When Ballet Tennessee shut their doors back in Spring 2020, a lot of hearts were broken — and some may still be healing. Balm is coming in the shape of Fredrick Davis, dance artist. However, his plans and goals are entirely his own.
A Ballet Tennessee and VanCura Ballet Conservatory alumnus, Davis is a former principal dancer and guest artist with Dance Theatre of Harlem, former guest principal with Ballet Tucson, guest artist with New Orleans Ballet Theatre, Connecticut Ballet, and New Jersey Ballet, guest choreographer with Neville Dance Theatre company in New York City, and currently guest choreographer and guest artist with American Midwest Ballet, as well as guest choreographer with Ekklesia Contemporary Ballet.
Chattanoogans may be more familiar with his story as told in “From the Streets to the Stage: The Story of Fredrick Davis,” a PBS movie tracing his life from homelessness, being taken in by his grandmother, and finding dance at age 11 through the Dance Alive program, then a collaboration between Ballet Tennessee and the City of Chattanooga to help youth connect with dance through summer classes, auditions and scholarships. (This year Dance Alive is being relaunched by The Pop-Up Project.)
Dance for People of All Communities
Rumors about Davis’s return have been circulating for a couple of years, some taking the form that he might be going to open BTN’s doors again. Davis has other plans — more diverse, eclectic and visionary.
“Chattanooga needs something new,” he says. “I want to start from scratch. I’m looking to establish afterschool programs as the first phase, building up to a conservatory and a student company.”
Davis may work with the City of Chattanooga first, he says, although he’s still hesitant to name potential partners. He aims to go where the need is greatest — to find poor students and students of color in their neighborhoods and offer high-quality instruction. His pedagogical vision is clear already: He intends to build up to a ballet course based on the Vaganova method.
Building the Dream
For the summer, he’s putting first things first. The transition from New York to Chattanooga requires a car, so he’s doing lots of guest work to pay for that. Other expenses will no doubt follow.
Davis is nothing if not a “hard student,” to use Ta-Nehisi Coates’s term. While visiting banks, meeting with potential sponsors and doing a ton of freelance dance to save up for that car, he is also spending the summer doing a deep dive into ballet curricula.
“Ballet is a great foundation,” he says, “and I like the idea of ballet as a foundation — having a stronger, more highly focused on technique on the Vaganova or Royal Academy or American Ballet Theatre curriculum. I do have a semi-curriculum prepared from teaching lots of master classes. I started teaching with Anna and Barry [Anna Baker VanCura and the late Barry VanCura, founders of Ballet Tennessee], and they helped me give a good idea of what I can teach and how to teach. I’m looking to study more on a curriculum across the board, from ages three or four to beginning adult, so I have better guidelines on training all ages.”
While I’ve seen Davis perform, I’ve never taken a class from him, so I can’t address what he’s like as a teacher. But I do have a clue about how he works with children: at a Dance Alive performance a great many years ago — I’m not sure when, but it had to have been before Barry VanCura’s death in 2013 — Davis performed in a dance about a wild stallion featuring the boys of Dance Alive as courageous hunters. The boy hunters don’t kill the magnificent creature, instead they befriend him. It’s a very boy dance, all sneaking and scampering and leaping. The interaction between the professional dancer and the little boys, many perhaps on stage for the first time, was lively and reciprocal. He gave them the spotlight and played off them until you could practically see them swell with pride.
Davis remembers the dance instantly. “That was Barry’s choreography,” he says.
The Company to Come
After the after-school and community programming, what’s next? Davis’s plans for the future span from regional to international, and he has clear ideas for getting from here to there.
In addition to establishing partnerships for afterschool and community programming, he’s interested in partnerships to exchange expertise and introduce Chattanooga students to a rich array of traditions.
“My main vision is starting with a multicultural school, including everyone — people of color, rich and poor — and eventually having a professional touring company, even a student touring company,” he says. “I want to impact the arts scene with new, diverse choreography. I’d like to bring choreographers like Christopher Huggins, Darrell Grand Moultrie, Desmond Richardson and others. For now, I’ll begin involving artists from Nashville and different areas of Tennessee and build from there. Nashville, for instance, has a lot of cool choreographers.”
He also speaks highly of the choreography of Brian McSween, artistic director of Chattanooga Ballet, whom he met at auditions for Ballet Memphis.
What About a Space?
Dance organizations in Chattanooga tend to be peripatetic, moving from studio to studio as finances, pandemics and other circumstances allow. Only the most well-established companies have their own spaces. Yet, as Ann Law of Barking Legs Theater noted years back, having your own space is key to financial stability as a dance organization. Without that, income tends to get ploughed immediately back into rent.
Davis doesn’t have a space yet; instead, he plans to dive into communities and bring dance to people where they are. But eventually, he says, he’d like to find an older building to repurpose, perhaps working with other arts groups to create a community arts center where people can come to take classes and experience the arts.
Here to Give Back
It takes vision to move within a few breaths from discussing homelessness to chatting about some of today’s best-known dance luminaries — let alone inhabiting a reality that contains both. But for Fredrick Davis, that’s just the world he lives in. Dance is a Jacob’s ladder with the power to connect multiple worlds. If the first phase of his career could be described as “From the Streets to the Stage,” his return home might be called “From the Stage to the Streets.” He’s here to give back.
“Dance is a way for us as a community to be connected,” he explains. “Dance means a lot to me because it saved me from a traumatic time. I was homeless for 10 years. If it wasn’t for dance … it has helped me in every way. I got my training, I graduated from high school, I went to New York City and became a professional dancer. Now I’m going to bring it all back. This is where I was always meant to be: giving back to the community.”
“In dance, we’re always giving back to someone else,” he continues. “It might be a step that I was taught that I teach someone else. We’re always giving back.”
He acknowledges that the task he’s set himself will be difficult. But now — with homelessness growing, housing prices rising and wealth inequality worse than ever before — is exactly the right moment precisely because things are hard.
“I’ve spoken to people, and they need inspiration,” he says. “That’s why I want to come back and devote my time and really help people. We need it more than ever. When I was a kid on the street, I had the opportunity to audition for Dance Alive and dance with Ballet Tennessee, and that changed my life. So now, what was given to me as a kid, I can come back as a man, execute on that and advance it further.”
Where to Find Him
Fredrick Davis already has a name selected for his school and company. The school will be known as Chattanooga Conservatory of Dance, while his student company will be Tennessee Dance Theater. Keep your eyes and ears open for those names!
To connect with Fredrick Davis about classes or collaborations, please contact him at fredrickedavis6@gmail.com or on his Facebook page at facebook.com/freddavis04