Keep dancing: Chanel DaSilva on taking risks, dealing with grief and tackling Trump

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Chanel DaSilva has always been a dancer. “I felt completely free,” she says of her first class. “I felt at home. Like I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing. And it’s weird to know that at the age of three.” The New Yorker, 38, is a rising star choreographer in the US, with credits including Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet, and is about to make her international debut in London.

DaSilva’s dance style has been described as “technique meets humanity”, in the sense that she draws on the precision and virtuosity of classical and modern dance, but brings in a freedom and naturalism. The piece she has made here for the company Ballet Black, called A Shadow Work, is in part about dealing with grief over the death of her mother when DaSilva was 19. At the time, trying to get through her college education, she couldn’t cope with it. “So I packed up that grief, put it in a little box, and pushed it down deep. And it stayed there for about 10 years until I was finally brave enough to reckon with it.” In hindsight, “I should have mourned,” she says. “But we’re not judging.”

DaSilva trained at the “Fame” performing arts school LaGuardia High: “I was very focused and very clear on what I wanted for my career.” She then went to Juilliard, which is nearby. “All I did was cross the street, and my entire idea of what dance is and can be just exploded.”

Going to therapy in her late 20s unlocked a lot for DaSilva, and A Shadow Work is inspired by the idea of the shadow self in psychology (as well as actual shadows). “I was fascinated by a video I saw of a little kid seeing their shadow for the first time, horrified at two years old by something following them. And there’s a parallel with the moment in therapy where you see the shadow and you’re like, this is too much for me to deal with, I want to retreat. But then one day you actually just surrender to the idea that it’s there. It’s a part of you.”

DaSilva’s piece shares a double bill called Shadows with a new work by Ballet Black director Cassa Pancho, based on Oyinkan Braithwaite’s bestselling book My Sister, the Serial Killer – far from your usual kind of ballet story. That’s something DaSilva welcomes. “Otherwise our art form is going to become so niche and so dated that it won’t move forward, it won’t evolve and it will die, right?”

DaSilva has taken some artistic risks of her own, agreeing with Nina Simone that it’s an artist’s duty to reflect the times. In 2018 she made Public/Private, performed by one male dancer with an ensemble of female dancers, using the audio recording of Donald Trump’s infamous “grab them by the pussy” boast. “I was enraged about all of the spewing that was coming from Donald Trump, and I was hearing [that clip] everywhere, every day, I was almost getting numb to it, you know? And I thought, why can’t I put it on stage, to put a mirror in front of us to say: this is who we’ve elected.”

DaSilva has written about her own experience of sexual abuse by a private dance teacher when she was a teenager – not an isolated incident in the industry. Now that she is in a position of leadership herself, training young diverse dancers with her non-profit organisation MOVE|NYC| and running a women’s mentoring project, she was moved to speak out. “This open secret is around and if this ever happened to one of my students it would break my heart. So I need to talk about it. What are we doing to protect our young people?”

She’s an activist, or “artivist” she would say. Just her presence is an inspiration – it’s rare to see black female choreographers at this level in ballet. “It’s not a secret that black women kind of sit at the bottom,” she says. “I haven’t forgotten what it took to get out of east New York, Brooklyn, so that’s what drives me. As I climb the ladder, I’m pulling up women with me.”

DaSilva’s Trump piece was made during his first term as president. Now we’re in the era of Trump 2.0 – can she bear it? “I continue to be hopeful that we will just try our best to put humanity first and not let greed get in the way,” she says. “I’m trying to have an optimistic point of view so I don’t get so cynical my brain just gives up on it all.” DaSilva is intent on making the arts world more equitable, “to put a little pebble into the pond and hope for some ripples of change” as she puts it. “Artists really are the catalyst.”