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The power of dance has multiple meanings for Kuumba’s Kya Conner

Bill DeYoung

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Kya Conner was born in Washington State and grew up in California. "My first love has always been dance, " she explains, "but I didn’t quite have the body posture for ballet – I would get told that in dance class - and my feet are flat and not arched. But dance was always my self-expression. My way out." All photos provided.

Just a week or two ago Kyaien Conner, PhD, was unanimously approved for tenure at the University of South Florida, where she has been an assistant professor in the department of Mental Health Law and Policy since 2013.

Dr. Conner (“Kya” to her friends) specializes in aging, specifically the benefits and effects of psychiatric treatment on older African Americans.

Kya Conner loves her job – and it’s obvious she’s doing amazing things – but really, all she wants to do is dance.

Kuumba onstage: Kya Conner is second from right.

She is a member of the Kuumba Dancers and Drummers, a Tampa-based company that’s been bringing the music and movement of West Africa to Florida cultural events since 1980. And she teaches West African Dance, too, at the University of Tampa.

She’ll perform with Kuumba Friday at Opera Central, for the St. Petersburg Celebration of the Arts concert “Harmony: Tolerance and Acceptance.”

Her husband, ensemble member Cheikh N’Dong, is a Senegalese master drummer.

“There’s something about the power of those drums,” Conner explains. “It’s different from when you’re dancing to recorded music. They’re creating this, and it’s almost like you can feel it inside of your soul, and your body just wants to move. It’s powerful. And it’s beautiful.”

Conner took her first West African dance lesson as a 6-year-old. “It was like something clicked inside me,” she remembers. “It was something I didn’t even have to try to be good at; it was like my body already knew what to do. And I didn’t understand how I knew it.”

Conner, who spent her youngest years in California, says she struggled with her racial identity as a child. With a black father and a white mother, she explains, “I didn’t know what box I belonged in. I didn’t know where I fit. And dance was a way for me to connect with an African ancestry that I so desperately wanted to connect to.”

Her father, Marvin O’Quinn, was the first African American man to head a large American hospital system. “And both my parents’ families were very racist. My mother’s white family, they threatened to kill my dad. My dad’s family disowned him also, because they saw him as the golden boy of their community – my dad grew up in Compton, in South Central Los Angeles. He fought his way through a really bad circumstance to get to where he is, and so I think everyone in the community thought he should marry an African American.

“Because of that, I grew up without any extended family, for the majority of my life. Myself and my brothers. So I was struggling to find my identity.”

She craved a career in dance, “by my father would not allow it,” she recalls. “Unless I made straight A’s, and go above and beyond academically – to be able to dance as a hobby, not as a career. I knew that in order for me to do what I loved, I had to excel academically.

“And I happened to be good at that, too. And I also really have a passion for helping people. I love seeing the power and the impact that dance and arts can have on individuals. As a clinical social worker, I’m able to help people in a similar kind of way.”

Conner arrived at USF fresh from a stint as a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

She recently received a $1.7 million grant from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. A second grant, from the Ed And Ethel Moore Alzheimer’s Disease Research Program, is to study the impact of West African dance on patients and their caregivers.

It affects mood, and energy, and even memory, Conner says.

“These are things I see every week in my dance classes. I see people really having a mental, physical, emotional and benefit from engaging in traditional cultural dancing and drumming. I see it, but the science hasn’t quite caught up to it yet, and that’s where I hope that I can lend my expertise.”

Friday’s 30-minute performance, which will follow a classical music program by St. Petersburg Opera Company, will include dance, drums, songs and poetry dedicated to the historical trajectory of the African diaspora.

It will end, Conner explains, with a typically joyful and exuberant dance of celebration. “A celebration of the beauty of all aspects of African, African American, Africans in the Americas culture. And also, just the value of us celebrating each other’s differences.”

At each performance, Kuumba founders Natalie and Myron Jackson explain the meanings of each dance, as well as its sociological significance to the people of West African countries.

Illumination and education are crucial to what Conner brings to her students at UT, too.

“I take students with me to Africa every year,” she says. “And one of the things that I like to have them see is this: On the continent of Africa, dancing and drumming is not just something you do for a hobby, or for sport. Or exercise. It really is a way of life. It is self-protective. It is community-engaging. It builds social capital – people sing while they’re working to make the time go by. They sing through the pain to get through difficult times.

“They dance for every event. And everyone dances, from the youngest of the young to the oldest of the old. It’s a community, and it’s a fabric of the culture. And as descendants of those people, it is in us to be doing that.

“So what Natalie and Myron have created is a family. And people who were dancing and drumming with them as children as still dancing and drumming with them now as adults.”

She sees numerous similarities in her twin occupations. “I think a lot of us feel that when we come to dance class, it’s almost like going to church or something.

“It’s an opportunity to take all of the frustrations, all of the stresses and the hurts and the pains, and just lay it all out on the dance floor. When you don’t feel like going to class, that’s the day you actually need to go to class the most.”

As for her other family – the one she began life with – Conner says her father has come around. “I think he’s finally realized that I’m good, that I made it,” she laughs. “I’ve been able to find the balance.

“And the balance is hard, but to me both of these aspects of my life are critically important. I wouldn’t be who I am without them.”

 

Tickets and more information about Harmony: Tolerance and Acceptance here.

Kuumba Dancers and Drummers website here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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