Wa Na Wari Celebrates Its Sixth Birthday With a Cake Dance

Attendees first watched Ward, a scholar of Black dance and a critical race theorist, move across the space to “Isadora” by Christian Scott, gliding and twisting through the crowd. Then came Lanza, a tap dancer originally from Honduras, dressed in a tux and tapping to songs by Cab Calloway and Jelly Roll Morton. At one point, Lanza told the crowd, “I’m here to represent Black excellence!” And, finally, Johnson, a Flint native, took the stage where she dumped a cup of sand before tracing and then erasing various names. She then danced on the sand, drawing from sand dancers like Howard “Sandman” Sims and Harriet “Quicksand” Browne.