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Ayisha Morgan-Lee was a junior at Oakland Catholic High School when she attended her first conference of the International Association of Blacks in Dance.
Morgan-Lee, who grew up in the Hill District, had been dancing since age 3, and she attended the IABD conference in Philadelphia as a performer with Norma Jean Barnes’ Xpressions Contemporary Dance Company.
It was 2000, and she says the experience was formative.
“It was at that conference that I knew I wanted to be a dancer,” she says. “I knew that I could have a career in dance. I saw people on stage who looked like me, people who were running the organization and the conference who looked like me, and it was just an exciting time.”
In a full-circle story, Morgan-Lee went on not only to found her own dance school — the Hill Dance Academy Theatre — but to become IABD’s board chair. And Jan. 22-26, she’s helping bring the IABD’s big annual conference to Pittsburgh for the first time.
The event will draw between 800 and 1,200 attendees to Downtown’s Westin Pittsburgh for five days of workshops, panels, classes, auditions and nightly public performance showcases at the Benedum Center and August Wilson African American Cultural Center.
“This is a dream come true,” Morgan-Lee said. “I’m so happy Pittsburgh is going to experience what we’ve been experiencing for so long.”
The IABD, founded in 1988, has 3,000 individual and group members, said IABD co-executive director Omar Ingram.
The organizational members range from dance schools like HDAT and collegiate dance programs to professional companies, some of whom tour internationally. The latter group includes some of the biggest names in dance, including Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Philadanco! and Ronald K. Brown/Evidence, all of whom will have performers onstage in the Sat., Jan. 25, showcase at the Benedum.
Noting the conference’s some 120 classes and 50 panels and workshops, Ingram calls it the “family reunion” of Black dance.
HDAT, the IABD’s official hosting partner, is marking its own 20th anniversary. Morgan-Lee, who majored in dance at Howard University, launched the company while earning her master’s in arts management at Carnegie Mellon University.
Echoing her own experience at her first IABD conference, she says, “I wanted a place where students could look to the right and look to the left and see people who looked like them, look in the front of the classroom and see people who looked like them inside of the studio, and know that they could have a career as a dancer.”
HDAT (pronounced “ha-dat”) teaches all styles of dance, from ballet, jazz and tap to African, modern, and even capoeira, to students 3 and up. It now has 50 students in the academy and another 150 from local public and private schools in its residency program, Morgan-Lee said.
Some residency students learn from HDAT instructors who come to their schools. Others visit HDAT’s campus — the former St. Benedict the Moor School on Bedford Avenue, in the Hill. HDAT purchased the campus, including the former convent and rectory, in 2021. The place has sentimental value: Morgan-Lee attended the school K-8 and later taught there. HDAT occupies part of the big school building and supplements its income by renting out space to other artists and groups.
Morgan-Lee says some HDAT students have gone on to careers with dance companies and with cruise line performance troupes. Some have even returned to the company as board members or in other administrative roles.
The IABD conference’s theme this year is “The Bridges We Build: From Revolution to Legacy,” and it seems likely to create connections both inside the local Black dance community and between Pittsburgh and the rest of the world. Other local sponsors include CAPA Dance Studio, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre and Point Park Conservatory.
If you want to root for the home team, the Wed., Jan. 22, showcase at the AWAACC features an all-Pittsburgh lineup including not just HDAT, PBT, CAPA and Point Park Conservatory but also Balafon and Shona Sharif African Drum and Dance Ensemble, Legacy Arts Project, and PearlArts Movement & Sound.
More information on IABD performances is here.
And here’s the complete conference schedule, including classes and audition opportunities.
