Choreographer D. Patton White’s 11 Good Things

In this series, ArtsATL asks a member of the Atlanta arts community to share 11 things on their mind. We hope you enjoy getting to know these people better.

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D. Patton White is artistic and administrative director of Beacon Dance. He has studied a variety of dance techniques, including modern, post-modern, ballet, tap, flamenco and African and has choreographed more than 40 pieces for a variety of settings, including community-based civic projects for both the young and the elderly, regional pre-professional youth ensembles and professional dance and theater companies. He has taught at Emory University since 2004. In 2024, he choreographed a new work for the Finster Fest in Summerville, Georgia.

Here, in no particular order, are his 11 good things: 

1. Karen Carpenter’s voice. As a young teenager, I was obsessed by The Carpenters, proudly proclaiming my nerdiness in my adoration of their music. It boiled down to the purity of Karen’s voice and how it glazed my soul.

2. Richard Neutra’s architecture. I first became aware of Neutra’s work through the photos of Julius Shulman. I am in awe of how he arranged space and form, and I see his art almost as a setting for the dances that could potentially live in them.

3. The First Existentialist Congregation of Atlanta (and existentialism in general). As a philosophy and psychology double major at Emory, I gravitated toward the “we make our lives through the choices we make moment to moment” ethos of existentialism and the freedom and responsibility that go hand-in-hand with it. This philosophically-based spiritual community has nurtured my soul since I joined in 2000.

4. Naps. What’s not to love about naps?

5. Network of friends. Friends support. Friends hold us to account. Friends help you keep it real.

6. Roquefort cheese. I can still remember buying Roquefort cheese and French champagne to celebrate turning 21 when I lived in a stone house on Coventry Road in Decatur, the taste of the briny cheese lingering on my tongue. Yum!

7. Thrift stores. When my parents introduced me to thrift stores in my teens, I wanted no part of it. Now I can’t get enough of them. They are the best way to learn about a community when I travel around the United States and the world.

8. National parks. This past summer, after turning the requisite 62, I bought my lifetime pass to the U.S. National Park System, which I had been looking forward to for some time. I love every aspect of the national parks, from their individual beauty to the historical architecture that suggests when they joined the system.

9. The United States Constitution. As a political animal, I couldn’t overlook this document, as both a philosophy and set of guiding principles allowing us the freedoms that enable us to live the lives we are living.

10. Forsythia. Each spring I look forward to these plans in particular. The bright yellow blossoms and wild, linear stems are at once organized and disorganized — as long as they have not been unfortunately pruned.

11. Family (however one defines it). I have been most fortunate to have an ever-expanding family: My original nuclear family (parents and siblings), my chosen family of friends and now a widening biological family of offspring that brings me more joy than I thought possible.