As instigator in residence, ShaDawn Battle will focus on Chicago’s ‘footwork’ dance for National Public Housing Museum

Imagine dancing so fast your feet are moving at 160 beats per minute. That’s “footwork” — a style of dance as ubiquitous in Chicago’s Black community as pizza.

And thanks to the National Public Housing Museum, Chicago footwork will get its moment to shine now that ShaDawn “Boobie” Battle has been named the museum’s newest Artist as Instigator. The annual residency program serves as an incubator for a creative or activist in the arts and culture realm to make a work that relates to housing issues, social justice and equitable development initiatives.

In the fall, the nonprofit chose Battle, a native of the Chatham neighborhood and an assistant professor of Critical Ethnic and Black Studies at Xavier University in Cincinnati, out of nearly 100 nationwide applicants for her ongoing research into Chicago footwork.

Battle is moving into postproduction as co-director and producer of “Footwork Saved My Life: The Evolution of Chicago Footwork,” a documentary series centering the art form across generations. The work looks at life on the city’s South and West sides through the lens of the expressive dance style by people who are in the culture. Battle has been intentional about gathering hundreds of interviews with people who lived in public housing projects such as the Ida B. Wells Homes and Cabrini-Green, among others. The shared narratives will inform her new work “Place, Space and Werkz” during the residency.

“This is a great opportunity for us to explore movement-based art, which we haven’t yet had an opportunity to do,” said Tiff Beatty, associate director of the National Public Housing Museum. “There’s built-in joy and excitement for being able to highlight this art form that has been at the margins and is starting to become more mainstream. When you look at ‘Footwork Saved My Life,’ you can’t deny that there’s real issues to be addressed. But there’s also this freedom of expression and creativity that’s contagious.”

The National Public Housing Museum has already connected with DJ Spinderella, of Salt-N-Pepa fame, to highlight the connections between music and public housing. Beatty is looking forward to doing more musical programming while also being able to draw connections to history, public policy and real conversations that people are having in communities.

“I’m using footwork to investigate and instigate this history,” Battle said. “I want to look at the dispossession of space and home place (via land sale contracts and the Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation). I also want to look at the relationship between environmental racism and public housing — specifically looking at the physical location of Altgeld Gardens. I spent a lot of time in the Gardens as a kid. ... How has that (racism) impacted dancers, using footwork to speak back to that kind of violence. I also want to look at the violation of home place, using Anjanette Young’s experience with no-knock warrants. It’s not just about taking my home, but it’s also violating my home and not allowing me to have the kind of bodily autonomy that a Black woman should have in 2023. It reverberates the history of slave patrols, how they would go into folks’ living quarters and violate both Black men and women. I would like to use community leaders, artists and scholars to help youth understand the history of these topics, how these topics might be related to their living conditions today.”

Battle said the second phase of “Place, Space and Werkz” would have youth performing footwork and spoken word in a showcase that allows for a more meaningful dialogue. Battle mentions a conversation she had with a DJ about ghetto house music being an antecedent to footwork.

“He would tell me how the cinder blocks, the concrete walls, changed the sounds of the claps and changed the bass, which ushered in sonically a new house sound. Ghetto house is that particular sound with overlaying chants about growing up in the projects,” Battle said.

When Battle started to learn stories like this, she coupled them with her family’s relationship to housing, as a lot of them grew up in public housing. She recalls her grandfather purchasing a dozen homes for family members who were facing eviction between 1960 and 1980. Some homes sold for cash in installment contracts. Battle said a white man was used as a middleman to get mortgages for him, given the racial discrimination that kept homeownership out of the hands of many Black families. Former Artist as Instigator resident Tonika Lewis Johnson spent 2021 focusing on homes sold on contract in the Englewood neighborhood, resulting in decadeslong inequity and disinvestment that is still seen and felt today.

“That history still reverberates,” Battle said. “I’m interested in this combining of art and culture and history and policy transformation. My work has always been uniquely situated at the intersections of all of those things. Chicago footwork isn’t something that was housed and nurtured at Juilliard. It’s a cultural formation that was birthed in the inner city of Chicago ... birthed out of a lot of sociopolitical or socioeconomic conditions: the hyper-surveillance or -criminalization of Black youth, losing access to homes and practice spaces, cultural hubs, communities, through these policies.”

Footwork dancers are people who grabbed onto something in order to make themselves visible, Battle said.

“The art form is intentionally speaking back to these different forms of state violence, structural violence,” she said. “It’s also a dance form that allows for mobility, a sort of imagined mobility that’s important for kids. You got a fine radius because of gang violence and because of other structural barriers. This is a dance that allows for the body to respond to that confinement that you feel.”

drockett@chicagotribune.com