Michele Byrd-McPhee is putting ladies first in hip-hop dance
Michele Byrd-McPhee has had a lifelong love of movement and music. Her family home in Philadelphia was stocked with records -- including exclusive white label promos from a DJ uncle. Michele would spin, jerk and sway to the sounds of Jimi Hendrix, world beat, R&B and soul – pausing only to obsessively study the ballet dancers broadcast on PBS, it was clear that Michele should dedicate her life to dance.
Fast forward 20-something years and Michele is now a leading dancer, choreographer, and founder of a dance company. After spending three years as the production coordinator at the BAM, and then four years as a senior music coordinator at "Late Night with Seth Meyers," it was Michele’s hip-hop expertise that landed her a teaching role at the University of Madison Wisconsin.
Yet perhaps her biggest accomplishment is the Ladies of Hip Hop Festival – a weeklong annual event. LOHH offers panels, workshops, performances, and battles. Sixteen years later and events across the globe, LOHH provides poppers, waackers, dancehall queens, house, and hip-hop dancers the opportunity to compete, one-on-one, in front of a roaring crowd for prizes and bragging rights.
Red Bull: How did you get into dance and organizing community around movement?
Michele Byrd-McPhee: I always had a love of dance and even though I performed all time and was known on the local dance scene, I didn't have access. My mom couldn’t cart us around to dance classes and nor could she afford it. Fast forward to 24: I knew what I wanted to do, but I couldn’t audition [because I didn’t have the requisite classes]. I ended up going to Temple for undergrad, got a public health degree and started working as a social worker. I've always had a desire to fight for women, and so I did welfare to work and then transitional housing. Meanwhile I was still dancing in clubs.
Did being a social worker encourage you to fight for women in dance spaces?
One of the things that I explain to anyone who wants to know why I created a space for women, is it wasn’t because men weren’t supportive of me or I didn't find space for me, but there were just so few women. I was trying to perform in a company and was told “Oh I don’t need women in my shows.” So I was like OK, I'm going to start my own company. It's not that they gave me space, it’s that I took it.
How did you break through the gatekeeping in hip-hop dance?
Twenty-two years ago, I started the all-female hip-hop company [Montazh Performing Arts Company, now the Ladies of Hip Hop Festival company] and that's where it all began. Ladies of Hip Hop happened out of necessity because most of the women who were coming into the company were not actual street dancers. They were learning styles of hip-hop, or what they thought was hip-hop, in studio spaces.
I created the first Ladies of Hip Hop Festival in 2004 and it grew into something that I never expected. By the time we got to the 5th year, we had all these other women who wanted to be involved – dancers, designers, DJs.
What makes Ladies of Hip Hop unique among other female-oriented dance or hip-hop focused spaces?
Some of the best [dancers] in the world right now, the first time they taught was at Ladies of Hip Hop; the first time they battled was at Ladies of Hip Hop.
What else are you doing in the world of dance?
Hip-hop is my life -- my entire life is supported and funded by hip-hop at this point. And my husband's a production manager for The Roots. We moved to New York and…. I couldn't afford to produce the festival at the level that I was and fund it as well without a job. I was a production coordinator for BAM and then I went to work on "Late Night with Seth Meyers," and loved it. Being a self-starter, you try to teach yourself. So I learned how to be a production manager.
Why was a festival the best way to recontextualize hip-hop culture?
I couldn't maintain a regular monthly event because, at the time, there weren’t that many women participating and the world wasn't as connected. When I was first doing it, there were only one or two other events.
When I would go to other events, people would say to me Wow this is so good for a hip-hop event; the expectations were already low because the event was a hip-hop event. That always kind of stuck with me. So I had a desire to really create a space to show people that we can produce amazing events with an all-female team.
So we branched out; we do other programming. We have a program called the Black Dancing Bodies, which focuses on Black women in hip-hop. We also have a Girls of Hip Hop program which is for any woman or girl who identifies as a woman of color to come and take free classes between once a month.
I'm trying to do work around bringing back in BIPOC people, because the dance and culture started with them.
Do you believe hip-hop has been co-opted or appropriated? How do you make sure women are centered in the culture?
[Hip-hop is] a global culture. It's not about taking it back and anything like that, but you want to make sure that the people the culture came from are also part of the journey as it moves forward.
Do you have any particularly moving memories or stories of success around the festival?
For the 2020 festival, we were supposed to partner with [Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater]; for me that was like now I’ve made it. I could never dance for Ailey, but in a way I kind of made that dream come true because look at me on Ailey stage presenting a showcase. We've done our showcase there for the last five years and we sell out within an hour.
We also had a partnership with Lincoln Center Out of Doors this summer, but that didn't happen because of COVID. I really feel like we’re there – COVID has just thrown a monkey wrench in everything. And then to be invited to this Red Bull chat, I think for us in terms of hip-hop validation within the culture, this is it.
What challenges lie ahead for LOHH 2021?
We did a digital festival for 2020, which was so amazing. I've had a lot of dancers who battle on the world stage, and they're like, Yo, I've been part of a lot of digital events and yours is the best. And I’m like, yes!
I used to work for Apple for years; I geek out about all the tech stuff. And then just being in production, I learned a lot. If I can say anything to anybody, it’s take advantage of every space that you're in.
I still don't have any major partners. I'm funding this entirely out of our family income and so I'm just like, I don't know what I'm going to do. [Typically], by December, I've already booked my venue for next year, and I’m booking my judges and my teachers, and the submission process opens up for performances. Like, can I do that? Do I do that? We are going to move forward like we normally do, but we’re also going to plan some kind of digital event. We’re doing the best we can on the platform that we have, trying to stay connected with people.
Lets get back to the idea of validating hip-hop. Does the culture need validation and what should be done to prevent hip-hop from being seen through a gatekeeping, and often white, lens?
The thing that has come out of this terrible climate of racial unrest that we're in, has been that we've been able to have conversations. I feel that real change doesn't happen until conversation starts to happen.
What I'm doing is teaching from the perspective of erasure, miscoding, and minstrelsy throughout the history of Black American culture; particularly dance culture. That's happened not only for Black people but even to a huge degree for women. You know the Ziegfeld Follies and the Chorus Girls? Black women taught those women how to dance; and then they were not given credit and were not allowed to dance on the stage or in film. So I start there in 1831, talking about Black American art culture and showing them how this has happened throughout history, and then how does that apply to what we're looking at now, where we are now.
We've looked at everything from YouTube, Instagram, the origins of a lot of TikTok dances…then looking at how Black people are erased from that story as it travels to other commercialized spaces. Within that space, I’m going, I know you know this choreographer, this dancer, this Instagrammer, but here's the person who’s still alive, still teaching and jumping around the world.
Do people in that New York arts echelon think hip-hop is no longer innovative?
I don't think they've ever given it its due. The way we view hip-hop culture in the US is just as a commodity -- it’s not a dance, a culture, a visual art.
Which is funny, because America is such a cultural arbiter.
[Hip-hop] is the biggest cultural art form in the world, and they don't recognize it. I think we don't value our cultural art forms because then we have to acknowledge a lot of issues with the history of this country. Also, the value of everything is measured by how much money it can make. And so obviously, the more money you make them, the more valuable what you do is.
Are there any trends in hip-hop culture that are particularly interesting to you?
What's interesting to me now is how styles like waacking and voguing are huge around the world. Pose and all these things that are now giving space – even though it’s not hip-hop in terms of what we practice at our hip-hop events, it’s a street style. The New York Times doing a piece on waacking and that kind of pivot to actually looking for authenticity within club culture is really interesting. And I'm wondering if that is ever going to happen with hip-hop.
It is at the point where houses of vogue are performing at the Guggenheim. To see this trend of like, high art and hip-hop is really great. The move towards authenticity and inclusion of people who are actually practitioners or pioneers within the culture is actually happening.
What do you think hip-hop culture and dance can teach us about adapting, engaging and fighting during times like these?
Some of the most powerful moments during the [Black Lives Matter] protests happened when music was on and people were moving. A lot of people didn't understand why people were dancing, why they were celebrating. People who don't come from that space of listening to music and having joy through movement can understand and learn from it. You don't have to speak the same language to dance together, to enjoy music together.
Is there anyone else doing work in this space that you're particularly inspired by?
Marjory Smarth was a matriarch for our community, we lost her about five years ago now. Honestly, there was so many times I was ready to give up on Ladies of Hip Hop. And before she got really, really sick, she died of cancer – I remember sitting with her one time…and she was like "Michele you have to continue your work, you have to."
Voodoo Ray was the person that was part of everything; he would go to all the different parties and he knew everybody. He was rocksteady, he was dance fusion. He was just like a huge figure in our community and he would say “I’m so proud, I’m so proud of you."