It was the 1970s, and Dianne McIntyre was a dancer on a mission: to soak up live music, specifically, she said, “so-called avant-garde jazz,” free jazz or, when labels really start to irritate her, just “whatever.” Shows would end late, making this obsession a sunrise pursuit. “We’d leave at 2 a.m., get on the subway from Brooklyn or down in the Village,” she said in a video interview. “At 2 a.m., the subways came by very seldom, so we’d get home at 4 a.m., something like that. But we didn’t care. We had to go. We had to go hear the music.”
To McIntyre, now 77, dance and music are one entity, an artistic union that she celebrated with Sounds in Motion, the company she formed in 1972. Starting Friday, that vision will be on display in her new work, “In the Same Tongue,” the inaugural dance performance to grace the new Apollo Stages at the Victoria Theater.
Filtered through the lens of Black culture, “In the Same Tongue” is a personal work, years in the making. McIntyre, a veteran choreographer, is fueled by questions: How do dance and music speak to one another? Are they — and are people — speaking in the same key? As she said, “It’s dance-music communication and human communication.”
McIntyre moved to New York from Cleveland in 1970 and studied with Viola Farber and Gus Solomons Jr., both influential dancers from the Merce Cunningham company. McIntyre’s deep connection to dance and music led her to form Sounds in Motion, a company — and studio — in Harlem dedicated to dance, of course, but also ideas about Black expression. It was a rich melding of the arts; the poet Ntozake Shange danced in her company and was part of her circle.
“In the Same Tongue” — a nuanced weaving together of motion and sound, both improvised and set — features musicians, dancers, poetry by Shange and text by McIntyre. When she first started working on the dance, years ago, she got stuck. A former dancer gave her valuable advice: to write about her associations with music. “I didn’t write so much about the individuals I worked with,” she said, “but how it was my intention for people to see the music in the dance.”
McIntyre brought on Diedre Murray as composer. Murray started out as a cellist. “She was one of the pioneers bringing a string instrument into the jazz world,” McIntyre said.
While this is their first official collaboration, they have worked together before, including performing a duet in the 1980s. That experience was “kind of breathtaking,” Murray said. “But my mother and aunt were dancers” — her mother with the Nicholas Brothers and her aunt had a dance company — “so I started by improvising for movement. Actually, that’s how I started my career as a kid.”
Soon after Murray first picked up a cello, at about 11, her aunt recruited her for a performance. Her aunt told her: “‘You see the movement. Make sounds behind it.’”
She’s still at it. For “In the Same Tongue,” Murray explores a variety of music styles. “Buddy Bolden and some earlier music like that,” she said. “There’s some straight ahead bebop in it. There’s some totally free music. There’s some avant-garde music in it, for lack of a better word. The music and dance work together in terms of storytelling.”
The work touches on the Black Power movement, too, politically and culturally. In the 1970s, both McIntyre and Murray were frequent visitors to the East, a Brooklyn arts and community organization that “was like a cognoscenti place for hipsters and the culture,” Murray said. “I saw Cecil Taylor there. It was a righteous place. The music was wonderful.”
In one section, McIntyre pays homage to that time and place: “Most people haven’t heard of the East, even musicians,” she said.
The same was true of her dancers. When she introduced that section by telling them that it was about going to the club — and that they could improvise on that theme — they got it all wrong. “I’m like, no, we’re not going to the club to boogie,” McIntyre said. “You are going to the club to hear these monumental sounds coming from these amazing musicians.”
She can still remember the feeling of hearing those musicians play: “It was like, whoa, OK, I’m going out and do something,” McIntyre said. “I have a new idea about a dance! The music fed my life force.”
Recently, McIntyre, who has since returned to Cleveland, spoke about the path to creating “In the Same Tongue,” her past as a music-obsessed dancer in New York City, her legacy as a choreographer and her secret weapon: jumping jacks. What follows are edited excerpts from our recent conversation.
How did you come to solidify your feelings about music and dance?
The musicians I gravitated to, I not only would follow their music but they also told me about things that they read. They were very influenced by Eastern philosophies. One of them told me about a book about the Sufi message of music by Hazrat Inayat Khan, who said that dance is music moving. That dance and music are on that same spectrum. I was just starting my company, and I said, Oh my goodness, that’s what I think! That’s what I feel. From there, I was working with these musicians called the Master Brotherhood.
Who were they?
They weren’t household names, but they were brilliant musicians. This was back when I first came to New York in the early ’70s, and they rehearsed every week in a day care center in Brooklyn. I would go to their rehearsals and go in a corner trying to make myself move like their music sounded. I could hear the saxophone by itself: How could my body move like that? How could I sound like the piano in my body?
How do you direct your dancers in terms of expression and physicality?
I give them choreography. I ask them to be as close to what it is I’m doing or what they think that I’m doing. And they have to make it so it’s not like a step. Don’t give me steps, OK? This is a flow from here and a pull. I always ask them to go beyond just your hand. And I also ask them to sculpt the space. Don’t just have an arm go around there, float around — if it’s supposed to float, I’ll ask for that float.
So it’s not so presentational?
Your dedication is to the theme of what this piece is. We will see the brilliance of who you are as an artist, as a dancer, within this particular theme.
Why is “In the Same Tongue” so meaningful to you?
It’s an artistic history of myself as well as something that is humanistic and specifically African American. All of those things rolled into one. So the through-line of it is important to me because I just keep on going. Other people may be like, Oh, well, I don’t know if I can still do my music or my da da da. Yes! Just keep on going — because Dianne McIntyre, she just keeps on going. [Laughs]
It’s also important to me because there’s a new generation of dancers who are carrying forth with my work.
What is your movement practice today?
I meditate every day and I do a movement practice that actually started when I was doing Zena Rommett Floor-Barre [a training method focused on alignment]. Some of those things I have continued to do with my yoga mat. They help me with my hips, with my flexibility and the legs and the arms. I do Qigong weekly with a group by Zoom — very fulfilling. But also, every day, I do 40 jumping jacks. It gets all the cells in my body moving. It helps me think.
