Asbury Park Dance Company Provides Powerful Performance on Black History

            In commemoration of Black History Month, the Red Bank Regional High School (RBR) invited the prolific Asbury Park Technical Academy of Dance (APTAD) to perform for its students. Through a combination of story-telling, narration and dance choreographed to historic events and spiritual songs, the dance academy illustrated the history of African Americans. The dance academy’s visit was facilitated by one of its dancers and RBR junior Morgan Brunson who warmly introduced the APTAD and its founder Michelle Burrell.

            Early in the program, dynamic story teller Lorraine Stone read the African American folktale, “The People Could Fly.”

            She told the audience, “Long before there were cell phones, computers, TVs and radios, there was the African storyteller, the Griot, who passed down the stories from generation to generation.”

            The dancers depicted her words of a certain sect of a proud people who had the ability to fly over their African continent. Then, their wings were clipped in the crowded slave ships that brought them to toil and chains in America.  In their repression, some were reminded of the magical words that enabled them to soar above their bondage; those left behind to pick cotton under the slave master’s whip could only use their imagination to plot their escape.

            Michelle Burrell narrated a slave’s heartbreaking story when his whole family was sold off, one by one, on the dreaded auction block, which was recorded by the Federal Writer’s Project of 1935.  The performers illustrated this horrific injustice dancing to the Negro Spiritual “No More Auction Block for Me.”

            The program traveled through time as Michelle Burrell informed the RBR students that African Americans prevailed through the darkness and contributed greatly to American History as “inventors, writers, engineers, scientist, and ballerinas” citing the famous African American ballerinas Raven Wilkinson and Misty Copeland. Two beautiful numbers followed with the dancers dressed in brilliant African costumes dancing to “One by One” (made famous in the Lion King) as well as a classical solo ballerina performance by Jordyn Postell of Neptune Township.

            The program concluded with a powerful performances entitled “17 and Unarmed,” recalling Trayvon Martin.

            Ms. Burrell left the audience with the thought, “It is important to know that what we do today becomes tomorrow’s Black History.”

            The program was well received by the student audience.

            RBR senior from Red Bank, Scott Reeves, remarked,  “(The performance) was very visually appealing to me and I learned some stories I didn’t know—like “The People Could Fly.”  That is a story I will pass down to my children someday.”

            The APTAD’s mission is “to help children from the Asbury Park community and surrounding areas have the opportunity to perform and reach their fullest potential in the dance arena.” For more information on the APTAD visit their website at www.apdance.org.