We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Solomon Roller a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Solomon thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?
I started off by teaching myself, both as a dancer and a writer. These things were not in my immediate surroundings but I found a love for them early on. I made a decision, however conscious it was, that I would not sit around and wait for the opportunity to do these things come to me. So I helped myself with no expectation, and to me that’s the most beautiful part of the process. The Doing, the presence and pure curiosity of it before all the foresight comes into play. I watched Michael Jackson and James Brown performances on repeat until the movements started to feel good in my body. I started writing stories before I could even write my alphabet. I would draw these wild pictures and I would make one of my parents write out these detailed stories verbatim on the page. The second I could start to write full sentences on my own, I took over. That quickly turned into journaling, poetry, and songwriting, a practice I’ve kept up on my own since age 10. Right around the same time I started teaching myself to dance. I bridged these two things because everything I wrote gave me a microscope into my feelings, the way my mind worked. And as a dancer, truly knowing yourself is one of the best foundations you can have, or rather, the art of being honest with yourself, being willing to be vulnerable. My main obstacle was learning how to do that on my own. No one taught me that, I had to find it in myself. And that takes time, it takes a serious sense of self-awareness while balancing the grace you need to have for yourself so it doesn’t turn into doubt or self-sabotage. One of the biggest things I learned is that community is necessary. You simply can’t do this on your own, you shouldn’t have to. It took me a while to find that, but now I have a community in so many places. They keep my light burning.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
My love for storytelling is at the core of everything I do creatively. It’s the reason I began writing, the reason I fell in love with dancing. I had a wild imagination as a kid, I was always creating worlds in my head. My mother has always been one of the greatest storytellers that I know. Whether it was stories of her childhood in Nigeria, re-telling a Bible story, a story in history, or describing an encounter with someone in her day, she could make you feel like you had been right there when it all happened. For a long time, I didn’t realize how big of an impact that had on me. She fanned the flame for my desire to share what I had with the outside world. I performed every year at my middle school talent shows singing and dancing to Michael Jackson songs and that’s really where it all started. I was still by myself doing it, but I kept going because I saw the impact it was having on people watching me and knew I’d start to find the right people eventually. From there I took almost every opportunity to perform and keep getting better since I took being good very seriously. I had a whole hour solo set at this Waukesha county fair a couple days in a row when I was 14 and that was a big step for me, I even performed Thriller at this Roller Derby halftime show in this big coliseum in 6th grade, it was crazy. I learned to become comfortable being myself in front of a lot of people. When it was time for college, I got a full tuition scholarship for my dancing and writing through this program called First Wave at University of Wisconsin Madison. It was a big spoken word culture in that program and for the first time, I found myself choreographing movements to live spoken word. We were all constantly collaborating with each other for performances. Through that, I realized there was a bridge between the story my movement told and the story my words told. Eventually, I was writing my own pieces, recording them, then dancing to those recordings for solo shows I was putting together. The creativity in my dance started to inform the imagery in my words, and as I learned more about who I was by writing more, it directly played into the evolution of my dancing and how I expressed my emotions. Today, that is still one of the elements of my craft that I am the most proud of. There is an intimate relationship between the two things, and it didn’t happen by accident.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
I did a lot of driving for my job, transporting music equipment, many times over state lines. One day, I was driving back from Alabama to Georgia and was having issues with the box truck I was driving. The next thing I knew, I woke up in the hospital by myself, in pain, confused, and with no memory of the recent years of my life. I had been hit from behind by a semi and it flipped the truck I was driving. No one was in the room when I regained consciousness. I saw pieces of glass stuck in my shirt pocket still, a piece of paper with the crash details, and my backpack they retrieved from the wreck. I quickly went into my bag, grabbed my little black notebook, and began to write. My thoughts were all over the place and I needed something to reel me back in. Writing was the first thing I ran to after almost dying. My very first clear thought was “Oh I’m alive! I didn’t die..” I sat there and wrote 12 pages of my raw thoughts and was losing memory of pages I just finished writing because of the head trauma, so I repeated myself a lot as I wrote. This was the most abrupt reset on my life that I had ever experienced. My mom came and got me in the middle of the night in Alabama and I went back with her to recover.
That first week, I could barely walk. Everything hurt. The fear of no longer being able to dance pain-free entered my mind, I didn’t know the long term effects yet. So I wrote every day because at least I could still hold a pen, and I still had my mind intact. For the first time in a long time, my world came to an absolute halt. The pieces of my life were scattered in front of me and I had to decide which ones to pick back up, and what to let go of. I was in full surrender and was ready to accept whatever results came from this process. I started by just limping around as I listened to my music trying to keep my body somewhat active. Then it was rolling my head and moving my hands like a conductor. I knew I needed my strength back, so I started doing a few static and dynamic stretches each morning and 10-15 pushups. I started slow. Very soon, my morning routine became a 20-30 minute yoga session, 1 minute hang from my pullup bar, meditation, writing, and moving to music. I’ve done it nearly every single day since then. That’s what I held onto for dear life to get through that first month mentally and physically. I had to pay attention to my body and mind in a whole new way now as I recovered. I had to be extra mindful with my body as I danced and knew my limits. Eventually, I would wear a weight vest to keep me from moving my upper body too much so I’d focus on my arms and being directional with my torso. I would re-read my writings from each day to get a sense of where my mind was at and what was coming up. I had to work through a big range of emotions, but especially fear. I had to face fear almost every day. But out of that bloomed new pieces for me to pick up. I learned how to DJ, I began recording my voice more to read pieces of literature I loved and more of my own pieces, I found a new clarity in my writing that freed me, I learned new pathways on how to move my body by how mindful I was in my recovery. I even made it down to Arizona for one of the biggest Krump events in the country, Desert Storm 5, and was able to train and dance (mindfully) without anyone being able to tell I had been in an accident less than a couple months before. My sister Sapphina was there through much of this process. When I was scared she brought me reassurance, when I felt stuck she gave me new creative possibilities, when I was scared to go home we took a road trip to the Blue Ridge Mountains together. I had to make the choice every day to keep going, but this dramatic event in my life showed me that you really need a team to make it. The people I love pulled through for me and supported me, that made me feel like I had something worthwhile waiting ahead for me still. Being surrounded by real love will do that.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
When I see the narratives from my imagination become tangible expressions, I get to experience a taste of what truly makes me Solomon. Solomon Osayi Roller, I was named after my grandfather the great Solomon Irein Wangboje. A pioneer of contemporary Nigerian art, one of the first modern printmakers of Nigeria, educator, scholar, and humanist. He was one of the earliest stories I was told as a child by my mother. He died before I was born. But I have always carried him with me in name, spirit, and story form. I am a storyteller, I have always been a storyteller. And that feels so liberating to say, to embrace. It is the divine bridge between all forms of my expression. Dancing, writing, speaking, music. It’s observing yourself in reaction to the world around you and finding the patterns in what others may miss.
You live in the details of what you create, it is your unique lens on the world and what you care about, what you love. It’s keeping something alive that people wouldn’t think to preserve. It’s embodying encounters that have nothing to do with you and yet have everything to do with you because we are more than our direct experiences. We feel on a spectrum beyond understanding. It’s like some sacred game of I Spy, how the feeling of being embraced by my friends at sunset on the shore of the San Francisco bay is the same feeling I got from the great oak tree I used to climb as a kid every summer. I find the thread and then I create a melody on my saxophone that connects those two feelings and call it “I have always been held.” Or maybe it’s as simple as seeing a video of my grandfather for the first time, and I write a poem imagining a life where I knew his love firsthand, so I write it from his perspective as he details how he sees me through his eyes. Storytelling is so beautifully nuanced. It is healing, it is preservation, it is alive!
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/solomonroller/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@solomonroller9127
Image Credits
Haaris Soomro
LIIV Atlanta
Sapphina Roller