Aleta Hayes, through her own lens

Nothing about Aleta Hayes is stagnant, least of all the way she gives an interview.

Before we get started, the professor-choreographer-dancer-singer-actor informs me that she has a few things to do at 185 Nassau before the office closes and asks if I would mind talking as we walk and completing the interview there. Why not?

As she strides toward Washington Road from Wilcox, where she teaches FRS 157: "Shall We Dance?" Social Dance and Social Life in 20th-Century America, she talks about her teaching philosophy — encourage students to innovate and defend ideas, not regurgitate them — and her background as a dancer and choreographer.

"I'm not good at being who other people want me to be," she says. "For instance, I don't dance the way other people want me to dance, and I'm not happy doing just one thing. That's why I act and sing in addition to dancing. I don't fit easily into one box."

When I ask her to describe her view of the role of African-American dance in the African-American aesthetic, she talks about African rhythm and about the extensive African-American influence on social dance in America.

Occasionally she stops abruptly in the middle of the sidewalk to emphasize a point. As we charge up Washington Road, I am desperately wishing I could write down everything she says and thinking that this is certainly not a woman I would dare put in any box.

Hair piled high above her expressive features, she wears a long eggplant-colored coat (velour, maybe?) with a huge plush collar, black pants, a long, trailing scarf and black and orange leather shoes. She pulls it off flawlessly.

Her personality is no less bold or engaging. When we arrive at the 185 office, she crosses back and forth between her mailbox, the copy and fax machines and a bag of extra-crunchy Tostitos at a dizzying pace.

As she goes, she animatedly educates Charlotte, an office administrator, and me about the role of blacks in the early 20th-century Parisian arts scene, a topic that is the subject of AAS 331/COM 331: Black Paris, the class she will teach next semester.

Hayes stresses that she wants the seminar to have a strong creative element and that she doesn't want to look at blacks in Paris "in a vacuum. You can't look at anyone in a vacuum." Rather, she would like to focus on the interaction between black artists and the Parisian community as a whole, particularly artists of other ethnic backgrounds — as she puts it, "what drew them to Paris in the first place, and what about them and their art appealed to the white people in Paris."

I take this opportunity to ask her about her place at Princeton as an African-American artist and intellectual in a predominantly white community. "I like it here" is her immediate response. She tells me she finds it "stimulating," that she feels she's learning as much as she's teaching. "I get to ask interesting questions. My personal mandate is to basically educate myself through meeting people from all different backgrounds and cultures. So I feel like I belong here," she says.

Hayes, who graduated with a bachelor's degree in drama from Stanford in 1991 and earned her master's in dance choreography from New York University in 1993, joined the Princeton Theatre and Dance Department faculty in 1995 as a guest instructor invited by department head Ze'eva Cohen. She then became a full time instructor and was later asked by Nell Painter, chair of the African-American studies program, to teach African-American studies as well.

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Hayes seems proud of her accomplishments, but is effusive in her praise of Cohen and Painter, both of whom she describes as her "mentors." She wants to be sure this article will mention their essential role in her success and her development.

Hayes admits that she has encountered individuals here and elsewhere who assume that because she is a woman or an artist, particularly a dancer, or a black person or any combination of the above that she is not an intellectual.

"Look how I handle that," she tells me. "Look at me. I just drop Stanford on them so fast" — she throws her pencil against the floor — "just like that. Sometimes I need to use my degree as a passport." She retrieves the pencil and tells me her primary goal in all her work is to get individuals to question their assumptions. "My thing is to open people up."

I ask what she thinks of race relations at Princeton. Does she think African-American students are segregated on this campus? "Yes, but I think the segregation here just reflects segregation in society," she replies.

Hayes says she thinks the situation would improve if people realized the influence other races have had on their lives. Essentially, blacks must realize that part of the way they see the world is influenced by their past interaction with whites, and whites need to understand how much of the world they know is a result of the influence of African-American culture.

"It's all about your lens. Everyone has one — it's what about our experience determines the way we see the world. We have to acknowledge it," she says.

In Hayes' opinion, race relations at Princeton will improve "when the student who's not black, who's not the artist, the dancer, who's not a woman starts to talk about that lens and says, 'Yes, it does exist.' "

When a member of the minority talks about prejudice, Hayes says, that person is more easily tuned out than the member of the traditional white male majority who calls attention to the prejudices and segregation on campus.

"Hopefully more questions are being asked about it," she says, and reminds me that "it's not just a black and white issue," noting the need to discuss the role of other minorities in the Princeton community. If non-minority students start asking the right questions about race relations on this campus, Hayes tells me, "that's where people have the possibility of really getting educated."

And isn't that what we're all here for anyway?