Black Women's Stories About Grief Shape a Seattle Dance Performance

In 2018, dancer and artist Jade Solomon Curtis was on an eight-city tour when she started feeling depressed in a way that she had never felt.

"I was like, 'What the heck is this? This kind of depression that I'm navigating feels different,'" Solomon Curtis said in her work space in downtown Seattle. "Historically for myself, I would shake it off and do something and create action out of it, but I was having a really hard time doing it."

She sat down with her mother-in-law and other Black women in her family to talk through her feelings. Through those conversations she learned the term "keeper of sadness" — an expression that represents the grief held in the body, whether the grief is personal, belongs to other people, or is ancestral.

Nearly a decade later, with support from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture and 4Culture, Solomon Curtis will showcase an immersive dance experience that invokes the term, using choreography she describes as "performance arts meets rigorous contemporary." The free performance will take place Aug. 1 and 2 at Union Station in the Chinatown-International District.

"I talk a lot about the nuance and the humanity of Black women: We are oftentimes kind of flattened into being strong or sensual and sexual," Solomon Curtis said. "But the in-betweens are [what is not] considered. So I hope that people see that."

A dancer of 25 years, Solomon Curtis didn't always know she wanted to pursue the arts, with life and the need to provide income often getting in the way. But with a wide range of skills, she held on to "affirmations that kept her on this path."

Leading up to "Keeper of Sadness," the artist premiered her first work in Seattle with 4Culture (and later on tour) in 2017. It was no surprise to 4Culture arts program director Nina Yarbrough that Solomon Curtis' work was once again being recognized by the arts community.

"There is a deep acknowledgment of [Solomon Curtis'] ability to do powerful, deeply introspective pieces," Yarbrough said. "Jade herself is the embodiment of what type of artwork that 4Culture wants to put its name behind."

Before she could work on choreography, Solomon Curtis spent the last nine months interviewing Black women of all generations about grief: their stories, how they navigate it, and how it can transmute into a physical form. The work also required her own introspection.

The silence — the self-suffocation of pushing pain down in order to survive — was universal in all her interviews, she said.

"You have to take ownership over what you decide to hold or put down," Solomon Curtis said. "It's also the realization that sometimes what you're carrying isn't yours."

"Keeper of Sadness" is a mix of dance, sound design, set design, lighting, and the stories of the 30 women. Featuring two dancers to tell these stories, with music ranging from gospel to house to R&B. Solomon Curtis is not asking dancers to perform what they think grief looks like, but to connect with each movement in how they see fit.

"What is grief in your body right now? What is joy in your body right now?" Solomon Curtis asks. "[The project] is asking people to bring their whole human selves: to embody, to channel, to explore every time that the work is shown and shared."