Baba Obediah Wright, founder and director of Brooklyn’s Balance Dance Theatre, is beloved in Brooklyn. A renown, choreographer, director and educator, Wright marvelously weaves dance, spirituality, education and Black culture to create uplifting edutainment. This month, he’s returning to the Central Brooklyn Juneteenth Arts Festival Saturday, June 14th at Herbert Von King Park as the host of the cultural celebration.
“Last year at Juneteenth, when I hosted, there was a young man who got an award and was going to college. So, I got all of the elder women to encircle this young man. I put them up on the stage and they prayed for him. Then I got all the teenagers to get in the circle as well,” he told Our Time Press. “It wasn’t planned. It was the cultural and African ancestral spirit.”
When working with Black youth, he likes to include some of the history of Juneteenth. “It’s hard for younger people to even grasp slavery nowadays,” he said. “So again, our history being lost, the history being misplaced, the history being hidden.”
To creatively explore Black history in America, in 2001, Wright premiered his multimedia dance and music production “Higher Ground, Still Rising!” at the Schomburg Center in Harlem. “It goes from Africa, through the Middle Passage up until the present,” he said.
“It’s spoken word. It’s a multimedia work. There’s live singing, music and dance. So,it’s also a lesson in history in African tradition and culture and a performance in African American culture.”
A native New Yorker, Wright has studied dance at the LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts, Alvin Ailey, Dance Theater of Harlem, and the Julliard School.
He has choreographed and taught master classes throughout the U.S, Asia, Europe, Africa and the Caribbean. Wright has been mentored by dance choreographer icons Geoffrey Holder, Chuck Davis and Otis Sallid. He has performed in leading venues in New York City and around the world. He’s become known for a choreography and performance style that is an eclectic mix of his extensive training in Ballet, Modern, Jazz, Swing, and Afro-Cuban dance.
High profile choreography and directing projects include Ray Charles, Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, Janet Jackson, Erykah Badu, Ashanti and was assistant choreographer for the film “Harlem Nativity” with Angela Bassett.
For 20 years at the Balance Dance Theater, he has instructed and mentored children, teens and adults in dance and culture. It’s balancing a professional component and a community component. “There is the concept of taking people and giving them artistic lessons, but also giving them cultural and social etiquette of understanding themselves a bit better. To help them be a better and more well-rounded kind of person,” he said.
“At Balance Dance Theater, I’ve taken my children to perform at the World Financial Center, Schomburg Center, and ABC-TV’s “The Chew. I put my children in music videos. Their parents are involved in a lot of the projects.” Several years ago, on his first visit to South Africa, he brought ten children and two parents for the cultural tour.
“I like intergenerational work because it we need community around art, we need community around culture. It shouldn’t just be the teenagers or the professional dancers, it needs to be the seven-year olds, the five-year-olds and two-year-olds. It needs to be their parents, it needs to be their grandparents.”
For 16 years, he has taught special needs children on the spectrum at Long Island’s Roosevelt Union Free School District. “Some of those young men that I’ve mentored are still very close to me,” he said. “When they were not doing well in school, I would go and sit down and have meetings with the principal on the mother’s behalf when they weren’t acting right.”
Wright’s dedication has earned many accolades. In 2006, Newark’s Mayor Sharpe James presented him with a special proclamation at the city’s Juneteenth Day at NJPAC. This year, the nonprofit Global International Alliance presented him with a doctorate in humanitarianism.
Recently, Wright was invited to perform and teach in South Africa. “When I was in Johannesburg at the Johannesburg Ballet, it was like me teaching at the equivalent of the Alvin Ailey School. When I was in Soweto, it would be the equivalent of me going into a community center in Brownsville. I’ve done both.
I’ve taught at the Ailey School and I’ve taught at community centers in Brownsville. I was at home in either place,” he said. “One of my dreams of the things that I want to do is travel extensively around Africa and learn dances, cultures and begin to bring them back here.”