For Urban Souls Dance Company, expressing the Black experience through dance is fundamental to their mission in cultivating a community that understands racial inequity, fosters healing, and addresses injustice honestly. Set to premiere at the Hobby Center on February 26 and 27, USDC’s upcoming performance piece titled Truth Be Told will share a variety of Black stories through modern forms of dance and artistic expression.

Bringing Stories to the Stage

As USDC’s founder and artistic director, Harrison Guy, 49, explains, Truth Be Told is a multifaceted performance piece that encourages audiences to engage with the stories of abolitionist Sojourner Truth, Houston’s Project Row Houses co-founder James Bettison, and recently retired ABC13 news anchor Melanie Lawson. Other pieces will showcase the stories of Black butlers during the civil-rights movement, the music that helped Generation X survive an epidemic, and a piece titled “For Choir Boys,” which is dedicated to gay Black men whose lives were celebrated in the church but whose deaths were clouded by the stigma of AIDS.

“I want people to trust us to tell these stories truthfully,” Guy says. “There is a difference between making people feel like they’re watching something beyond them and watching something that feels eye-to-eye. ‘Eye-to-eye’ is how we want our art to resonate with people.”

With its five dance pieces, the entire show will last about an hour and a half. Truth Be Told is the newest iteration of the contemporary dance concerts that USDC creates each year in honor of Black History Month—a recognition month that has its 100th anniversary this year.

You can find out more about Urban Souls Dance Company at urbansouls.org.

WHAT: Truth Be Told
WHEN: February 26 and 27
WHERE: The Hobby Center, 800 Bagby St.
INFO: thehobbycenter.org

Dancing Toward Broadway

Dunia Baruani

For some dancers, Urban Souls Dance Company represents an entirely new place to call home. Dunia Baruani, 23 and a native of Burundi, has been a member of USDC for over a decade now, and describes the experience thus far as “magical.”

“It means so much to me that I can bring the audience with me on this journey of understanding the emotions in these stories,” Baruani says. “I have grown so much with Urban Soles because we all have different perspectives and still lift each other up, so I’ve gotten to a place where I can say I’m proud of myself.”

Having immigrated from Burundi to Houston in 2010, Baruani came into the USDC audition with a background in West African dance and belly dancing. He recalls that after joining the troupe, one of the first stories he got to portray was that of USDC’s artistic director. “It was a piece called Montrose, and I got to play a younger gay Black man by the name of Harrison Guy. Ever since then, I’ve kept up with him and all of his classes. Anything that Harrison thought I could do, I did.”

Regarding the creation of Truth Be Told, Baruani describes the process of storytelling as complex. “It’s not always a completely sad or happy story,” he says. “I want the audience to feel like they’re dancing with us so they can really understand the feelings that we are working so hard to portray.”

Since joining the team, Burauni has cultivated strong foundations in ballet, jazz, contemporary, and modern styles of dance, which he hopes will help him achieve his dream of dancing for The Lion King on Broadway. “I would love to tour in general, and The Lion King is such a dream of mine. I want to be ready for whenever that opportunity may come.”

Keep up with Dunia Barauni on Instagram @itsdunia3

Speaking Out Through Film and Dance

Aniya Wingate

Aniya Wingate, 23, is no stranger to mixing her artistry with advocacy. As the titular figure in the upcoming documentary Raising Aniya, Wingate has found herself in spaces where she gets to mix her love of dance with her passion for justice—something she says was first cultivated through Urban Souls Dance Company.

“I had started dancing when I was around 3 years old, and I really started training with codified forms of dance when I was about 7,” Wingate recalls. “Before joining the youth program at USDC, though, no one had ever sat me down and questioned me and challenged me about issues pertaining to the Black community. At the age of 11, we were having conversations about police brutality, civil rights, racial discrimination, and discrimination toward queer people.”

Wingate attributes these early lessons as formative for how she approaches her choreography and storytelling. After being displaced by Hurricane Harvey in 2017, Wingate shares that personal interest in environmental injustices toward the Black community, mixed with her experiences with Urban Soles, led to a director placing her journey as the center of a documentary.

“Director John Fiege was originally just shooting footage of dancers performing in front of chemical plants,” Wingate says. “Years later, he learned through Harrison Guy and Walter Hull that I had been displaced, and John reached back out with the idea. The entire filming process started when I was around 15 years old and ended when I was around 19, so he could really see the impact of environmental inequity and how I was navigating it.”

As Raising Aniya circulates at film festivals, Wingate has continued to push her art in a political direction with the creation of her show Caution: Roses Die Here and a short film titled Shoulders Deep, which has been used by the NAACP and other organizations to teach children about climate change and environmental injustice. Wingate hopes to further her education so she can teach dance at the college level, and she notes that Truth Be Told represents a form of storytelling she intends to keep with her moving forward.

The titular section of the performance for Truth Be Told is about Sojourner Truth’s speech Ain’t I a Woman? “When I think of the audacity of people to question her rights as a Black woman, those are the feelings that I think will resonate with people,” Wingate explains. “Not everyone can do a triple pirouette, but that feeling of anger, that feeling of constantly being in a fight with people that are meant to be taking care of us—as a Black woman, sharing that story is so powerful. The residue of that conversation is still happening today.”

Keep up with Wingate on Instagram @anayathegreat