work that they've written. I think Nina Freelon would be another I’m familiar with, there might be a few others, but black theater, musical theater, non-traditional theater isn't really appreciated and developed the way that I think it could be. I think that's something missing as a genre within the black arts that's not strictly musical a musical. “The Color Purple” is a musical, but this is something that is still hybrid in terms of theater and musical and dance because its dance driven. It's not vocal, like it's not vocally driven. The vocals are important, but the dance is the vehicle.

So, like Ntoshake Shange's “For Colored Girls…” would be another example, but that's also very text, text-driven and narratively driven, but the dance and the movement is important. But, as you could see from the televised version, you could still make the piece and make the dance sort of a special event that happens periodically, that doesn't drive the drama. So, that was one of the last big projects I did. And being at the… my mother came down from Philadelphia to Winston-Salem. She loves theater. So, she was like, “My daughter is in the theater festival!”  She was so happy. But, yeah, so that… I think those theater tie-overs from the type of work we did with Bill, my love of literature and writing, my love of music, playing music. I play the banjo in the piece, that's important to me as a black American, maybe with some mysterious Cuban roots that we're not sure of, but I just… I claim black America. And my ancestors, my family, my father's family is from down here in North Carolina, five generations back. We have our cemetery where our matriarchal, enslaved ancestor, Harriet Doula, our family really honors and respects that history that we know of. So, those things are integral to my work, to being a black American and claiming this space, like where is black America? Where is black America? We have to claim it and we have to say, “It's here. It's just Doula Town. It's Lenore. It's Philly. That's black America.”  

Tia Imani Hanna: And you've worked through lots of different versions of what that is and just with your pieces that you've done. The piece that we did was “Love Letters,” which I thought was an amazing piece and I’d love it to see that redone. 

Andrea E Woods Valdés: I forgot about that. Go Tia, the archivist!

Tia Imani Hanna: That was a great piece because had you had the multi… you had video, you had live action and spoken word and, of course, all the dance and then we had live music. And all of that was such, it was such a beautiful piece. And I kept saying, “Oh gosh, I want to see that on PBS, I want to… I want that collection.” 

Andrea E Woods Valdés: It maybe needs a reworking.

Tia Imani Hanna: It does. It does.

Andrea E Woods Valdés: That work with David, him playing the banjo was very influential for me and he played harmonica in another piece for me and a woman, Ti'Ye Giraud. I don't know if Ti'Ye was one of the first women percussionists that I saw, and Madeline Yayodele Nelson and women of the Calabash. I worked with them for a while and they were like, Andrea, you can sing, you sing. And I was like, I don't have a beautiful voice. That's not something I can do. And she put, she put me in that place and didn't allow me to disclaim it. She didn't allow me to cut myself off. And so, all of that, I think has been a trajectory, like somebody threw a ball way ahead of me and now I'm, like, following the path of… not always following it exactly, but following the path of where that ball was thrown, and sometimes it's bigger than I even imagined. But yes, “Love Letters” and those beautiful letters that were from my ancestors and from… we collected, and we went around and did workshops and collected them from people. And that was the email just started. And somebody had a letter, it was from @yahoo.com and the audience would laugh that the love letter was from an email. Yes. Yes. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. So, it's… now it's texts.

Andrea E Woods Valdés: Right. Right. 

Tia Imani Hanna: And Instagram, but so what, it's just the evolution. So, it would be reworking of that would be amazing. 

Andrea E Woods Valdés: Black love. Black love. Black love. Black lives matter. Black love matters. Yeah. 

Tia Imani Hanna: And just the focus of it being love. 

Andrea E Woods Valdés: Yeah. Yeah. 

Tia Imani Hanna: And there's so many of the things that I've seen you do. The “Maybe Brown” piece, I believe it's up on YouTube, and I didn’t get to watch the whole thing, but I watched a good part of it and it's still surrounded about love and that's one of the things as artists, that least that I always try to profess to be, it is to always bring the love and the hope back into the world, because we create the culture. So, trying to do that, and I see that in your work. And that was one of the reasons I wanted to work with you in the first place. Cause it's, “Oh yeah, she's got it going on.” 

Andrea E Woods Valdés: That's mutual Tia. That's mutual . You bring that too. You're very hopeful, positive person. You… I learn from you. That's mutual. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you. Thank you very much. 

Andrea E Woods Valdés: Love is my anchor. My little “Me and Mary Jane” sticker. A sticky memo. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Yep. Love is my anchor. 

Andrea E Woods Valdés: Love is my anchor. 

Tia Imani Hanna: That's right. You're definitely expressing that. And, and I'm excited to see more work coming out of you in. Eventually, I do still have some pieces I want to send to you. I have to record them. 

Andrea E Woods Valdés: We have to do something. And I have the CD that you gave me. But that's a project that has to happen. There's still more, or there's still another project in there for us, but more projects for sure. For sure. 

Tia Imani Hanna: So, is there anything else you want to share with the audience today, like where they can find you, where they can find Soulo Works Dance Company? 

Andrea E Woods Valdés: The reality is the company works on a project basis now. So, I've reconfigured what Soulo Works is. It's not, it never was, a dance company where I salaried people. We had a couple months of tour. “Love Letters” was a tour. We did international. We went to Russia, Poland, and… but Soulo Works is now for me, an umbrella. And it's an umbrella for collaborative projects like you and I might do a project. It's an umbrella for scholarly forums, which I haven't done yet, but I'm planning to do. It's an umbrella for wimmin@work, audience development. It's an umbrella for another company I have called Calabasa, which is with the shekeri and shekeri as played in other countries. And I wanted… COVID cut it off. I was planning to go to Hawaii and look at it as IPU, and in Ghana and Cuba, and look at the gourd instrument, the Shekeri, and the dance and the music and the spirituality around it. So Soulo Works is now an umbrella for other projects because I've seen myself grow as a scholar. I'm working on my PhD, a PhD in dance now. I'm in my third year. I just finished my qualifying exams the summer, which is a big deal for me. And of course, work and going back to school. And I do that and work full time. Yeah, so you can… I have my website, Souloworks.com, but really finding me through Duke university. That's where my scholarship and other entities and other projects take place and mentoring students and mentoring other artists. That's where those kinds of things are happening. But I don't have any one thing, for me, it's a continuum. Every once in a while, there's a big, like, bang thing that happens like a show, a grant, or whatever. But what I find, if somebody asks me about secrets or words of wisdom, is that you have to keep doing the important work, especially when nobody's looking.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes.

Andrea E Woods Valdés: So, when you don't see me, you can assume Andrea somewhere working on something, somehow.  I just started learning to play the fiddle and the violin. So, I'm like, okay, give me about three years. And I'll be like, “Tia  come on. We got to do a duet now.” Maybe about eight years, but …

Tia Imani Hanna: I'm looking forward to it. 

Andrea E Woods Valdés: It'll be a sit-down project. But anyway, Yeah. Yeah. It's a continuum. That's where you look for me, in the continuum. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. thank you so much. I'm just thrilled that you were able to come on the show and it's so great to talk to you and to see you. And so, let's not let it be so long next time. 

Andrea E Woods Valdés: And we'll just… to be continued, right? All right. Thank you, my girl. Do good. Do good work. Do good work. I know you will.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes. 

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