Today’s Black History Month spotlight is a discussion between AGMA Dancers Vice President Antuan Byers and AGMA Communications Coordinator Eldad (Eldee) Eyimife. In the interview, they discuss dance, organizing, and what it means to be a Black dancer in the labor movement today. This in-depth conversation uncovers the layers of Black labor history, civil liberation, and what that signifies for Antuan, tracing his journey from Dallas to Ailey II to the negotiating tables of the Met. Now, as a leader of his union, he looks toward a future where Black artists are anything but decoration.
Eldad (Eldee) Eyimife (EE): Thank you for meeting with me today, Antuan. I really appreciate you taking time out of your schedule. I know you’re very active in AGMA leadership and serve as an Officer. How long have you been involved with AGMA, and what has that been like?
Antuan Byers (AB): To be honest, I didn’t plan on still being at AGMA. I joined in 2016 as a student at the Ailey/Fordham BFA program, juggling an apprenticeship with Ailey II and my first contracts with the Metropolitan Opera during my senior year. For a long time, I was just a dues-paying member of AGMA. It wasn’t until I briefly stepped away and then felt the absence of that protection that I truly understood what it meant to be a dancer in a union. Since then, I’ve served on three Metropolitan Opera negotiating committees, co-founded the AGMA Black Caucus, joined the Board of Governors, and was elected Dancers Vice President on a slate called BLAAC (Black League of AGMA Artists for Change). BLAAC’s mandate was clear from the jump. But what that mandate pushed me toward goes deeper than representation. It’s pushed me toward a question I keep returning to: “What are Black artists, specifically dancers, uniquely positioned to do in the movement toward collective liberation?’
EE: You’ve had quite a history moving through different positions and growing in the Union, which is fantastic. Bringing in your heritage and Black lineage—how have the paths carved by Black artists and organizers before you shaped how you move through AGMA and institutions in general, like the Metropolitan Opera or Alvin Ailey?
AB: I describe my lineage as an organizer as being rooted in the Black radical tradition. I organize through a Black queer feminist abolitionist lens, and I say all of that intentionally, because every part of it informs how I show up in this union and in my work. We’re often added just as decoration or embellishment. I often say that we’re brought in to be ‘ornamental.’ But as artists, and especially as dancers with an embodied practice, we have a unique lens on how to move people, how to choreograph a movement, and what performing revolutionary acts can look like. My charge goes beyond securing better contracts or filing grievances to understanding that, as Black artists, we carry something in our bodies—a literacy of movement, presence, transforming space. We know how to make people feel something; that is power. And for too long, we’ve let others extract that power without recognizing it as our own.
My charge doesn’t come only from the dance world. I also look back on movement elders like Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, A. Philip Randolph, and Addie L. Wyatt, and more modern labor insurgencies, like Chris Smalls (Amazon Labor Union) and Stacey Davis Gates (Chicago Teachers Union), who’ve done a beautiful job of weaving labor and community organizing together. They are truly my inspirations as I carry on the complicated history of Black people and the labor movement. Unions didn’t always welcome us, and, frankly, our labor wasn’t always voluntary in the first place. So a strike, for example, is a very different ask for a Black artist already navigating pay inequities and systemic barriers. I hold that history seriously because if I say this union represents its members, I have to mean all of them.
EE: Can you talk more about the inequities and the additional risks Black artists take on?
AB: The very public Dallas Black Dance Theatre (DBDT) campaign really highlighted the added risk and uncertainty Black workers face. Dallas Black was a second home for me. I grew up there, trained there, went to the school, and really came into myself as a dancer within those walls. So when the artists voted to form a union with AGMA, it was personal. And when management chose to wholesale fire them, that was personal, too. For a while, I was holding two things at once: my love for that institution and my commitment to the dancers who make it what it is. Eventually, I realized those weren’t competing loyalties. Fighting for those dancers by securing justice and honoring their courage was the most loving thing anyone could do for DBDT. That fight became one of my proudest moments as an organizer because my dance life, my Black radical organizing, and my AGMA work came together in a way they don’t always.
EE: Let’s talk more about representation and responsibility, and what that means for you when you walk into a predominantly white space. How has representation turned into a sense of responsibility for you, especially around showing up for and educating the next or current generations?
AB: It would be easy to walk into a predominantly white institution and feel small, like you aren’t leaving a mark on history. Instead, I feel held because my people helped build this place. The Met at Lincoln Center opened with Leontyne Price as Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra, choreographed by Alvin Ailey. That history lives in these walls, and I carry it with me every time I step on that stage. I stand on their shoulders not just as a dancer, but as a full human being. I hope people can see the dancer, not just the dance or my race. I hope they see an artist, a worker, a human being. Dance is the vehicle that lets me communicate my humanity, but at the core, I’m just a person who happens to dance for a living.
That’s what I want a young Black person in the audience to see. Not decoration. Not embellishment. Full humanity.