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By Nicholas Felder
Spring 2025

Helanius J. Wilkins, a native of Lafayette, Louisiana, is the Associate Chair and Director of Dance at the 51�Թ���. He is an award-winning choreographer, performance artist, innovator, and educator. Wilkins's creative research and projects are rooted in the interconnections of American contemporary performance, cultural history, and identities of Black men. In his intermedia collaborations, he works with artists from a wide range of disciplines, including film, video, and design. 

Wilkins’s most recent work is a multi-year, multi-outcome work that is an ongoing and always shifting dance-quilt that celebrates and confronts heritage, resilience, justice and hope. A 7 – 10-year practice/process, this work requires traveling to all 50 U.S. states/D.C./5 inhabited territories to create a component of the work in and WITH community. The work will yield new choreographies, a documentary film, a digital archive, and a DEI&SJ (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Social Justice) toykit. Wilkins shares that a toolkit implies a need to fix while a toykit represents an invitation to co-create and participate in a process of uniting and healing.

How do you see your identities, values, and lived experiences showing up in a space?

I see all of these things showing up all the time, particularly in homogeneous spaces, and they show up as different, are uncommon, and not in the majority. On another hand, it's something about how I show up and how I function in spaces. And while I'm conscious of the body that I'm in, and the impact that the environments have on me, and how I ground myself to orient in those spaces, I also aspire to lean into spaces from a place of humanity. In this sense, I'm recognizing that there are common denominators among all the differences, and that the more I experience difference, the more I recognize similarity. And that's really interesting to think about, even in relationship to the work that I'm currently doing, because I'm traveling across the country in a way that's illuminating differences, but the undercurrent or the thread that's allowing me to stitch stories and lives together is the fact that we're all desiring some similar things.

How do you develop trust?

I think you develop trust at the speed of patience, which comes back to centering humanity and therefore relationship building. We live in a world where it can often feel like we're going to grocery shop for everything, and we want to pick the item—buy trust. We pick it off the shelf, and suddenly, we have trust, and we buy generosity, or we buy friendship, as just items. There's an immediacy in that, and it's quick, and it's fast, and it's picking the thing when the reality is that all of those things take a lot of time. So it requires us to be architects of a world where we are willing to slow down and tend to really building something for it to manifest. Otherwise (even though I believe everything is a performance), I think it becomes a performance, and of a different kind. And maybe it's not real. It's something assumed really quickly, without really knowing that it exists.

Listening is also at the heart of my work, and there is a deep commitment to being willing to listen as a practice. Listening toward action, listening toward building relation, listening toward creating a space where trust can manifest. 

How do you work with groups from different (or similar) backgrounds as yourself?

There’s also something I do in my work, and in just my general being, that’s centered around being in the business or the practice of creating invitations. And so, my interest is always about, how can possibility, rather than obstacle, be created? In that sense, what are ways I can create invitations for us to meet at varying degrees of risk? Because to gain trust also means to risk. To work with difference or in spaces of difference, that means you’re willing to risk—acknowledging how you, how your identities, values and lived experiences show up in spaces.

This is a gross generalization, but in the greater fabric of our society, we tend to orient around the word “safety.” I actually don’t believe there’s such a thing as safety. I believe that risk is always the thing that we’re up against, so when we’re walking into any space that is deemed a “safe space,” we actually don’t know what’s going to happen in those spaces or how we’re going to be impacted. And we don’t know how we’re going to be implicated. So all of those spaces that we’re walking into are risky spaces, so I like being honest about that from the beginning and orienting myself around that. The hope is that I'm able to weather that riskiness and arrive at a place where that riskiness transforms into something that creates a discovery space. And perhaps by that discovering and becoming more grounded, it creates a sense of belonging. But even in belonging, I don’t know if that’s about safety. But I do think the connectedness can equal trust-building.

What does equitable teamwork / equity-oriented partnerships look like? (in positions of leadership or otherwise) How have you managed / (or how have you experienced) collaborative work that appropriately and equitably recognizes the contributions of partners (is recognized as mutually beneficial)?

I think equitable teamwork and equity-oriented partnerships can render as experiences where maybe there’s some sensing or clear understanding of common goals—where all those who are involved feel a sense of agency to contribute in meaningful ways. We’re tethered together. And there’s space for all that we bring to the table to achieve that thing we’re tethered to.

I think about how I often lead from behind because I want the space for us to experiment and to test and to strategize together. And to learn how we can bring varying things together to create the whole, and I think that’s collaborative work.

I typically start practices in the community, classroom, and meetings in a circle. The simple action of a circle creates a space where everybody can be seen, and it interrupts the “me vs. them.” In that way, it already invites bodies in a different way, and it changes the landscape. Equitable is about something you can do structurally, asking: Do people feel included? Do people feel like they can contribute? Do people feel seen? Do people feel heard? I’m always striving for individuals to feel connected to the environment they’re in and that they belong here.

Was there ever a time when you were facilitating and someone from the group came up to you after the session and said, “That didn’t work for me” or “I didn’t feel heard”? Was there a time when you had to pivot?

I think an aspect of equitable work translates to being anchored in uncertainty, being fluid, and being able to read spaces to the best of your abilities. I have been on both sides of this question—participant and facilitator. I come back to community agreements, asking: what are the common agreements that allow you all to interact with each other thoughtfully, meaningfully, to achieve whatever is on hand, knowing that there might be moments of friction? And then, how do we navigate the friction?

In my current work, the Conversation Series: Stitching the Geopolitical Quilt to Re-body Belonging, I do belonging conversations, community gatherings. There was one particular time where the conversation was heightened because we were talking about some deep issues of racism within a community. There was a participant who I could feel was just looking for a way out of the conversation, and they did not want to participate. My commitment to the process was to hold space for everyone and to not silence any voices that are accustomed to being silenced. I would step in at the point at which the environment is potentially on the verge of danger, and I was trusting that I was going to know what that would feel like. There was a moment, in the heat of the conversation, where people were truly respecting one another, but hard things were coming out, when a group of 3 or 4 individuals arrived late into the conversation. (And it was quite alright. That was one of my rules. I say that the invitation is for you. If you only come for 30 minutes, that’s fine, and I will weave you into the fabric of the conversation and meet you where you are.) The group of people came in, and the person I sense was looking for a way out saw that moment as an opportunity to leave. The conversation continued, and it arrived somewhere super magical and powerful for the community because some community apologies happened. This led to an environment in which you could hear a pin drop in the room—tears fell—because we saw it as the beginning of a healing within the community.

Following the conversation, I sent a thank you note to everybody for their generosity, for their bravery, for their courage in participating in the conversation, and I extend the invitation for them to continue on the journey with some upcoming activities. For the one person who left, I sent an independent thank you, and in that letter, I reached out and asked “Are you okay? I noticed you left early, which is totally fine, and I want to make sure you are okay.” The person wrote me back and said, “I am fine, and I’m very interested in what you’re doing. I would love to help in any way I can. I just felt like I needed to leave because we were heading down a path, that for me, we would not be able to get past. It was like a dead-end road.” And so I responded, saying, “Thank you so much for your honesty and for sharing, and I’ll keep you abreast of upcoming activities.” In that moment when I did the tending, I recognized that something different had happened. It caused me to reflect on what it can mean to show up for your community. But to do equitable teamwork, if we cannot be in the room with each other in some of those hard moments—if we could only be in the room with each other in the light moment—do we really get to the things that need to be healed? Or can someone be an active participant in contributing to the healing of a community if they’re not able to be present for the heart?

Some systems are at work to keep us divided and to keep us feeling that we are different from one another and that we are valued differently. So to work through the thick of all of that, we need to ask: how do we create spaces where we really could just sit and have conversations with one another and really listen? Listening without an agenda. 

What are ways beyond surveys you have solicited and documented feedback? How do you get the feedback/impact analysis you need for building the funding base/participant base?

Feedback is not only a back-end activity. How people are participating in things, how people are exchanging, that is feedback, that’s being exchanged to one another. I’m looking at feedback as something that has a longer arc, and I see it as a continuation of the conversation. My direct motivation is not to collect data, to quantify. My direct motivation is to continue conversation, to learn to continue to be a witness to. I think surveys are one way to capture information, and there are other forms, such as video documentation, personal testimonials, and (in the case of what I’m doing) post-performance talks.

If I’m doing an embodied workshop that includes some kind of building together, working with materials, I might ask: how am I capturing those materials? Because those materials are stories. Those materials are things that were created amongst a group of people. Organizing statements written by advisors or advisory teams who are invited to come in and be a witness to things that I’m doing is another way I can get feedback. It’s extending the conversation and in an increased capacity because there’s the primary exchange from those who are involved, and then there’s the secondary feedback from people who are not directly involved but who are a witness to and have knowledge that can support my continued ability to see widely.