Wa Na Wari Celebrates Its Sixth Birthday With a Cake Dance

At Georgetown Ballroom last Saturday, April 19, Aaliyah and TLC blasted from the speakers as a group of Seattleites gathered together to watch friends and loved ones dance for cake. Organized by Wa Na Wari, this Cake Dance honored the Central District Black arts space and cultural center's sixth birthday with performances by Black professional dancers — curated by choreographer dani tirrell — drawing on the long history of African diasporic dance. And cake. A whole lotta cake.

Two dozen donated cakes from places like PCC, Shikorina Bakeshop & Cafe, and Simply Soulful lined one wall of the ballroom, gleaming under the diffuse afternoon light. Attendees came by to survey each cake, eyeing the ones they'd choose if they won a round of cakewalking later. But first, tirrell took the mic to introduce three dancers from across the country who'd come to perform that day: Cyrah L. Ward, Gerson Lanza, and Quynn L. Johnson.

"Don't ever become afraid to dance because it's a connection to ancestors, it's a connection to spirit, it is a connection to something bigger than yourself," tirrell told the crowd. "We get so afraid of this thing, but if you give yourself over to moving your body, you give yourself over to something greater than yourself. Dance does so much good in the world and what we're going through right now, we need dance, we need art. Period."

"Art is not just resistance," tirrell continued. "It is healing."

Attendees first watched Ward, a scholar of Black dance and a critical race theorist, move across the space to "Isadora" by Christian Scott, gliding and twisting through the crowd. Then came Lanza, a tap dancer originally from Honduras, dressed in a tux and tapping to songs by Cab Calloway and Jelly Roll Morton. At one point, Lanza told the crowd, "I'm here to represent Black excellence!" And, finally, Johnson, a Flint native, took the stage where she dumped a cup of sand before tracing and then erasing various names. She then danced on the sand, drawing from sand dancers like Howard "Sandman" Sims and Harriet "Quicksand" Browne.

"I practice a lot of different art forms, so I wondered how ancestral memory shows up for me in the sand," said Johnson after her performance. "I gave [sand dancers] a few shout outs and then the rest was my exploration of fusing sand movement with body percussion with tap dance with West African rhythms and movement altogether."

Some background — cake dances or cakewalks originated in the pre-Civil War South by enslaved Africans on plantations where they'd dance for cake. First dubbed as "prize walk," the dance originally started off as a way to poke fun at the formal dances of white folks with the best dancers being awarded their prize in the form of cake by the plantation master (who probably wasn't in on the joke). More from NPR:

"By the 1870s, a cakewalk was a popular feature of minstrel shows. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that usage of the word "cakewalk" really began to take off during this decade. It was also when the word began being used as a way to describe an accomplishment that was easy or simple to obtain. This is not because winning a cakewalk competition was easy. Rather, it was because the dance steps were fluid and graceful. Hard work by the dancers gave the impression of great ease."

Cakewalks continued to be a feature of American, and specifically Black-American, community events and celebrations in the 20th century. Wa Na Wari's 21st-century interpretation of the cakewalk arranged seven numbers in a circle on the floor. Each cakewalker started on one number and, once the music played, would dance around the numbers until the music stopped, when they'd have to step directly on whatever number was closest to them. An emcee drew two numbers and whoever stood on each number won a cake. And then the process would repeat again until all the cakes were claimed.

One of the early Cake Dance winners was Lisa Price, who chose a vintage-style pink cake with glitter-dusted cherries on top as her prize. A longtime supporter of Wa Na Wari, Price recalled going to many cakewalks as a kid.

"On the East Coast in New York — I'm from Brooklyn — when I was little, people incorporated cakewalks into church events, barbecues, and community events. I remember people making cakes — maybe too many cakes!" Price said as she held her prized cake. "I'm happy that Wa Na Wari is reviving it. It's important."