'The Center Will Not Hold' performance celebrates Afro-diasporic dance tradition

Flashing lights and rhythmic dance from the Afro-diasporic vernacular entertained audiences Wednesday night when Chapel Hill’s Michelle Dorrance brought her performance "The Center Will Not Hold" home to Memorial Hall. 

The hour-long show captivated the audience from the start. A collective of performers brought styles of house, breaking, hip-hop, tap dance, Chicago footwork, Detroit Jit, Litefeet, Memphis Jookin and body percussion to life. 

"The Center Will Not Hold" was co-created and directed by Dorrance and Ephrat Asherie, a New York City-based director, choreographer, performer and breakdancing “b-girl.”

Dorrance, who was raised in Chapel Hill, focuses her work on tap dance choreography and performance, integrating the style into dialogue with international cultures. Dorrance and Asherie also credit tap and breaking trailblazers with mentoring and influencing their work.

“The access to the elders and to the communities that birthed these dances really changed me,” Asherie said. “It became about, 'Wow, these dances are about really resistance, resilience, expressing who you are.'”

The creative process for developing "The Center Will Not Hold" originated in December 2022 with a short duet titled “a little room” and the work grew from there. According to Dorrance, creating "a little room" involved vulnerability, leaning into physical pain and being honest about experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic and increasing cultural division. 

“I think [the duet] was an opportunity for us to just be very honest, as each other, and right next to each other as friends, and often barely realizing the other is there, literally. We're shoulder to shoulder for most of it,” Dorrance said.

Wednesday’s performance showcased that vulnerability when Dorrance, Asherie and their collective of dancers performed styles of street, club and vernacular dances. Shaped by changing background colors, flashing lights and haze, dancers performed in unison and solo, many times in an overlapping, contemporary fashion. In addition to the dancing, the performance also included original music composed by Donovan Dorrance, Michelle Dorrance’s brother, and live percussion by drummer John Angeles. 

“There's so many different styles of dance and choreography and being a dancer myself and doing more student-led dance, it's really cool to see the professional side of it because it just brings a new light to dance,” Morgan Whiteside, a senior and Blank Canvas president who attended Wednesday's performance, said.

Throughout the creation and performance of "The Center Will Not Hold," Dorrance and Asherie engaged in conversations about the world, feelings and dramaturgy, which is the study of dramatic composition and the representation of the main elements of drama on the stage.

Through their work, both artists hope to keep changing the hierarchy of Eurocentric dances being presented more regularly than Afro-diasporic forms. The performance is a reflection of a diverse range of incredible Afro-diasporic dances full of depth and complexity for the audience to engage in, Asherie said. 

Whiteside said dance is a creative platform with many ways to perform, so it is important to bring that range to UNC and the larger community of Chapel Hill.

“It’s about audiences being drawn in to ask more questions and hopefully by having this shared experience, like Michelle said, we're moved at a molecular level by music and movement and live performance and being part of something that will never happen again,” Asherie said.

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