Texas Woman’s University alumna and New York City-based dancer Kayla Hamilton has a mission.
She wants more people to feel free to dance and more people to join the audience for dance. Hamilton’s life’s work is to lift up Black disabled creatives, and others she describes as “multiply marginalized.” Hamilton, who graduated from TWU in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in dance, describes herself as a sight-impaired or low-sight dancer and choreographer.
Her experiences as a dance student and as a professional artist have compelled her to commit to broadening the idea of who can dance and who can share in the performing arts as an audience member.
It’s Hamilton’s talent and curiosity, and her habit of looking beyond convention, that landed her among Dance Magazine’s ”25 to Watch” earlier this year. The definitive dance magazine praised Hamilton’s project, Circle O, as a pioneering organization by a visionary dancer and choreographer.
“Oh my God, I still don’t even believe that,” Hamilton said from a rehearsal space in the Bronx, drums throbbing in the background. “I still don’t believe it. As a kid, Dance Magazine was the thing. I got it every month.”
Hamilton remembered reading Dance in her bedroom and in the bathtub. She absorbed the stories about dancers and choreographers and how they were honoring or challenging their art forms.
“And I dreamed of, like, seeing myself in the magazine,” Hamilton said. “And when I found out, I was just, like, this is not real. Like, stop playing, get out of here.”
Hamilton is a Texas native for whom dance and teaching were in the blood. Her grandfather Oscar Hamilton was the principal of an all-Black elementary school in Foreman, Arkansas. Her uncle Lawrence Hamilton was a Broadway dancer.
But when it came time for Kayla Hamilton to choose an activity, her parents knew what they didn’t want their daughter to do.
“When I was 8, my parents didn’t want me to be at home doing nothing, like watching TV,” Hamilton said. “Thinking about it, I mean, you know, Texas is a ‘ball’ state. And I really wanted to play soccer and softball. But with my eyesight, they were afraid that the balls were going to hit me in my only seeing eye. So they thought dance was a better pathway, something that can be active and physical without impacting the eyesight.”
When she discovered that her uncle was a tap dancer with an impressive Broadway resume, she told her parents she wanted to dance in Uncle Lawrence’s footsteps. The turn of phrase is about following in someone’s footsteps, but for Hamilton, it wasn’t so much as following as it was finding her own variations.
Her parents agreed, and Hamilton started dancing. She followed the typical American girl’s foray into dance, starting with ballet and then moving into jazz. But it was tap that spoke to her.
“I love the rhythm,” she said. “I love rhythm. I love the energy. It was about, like, what you brought to the dance. It was never about shape or form or, you know, trying to mold your body in a way. You could, like, bring your own style, add your own energy, and then, of course, making music with your body. I really enjoyed that as a kid.”
Tap was also ripe for improvisation, something she started experimenting with when she was practicing solo. She saw the possibilities in the performances of her uncle and Gregory Hines.
Her studies took her to TWU, where Hamilton said she met students and faculty who changed her life.
“It was the time of my life,” Hamilton said.
“I would say I had a phenomenal success,” she said. “They encouraged me to be curious. They encouraged me to take risks with my body, to try new things. TWU taught more than dance. They taught me curiosity. They taught me how to be a part of a group, of a collective. We loved on each other. At TWU, dance wasn’t that competitive nature. I didn’t experience that. We cheered each other on.”
Hamilton said she followed the light held high by professors, and that TWU emerita professors Gladys Keeton, Penny Hanstein and Mary Williford-Shade transformed her understanding of dance, as did professor Sarah Gamblin.
When Hamilton wanted to dance and work with TWU dance students in the master’s program, the doors were open. She studied modern dance and traditional African dance.
On the Denton campus, Hamilton said, she learned to trust her peers and to be trusted by them. She earned an internship at Dance Place in Washington, D.C., under legendary dancers and co-directors Carla Perlo and Deborah Riley when a classmate from TWU called her and told her to come to New York.
“I was like, I only have $500 and two suitcases, and she was like, ‘I don’t care. Let’s do it,’” Hamilton said. “And she came down and helped me pack my two suitcases. So I moved with my $500 and my two suitcases, and I’ve been there ever since.”
Because dance doesn’t always pay all the bills, Hamilton said she spent 12 years teaching public school in New York, a gig she recently ended.
Now, she’s at the helm of Circle O, named after her grandparents’ farm, and creating dance and community with people who wish to reimagine what it means to be included and live and work in community.
Part of the reason she caught the attention of Dance Magazine is because of the work she has produced. Nearly Sighted blends Hamilton’s notions of being seen and living as a sight-impaired Black creative. Last year’s project, How to Bend Down/How to Pick It Up piqued the interest of the magazine because it’s both a large ensemble project and a piece that explores the histories of Black disability.
As she has hit her stride as the director and founder of a company that performs, educates and consults, Hamilton has grown into some competencies she might not have foreseen.
In her drive to explore and include disabled Black people in dance, Hamilton said she has a sort of ultimate dream (one that she says probably won’t happen in her lifetime): to encourage everyone to have some kind of movement-based practice.
“I’m really begging the question, who is the dancer? What makes a dancer a dancer?” Hamilton said. “So underneath that is this question: Do we even know what happens if that movement was a part of the accounting department, the engineering department, the nursing school? What if we made that movement a part of that experience? And what do we all do without you and learn from them?
“I think it disrupts notions of like mastery, beauty, perfection and form. Because what I’m offering is like, sure, ballet is one way, but you do not have to do ballet in order to identify as a dancer. Everybody has their own technique, right? Because no one is going [to be] looking the same because they’re all individual people, and that what individual people bring to the dance is what actually makes it.”