Karine Plantadit: Dancing as a Weapon for Peace
ICAP artist Karine Plantadit made history when she was nominated for a Tony Award in the Best Featured Actress in a Musical category for her work in Come Fly Away. Her fellow nominees were Barbara Cook, Angela Lansbury, Lillias White, and Katie Finneran, who ended up winning the award. While the other nominees had all appeared in speaking roles, Karine’s performance was solely as a dancer—the first dancer with a non-speaking role to be nominated for such an honor. The nomination, in effect, said that Karine’s dancing spoke volumes!
“When I meet those ladies, I’m going to bow so low,” Karine said right after the nominations were announced. “But I’m also going to stand up, because I believe strongly that by being nominated with those people, it also means that the genre that we brought forward—dance-theatre, dance-acting—is equivalent to the work that they’ve done. I have been in my craft for a very long time as well, and I’ve been working really hard at it. So I am honored. I will bow, bow, bow, and I will stand up and meet their eyes with a lot of joy.”
“At one point, I’d had surgery and could not move. I had to dig deep inside of me and push through to express this character . . . it became a part of me. That’s what the [nomination committee] saw,” Karine commented.
A Professional Journey Across Continents
Karine is a professional dancer, actor, director, choreographer, and instructor. Her impressive credits include the Broadway productions of The Lion King, Saturday Night Fever, Movin’ Out, and Come Fly Away.
Raised in Cameroon, her first dance training was ballet in Africa. At only 14, she moved to Cannes, France, to study dance. One night in Paris, she saw the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater perform, and it changed everything. In time, she moved to New York to study with Ailey and eventually performed with the company for seven years before being cast in Broadway’s The Lion King.
It was another Broadway gem, Twyla Tharp’s Movin’ Out (2002), which told a story completely through movement, that sparked something within Karine, who developed a desire to portray a character completely and in-depth but mainly through using her body and movement.
Come Fly Away arose from Karine and co-star Rika Okamoto asking Ms. Tharp about the possibility of creating new work, which led to semiprivate classes being held at Ms. Tharp’s home studio. The Tony-nominated hit was born out of these workshops and premiered in Atlanta in 2009 under the title Come Fly With Me. Come Fly Away opened on Broadway on March 25, 2010, at the Marquis Theatre. Frank Sinatra: Dance With Me ran from January to April 2011 in Las Vegas.
The Dancer’s Body: A Precious Instrument
After performing in Frank Sinatra: Dance With Me at the Encore Theater in Las Vegas, Karine shared the story of her struggle and victory with students from the Las Vegas Academy. Speaking later with ICAP, she said that she always tries to find time to speak with young dancers and students. “They ask questions like: Am I going to make it? How do you do it? What I really want them to understand is that passion—a true passion for your art form—will be the gas in your car. Passion has got to be yours forever. I choose to use my body as a weapon for peace. So all my movements are made to show strength, courage, compassion, love, joy, and justice.”
One of the biggest struggles as a dancer, Karine explains, is maintaining the health of the body. “Just as athletes, we have to learn to be extremely caring and respectful of the body, which oftentimes we aren’t because we start so young that we have no idea what we’re doing. So it becomes all on pure adrenaline. For instance, ‘I’m just going to do this,’ and the body just takes a great beating. But it’s through wisdom, literally, through learning more, through injuries that we get to learn. ‘Wait a minute, if I do this and I bang my knee five times in the same place, it will swell, I will get hurt. I will take five, one week off.’ So we become more aware of the preciousness of this instrument that we have, because without the actual instrument, we can’t dance.”
She draws a distinction between dancers and musicians: “Musicians can use an instrument, if it doesn’t work, they send it somewhere, but they are intact. We, on the other hand, dancers, we can’t think that way. So the relationship of my body and with our body in general, it’s a huge thing.”
When injury does happen, it’s a particularly vulnerable time. “A lot of dancers get so depressed, so deeply. We’re not prepared usually for those times, because we’re used to using our energy when the body is well. So when we’re not well, we cannot use the energy, so the energy goes inward, and you have to be so smart. You have to be well-surrounded. Hopefully you have good beings around you, very good people that will teach you, inspire you to eat well, rest, take the time to heal, because oftentimes we don’t take the time to heal. So those are the big things in dancing, that and competition.”
Building a Culture of Peace
“One of my biggest joys today is to know that through my performance I can actually connect with young dancers and let them know how, in their own beautiful ways, they can excel in their own dancing and careers, that they can choose to make a difference in the world through their art,” Karine reflects.
For Karine, building a culture of peace begins with being an example through her true belief in the equality of all human beings. “It is through my actions. How do we do this together? And I think that it is paramount, crucial, that we as human beings find that question to be the reason why we wake up in the morning. For me, it is to create projects that even before the audience gets to see the actual ending, the people who were part of the project have an incredible time together.”
She describes creating environments of joy and safety: “The joy to come to work, the joy to participate, the joy to be challenged. The joy to find out the way you are. But then because we are together, having the courage to step up and say ‘I don’t know what to do’ in a place that is so safe for the human being to blossom. That to me is culture for peace because if I’m able to do this, then the people watching me can transcend and go further.”
Children are central to Karine’s vision of building peace. “Children need to be part of that. They need to be our real target and for them to know that the world that we’re building today is safe. They need to know that. One of the ways I do this is that any kid I meet, anywhere in the world, I have a moment with. I usually go to their level. I call them sunshine, prince, or princesses or whatever. They don’t even know who I am. The parents are like ‘what’s this woman doing but this is my kid?’ But it’s my contribution to let this child know that where they are is safe. And I think it’s important that they would know that.”
She continues, “The world can be so violent out there that one of the ways to transform neutralized violence is in bonds of humanity that we build. If we can build those bonds with children who we don’t even know, the bonds of humanity will grow stronger.”
Art itself, Karine believes, is a pathway to peace. “When they are touched by the music, or by the visual, at that moment, that human being gets to be transported, wherever they might be. Bring art to people, that place where you can go.”
“Building a culture of peace will be like you finally lay down, you lay on your seat, and you can kind of tilt your head, you could look sideways and you feel comfortable. You don’t feel attacked, you don’t feel like you defend yourself. Build it and then you go and you smile to someone you don’t know and say ‘That was great!’ You become friends with people you never met before. And you walk and you go home. And maybe you write a letter to someone you haven’t heard of for a long time. Maybe you make peace with something you haven’t made peace with.”
Through her groundbreaking work on Broadway and her commitment to the next generation, Karine Plantadit continues to use her body as a weapon for peace—one movement, one connection, one inspired young dancer at a time.
