- [Announcer] BECU isn't like other financial institutions.

And the difference is people.

Because we're not-for-profit, there's no boardroom of billionaires maximizing their margins.

Our biggest stakeholders are people, like you.

It's our members who make money meaningful.

So we focus on helping them thrive.

It's the art student, bringing beauty to his community, that makes a college loan matter.

It's the mother, building her family's foundation, that makes a mortgage matter.

It's people that make BECU matter.

People like you.

- [Announcer 2] Meta's mission is to build technologies that help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses.

Supporting local artists allows us to shape the way we think about building the next evolution of digital connection.

We are proud to support Black Arts Legacies.

- [Narrator 1] These are necessary conversations.

- [Narrator 2] Ideas come from everywhere.

- [Narrator 3] And the next generation takes them into a new idea.

- [Narrator 4] About us by us, for us and near us.

(soft music) (classical music) - [Syvilla] I had this desire to do classical ballet.

I used to dance in the aisles at the Palace Theater in Seattle.

(light classical music) But I wanted ballet.

I wanted ballet like nobody straight to this day wanted ballet.

- [Member 1] When I came into the project, I didn't know about Syvilla at all.

- [Member 2] She was from Seattle and she was very interested in meeting me.

And I had just started a dance studio here.

- [Member 3] She taught from the age of like 13.

She was holding little classes in people's living rooms in the CD and I gather elsewhere.

- [Nia] Much of the, the history and the legacy is in the bodies of the people who experienced it and the bodies of the folks that are carrying it forward.

Like prime example is learning about Syvilla through Miss Edna.

You know, there are biographies about her written online.

There's some information but it was just really hard to piece together what her life might have looked like here in Seattle before she moved.

(soft piano music) - But I had this desire to do classical ballet and my mother carefully took me around several studios more than several studios.

I was denied entrance because of color.

Still, I wanted to dance, I just wanted to dance.

So my mother saw that I got private lessons until a class could be formed for me or to help me.

And back and forth from year to year I began to get training bit by bit through, you know, various circumstances.

- Syvilla's mom worked as a housekeeper and a cook for Nellie Cornish.

And at Nellie Cornish's place, you know, the Cornish at that time, Syvilla was able to get training and dance lessons and private lessons.

And so eventually Nelly Cornish welcomed Syvilla into that community.

- That program was sort of three year program and at the end of three years you would present work as a sort of culmination of your studies.

And so she put on a final concert that happened in April 28th, 1940.

And it was her own choreography, an evening of her own rep. And she collaborated with a bunch of different artists to do it, but these were her ideas.

This was the culmination of her studies.

- [B.J.]

And then eventually she ended up wanting very much to incorporate Caribbean and African movement into her dance repertoire, which she did.

She was very committed to that.

The Space Needle's one of the most recognized towers in the world.

Cornish was this place where artists, dancers, actors came together and there was a synergy in that group who were feeding off each other and learning from each other.

And it became a really wonderful community.

So Syvilla was part of that.

Victor Steinbrook was part of that.

We know that this, the curve and the needle was inspired by the sculpture of the feminine one.

Certainly Victor Steinbrook saw these figures, you know, the figure, the shape of the feminine one as a dancer.

I started thinking who were the dancers that were around Seattle around those times when he was kind of coming of age.

And that's when I discovered Syvilla Fort.

If we look at the Space Needle as this icon of a region, what would it mean to imagine her as perhaps capturing the spirit of a Syvilla Fort?

- [Edna] When I went to New York in 1970, I think it was about 70 75, 76, and I was able to be introduced to her and sit in on her class and watch.

She was a very good teacher.

She was very into giving her students a voice so that she could understand their needs.

'Cause everyone who would come to her studio was not pursuing dance careers.

They were just wanting to be a community to be able to talk and express themselves.

And she adopted so many of these students.

Eartha Kitt, Marlon Brando.

It was Cheetah Rivera.

Every step and every move that she would teach her students had some kind of purpose and reference.

It made you move, it made you feel what she was trying to tell you through the story, 'cause she is a storyteller.

- [Nia] In researching Syvilla and her contributions and her early sort of dance education, I can already see where the connections are.

I know that she was a part of that early generation of Dunham dancers and I know that I studied Dunham as a, as a child.

And so I'm deeply connected to those movements.

I know that she moved to New York and studied but then taught a whole generation of New York dance artists who went on to teach, perform, choreograph, be in movies, be on Broadway, you know, be in theater productions, do modern choreography.

And that sort of cascades into the companies and ensembles and choreography that they created.

And it sort of all continues in this circle.

And in a lot of ways, that sort of dance is a continuum movement.

They're just these ideas that come back over again and the next generation takes them and takes them into a new idea.

I think that, I mean, dance is really beautiful.

There's a lot of embodied knowledge that, that artists carry in movement in their body over time across generations.

So there, there's certainly, there's certainly things that are present because they were explored by someone like Syvilla Fort in the 1930s and 40s or someone like Catherine Dunham in the 1930s and 40s.

And they still show up in the roots of the movement that we do today.

And I think that's a really beautiful thing about dance.

As an archive dancers, choreography, we can hold memory in these ways that are very much like unspoken.

(classical music)