Hubbard Street Dance Chicago Addresses Cultural Erasure and Racism
While most of Greener Grass features an otherworldly soundscape, one scene includes a voiceover of two stories being told at once, while Alysia Johnson performs a solo. Johnson whips her body around in the solo, as if every so often she is hitting a wall and rebounding off of it. In a voiceover, she tells a story of stealing her mother’s makeup as a child and inadvertently waxing off her entire eyebrow. Intermittently throughout her story, dancer Andrew Murdock’s voice chimes in with an unrelated tale. He tells of a person holding the door for another only to make snide comments about (his or her) heritage and culture. The would-be gentleman stings his target with phrases like “Where are you from? Err What’s your heritage?” and ''manners must be a little bit different wherever you’re from.”
At the end of her monologue, Johnson says the moral of her story is to “Mind Your Business.” The two stories, while wildly different, one being silly and personal, the other condescending and serious, somehow work together to send one message, that we alone are responsible for our own actions and shouldn’t put blame on others.
