Interview with Ronee Penoi of ArtsEmerson for In The Same Tongue
Ronee Penoi, Director of Artistic Programming at ArtsEmerson, very kindly spoke with Tarikh Campbell about In The Same Tongue, coming this week, Thu Sep 26 to Sun Sep 29 to ArtsEmerson in Boston.
In the Same Tongue is, according to the press release, “a new, breathtaking work combining movement, sound, and language from the legendary Emmy-nominated dancer/choreographer, Dianne McIntyre. In the span of 80-minutes, McIntyre unites a brilliant company of dancers and musicians to reveal how dance and music “speak” to each other. With original music by celebrated composer Diedre Murray and working with the poetry of Obie-winning playwright Ntozake Shange, In the Same Tongue shows audiences how language—in all its many forms—can create worlds of beauty, alienation, harmony, tension, or peace.”
“Reviving the spirit of McIntyre’s internationally celebrated dance company Sounds in Motion, In the Same Tongue explores artistic legacies, like 1920s Harlem salons and the Black Arts Movement of the 60’s & 70’s, by bringing dynamic dancers, writers, and musicians together to manifest connections on stage in the most unexpected ways.”
Here is the video interview or read the transcript below!
For more, see artsemerson.org and our review of the show!
Events INSIDER: Could you introduce yourself to our readers, and give a brief overview of “In the Same Tongue”, and how this production aligns with the mission and goals of ArtsEmerson?
Ronee Penoi: I am Ronee Penoi. I use the She/Her series. I am Laguna Pueblo and Cherokee, and I am the director of Artistic Programming for ArtsEmerson, as well as the interim Executive Director for the Office of the Arts and ArtsEmerson. Word salad!
In The Same Tongue is a stunning work of what I will call dance theater that is helmed by living legend Dianne McIntyre – incredible choreographer, artist, human being – and really generated with the collaborative talents of Shange and her incredible body of work, as well as Diedre Murray, who is an experimental jazz musician. So I love that the spirit of the piece is very much about the ways in which music, dance, texts are all speaking the same language. They’re all in the same tongue. And I know for many folks that think about dance, it’s like, “Oh, it’s esoteric. Is it kind of abstract?” What I, what so resonated with me about this piece is the way in which when watching it, you can feel the invitation in your own body to move. And the ways in which the body is a natural form of storytelling for everyone.
And that goes beyond the professional dancer to us as human beings. We feel so much in our bodies and it can express so much in our bodies, and I really love the way that Dianne bridges both professional dancers and musicians as well as local artists in the piece. So it gives this kind of layered approach. So I’ll say that in terms of more specific content, there is a bit of a connection across time, energy of both the energy of Harlem in the kind of twenties and thirties, but then also in the sixties and seventies and the Black arts movement that she was so much a part of. So while it is not overtly a story about one particular moment in time, it’s very legible in terms of what emotionally and experience-wise this group of artists is going through at any one moment. It is incredibly inviting.
And in terms of our mission at ArtsEmerson, our favorite tagline is, “The art is prompt and the conversation is the point.” So we do work that is incredible and the reason that we do it is really to prompt civic transformation, connecting across difference and conversation. So one of our biggest commitments is to work that celebrates the African diasporic experience here in the United States. Sometimes that shows up in our international work from around the world, and sometimes it’s very obvious that the focus needs to be on sharing the work of someone like Ms. McIntyre who hasn’t, I don’t believe to my knowledge, hasn’t ever been presented in the city of Boston. And she is, I say living legend, not lightly in that this is going to be the 50th year that she’s creating work, which is just, I can hardly wrap my head around, but she has been such a phenomenal artist and choreographer in her own right and mentor and teacher.
Her ability and to connect with individuals, whether in the dance space or in conversation is really, it’s pretty unparalleled. I mean, I got to spend some time with her at an event we had at ArtsEmerson this spring and her sense of curiosity and inquiry around people, whoever they are, whatever their come from is and being fully present for their experience…it’s not something you see a lot of these days when a lot of people have some walls up about their own lives, their own experiences and their ability to really extend themselves. And it’s really courageous, emotionally courageous to be in her presence and hear the way that she thinks about the work and thinks about people. She still so deeply, you can tell, loves and cares about getting to know new people. So this piece, this work of hers I heard about when I was working at Octopus Theatricals independent producing company before I came here.
And so when I started as Director of Artistic Programming, I knew I wanted to offer a commission for the piece. So we were early commissioners and then when the piece was at the Apollo, some members of our staff went to see it and it was very clear that this was ours to do. I know that dance in the city of Boston, some folks do a little bit of it, but I think about Jeremy Alliger, I think about Dance Umbrella. I think about, as someone who was very serious about dance earlier in my life, it’s such a special and dearly held art form for so many. But it’s a really tricky thing in 2024 to bring folks who don’t have that past experience with dance in. So I’m really passionate around our work and connecting across difference to expand to thinking about, okay, especially when there’s so much here that is celebrating Black legendary artists and work that this is exactly the way that we should be thinking about having some of these critical conversations around race and history and just joy. So the commitment to African diasporic work and also mixed media, contemporary music, theater, all of which are three of our seven tent poles. This was very obvious that this felt like ours to do. So it’s kind of a long answer, but there you go.
Events INSIDER: It’s almost like you’re introducing Boston to Ms. McIntyre’s work and this incredible production as well. I’m incredibly interested in seeing this and I think it’ll be an incredible experience for everyone who does see it as well.
Events INSIDER: What themes and messages does this production explore, and why are they important for today’s audience?
Ronee Penoi: Yeah. Well, I want to say that Dianne’s work is one where it’s not prescriptive that you’re going to come in and go, “I’m going to walk away with this.” So I’ll share for me what I take away from the work and why it feels meaningful to bring to Boston. But I think something that is so beautiful about the work is that different folks will come to it and take different pieces away from it, I imagine will have different resonance. It has that kind of universal out-of-the-specific component to it. But for me, in Boston as a city, even as it is a non-, it has no one majority in terms of racial makeup in particular.
It still feels like a very white dominant culture, especially in dance, especially in, I would say it’s changing, but I still think that that’s true of downtown of the art space. It still feels like that’s the dominant culture. So when we think about history, when we think about black history, it can be easy to kind of go, okay, that’s that over there. And it’s in the history books and it’s not alive. And I think there’s something about what Ms. McIntyre is bringing forward with not only her key role in that, and you feel it in the jazz, you feel it in the movement, the kind of specific place in time. I mean, heck, you kind of feel it in the costumes of the 60s and 70s, the real sense of salon, the sense that the arts and the most rich intellectual thinking was all part of the same universe. We were all speaking to each other just using different ways of getting at the same thing, whether it was art, whether it was science, whether it was writing.
And all of that is to say it is still alive now. And the importance of the past is present. And especially in a city like Boston where we love, the joke I always like to make is that we are the city of cosplay and muskets. We love our founding fathers, we love our Revolutionary War history. And it can still be a very white history. And again, that’s changing. I don’t want to erase the really meaningful work that I see that has been happening over time to shift that. But especially being Indigenous myself, it’s not hard to see that Black history, Indigenous history is not yet American history is understood in the city of Boston fully. So when we’re thinking about this moment where we are in the future across racial lines, across, we still as an American society, I think struggle with intergenerational leadership and carrying our ancestors’ wisdom forward as a society.
I know in certain cultures that’s much more present than in others. So this just really feels like a sense to bring the richness of the past through this really, led by this incredible woman who is still very much with us and has so much to offer, to offer a support portal forward through how we could imagine a different kind of future. I mean, I walk out of the piece with such a sense of aliveness, I feel embodied, and so many of us are in our heads, we’re in our stresses and in our emotions, and it just feels incredibly nourishing and a kind of powerful, empowered challenge to approach the future differently.
Events INSIDER: And to look at the past differently as well as you’re saying, which is I think an incredible opportunity to awaken people to realize what you’re talking about in the way that history still looks so segregated. And to look at something like Dianne McIntyre who can really show us a new way to think about how we combine our narratives and our stories.
Ronee Penoi: Exactly. And I’ll also offer too that for our various Black audiences that we’re in relationship with that we hope to grow, this is also just a different kind of window into the kind of legacy and the highly held, almost mythologically embraced at times notion of Harlem as this epicenter of Black culture. And it really is held in a more specific, and it’s a different window into it in a way that feels less the stuff of stories, but more the stuff of how are we in it now? How are we holding it now?
Events INSIDER: How does In The Same Tongue stand out from other productions that Arts Emerson has commissioned?
Ronee Penoi: Oh boy. Well, for one thing, it’s very dance forward. So it is an aesthetic. I mean, as with all of our works, we try not to…we kind of want to live in the gaps, as we like to say. So if there are things that are not being seen, done, engaged with in the city of Boston, we try to live in that space of gap as long as it has a theatrical quality at its center. We were pretty open to the interdisciplinary, the kind of stretch of form and things like that. Commissions, often we are sometimes commissioning things that don’t necessarily make it to this stage because we really believe that as an arts field, both in the US and internationally, we all need to be doing more than the sum of our arts. So that means sometimes supporting something that needs to be in the world, even if it doesn’t make specific sense for it to be at our theater.
But one of the things that made it clear to me that this was both something that was a commission and something that I so hoped, I’m delighted that it has made it to our stage, is the, it’s really entering all of the conversations that I previously mentioned in a unique way that I haven’t seen before. Theater is historically very text-based, can often be an American context. This has a real theatricality to it, but it is poetic. It is not narrative in that way, and it asks a different kind of thing of the audience. So I will say that on the theatrical spectrum, it’s leaning more into dance than some of the other work we’ve commissioned. But I think that’s part of the kind of universe of things that need to be seen in Boston. And so we’re kind of stepping into support and there’s amazing colleagues that we have in celebrity series in the ICA and of course in our world-class dance companies that bring a lot of wonderful choreograph at work to the fore. And there’s so much more work and I think benefit from experiencing the work than there are folks that are currently doing it. So delighted to be additive to the space that’s already really loving and sharing dance.
Events INSIDER: Amazing. As a dancer, I’m very much looking forward to that and really trying to digest and internalize what the movement is speaking. Oftentimes it’s one thing to take it and interpret text or song, anything that’s lyrical, and it has words, English words, if we all speak English, but to look at movement. Not everyone has the same lexicon there.
Ronee Penoi: Yeah, and I also think too, the way in which Diane’s work is in relationship to jazz. I mean, it’s very different than what I think a lot of folks feel. So the broader population that is interested in dance, I think they often think about music and dance in the realm of Twyla Tharp and moving out where it’s like you have this score like a Billy Joel, or even in a lot of dance spaces, you have an anchor of something that feels known or that feels, I don’t know, you’re building dance off of this other thing, whereas this is a real kind of interplay and conversation and expressing the same thing, but through two different mediums that doesn’t feel like dance is responding to or in service to the music, but it is emerging and with the poetry and with the language as well, it’s all kind of growing.
Ronee Penoi: I can’t help but move and trying to communicate it, but it feels like it’s being graded together or that it’s kind of evolving together rather than one thing is kind of being set against this other thing. So it kind of contributes to that sense of aliveness. You never know when I’m watching the piece, I don’t have a sense of when a movement starts, where it’s going to land based on what I’m hearing in the music, which is exciting as someone who, we have a lot of modes in the theater where, I don’t know why this is the thing that’s popping up, but Chekhov’s gun, you see something introduced later, it’s going to be used. That’s not to say that everything is expected or formulaic, but I think that the notion of something unexpected or what is the way in which we’re going to enter this kind of interplay of art forms is not obvious, and it just feels like you’re in this place of discovery as you watch the piece.
Events INSIDER: Earlier you spoke about everyone will take away something personal and perhaps different for themselves from this production. What most strongly resonated with you from this production?
Ronee Penoi: I think for me it was the give-and-take. There’s a moment that sticks with me of the dance ensemble sitting around and listening to the jazz musicians on stage and the back-and-forth between them, and particularly in that moment. And it feels like it has a kind of kinship that I often don’t feel like in the kind of sharp, polished, well, I will edit that to say, because it’s not like Ms. McIntyre’s work is not sharp and polished because it is, but something that feels like it’s trying to make sure I have the right language.
It feels because of the way that it has a give-and-take and how it is built, that it has almost an improvisatory quality to it. Even though it is set, you can see the very real I’m honoring and giving attention and kind of vibing with what you’re giving me here. You are kind of following me here. And that sense of trust and relationship and feeling that in the artistry, especially personally as someone who is thinking a lot about what actually are the ways in which we build connection. I mean, there’s something to be in your thirties, they say that it’s hard to make friends in your thirties. So I am new to Boston ish. I’ve been here three years still finding my people, so to speak. So in so many ways, anytime I see something that feels like such a beautiful and living expression of give and take, I think just kind of personally sits with me a little bit more and I kind of pick up on it a bit more.
Events INSIDER: That’s an amazing observation. I’ll definitely be looking out for that too. How can people stay connected with ArtsEmerson and up-to-date for this and future productions?
Ronee Penoi: So we have our handy dandy website, artsemerson.org to stay tuned. We have Instagram, Facebook, all that good stuff to see what we’re doing. And just to say I’m always very eager and open to conversation and to hearing from folks about the work and finding other ways for folks to plug in. We have a few things I’ll say. We have a play reading book club program that is completely free and open to the public that is, we’re not doing one for this particular piece, but the piece following Dianne’s work on the eve of abolition, we have one. And it’s a way to get a deeper dive, and it’s also a chance to connect even more deeply with other community members, which is so in the spirit of what we’re trying to do. Because while we love showing incredible art, we’re really looking to find places where people can connect.
Events INSIDER: Thank you so much.
See In the Same Tongue at artsemerson.org.
Tarikh Campbell is a choreographer, dancer, instructor, and Executive Director of the dance crew ConArt in Boston, MA. His and his crew’s work can be viewed on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/tarikhcampbell/ and https://www.instagram.com/theconceptartists/.