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The young man may be bagging groceries now, but a far different occupation lies ahead. His electric dance style has already brought him opportunities rare for an artist his age.
By MARINA BROWN
© St. Petersburg Times, published June 25, 2001
ST. PETERSBURG -- The Sunday afternoon crowd at the Palladium Theater was a bustle of beaming parents and grandparents clutching daisy bouquets for talented young women.
They expected to cheer a spring showcase of pretty teenage dancers filled with energy and verve, which they did.
But they hadn't planned on being hit with a thunderbolt.
In the quiet after intermission, with programs still softly rustling, the curtain rose. A gasp went up as 19-year-old Rikki McKinney burst onto the stage.
To the husky croon of Donny Hathaway's Song for You, the tall, powerfully muscled young man arched his body in languid tension. Then he curled his 6-foot-2 body, only to release in an explosion of tremendous, suspended jumps. Quietly, never rushing, he let the emotion of the melancholy piece,Lament, flow through him and into the audience.
The mesmerized crowd rose, cheering the arrival of an artist.
Nobody in the audience that day would have been surprised to hear of McKinney's accomplishments: Summers dancing with the prestigious Alvin Ailey Dance Company school. Serving as president of his high school senior class. Fashion modeling. TV pilots. Five college scholarship offers.
What the audience had no way of seeing were the struggles -- and the triumphs -- that McKinney and his family went through on the way to creating an artist.
Flashback to 1993. McKinney was 10 years old, a skinny fourth-grader at Pinellas Park Elementary School who was keeping a secret.
An alert teacher had come across his school journal entry. In it, McKinney had confided that he was being sexually abused by two acquaintances.
His father was seriously ill with lupus. His mother seemed to be working constantly, struggling to hold the family together. McKinney didn't want to burden his parents any further. So he confided to his journal that he was thinking of killing himself.
With his teacher's encouragement, he began to talk to a school psychologist. With his mother's help, he began to understand that he wasn't alone.
He found more support at Faith Memorial Missionary Baptist Church, which he attended with his family. He loved to sing -- and to move. Sundays were filled with praise and rejoicing and putting all that emotion into music and gospel rhythm.
With his naturally extroverted personality emerging, he began to get parts in school plays. Soon he was focusing on voice and acting at John Hopkins Middle School for the Performing Arts.
"No matter what was going on in my life," he recalls, "theater has always embraced me."
McKinney loved MTV and regularly was knocking over the lamps as he danced around the living room, but he'd never been near a dance studio. He was 13, middle age by dance standards, when Paulette Johnson, a dance teacher at John Hopkins, suggested he try a jazz class.
He loved jazz, but ballet felt totally alien. He had never seen dancers wearing tights or perched on their toes.
Still, McKinney was game. He took ballet in tights, but with a pair of Nike boxer shorts on top for "modesty's sake." He even persuaded some of his basketball buddies to join the class.
But it was McKinney whom teachers stepped in to watch from the back of the room. Supple, strong and with a bounding joy when he danced, he joined Chuck Davis' African American Dance Ensemble and was chosen for the role of Scarecrow in the Hopkins production of The Wiz.
He still recalls his excitement the day of the first performance at the Mahaffey Theater, anticipation tinged with sadness that his parents -- his father now was gravely ill -- weren't in the audience.
"All the other kids' parents were there, and I was feeling kind of bad until they said I had a call from my mom. I figured she was going to wish me luck. But all she said was, 'I'm sorry to tell you this, but your father just died.' "
McKinney says he didn't want to perform that night, didn't know how he could.
"Your father may not be out front, but he's going to be watching you -- and you'd better be good," Davis told him. And so he went on.
"It was like I was levitated. It sounds weird, but it was like all the molecules of my body just kind of flowed into everyone in the audience -- like we were all one," he says.
After that night, McKinney's life took a new direction. He received a scholarship to the Judith Lee Johnson School of Dance in St. Petersburg. He was accepted into the dance program at the Pinellas County Center for the Arts at Gibbs High School.
When auditions were held for the Alvin Ailey company's summer program in New York after his freshman year, he was offered a chance to go for a full scholarship there. Shortly after, he was cast in a leading role in the PCCA's production of Carmina Burana.
And his mother was pulling her family back together. Today, Gernita Carson works full time at the Pediatric Health Alliance as a medical assistant.
That first year, McKinney didn't go to the Ailey program. His family needed the money he made from his job at Publix. But, he says, "with the help of church and friends, and my mother's stretched credit card, I've gone every year since."
Judith Jamison, the diva from the Ailey company, says McKinney was a standout in the program. She calls him "sublimely talented."
McKinney was chosen last summer from 750 auditioning dancers for an Ailey Fellowship and was the only student selected to dance a role in Ailey's Memoria with the main company. Jamison had encouraged him to stay for the fall teaching session with the hint that a place in Ailey's company would follow.
While he was in New York, a fashion photographer from L'Uomo Vogue, the Italian Vogue, spotted him. The result was McKinney in a 14-page spread doing leaps and twists in Armani and Versace suits. He took a hip-hop audition, "just for fun," with P/Funk at the Broadway Dance Center. There an MTV choreographer, Bev B., couldn't stop shouting, "Go, Southern boy!"
She offered him a full scholarship to the Broadway Dance Center, housing and the opportunity to dance in videos for Warner Records and Motown Music.
The opportunities have been wonderful, but McKinney says he wants more.
"My deepest goal is to become a true artist. And I know I'm going to need to be educated to have something to say to an audience."
And so he came back to St. Petersburg. Recently he finished two TV pilots in Orlando in dancing roles.
This spring, he was senior class president at Gibbs High School, where he carried a 3.3 average. He was hoping to be voted prom king but was pleased to come in second.
He has received five full scholarships to universities, including the Boston Conservatory, North Carolina School for the Arts and Fordham. But he has decided to attend the Philadelphia University of the Arts: It will allow him access to New York, yet is far enough away for him to stay focused on his studies.
He'll spend this summer on a full modern dance scholarship at renowned Jacob's Pillow in Massachusetts.
And what about 10 years from now? McKinney laughs out loud, but answers readily.
"In 10 years, I'd like to be guest starring with Alvin Ailey, just finishing a movie based on a guy like me and enrolling in an MBA program so I can run a dance company and school for kids like the one I used to be."
But on this day, McKinney has to hurry. He has to catch a city bus to his job at Publix. "Life is good," he says, "I even like bagging groceries!"