Student Spotlight
A timely statement via dance
By Cory Walsh
UM student Elijah Fisher felt tired and frustrated long ago, a feeling he began working out through kinetic, expressive dance, alone in a studio.
The dance piece he created, “TIRED | T1RED,” has won accolades, yet the context around it changed completely after protests over the deaths of Black people at the hands of police in the U.S.
The 24-year-old takes the stage on his own. Sometimes bearing a mask and accompanied only by a medley of hip-hop tracks, he wordlessly communicates the exhaustion he feels as a Black-Filipino man who’s spent years living in predominantly white communities.
He hopes audiences see it and ask themselves questions like “Why is he tired?” and “How can we all help take this conversation of race as a nation, as a people, and have more complex conversations about it?”
Fisher is studying for his Master of Fine Arts in acting in UM’s School of Theatre and Dance and will graduate in May 2021. He grew up in Richmond, California, where he dabbled in theater during his senior year of high school. He enrolled at the University of Portland and its strong theater program, eventually changing his major from computer science in favor of drama.
He was drawn east to Montana and UM’s School of Theatre and Dance for a few reasons. One, the acceptance is limited, so he knew the faculty would be focused on his cohort. Second, he wanted the opportunity to teach.
“I thought that would be a great opportunity for me to really hone my skills, because if I know what I’m talking about, then I can actually execute it,” he says.
Besides his main focus on theater, he also was interested in learning more about dance outside of his self-taught hip-hop style.
Last fall, he took a Creative Practice I course with Brooklyn Draper, a visiting assistant professor of dance. At the start of the semester, students learned they would have a final project.
Almost immediately, he began working on what would eventually become “TIRED.” Like most of his dance work, he starts with the music. The seed was a track called “151 Rum” with rapid verses by Atlanta rapper JID.
“This song makes me feel like I’m tired, you know, and I want the audience to feel as tired as I am,” he says.
The weariness comes from a feeling he had after leaving California for Oregon, and later, Montana.
“Being in predominantly white spaces can be truly exhausting,” he says. “I didn’t realize it was that way until I found myself kind of adapting to the spaces that I’m in, as opposed to just existing the way that I want to.”
Fisher feels the need to code-switch frequently, or feel a burden of unspoken expectations.
“If I’m around Black people in Missoula, then I am not necessarily acting a completely different way, but I feel more comfortable to just be, whereas, if I’m around other people, then there’s an expectation of me to behave as opposed to just be,” he says.
While developing the piece, he researched the idea of whiteface — used in performances by Eddie Murphy and Donald Glover. A white mask, used as a learning tool in a Performance and Practice course with visiting theater faculty member Mark Plonsky, became a key prop in “TIRED.”
Fisher eventually edited together a suite of songs into “TIRED,” which he performs alone, clad only in a pair of jeans. During JID’s introductory track, he creates staccato movements, with references to the lyric’s repeated use of “run,” he is basically, as he says, “running in place.”
Elsewhere he references movement from the movie “Black Panther” or hangings or the “intergenerational trauma that lives within Black bodies,” he says. That song segues into “Who Dat Boy” by Tyler, the Creator, with Fisher wearing that mask, which he decided to paint black, as a way of conveying ideas about questioning whether he matched his own or others’ expectations of him.
During the next track, “SWITCH IT UP | ZWITCH 1T UP” by Denzel Curry, he places the mask on the back of his head and cycles through movements in “Who Dat Boy” backward, which he figured out with the help of phone videos and mirrors. For the finale, Kanye West’s near-spoken word, “I Thought About Killing You,” he places the mask on the ground and makes subtler moves. They’re intended to match the song’s frank words about depression and suicide, as Fisher was “thinking about wanting to kill my own Blackness within me so I can adapt enough,” he says.
Some decisions, like his circular sprints around the entire stage, are rooted in his classes studying modern dance, where students are taught to fill a performance space. He also thought deeply about theater and dance lessons emphasizing awareness — what movements are you making and why, or what are you “not doing” and what does that communicate?
The program also encouraged constant experimentation. “This is supposed to be your playground to do whatever you want, let your imagination fly,” he says.
Like a plotline in a dance film, Fisher kept his piece mostly private until a debut when he was nearly finished. While working it out, he’d felt awkward performing it in front of white people.
“A lot of it was developed in the dark, but I was hearing things that my professors were telling me from classes,” he says. He “debuted” a mostly completed piece during a brown-bag gathering where performers were supposed to share their progress.
Dance Professor Heidi Jones Eggert says Fisher’s piece is “so genuine, so pure, so honest and exquisitely performed” and that Fisher “gives his everything,” and the “vulnerability that comes with it is just so rare.”
Since Fisher is an actor (and a musician as well), she thinks those interests visibly differentiate his work. “They’re all different forms of storytelling,” she says, and they cross-pollinate in his choreography and performance.
The UM program selected Fisher’s work for the American College Dance Association’s Northwest regional conference in Spokane back in March because they were confident it could reach a national stage after the regional conference, and in part they wanted him and his message to get exposure and feedback from a larger and more diverse audience.
The performance, which solicited applause before it was over, was described as “outstanding,” “nuanced” and “virtuosic” by adjudicators and subsequently picked for the National College Dance Festival in Long Beach, California, in May.
After the pandemic struck the United States, that was called off. Yet Fisher is stoic while discussing that missed opportunity.
“I can’t be sad that my thing got canceled, ’cause everything got canceled,” he says. However, he is sad he lost a chance to bring his work to his home state and perhaps a larger Black audience. He says responses from largely white crowds has been positive but not as deep as he’d hoped. He wanted more questions about the complexity of being Black, the exhaustion they’re witnessing and why he might feel that way.
During the pandemic, he wants to take time during the pause on live performances to develop art like “TIRED.”
“My intention is to continue developing this type of work, because it was important before, but it’s still important now,” he says. “I also found time to channel my energy into my new, debut album, ‘Nothing to Say,’ in collaboration with Britt Arnesen. Creating this album was important to me because I wanted to show people that I am entering these conversations by leading with love through an avenue that can reach any individual in the comfort of their room.”
Fisher wants the difficult discussions and questions about being Black in America to go on.
“The conversations are hard but they are happening,” he says, “and I think one of the big things is that we have to continue the momentum and make sure that it’s not just a moment but a movement.” •
