Young Changemaker Series: Quincy Wilson of Variation En Hue
Last month, Brown Girls Do Ballet kicked off the Young Changemaker Series to highlight ballerinas of color across the country who are actively committed to spreading resources and positivity throughout the dance community. The Young Changemaker Series was inspired by a recent interview, where the Ava Holloway and Kennedy George Scholarship for Change was launched by two young ballerinas.
Other Brown Girls Do Ballet initiatives, such as the Supply Closet and the Pointe Shoe Program, were also centered around ideas shared by youth who are affiliated with our organization. The Young Changemaker Series will be used to introduce and promote more youth-led projects of similar nature - those that are intended to benefit Black and Brown ballerinas.
For the first interview of the series, Brown Girls Do Ballet founder TaKiyah Wallace was accompanied by her daughter, Charlie, to chat with Quincy Wilson about her diverse dancewear project, Variation En Hue.
Photo: @variationenhue on Instagram
Quincy, who is 15-years-old, was born in Massachusetts. She moved to Alabama at the age of 3, which is also when she started dancing. Recently, she and her mother collaborated with her dance studio, Birmingham Dance Theater, to collect unused costumes and supplies for donation to Brown Girls Do Ballet’s Supply Closet.
They quickly gained the desire to expand their efforts of providing costumes and dancewear to ballerinas in need but were eager to find a unique way to do so.
Throughout her several years of dancing, Quincy has been required to wear tights for classes or performances that do not match her skin tone and was teased in high school when her brown-colored tights were considered “weird” and unorthodox. Once Quincy began to notice that the donated costumes she and her mother received mainly consisted of suntan or pale-colored tights, she knew their unique project would be geared toward ballerinas of color.
“We wanted to come up with a project to help girls feel more comfortable in their skin and to give them brown and other shades of tights that would fit their skin,” Quincy explained.
About a week before Quincy reached out to Brown Girls Do Ballet, TaKiyah was completing a dance supply drop off to a nearby studio in need. All of the tights and shoes she was donating were pink, and the studio informed her that their dancers were actually in need of skin-toned tights and shoes. TaKiyah had to return to the Brown Girls Do Ballet supply closet to attempt to stock up on dance supplies of various shades.
As Quincy’s desire to provide costumes and dancewear to ballerinas across the nation melded with TaKiyah’s efforts to get more shades of dancewear to dancers of color, Variation En Hue was born!
Photo: Quincy picking up donations - @variationenhue on Instagram
The Variation En Hue project is dedicated to supplying various shades of skin-toned tights, shoes, or other dancewear to dancers of color across the country. There is a P.O. box where donations can be shipped, and Quincy will facilitate donations, inventory maintenance, and delivery to studios in need. During her interview, Quincy described the volunteer opportunities available, such as helping with packaging and quality control.
Programs like Variation en Hue continue to showcase the positive impact we can make on our communities through dance.
“I think dance is a language,” Quincy said when TaKiyah and Charlie asked her how she uses dance to create change. “It’s a very interesting language for people to really speak to each other and to convey a message through your emotions and your dancing. So I would say I use dance to create change by just expressing myself and expressing a message that’s bigger than me to a number of people.”
Through her efforts with Variation En Hue and Brown Girls Do Ballet, the message Quincy is expressing is clear: embrace self-love and self-expression.
“My skin color is not anything more than a beautiful shade that I am, and I want other girls my age to feel the same and to know someone’s looking out for them,” she said.
To help Variation En Hue with donations or to volunteer your time, you can follow the project on Instagram for the latest updates. To learn more about Variation En Hue, visit our webpage. To watch the full interview with Quincy on Instagram, click here.