Debbie Allen’s career in dance, acting, singing, producing, writing, and directing has dazzled and touched millions. Her career soared in 1980 with the hit TV series Fame. She holds the distinction of having choreographed the Academy Awards for six consecutive years, and she has won many awards herself, including the Essence Award in 1992 and 1995. She is the founder and director of the Debbie Allen Dance Academy, which offers professional training for young dancers and professionals. It also commissions opportunities for new choreographers and provides an introduction to dance for all ages.
“As a young child,” she told me, “very young, four or five years old, I can remember putting on my pink shiny bathing suit and tying a towel around my neck, climbing a tree, and dancing on the roof of my house performing to the birds and the clouds. I was always dancing as a little girl; I was inspired by the beautiful pictures of ballerinas. Because I was black and lived in Texas, I hadn’t seen a dance performance but I watched musical films, Shirley Temple, Ruby Keeler, the Nicholas Brothers.
“When the Ringling Brothers Circus came to town, when I saw the spectacle, the people in beautiful costumes and the dancers flying in the air, toes pointed, I just thought it was amazing! I was so inspired by movies. Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev were the most incredible things I had ever seen.
“As a young girl, I couldn’t go to serious dance schools because everything was segregated. I joined Debato Studios. I got a full grant scholarship and attended ten dance classes a week. I still remember my first dance recital—I wore a white shiny satin skirt, a white jacket and orange blouse, white tap shoes and was playing a triangle. The feeling of performing was like being on top of the world! I was always wearing leotards as a child. In fact, at my fiftieth birthday party one of my aunts brought a picture of me at age five in my leotard. I knew I was a dancer very early on.
“I first saw the Alvin Ailey Company at age seventeen. I knew then that I was going to throw away my point shoes, put on high heels and long white skirts, and dance to that kind of music. I identified myself with them so much onstage. It was glorious.
“One summer I went to the Spoleto Dance Festival in the Carolinas. That was when it all fell into place for me. I had ideas as a child but I was challenged by segregation, and so this opportunity to be taught by Dudley Williams in those classes was amazing. Alvin Ailey was there, the resident dance company taught Revelations Dance Classes, and I just shone. They wanted me in the company but Alvin thought I was too young. I never joined them but I knew I had to do that kind of dancing and teach.
“The Academy is born out of my desire to give back. It offers all styles of dance from flamenco, African, modern, and character to tap and hip‐hop. We have incredible teachers from all over the world. Every child has the right to learn to dance. It is an incredible language. These are not the kids that are going to get into trouble, believe me.”
Connecting with people who share the same passions affirms that you’re not alone; that there are others like you and that, while many might not understand your passion, some do. It doesn’t matter whether you like the people as individuals, or even the work they do. It’s perfectly possible that you don’t. What matters first is having validation for the passion you have in common. Finding your tribe brings the luxury of talking shop, of bouncing ideas around, of sharing and comparing techniques, and of indulging your enthusiasms or hostilities for the same things. Making this connection was a significant spur to many of the people we’ve met so far in this book—from Matt Groening to Ewa Laurance to Meg Ryan to Black Ice—and to many of those ahead.
Being among other artists at Cranbrook gave Don Lipski a deeper sense that what he was doing mattered and was actually worth doing. He said, “In graduate school I started taking seriously for the first time the little doodles I had made. If I saw a rubber band in the street, I’d pick it up and then start looking for something to wrap it around or combine it with. That’s the sort of activity I’d always done, but when I was in graduate school, I realized that that indeed was sculpture. Although modest, it really was art making and not just passing time.”
Some people are most in their Element when they are working alone. This is often true of mathematicians, poets, painters, and some athletes. Even with these people, though, there’s a tacit awareness of a field—the other writers, other painters, other mathematicians, other players, who enrich the domain and challenge their sense of possibility.
The great philosopher of science Michael Polanyi argues that the free and open exchange of ideas is the vital pulse of scientific inquiry. Scientists like to work on their own ideas and questions, but science is also a collaborative venture. “Scientists, freely making their own choice of problems and pursuing them in the light of their own personal judgment,” he said, “are in fact cooperating as members of a closely knit organization.”
Polanyi argues passionately against state control of science because it can destroy the free interactions on which genuine science depends. “Any attempt to organize the group… under a single authority would eliminate their independent initiatives and thus reduce their joint effectiveness to that of the single person directing them from the centre. It would, in effect, paralyze their cooperation.” It was partly this pressure on science that made Helen Pilcher jump ship from stem cells to the comedy stage.
Interaction with the field, in person or through their work, is as vital to our development as time alone with our thoughts. As the physicist John Wheeler said, “If you don’t kick things around with people, you are out of it. Nobody, I always say, can be anybody without somebody being around.” Even so, the rhythms of community life vary in the Element just as they do in daily life. Sometimes you want company; sometimes you don’t. The physicist Freeman Dyson says that when he’s writing, he closes the door, but when he’s actually doing science, he leaves it open. “Up to a point you welcome being interrupted because it is only by interacting with other people that you get anything interesting done.”
How Do They Do That?
Finding your tribe offers more than validation and interaction, important as both of those are. It provides inspiration and provocation to raise the bar on your own achievements. In every domain, members of a passionate community tend to drive each other to explore the real extent of their talents. Sometimes, the boost comes not from close collaboration but from the influence of others in the field, whether contemporaries or predecessors, whether directly associated with one’s particular domain or associated only marginally. As Isaac Newton famously said, “If I saw further it was because I stood on the shoulders of giants.” This is not just a phenomenon of science.
Bob Dylan was born in Hibbing, Minnesota, in 1942. In his autobiography, Chronicles, he tells of his sense of alienation from the people there, from his family, and from the popular culture of the day. He knew he had to get away from there to become whoever he was going to be. His one lifeline was folk music. “Folk music,” he said, “was all I needed to exist.… I had no other cares or interests besides folk music. I scheduled my life around it. I had little in common with anyone not like‐minded.”
As soon as he could, he moved on instinct to New York City. There he found the artists, the singers, the writers, and the “scene” that began to unleash his own talents. He had begun to find his people. But among all of those who inspired and shaped his passion, there was one who led him to an artistic place that he had never imagined. When he first heard Woody Guthrie, he said, “It was like a million megaton bomb had dropped.”