Ja’Malik Is Entering His Fourth Year Leading Madison Ballet: Discover Ballet!
Ja’Malik became artistic director of Madison Ballet in July 2022 and was named interim CEO in January 2023.
By Jonathan Gramling
Ja’Malik, who was hired as Madison Ballet’s artistic director in July 2022 and six months later was named its interim CEO, found ballet to be an oasis of clarity when he was young in the midst of the very chaotic and noisy world that surrounded him.
“I was drawn to it because of the discipline of it, the challenges that it presented,” Ja’Malik said. “I quite enjoyed how hard it was to achieve what they wanted. And I grew up in a chaotic childhood with a lot of siblings and parents and a loud environment. I liked the fact that it was only one person talking in the classroom, which was the teacher. The students were taught that you had to listen and pay attention and replicate what you saw. I loved that. It was a complete contrast to my life.”
It also turned out that he had a natural acumen for ballet.
“I was lucky that I was born with a natural facility and a natural mind to pick up music,” Ja’Malik said. “I had a body with a great deal of flexibility and nice feet and what they call the ballet lines. And I could easily replicate movement. I was really lucky in that sense. I kind of was naturally built for it and had to learn how to truly perfect the natural abilities into an actual technique and work body.”
Ja’Malik feels that ballet can give today’s youth that which they may be missing in a social media, game-crazed world.
“I think it creates that discipline in you that carries out in whether you are going to be doctor, a lawyer, financial analyst or any of those professions that discipline and the presence that you have is very different when you learn to dance and hold yourself upright so that when you walk into a room, people go, ‘Who is that,’” Ja’Malik said. “‘I want to know who this is?’ I don’t dance anymore and I still walk into rooms and people go, ‘You must be a dancer.’ That carries everywhere even when I took a break from the performing arts. When I worked in the fashion industry, people would always ask, ‘Where did you come from? You hold yourself so differently. There’s an air around you.’ I think it is that. And especially today with kids so attached to their devices — iPads, the phones and things like that — I don’t see them playing outside anymore. They are lacking the fundamentals of motor skills that you gain from going outside and playing jump rope, hopscotch and things like that that we p[layed as kids that built the coordination. Kids are losing that. They are lacking that. So I think putting your child into creative movement or early ballet classes gives them some kind of sense in how to build that coordination so they aren’t awkward and uncoordinated.”
It’s also good for adults as they age and realize they aren’t as agile as they used to be.
“We have adult ballet classes at our school in Madison Ballet and they are highly attended,” Ja’Malik said. “It’s a lot of older people and it is really great because it keeps your body mobile. It keeps your body limber. It keeps you body elastic to not have as many injuries or have osteoporosis, certain things that naturally come as you start to age like your body goes from being upright to being hunched over or steps are getting a little slower and it is harder to get up stairs and things like that. It keeps your body and your mind active. I think it is really great, whether you’re a kid all the way through the late stages of adulthood and you’re not as active anymore. I think it’s a great way to keep your body and your mind active.”
Ballet, French for dance, while simply graceful in its movement, is a beautifully complex performing arts form that can be appreciated on many different levels.
“It is telling stories or feelings and emotions through movement,” Ja’Malik said. “And I know a lot of people look at ballet like, ‘I don’t understand it, it’s not for me.’ But I equate it to if you love sports, you don’t particularly play the sport. I love watching basketball. I don’t know anything about it because I never played it and never studies it, never trained in it, but I love to watch it. I equate it the same way. If you are just coming to enjoy and see the astonishing athleticism of these human beings doing things with their bodies that most humans can’t do and telling stories and invoking music and time and emotions through movement. It’s relatable on every level. We start moving when we come out of the womb. If you think about it that way, everyone has been moving since they were born in some way, shape or form. I look at it that way and try to explain to people who don’t understand ballet that it’s an art form, a performing art form. And at least the way that I present ballet, it isn’t rooted in the Eurocentric aesthetic of it or what it was originally, which was court dances of Louis XIV.”
When watching the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament, it seemed that the players were making almost balletic moves as they charged through the opposing team to deliver the ball to the hoop.
“I think a lot of the really great athletes in our history, the ones who are really, really like the greatest, I think they all have had some kind of training in some kind of movement, either modern dance or ballet or creative movement or jazz,” Ja’Malik said. “I think they trained in some kind of movement-based technique because it enhances your coordination and your sensitivity to the space around you, so you are more aware of like when you are watching a guy coming down the lane to shoot his basket, you have to be aware of your opponents. You have five of them on different sides of you and you also need to know where your teammates are if you need to throw the ball to someone else. It helps build all of that awareness into the body. So I think if you look at any tennis player, basketball player, soccer player and even football player, all of the really great ones have taken some form of movement class for technique.”
Ballet operates on different levels, from realism to the abstract in ways that reach your mind and your emotions.
“We definitely have story ballets,” Ja’Malik said. “We have certain ballets that are adapted from real life stories and some are fictional stories like Swan Lake. There are some universal stories and some people choreograph ballets that don’t have a story, but as always, when you have more than one person on stage or even with one person, there is a story there. There is something going on. I don’t choreograph anything that’s just dance. It may be an abstract-non-abstract narrative, non-narrative ballet. It’s the viewer’s choice on how they want to look at it. You can look at just the steps and listen to the beautiful music or you can actually find the meaning in everything such as the touch, the look, the steps, the patterns and formations. When you get more than one person on stage, there is definitely a conversation there. It could be about a love. It could be about hate. It could be about anything that you can imagine. Sometimes it just turns out. People get frustrated because it isn’t a Swan Lake or a clear story or narrative. Some people get frustrated. ‘I didn’t know what was going on.’ I tell them, ‘What did you think was going on? What did you feel? What were you able to take away from the performance?’”
With ballet, there is no absolute or correct message. Like many other things, the meaning of ballet is in the eye of the beholder.
“I hope people who have come to see Madison Ballet, as they are walking away, they have some kind of idea about life or some kind of idea about humanity or some kind of idea about community,” Ja’Malik said. “I go to museums all the time. And I’m not in the artist’s mind. I have no idea what Rembrandt was thinking or Ernie Barnes was thinking when he created the images and the colors and the way that the people are moving in the picture. But I can look at it and appreciate it and wonder and have ideas about it. If you take an Ernie Barnes painting, who is the Lady in Yellow and why. I want to know this lady. It may just be an image for him, but for the people who are seeing the art, it’s up for interpretation. Like I said in ballet, there is no need to think about what it is.”