How Do We Dance with Legacy?

Exploring Legacy Through Dance and Conversation

By Margaret Steen

What does it mean to unearth and pass on a legacy? 

Panelists at “How Do We Dance With Legacy?” — a program hosted on March 11 by Stanford's Institute for Advancing Just Societies (IAJS) and Zócalo Public Square — used both their professional and personal experience to delve into this question. 

The program started with Durga’s Daughters, an original performance created and directed by Indian American Bharatanatyam choreographer and dancer Mythili Prakash.

“Part of the Institute’s approach is to offer a space of envisioning and dreaming, of shaking us out of our reality,” said Tomás Jiménez, professor of sociology and IAJS faculty director. “Art does that. It’s both a mirror and a compass: a mirror showing us who we are but also a compass showing us who we can potentially be.”

The performance was followed by a panel discussion moderated by Jiménez. Participants included Ahmed Badr, an author, poet and social entrepreneur who is president and CEO of Narratio; Julian Brave NoiseCat, a writer, filmmaker, and powwow dancer who is author of We Survived the Night and director of Sugarcane; and Janina Jeff Ringo, a population geneticist and science journalist who hosts the podcast In Those Genes.

Making connections through art

The program was the fourth and final installment of a nationwide series of events entitled “What Can Become of Us?” and hosted by IAJS and Zócalo, a unit of Arizona State University Media Enterprise. 

The series encouraged “thinking about possibilities,” Jiménez said. “If we don’t have that space, we live in the current crisis and just jump to the next one — or we live in the rubble of the destruction of our institutions and of our mutually recognized humanity.”

Each event in the series was centered around a commissioned piece of art, with panelists using that as a jumping-off point for a discussion. 

“There’s a kind of moral centering, where it’s easier to find our humanity and make connections, through art,” Jiménez said. 

Examining ideas about legacy

Both the performance and the panel explored themes of storytelling in legacy, identity and belonging, particularly in relation to immigrants’ experience.

“Storytelling was always the thing we carried with us from place to place — we went from Baghdad to Aleppo to the coast of Syria to Sioux Falls, South Dakota,” said Badr, discussing his family’s 2008 arrival in the United States as refugees.

Durga's Daughters, inspired by Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series about the children of Greek gods, also explored a journey — that of the daughters of Durga, a powerful warrior Goddess in Indian mythology, who are living on earth as undocumented immigrants. 

The performance also pushed the panelists to consider the responsibility that comes with sharing one’s legacy— as well as whether parts of legacy should be left behind.

Jeff Ringo, for example, said she has never had a commercial genetic ancestry test done despite her work as a geneticist.  “I know that my genome can tell me a painful story that I may not want to confront,” Ringo said. 

NoiseCat and other panelists noted the challenges of trying to fit one group’s narrative into a larger whole. “I come from a tradition that’s really skeptical of inclusion — ‘inclusion’ is a nice way of saying ‘assimilation,’ at least from an indigenous perspective,” NoiseCat said. 

Looking ahead

The two-year project forged lasting connections among researchers, practitioners, artists and community members. The art commissioned as part of the four-part “What Can Become of Us?” series is permanently installed at the Institute’s office — and both the artwork and the networks it has helped connect will be part of the Institute’s evolving work. 

The series has also inspired innovative thinking on ways to connect research with big questions that have an impact outside the academy. Building on the series, PBS Arizona is developing a program that draws on recorded content from the four-part series, extending the conversation and broadening its reach to wider audiences.

At Stanford, future events will pair artists’ and academics’ work. One upcoming event, to be held April 21, will feature Benny Starr, a U.S. Cultural Policy Fellow at Stanford, and Khalid Osman, assistant professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Stanford School of Engineering. Starr, whose work fuses Southern musical traditions with storytelling, will give a performance centered on water. Former Founding Faculty Co-Director and Senior Advisor Brian Lowery will then moderate a conversation that includes Osman, whose research focuses on water infrastructure, conservation and access.