We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Billy Hawkains a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Billy, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.
Risk-taking can be petrifying. Completely intimidating. Be that as it may, undertaking things that may result in loss or failure is an essential part of life.
In less than two months, my new dance creation will make its premiere as part of Dance Canvas’s Choreographer Career Development Initiative showcase. If this creative process wasn’t risk-taking personified I don’t know what was. Every rehearsal is full of unknowns, down to the choreography and how it will all come together. Me and my lovely five dance collaborators walk into an abyss every Friday and Saturday where any and everything is possible, including leaving those same rehearsals with absolutely nothing generated. We’ve grown to love the unknown. It’s there where we truly find ourselves, our truest selves. I’m not the choreographer who typically comes inside the studio with movement phrases already set; I come in ready to collaborate with the dancers, workshopping and exploring ideas for the very first time that may or may not lend itself to something we’ll use. Hopefully we do. But in the end, whatever we produce – what we have produced and what you’ll see this March – has been the most honest and authentic dance creation I’ve ever released.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I’m from the streets of Motown. I lived in two houses on the same block until my fifteenth birthday. All we did was move down and across the street. I laugh now. I didn’t grow up dancing or going on family vacations of any sort. I grew up going to church on Sunday mornings where black bodies fell to the ground after running around the church and hearing bullets during the night after a black body fell to the ground and wouldn’t get up. I went to summer school even though I had straight A’s. Momma said we had to be in school and “out dem streets.” Shoutout to mom. I eventually started dancing in high school at Lewis Cass Technical High School in Detroit and the rest is history. Cut to me obtaining a BFA in Dance Performance from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, the first public arts conservatory in the United States. Crossover to me graduating from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with an MFA in Dance Choreography. Take a stroll through Japan, Antigua, D.C., New York, and works by Juel D. Lane, Veronica Silk, Doug Varone, Paul Taylor, Merce Cunningham, Julio Medina, and many more as my sincere love for the performance continued to evolve around people who I now call family. Go behind the scenes of Theatre of Movement where I danced and served as rehearsal assistant to Artistic Director Duane Cyrus, my lifelong mentor who continues to pour into me and support my career like his own. Now, I serve the dance department of Kennesaw State University as Professor of Dance where I teach courses in Composition, Improvisation, Dance Entrepreneurship – a course I developed, and Safety Release, a movement modality created by my mentor Elizabeth ‘B.J.’.Sullivan. So glad to do life with you. I still go to church where all bodies rip and run around the church. I write to encourage. I dress to express my every side. I create to heal and restore others.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
That I get to see something go from an idea to something tangible. Something real. That’s so inspiring because to manifest anything means one must go through a process. And if, only if we stick that process out – with all its ups and downs and fears and uncertainties and trial and errors, the vision will NOT lie.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
It’s okay to not know. No one has all the answers and that’s perfectly fine. To admit you don’t know something opens up the opportunity to grow. But to sit in arrogance and pride and in the appearance of knowledge is to close oneself off from greatness. Too many people are full and not empty, and no one will ever truly advance in this life until they can admit their emptiness, or all of which they have no prior understanding of. Emptiness is beautiful and something to constantly pursue because only then can we be filled.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @iambillyjhawkains
- Facebook: @Billy James Hawkains III
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuHCaksGUiUMTlDHP4CfKTA
Image Credits
Peter J. Brown II