Julinda Lewis leads a BeMoved dance class at Dogtown Dance Theatre (Photo by Dominic Hernandez)
They share a wide, dazzling smile, a girlish, velvety speaking voice, and a love of dance. Indeed, Julinda Lewis has often been mistaken for the late singer and actress Eartha Kitt. Lewis met her once, at a long-ago modern dance class in New York.
“She came in and said, ‘I’m Eartha Kitt, and I feel like teaching tonight,’ ” Lewis recalls, her voice still edged in wonder 40 years later. She says, chuckling, “Maybe she marked me somehow, or left some of herself with me.”
Lewis is a multi-hyphenate talent in Richmond’s creative arts community. Punctuating her four-decade-long career as a trained professional dancer, Lewis founded St. Paul’s Baptist Church’s Ayinde Liturgical Dance ministry. She teaches dance history classes in Virginia Commonwealth University’s department of dance, complementing a triple-decade career as a public school teacher, the first 16 years in her Brooklyn hometown, the next 18 in Richmond. She is a founding member of the Richmond Theatre Critics Circle and is a constant on the theater scene. Her reviews appear in a variety of publications, including the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
“Out of all the plays performed in Richmond last year, across all the theaters, I think I missed two or three,” says Lewis, who for years was a consultant with the National Endowment for the Arts. With all of her talents, her standout role is that of mother to her three children, Jamila, Soleil and Amandla. She started her family in New York, enveloping her kids in a culturally vibrant atmosphere from birth and encouraging them all to participate in plays, dance, music and films.
“My own family, they weren’t that much interested in the arts,” Lewis says, fresh from leading her weekly BeMoved class at Dogtown Dance Theatre in Manchester. She’s perched on a couch in a small room off one of the downstairs studios, her long, honey-colored dreadlocks pulled back under a purple headband, wearing a sweatshirt proclaiming, I’m a Retired Teacher. “So I was determined to raise my kids with art a central part of their lives.”
Photo by Dominic Hernandez
It was nothing for Lewis and her kids to see Chris Rock in the neighborhood coffee shop. Ralph Carter, who starred as Michael in cult classic TV sitcom “Good Times,” dropped in to their apartment regularly. “He came by and ate whatever I cooked,” Lewis says.
Before the world recognized chart-topping R&B songstress Amel Larrieux’s talent, the singer lived with Lewis and her family for a year. “She was starting to form [R&B band] Groove Theory when she was with us,” says Lewis.
She pegged one of their young neighbors as a troublemaker, seeing the mischievous teen swiping newspapers from the stand and reselling them to passersby at a higher cost. Lewis thought the boy, named Christopher Wallace (who became legendary rapper The Notorious B.I.G.), would be a bad influence on her children, “but he was always respectful. Whenever I saw him on the street, he’d greet me like any other kid. We’d joke a bit, and that was that.”
Growing up in such an atmosphere felt “interesting, funny but natural,” says Jamila Williams, Lewis’ eldest child. “It made the arts [feel like] a natural extension of myself.” Williams describes her mother as a busy but engaged parent, who would carve out individual time with each of her three children every weekend.
“She’d take one of us to the theater Friday, another to the museum Saturday, and another to a dance performance or something on Sunday. It was constant exposure to culture,” says Williams, who is a massage therapist and a poet based in Richmond. As a child, Williams tagged along when her mom had rehearsals or performances at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in Manhattan. “Jamila sat in the back of the theater next to Mr. Ailey, watching everything,” says Lewis.
Williams is also the god sister, and Lewis godmother, of the late Lorna Pinckney, the visionary founder of Richmond’s longest-running open mic series, Tuesday Verses. When Pinckney died a few weeks ago, Lewis thought back to the days when Pinckney and her daughter would set up their own mini-talent shows in her Brooklyn apartment. “They always sparked each other creatively, Lorna and Jamila. Lorna went on family vacations with us; they were just two beautiful, giggling girls.”
Lewis fiercely champions African-American theater in Richmond, and works to shine a light on black playwrights and performers in the region. “[Lewis] was an advocate for the RTCC [Richmond Theatre Critics Circle] naming our Best Ensemble award after Ernie McClintock, a true African-American trailblazer in the Richmond arts community,” says David Timberline, a freelance writer and Style Weekly theater critic who cofounded the RTCC with Lewis and others a decade ago. Her background in dance positively influences her contributions to the group, says Timberline.
“She brings a dancer's eye to her perspective on theater, and I always feel I learn something from her analysis of productions. As an active dancer, I think she has empathy for performers in a way other writers may not.”
Lewis has taught people to dance all over the world, from Africa to the Caribbean. In December, she’ll lead liturgical dance training in Kenya. She’s in love and engaged to be married. After that, the 62-year-old plans to keep her passport handy.
“I’m ready to do things I’ve never done before.”
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