Distinguished Alumni Joanna Dee Das and Lauren Morrow came by COCA to share their COCA experiences and newly published books with the COCA community.
Lauren reminisced, “As a kid, I was painfully shy, and I remember coming [to COCA] and being new, and everyone was so talented and confident. I was a little unsure about how I was going to find my way. Throughout my time here, my confidence grew so much, and I found that I was able to channel something while I was dancing that I couldn’t in my regular life, which I think is an emergent theme in my life and in my writing.”
Joanna shared, “I came to COCA when I was nine years old. It was my second home. I was kind of a reserved kid and I would have happily read books in my room all the time… COCA forced me to interact with people, be a part of a group, to have to work together to make something happen, and that was so important. It brought out a different side of me.”
Both shared their experiences of how they journeyed from the dance world to being published authors. Said Lauren, “When I graduated from college, I moved to New York and had to get many jobs, and my writing fell to the wayside – I just didn’t have time while trying to pay my bills. But every couple of years, I’d write a short story and submit it, and it would get accepted into a publication. It was when I was working at Ailey and admiring the way the dancers really dedicated themselves to art in the way that I had wanted to with my writing, I decided to apply for MFA programs and focus on writing. Afterwards, I transitioned to publishing [for my day job.] For a long time, I avoided writing about dance because it felt obvious, like the thing people would expect me to write about. But then I wrote a short story about a woman auditioning to dance on a cruise ship and it was by far, of all the stories I’d written, the most positive feedback and got accepted into a wonderful publication. I think there was something of me in [that story] that didn’t exist in my other writing. So, in approaching my first novel, the thing I know the best in this world is dance, and there are so few books about modern dance, and even fewer books about Black modern dancers.”
Joanna said, “My first book was about Katherine Dunham, who was greatly influential on Lee Nolting, our first dance teacher. Katherine Dunham’s ethos of arts as a way of building community and arts as a way of spiritual practice really informed the way I thought about dance. In [my new] book about Branson and the Branson entertainment industry, the seeds were actually first planted here at COCA, because one of my early ballet teachers here had danced in Branson. I thought about this missing piece of our story about theatre and live entertainment in America. Even though [the book] isn’t focused on dance, per se, it is still focused on performance and how performance can shape our social and political world, and that’s really what I’m interested in. So, I found a way to bring together dance and writing.”
Grab your very own copies of their books! Faith, Family, and Flag: Branson Entertainment and the Idea of America by Joanna Dee Das and Little Movements by Lauren Morrow. Thank you to all who were able to attend. We loved getting to see so many alumni back at COCA. More Alumni events are in the works!
