- Phillip Bainbridge "For real peace is not the absence of war. It's Tricky to rock a rhyme, to rock a rhyme that's right on time It's Tricky...it's Tricky (Tricky) Tricky (Tricky) It's Tricky to rock a rhyme, to rock a rhyme that's right on time It's Tricky...Tr-tr-tr-tricky (Tricky) Trrrrrrrrrrricky I met this little girlie, her hair was kinda curly In Jayna Brown’s cultural history of African-American women performers during modernism, she positions black vernacular dance as a way to claim a sense of place, relation, and community during the black migration: “For black people, dancing was an analogous creative response to shared and individual experiences of dislocation and relocation, itinerancy, and the fraught negotiations of claiming a geographical space to call home.”Monáe’s explanation of the Tightrope dance echoes Goldman’s claims about aesthetic and social choreographies of improvisation and their relationship to notions of freedom:After countless hours watching both live and recorded improvisations (and having been    moved greatly in the process), I have come to believe that improvised dance involves         literally giving shape to oneself by deciding how to move in relation to an unsteady landscape. Real...Photographer: Roland Watkins. Tightroping is like horizontal flying in a way, as one moves their body forward along an unstable route traversing huge gaps of space without substantial support. So stay like this and go in and out. [Cover by Second Breath] BTS - Tricky + boy with fun - YouTube

When verbalizing the dance while moving, the lyrics help to theorize the work that her body is already doing. so as to lessen irregularities,” “deal successfully with (a problem or difficulty)” or to “free (a course of action) from difficulties or problems.”I’m telling you as a friend you must develop your whole body to match. Monáe’s contributions within the lineage reflect contemporary concerns about racialized embodiment emblematized by the Obama presidency. The Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the As a verb, “smooth” means to “give (something) a flat, regular surface or appearance,” “modify (a graph, curve, etc.) Labanotation grew from Laban’s interest in movement, which stemmed from his early travels. Scholars Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez describe the rise of commentary regarding black performance by “Negro” and “colored” artists in their introduction to their collection In “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” Hurston highlights that action words and drama distinguish black performance.The presence of rhythm and lack of symmetry are paradoxical…Both are present to a marked degree. But easily workable to a Negro who is accustomed to the break in going from one part to another, so that he adjusts himself to the new tempo.She writes that black dancers had to dance through certain limitations, therefore encouraging an adaptive and improvisational style instead of always performing fully rehearsed pieces.Although she observes artists and performers as originators, Hurston also discusses the paradox of authenticity due to the difficulty of tracing origins: “It is obvious that to get back to original sources is much too difficult for any group to claim very much as a certainty. Notating Monáe’s radio show appearance reveals strong affinities with both Hurston’s theory regarding black community/collectivity as well as Katherine Dunham’s exploration of movement as self-healing in her research and development of Dunham Technique. He’s inspired a lot of my music…I wrote ‘Tightrope’ because it talks about dealing with balance—don’t get too high, don’t get too low—and that’s one of the things that I noticed about President Obama…He stays very centered.”“Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis ‘Tightrope’ Dance” by Dana Venerable