The Bessies: The New York Dance and Performance Awards of 2023 pulled out all the stops Friday, Aug. 4, to honor outstanding work in dance at its annual ceremony in Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park on a pleasant summer evening where the stars on stage shone as bright as the ones in the sky. But this year, celebration mixed the bitter with the sweet as the award celebration opened with a tribute to 28-year-old O’Shay Sibley, the dancer brutally murdered at a Brooklyn filling station as he and friends defied the phallocentric masculine ideal while expressing their Black joy by voguing to the music of Beyoncé.
In a press statement, Robert Battle, artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, where Sibley had studied, noted the tragic irony of the murder filled with racial and homophobic overtones. “We live in a world where the fact that someone wants to dance for joy can inspire hate; we dance for joy to inspire the humanity in each other.”
Recalling the 14-year-old boy whose love of dance, and a referral from the sister of the late R&B singer Teddy Pendergrass, brought Sibley to her Philadelphia Dance Company (PHILADANCO) years ago.
Outspoken matriarch Joan Myers Brown denounced the influence of white supremacy that allowed one group of men marked as Other by the dominant culture to think they were entitled to police the behavior of Sibley and his friends. “He was dancing. He wasn’t hurting anybody,” Brown said of the young man whose love of dance she had encouraged. “In fact, he danced with my second company and the first company.” In Sibley’s honor, The Bessies MC’s urged the audience to stand and dance in honor of Sibley’s memory before the official proceedings began.
As the ceremony got underway, the first to be applauded was Virginia Johnson, founding member and recently retired DTH artistic director,who received the 2023 Lifetime Achievement in Dance. Dancer, singer, and actor Dionne Figgins recalled how, when she was an aspiring young Black ballerina, the reaffirming image of Johnson in DTH’s “Creole Giselle” at Washington, D.C.,’s Kennedy Center made her believe that, “because she did, I knew I could”—a “simple belief” that she said changed the trajectory of her life.
With Johnson’s award, the Bessies recognized an impressive history-making, paradigm-shifting career that began at the Washington School of Ballet, and included a brief stint at New York University as a University Scholar, only to assume its magical trajectory with a trip uptown to Harlem in 1969, where she took class with Arthur Mitchell. It was a path that would change countless lives. Universally recognized as one of the great ballerinas of her generation, Johnson has danced an impressive repertory of classical, neoclassical, and contemporary works, but is perhaps best known for performances in the ballets “Giselle,” ”A Streetcar Named Desire,” and “Fall River Legend.”
At one point, Johnson ventured into choreography, but an interest in journalism led to a degree in communications from Fordham University. A circuitous route included a stint studying film-making and television production at the School of Visual Arts, but it wasn’t long before fate led her back to dance, albeit on a different footing: Johnson became the founding editor-in-chief of the national dance magazine POINTE (2000 to 2009).
In a life marked by impressive milestones, an equally impressive list of awards marks her impressive achievements, but one of Johnson’s most outstanding is probably the honor bestowed on her by Arthur Mitchell, DTH’s founding artistic director, when he asked her to take the helm of the company he created with teacher/mentor Karel Shook.
Then, in July 2023, after decades of steering DTH through troubled waters and protecting Mitchell’s legacy while securing her own, Johnson recently officially stepped down, passing the torch to Robert Garland, former DTH dancer and resident choreographer.
Welcomed to the stage by thunderous applause, Johnson graciously accepted the Bessies Award. In her characteristically measured tones, she thanked the New York dance community and the giants who inspired her, including a list of dance greats such as Mitchell, Mary Hinkson, Carmen de Lavallade, Maria Tallchief, and Janet Collins, as well as “the amazing members of Dance Theatre of Harlem; artists, staff, and board, past and present; and friends and colleagues.”
“What a gift it is to dance,” Johnson declared. “Dance, in whatever form, is a guiding light. In this time of change, dance alone has the possibility to transform across every demographic. It is on all of us to put dance at the center—to lead with our hearts and never doubt its power.”
In a sequence of what can only be called dance brilliance, Johnson was followed by other impressive talents, beginning with celebrated choreographer and dancer, producer, composer, and director George Faison, whose career began as a dancer with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, followed by his Universal Dance Experience and his history-making achievement in 1975 as the first African American to win a Tony Award for Best Choreography of a Broadway musical, “The Wiz.”
Although Faison was a presenter, he began by calling the names of a treasured host of forerunners, including Donald McKayle, Eleo Pomare, Thelma Hill, Joan Myers Brown, and more before announcing Symara Johnson as the winner of award for Outstanding Breakthrough Choreographer.
And so it went at the Bessies, as presenters Tyler Ashley, Clifton Brown, Erin Fogerty, Dyane Harvey Salaam, Karisma Jay, Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte, Abdel Salaam, and Paz Tanjuaquio proceeded to honor an impressive list of dance notables, beginning with Michele Byrd-McPhee, founder and executive director of Ladies of Hip-Hop, who, in the year of the 50th anniversary of the artform, received the award for Outstanding Service to the Field of Dance. A complete list of winners is available on the Bessies website at https://bessies.org.