Credit: David Anthony
Andrea Kelly was photographed exclusively for ESSENCE magazine March 15, 2007, at the Drake hotel in Chicago.
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In fact, the only time she really broke down was when a recent magazine article stated she had turned on her husband. A straight- up lie, she claims in response. “How could someone write something like that? I have children,’’ she says, inconsolable. “They are going to grow up someday and read this. I would never do anything to hurt their father. We have a bond that we will have for the rest of our lives because we have children.’’
As she sits down to talk one spring afternoon, there are myths she yearns to dispel, starting with what it’s like to be the spouse of a workaholic celebrity. It’s not a life of nannies and mimosas. “I was there as Robert was evolving,” she says, “but most people don’t realize that as a celebrity’s wife, you make a lot of sacrifices. You have to understand there are birthday parties he’s missing; there are recitals that you have to go to by yourself.”
She knows that her dancing has gone unnoticed and that occasionally others have hijacked her work. After she choreographed a Matrix-like move in a music video four years ago, Andrea couldn’t turn on BET without seeing the step. “I actually taught my dancers to do it in half time. So they’re doing it in slow motion. Later, I turn on BET, Ciara’s doing it in her video. I was like, ‘There’s that bitch,’ ’’ she recalls joking to her assistant.
But she’s sick of not receiving the proper recognition. “There’s so much more to me,” Andrea notes, “but to deal with people every day who just look at you like, well, isn’t that cute, R. Kelly’s wife. It’s like, boy, oh boy, if you only knew, you’d be a little more quick to hold your tongue, if you knew what it took to be in that position,” she says, now wiping away tears.“I would hope people would take away from this that you can’t just look at a woman in my position and judge her because of things that you perceive in a video or stuff you hear on the street.”
SEX, LIES AND THAT VIDEO
R. Kelly is a darling in the Windy City, an inventive songwriter and one of the most successful R&B performers of all time, composing and arranging for superstars like Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones. Despite the child pornography charges, he continues to masterfully craft remixes and has released two multiplatinum solo albums since the indictments.
A multi–Grammy Award winner with six multiplatinum albums, he rules the radio airwaves as if he were an R&B autocrat. His “Step in the Name of Love” songs endear him to Chicagoans for putting their “steppin’ ” music on the national radar. But Kelly’s travails have been soapier than his “ghetto opera” song series, “Trapped in the Closet.”
With the trial recently postponed again, and despite his mounting legal problems, he remains as successful as ever, with a new album that dropped in late May. Ironically, while Kelly drips sex and scandal, his wife is simultaneously trying to school little Black girls. Follow your dream, she tells them, but remember, beautiful doesn’t mean naked. Andrea, who volunteers at a Chicago public high school as a dance instructor, warns girls who dream of being in videos to beware of the web of perilous men: “If you’re coming to a video, and you know that you’re there to dance and someone’s like, ‘Yo, when this video shoot is over, why don’t you come holler at my boy? He’s at the hotel.’ But there’s no cameraman at the hotel. So that’s when you compromise—the first time you say ‘Okay.’ You allowed him to disrespect you, so don’t get upset then when you get to the hotel and things go left on you.”
Through the years, she has ruminated over these issues and over music videos, even ones she’s in, seeing the images as contributing to the objectification of Black women. Back in 1994 Andrea thought the R. Kelly video “Summer Bunnies,” in which she performed, was cutting-edge. Today she says you couldn’t pay her enough to do those same moves again, to wear those booty shorts and swimsuits. But she was in her early twenties back then and wasn’t thinking about her responsibility to those who came after her. Now she does.
Last year Andrea founded Dream Tu Dance Productions. Her goal is to open a dance academy on Chicago’s South Side. She wants a place for Black girls to learn the styles of dance luminaries like Alvin Ailey, Bob Fosse and Martha Graham. “I’ve become more and more conscious,” she says. “In this business, I know you’re going to have to make compromises, but when you start to compromise yourself, you’re getting so far away from your dream that you’re going to look up one day and find you’re not doing what you started out to do. You’ll be like, Who is this person in the mirror?”
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