Beacon Dance Company, led by the thoughtful and quietly resolute D. Patton White, is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year with a series of performances on June 3, 4, 17 and 18.
On June 3 and 4, the company will perform three works at B Complex. One of them is a reprise of White’s dance film Adrift through the Interstices, which premiered virtually this year, with the addition of live performance.
Beacon will share the program with Decatur City Dance, the oldest performing dance group in DeKalb County. Six groups of accomplished adult and teen dancers will be featured, all of them operating under the Decatur City Dance umbrella: AboutFace (professional contemporary), Nexus Premiere and Nexus Apprentice (ballet, jazz and modern), Rhythm Keepers and Junior Rhythm Keepers (tap) and Nexus Contemporary (contemporary/modern).
At first it seems odd that Beacon, dedicated to conceptual art, community engagement and site-specific works for dancers as old as 70, will share a program with young tap and ballet dancers, but when talking with White it soon becomes clear that this anniversary celebration is about family. A family of local companies that have grown up together.
White arrived in Atlanta as an Emory student in 1979 and graduated with a double degree in psychology and philosophy. He fell in love with movement, however, and performed with Atlanta dance pioneers such as Ruth Mitchell and Lee Harper. He spent 28 years with Core Dance, first as a dancer and later as company manager.
He believes deeply in dance as a means of communication, has created 40 of his own works and is on the Emory faculty. In 1990, he was named artistic/administrative director of Beacon, which was founded in 1962 under a different name.
On June 17 and 18, Beacon will celebrate this 60-year milestone with the third episode in a site-specific triptych Who Decides Who Belongs at The Junction, a small outdoor space close to B Complex. Part one of Who Decides took place on the BeltLine and dealt with the pandemic. Part two was performed outside the Fulton County Library Metropolitan branch and looked at privilege.
ArtsATL: Each section of Who Decides Who Belongs deals with a different aspect of community and belonging. What inspired the work, especially the last section?
Patton White: The genesis of this project came about through an article in Time magazine I read last year and a conversation with my collaborating partner, Paula Larke [a storyteller and musician]. The article detailed one of Kamala Harris’ campaign stops during the presidential campaign, in a community in Pennsylvania. As Harris’ convoy left, a woman shouted: ‘You don’t belong here’. That got me to consider who does get to say whether or not someone else belongs or not?
ArtsATL: How did you and Paula make this idea Atlanta-specific?
White: Paula was interested in addressing how many neighborhoods in Atlanta are experiencing gentrification. The neighborhood where our studio is headquartered, Capitol View, is definitely going through this — and has been for many years. Part of gentrification centers around this question of who decides who belongs: Do the people who have lived in the neighborhood for decades or generations, and are now being forced out due to the inflated prices of real estate, belong? Do the people who are moving into the community and changing it in dramatic ways belong? What other factors are involved in this question?
ArtsATL: How did the work develop?
We engaged with community members and heard stories about how they have dealt with instability in their housing situation, how they have helped others find ways of belonging, how they have taken responsibility for their own sense of belonging. We have used both their stories and the movement gestures that they created to convey the essence of the story and weave a tapestry of movement, words and sound. Beacon is less about technical prowess and more about coming from a somatic point of view, working from the inside out.
We’ll be housed in the unique space of The Junction, a hollowed-out building with no roof, no glass in the window openings, no doors in the doorways. Yet it is filled with places for people to gather and to converse with one another. The space will be a part of the performance — as a set, but also a character, of sorts, as we consider place, belonging and community.
We want to inspire the audience to consider the question . . . and carry the conversation forward in their own spheres of influence.
ArtsATL: You will perform in the piece along with one other man and six women. The age range is from 37 to 70 and includes seven White performers, one African American and one wheelchair user. Tell me more about your vision of inclusion.
White: We seek to be a participant in making our community and our world a better and more just place for all. We wish to be more than simply a bystander. We want to be a catalyzing agent, bringing people together to address the concerns of our community, as well as to celebrate all the ways in which our community is wonderful.
ArtsATL: All of Beacon Dance’s performances, including these at B Complex and The Junction, are free. Say more about this.
White: Part of it is a practical thing because we do so much site-specific work. It’s easier to say anyone can come rather than maintain crowd control or get people to pay to be in the public realm. But we made the decision many years ago to be a public art entity and we have embraced this [free performances] as part of our mission.
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Gillian Anne Renault has been an ArtsATL contributor since 2012 and was named Senior Editor for Art+Design and Dance in 2021. She has covered dance for the Los Angeles Daily News, Herald Examiner and Ballet News, and on radio stations such as KCRW, the NPR affiliate in Santa Monica, California. In the 1980s, she was awarded an NEA Fellowship to attend American Dance Festival’s Dance Criticism program.
