The way ice skating instruction at Aldrich Arena in Maplewood was supposed to work in the mid-1980s was that kids would take a group lesson based on their skill level and then, built into the class length, they’d have a half hour or so for independent practice on the ice.
Four-year-old Deneane Richburg didn’t quite grasp the “half hour or so” part.
“It felt so much fun to just ride the wave of momentum,” she said. “My mom had a hard time getting me off the ice.”
Later, when she began participating in figure skating competitions, elementary school-aged Richburg didn’t quite grasp the “competition” part. If she scored near the bottom, she didn’t mind.
“I just liked throwing my body in the air,” she said, laughing. “The idea of placing was at the back of my mind. I was just like, ‘Ooh, I get to go out there and perform and put on makeup — and try my own choreography,’ which I’m sure my coach was thrilled about.”
But eventually, as Richburg got older and her skills became more advanced, she’d nail her routines and still regularly score last or second-to-last. As a child, she said, she didn’t quite catch the signs — “I just wanted to skate,” she said; “I didn’t necessarily intend to be like, ‘I am this Black child!’” — but the pattern soon became clear.
“Racism, I hate to say it,” Richburg said. “After they started to see I wasn’t going anywhere — I kept competing and continued to progress — it got to a point where it became obvious that I would score really low and have done all the things nicely. So, begrudgingly. Eventually I started to place and score in a way that was commensurate with how I performed, but it took a while.”
But what would it look like for the ice — both a literally and figuratively white space — to uplift Black performers and identities?
That question is at the core of Brownbody, a St. Paul-based skating artistry organization Richburg founded in 2007.
Richburg initially founded Brownbody in the model of a dance company, with a network of performers and its own repertory, mostly works choreographed by Richburg that blend Black history and cultural thought. In recent years, the organization has been most active through its Learn to Skate program, which offers free or low-cost skating lessons predominantly in St. Paul.
The next Learn to Skate session begins in the fall, and Brownbody is holding a community skate party at 11:30 a.m. March 22 at the Charles M. Schultz-Highland Arena (800 S. Snelling Ave.). Participation — and skate and helmet rental — is free. More info is at brownbody.org/learn-to-skate/.
Brownbody also partners with community organizations to bring Learn to Skate lessons to ice rinks around the metro. During the Winter Carnival, the organization hosts skating classes at Springboard for the Arts in Frogtown, and they’ve previously held community lessons and performances in Hopkins and Brooklyn Park.
“We really focus on creating an environment that makes skating safe and fun for (Black) communities, because it’s not a sport that always has been,” said Karyn Wilson, Brownbody’s Learn to Skate director and also the organization’s administration and operations coordinator. “And for that reason, a lot of people miss out on learning how to do it.”
Skating instructor Karyn Wilson, in background, monitors a student during a lesson on Dec. 18, 2021, at the TRIA Rink in downtown St. Paul. Wilson, the administration and operations coordinator for skating arts nonprofit Brownbody and a former competitive synchronized figure skater, runs the organization’s Learn to Skate program. (Alice Gebura / Brownbody)
Creating a community-focused environment that welcomes skaters of all ability levels, rather than just catering to children in the competitive figure skating pipeline, reflects Wilson’s own background in skating, too: She grew up in Washington, D.C., and briefly took skating lessons as a child but didn’t connect with it until returning to the sport as a high schooler.
And rather than entering the competition circuit, as Richburg had, Wilson joined synchronized skating teams, including at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. After college, Wilson returned home to D.C., but moved to St. Paul in 2021 specifically to work with Richburg at Brownbody.
“I don’t expect that all my students are going to want to become competitive figure skaters, but now they know it’s an option if they want to do it,” Wilson said. “So just being able to open up the skating world to people in that way — if you don’t know how to skate, none of those options would be available to you.”
‘Reclaiming the ice’
In the early 2000s, about two decades into Richburg’s competitive skating career, she injured her right knee and could no longer land complex jumps.
So while studying contemporary African-American literature at Carleton College and later in a master’s program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, she adapted her ice skills to dance theater, and trained with local arts leaders including Toni Pierce-Sands at TU Dance, Lou Bellamy at Penumbra and Dipankar Mukherjee at Pangea World Theater. Later, as an MFA student in dance and choreography at Temple University in Philadelphia, she studied techniques created by Kariamu Welsh, a renowned scholar and practitioner of African and African-diaspora dance.
Richburg’s work with Brownbody brings all these influences together.
Rohene Ward, Chrissy Lipscomb, Devinai Hobbs, Simeon Hanks and Deneane Richburg in a 2015 performance of “Quiet As It’s Kept.” (Jon Dahlin/Brownbody)
One piece, “Living Past (Re)Memory,” is based on the novel “Beloved,” by Toni Morrison. Another, 2017’s “Quiet As It’s Kept,” aims to draw parallels between post-Civil War Reconstruction era and modern racial justice efforts, with music co-created and performed by local singer Thomasina Petrus. One of Brownbody’s earliest productions, which Richburg initially choreographed and performed as her master’s thesis at Temple University, focused on Saartjie Baartman, a southern African woman who, in the early 1800s, was exhibited in England and France as a hypersexualized “freak show”-style attraction and whose story, in recent decades, has become important to contemporary Black feminist scholarship.
“To be able to bring her story onto the ice was really important, because I felt that I was reclaiming the ice as a place for really nuanced and honest discussion and affirmation of Blackness, which it had not been and, still, for the most part, is not,” Richburg said.
Thinking of Blackness not just as a racial identity but also as an embodied practice is central to Richburg and Wilson’s vision for skating education, both said. Following a dance style called Umfundalai, developed by Welsh, the Learn to Skate curriculum incorporates African and African-diasporic movement techniques. And in Brownbody’s apprentice program — which consists of skilled skaters, instructors and older students who have advanced out of the Learn to Skate curriculum — Richburg is focusing on West African dance styles like Manjani and Lamban.
The Black skating community in the U.S. is already somewhat small, Richburg said, and the skaters who are trained in the specific style of dance performance Brownbody’s work calls for are scattered around the country. Bringing them together to stage a full company show is quite expensive and requires more than a year of planning and rehearsal residencies, Richburg said. She is currently planning to stage the company’s next major show during the 2026–2027 season.
An eventual goal of hers, through the Learn to Skate and apprenticeship programs, would be to build up the community of local Black skaters who have the skills to perform Brownbody’s repertory. But for any style of skating, achieving a high level of proficiency requires dedicated, usually one-on-one coaching on up to a daily basis, which Richburg said Brownbody does not currently have the resources to provide.
What Brownbody can accomplish now, though, is to create opportunities for self-expression on the ice. Richburg said she frequently thinks back to a post-class survey comment from a parent who said her young daughter doesn’t conceive of skating as a predominantly white sport because she was introduced to it by Brownbody. Rather than seeing herself first as a Black girl in a white world, Richburg said, she can get to know herself as a full human being.
“For that to be her first point of contact, where blackness is normalized and is the standard, is going to shift her perception of herself as not being an anomaly, not being a counter-discourse, but being centered,” Richburg said. “And what that does to a person’s self-esteem, one’s concept of oneself, is huge.”
Related Articles
Made in St. Paul: Painter and wine educator Angela Kallsen finds the personalities of wine grape vines
Made in St. Paul: Printmaking to revitalize an endangered Alaskan language, by Deg Xit’an illustrator Gidinatiy Hartman
Made in St. Paul: Plastic trash becomes detail collaged portraits by ‘junk art junkie’ Sonja Dapper
Made in St. Paul: Gravity-defying rock sculptures by Eagan rock-balancer Peter Juhl
Leave a Reply