Note: This article was first published in Stance on Dance’s spring/summer 2024 print issue. To learn more, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.

The conversations about accessibility in higher education dance programs, born from the swift onset of the pandemic lockdown, seem to have faded as quickly as they began. Some of these ground level conversations resulted in great first moves toward increased disability awareness and accessibility measures for both students and audience members. Unfortunately, except for small pockets where this work was already in motion, the disability work in higher education dance training has largely ended there: great first moves.

My other disabled colleagues and I continue to receive the same defensive reaction when engaging in access work: “We don’t have any disabled students.” This excuse is nearly identical to the decades-long excuse for not engaging in anti-racism work: “We don’t have any students of color.” At best, this excuse demonstrates a limited understanding of disability that extends only to “perceptible” disabilities* (e.g. mobility devices or neurodivergence that is not “masked”), which erases those with “less perceptible” disabilities, the majority of disabled folks. This excuse communicates an absolution of responsibility and a deprioritization and invisibilization of disabled and other marginalized folks.

Disabled dancers are very much present, and as I mentioned, some great first moves have taken place toward greater accessibility in our collegiate dance programs. Let us celebrate those first moves, examine their shortcomings, and continue this urgently needed work.

Vanessa Hernández Cruz and CSULB Dance students in Tales 11.20.19 (2019) by Marjani Forté-Saunders, guest artist, California State University, Long Beach. Costuming by Kelsey Vidic; photography by Gregory R.R. Crosby. Photo courtesy of Vanessa Hernández Cruz. Image Description: A photo of Vanessa on stage with her walker named Pluto. She is wearing all black and has a white mesh head piece that looks like an abstract Venus fly trap. Her walker has a costume on that is a white fabric looped around the purple metal parts of her walker. In the background, there are six dancers in a wide stance leaning back.

Disabled Dancers Seek Dance Training

In the past half decade or so, more and more openly disabled-identifying dancers continue to dance through US collegiate dance programs. Some of these disabled dancers have “perceptible” disabilities, and more dancers have begun claiming their disability identity around disabilities that are sometimes “less perceptible.”

Just like the increased enrollment of dancers of color in collegiate dance programs, the increase and heightened visibility of disabled dance students is a very good thing and adds to the increased diversity of the field. However, diversity by itself is neither inclusion nor equity. Some disabled dance students have shared their experiences of being prevented from enrolling in various movement technique courses due to inadequate accessibility measures, feeling ignored and invisibilized by instructors in their classes, and needing to take drastic measures such as peer-supported petitions and interventions to have their disability-related needs taken seriously by faculty members.

Relatedly, some disabled dance students also share that they perceive their quality of dance training to be less than that of their non-disabled peers. The necessity of constant self-advocacy, especially in environments that may not be receptive to accounts of non-normative experiences, is an expenditure that diverts already-limited capacity from the strain of interpreting multisensory input, investigating new movement pathways, and forging new body-mind connections.

Additionally, some disabled dance students share that their instructors feel less invested in them than their non-disabled peers. Reasons include inadequate knowledge to work with them and their specific disabilities, or the mistaken and condescending belief that a professional dance career is not viable for them because of their disability. Whether conscious or not, these reasons reflect an internalized ableism that dehumanizes those around us, whether disabled or not.

Orli Resnik, Martin Quintana, Ronan Helvey, and Zera Adame in Rituals, Routines, and Rain (2023) by Martin Quintana in collaboration with Orli Resnik, undergraduate students, University of New Mexico. Photo courtesy of Martin Quintana. Image Description: Orli supports Zera, who is hanging upside down from Orli’s wheelchair, legs up and dangling in the air. Martin and Ronan tilt Orli on opposite sides. Behind them is a dark blue backdrop.

Increasing Accessibility in Community Interactions

In 2022, I was brought on as the inaugural concert accessibility coordinator for a leading US collegiate dance program at a large public university. This initiative continued the years-long accessibility work done by one of my disabled colleagues while they were a student there. My primary responsibility was training and supervising undergraduate dance students in the creation of audio description tracks toward increased audience accessibility for their mainstage concert productions. To my and other disabled colleagues’ knowledge, this initiative was unparalleled in US collegiate dance programs — an exciting win!

My unpaid work lasted one school year before it was quietly and unceremoniously discontinued. Although extremely disappointing, I was admittedly a little relieved to be relieved of this responsibility. My sense was that the students were more interested in fulfilling their dance production requirement than investing in the pursuit of this accessibility work.

Put another way, it felt like the students did not understand the urgent need for access work in the context of disability and ableism. How could they when my only interactions with them were a two-hour introductory workshop on disability and audio description followed by script feedback exchanges through email?

The exhausted pessimist in me is inclined to consider this undertaking a failure. As a disabled educator and activist, I do not feel I impacted the students in any lasting manner. I also do not know who in the disabled community this access work reached, if any. But my inner facilitator holds space for myself by framing this short-lived work as a prototype. This experience allowed me to workshop ideas and modifications for a semester-long audio description course I had imagined for a university setting.

A glimmer of hope is found at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts, Department of Dance. Its undergraduate course offerings include Adaptive Movement through Dance, which focuses on working with “differently abled individuals who require adaptive movement and [providing] appropriate movement practices.” MGSA also houses the Integrated Dance Collaboratory, which produces “Choreo Lab” choreographic incubators for disabled dance artists, most recently for Madeline Maxine Gorman in January 2024.

This pioneering disability-focused progress, especially at Rutgers, is largely unprecedented and cause for celebration, a jumping board for continued work. However, a 10-hour production unit, single pedagogy course, or choreographic incubator not tied to the curriculum can be viewed as equivalent to mere master class or elective offerings, ultimately still communicating disability as tangential. And yes, it is hauntingly similar to the historical trajectory of race-oriented work and marginalized dance forms in our collegiate programs. Including disabled people is largely treated as decorative — perhaps nice to have, but unnecessary and extra.

University of California, Irvine students and guest artists in The world was ending, so they danced, and they were free (2023), directed by Bradford Chin. Lighting design by Jimmy Balistreri; costume design by Kaylynn Sutton; set design by Bradford Chin and Bill Kingsbury. Photo courtesy of Bradford Chin. Image Description: On a darkened stage, eight dancers bottleneck in a thin pathway of light that leads to a dim, fiery red portal blocked by a chain link fence. Six of the dancers grasp at each other in counterbalances while Vanessa collapses over her rollator walker with David slowly pacing around her. Outside the lit pathway, another dancer stands with her foot on the motionless body of a tenth dancer laying at her feet. All of the dancers wear shapeless brown coverings that obscure their bodies and their colorful, patterned tunics.

Humanizing Paradigmatic Shifts for Radical Change

There is a lot of work to do toward realizing far greater numbers of disabled dancers in our spaces, but sometimes I feel that focusing only on whether disabled dancers are present or absent from a space is merely focusing on a symptom rather than a root cause. Disabled dancers are already here and have always been here. To me, the deeper issue is whether the space is safe to disclose and operate openly with a disability identity.

During the 2022-2023 cycle on the academic job market, I was the only one masked at all my several final round campus visits. Every time I entered a space with my mask, I felt like the energy shifted such that I did not feel safe to disclose my disability identity. I later learned that for one particular visit, the students were very interested in DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) but did not feel that disability-centered work counted as DEI. How am I — or any disabled person — supposed to operate in an environment where my marginalization and humanity are not recognized?

The students’ unfortunately common sentiment positions disability as an individual condition, rather than an opportunity for community care or a product of how our structures and practices are constructed. Recall that sometimes, instructors may not view a professional dance career as viable for a student based on their disability. As further illustration, when a trained disabled dancer auditioned for a dance major program, the internal faculty deliberation included whether the disabled dancer could complete the program’s technique requirements. These mistaken beliefs communicate that the issue is disabled students’ “inability” to participate, but the actual barrier is the instructor’s inability to include them.

Institutions of higher education are heralded as sites of learning and innovation. Our collegiate dance programs are tasked with preparing their students in response to the current state of the field, but they also have the power and responsibility to envision a different future for the next generation of arts workers. To maintain the status quo because “that’s the way it is” is a cop-out that fails all our students, renders our programs the opposite of cutting-edge, and cheapens our art form; dance may as well be dead with that uncreative attitude.

A slightly better-but-still-not-good scenario is when an instructor or program gives the excuse that they are not properly trained to work with a student and their disability. On the surface, this excuse can be a recognition of limitation or an attempt to mitigate potential harm. However, the reality is that this response is rarely followed by actions toward further education and training. In essence, rather than a hard “no,” the disabled student is strung along and left in limbo, waiting indefinitely. As disabled dance artist and activist Vanessa Hernández Cruz puts it, “We [disabled folks] don’t have time to wait.” Cruz is correct; disabled folks experience higher mortality rates and a decreased life expectancy of at least 10 years compared to non-disabled folks.

Ultimately, that slightly better-but-not excuse still leans into the ableist dehumanization of disabled students. There is no singular correct way to work with our collection of students; the same is true for our disabled students. What is preventing us from engaging with our disabled students as partners in the learning process? Are we so omnipotent and omniscient that we have nothing left to learn?

Vanessa Hernández Cruz and walker Pluto, guest artists, in The world was ending, so they danced, and they were free (2023), directed by Bradford Chin, University of California, Irvine. Lighting design by Jimmy Balistreri; costume design by Kaylynn Sutton; set design by Bradford Chin and Bill Kingsbury. Photo courtesy of Bradford Chin. Image Description: Vanessa and her walker Pluto are silhouetted as they travel away from the viewer and through a narrow portal of fiery sunlight at the back of the stage, under a large tapestry print of Petrona Viera’s Recreo (c. 1924) displaying a hopeful vision of children dancing through and around each other in the lush green grass.

Closing

What our programs perpetuate impacts the professional field and informs how non-dance folks understand both dance and disability. In a competition presentation of my disability-centered research, a non-dance faculty member commented, “I am not sure that people are as narrow-minded about dance as you think. I suggest visiting some community dance classes and see the fun people are having.”

The reality is that this narrow-mindedness does exist—rampantly. Across the board, our collegiate training programs position community dance contexts as less than “professional” dance and subsequently relegate disability to these “less than” contexts. Disability’s rare appearance in our programs often revolves around “teaching to”—rather than “learning from” or “creating with”—disabled folks. There is no training pipeline into professional dance careers for disabled dancers.

Simultaneously, our programs love to celebrate disability artistry (e.g. Kinetic Light or AXIS Dance Company). However, without critically interrogating the accessibility barriers in our program offerings, the celebration is merely that of exceptionalism: that you, the disabled artist, were able to “succeed” despite the barriers that programs like mine continue to reinforce. That you are a heart-warming inspiration, rather than a call to action.

It is high time to ditch the poor excuse that disabled dancers are not present. Instead, ask why disabled dancers are absent and what will be done to remedy those barriers and foster safer spaces for everyone involved.

If a student is made to feel less than their peers on account of their disability, the space is not safe. If a disabled student’s access needs are not taken seriously or acted upon, the space is not safe. So many of the equity issues in our dance programs are issues of access: how we access information, each other, ourselves. An accessibility mindset benefits everyone regardless of non/disability identity.

Just like with other equity work, if the space is not safe for disabled folks, it should come as no surprise when disabled folks leave and other disabled folks subsequently do not replace them. Disabled folks cannot be expected to suddenly show up en masse to a historically unsafe space just because of one act of goodwill. Building trust and recognition toward undoing decades of harm requires time, patience, and consistency.

Do the work, and disabled folks will come. In fact, we are already here, and the time to begin this work was yesterday.

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Bradford Chin (he/they) is a disabled dance artist, DEIJ/accessibility consultant, and audio describer for dance based in Chicago and San Francisco. A former dancer with AXIS Dance Company, they received their MFA in Dance from the University of California, Irvine, and their BFA in Dance from California State University, Long Beach.

*I feel I must acknowledge that the current dominant language to describe disabilities is “visible” and “invisible.” My chosen verbiage — perceptible/less perceptible — is not an attempt to prescribe new language; rather, it is an attempt to share my ongoing personal contemplations on the symbolism of language, the construction of ableism and disability, and their intersectional relationship to other forms of power and identity. Are “invisible” disabilities invisible to everyone, or merely less perceptible to those with a reduced sensitivity to a given disability? Who has the power to dictate what is “visible” or “invisible” especially regarding lived experience? In what ways does the “visible/invisible” binary privilege sight, reinforcing the power dynamic that disadvantages folks who are blind or low-vision?

The post The Urgency of Accessibility in Higher Education Dance Training appeared first on Stance on Dance.

BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT

Diane Duggan is a New York City-based psychologist, dance/movement therapist, and dance educator who has worked with children and youth with disabilities since 1973. She ran a dance program for adolescents with emotional and learning disorders in the South Bronx for 21 years, and has taught in the NYU Dance Education MA program since 1994. She also has taught in the 92nd Street Y Dance Education Laboratory (DEL) and Dance Therapy programs since 2006. Here, she shares highlights from her long career as well as her thoughts on how dance therapy and dance education support each other, how dance for students with disabilities has changed over the decades, and what she sees a dance education looking like in the future.

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Can you share how you became a dance therapist and educator, as well as some highlights from your career?

When I was a little girl I was always dancing, but I had no idea that people could take dance lessons. In Inwood, my neighborhood in northern Manhattan, I didn’t know anyone taking dance lessons. My parents encouraged my interest and bought me a little book about ballet, so I was always doing port de bras and making the body shapes I saw in the book. By the time I took ballet at age 12, it was already in my soul and body from the book.

In college, I started as a psych major, but they were running rats and I wasn’t into that, so I switched to literature because I felt that related more to what people were about. After a year in the Experimental College, I did two years’ worth of a French major. It was satisfying but didn’t prepare me for a job. My first job was microfilming documents for the NYC Housing Authority. I knew I needed a better job, so I went to NY State Unemployment. The woman in charge told me I didn’t belong there. But before I left, she asked me, “What do you love to do?” She did not ask me what I wanted to be. She asked me what I loved to do. I was very naïve, so I told her I love to dance and to help people. And she simply said, “Dance therapy.” I didn’t know what that was, but she told me there was a dance therapist at Bellevue.  Those were the days of the phone book, before the internet, and I found Lee Strauss’s number at the hospital. She told me about the dance therapy master’s program at Hunter College. I applied and got in the first year of the program. It changed my life. Elissa White and Claire Schmais were a phenomenal team and great teachers. I also met and learned from Irmgard Bartenieff. It’s serendipity that the woman at the NY State Unemployment knew of dance therapy, which was not something I had heard of. I’m so grateful that she took the time to ask me such an important question.

After graduation my peers got jobs at psychiatric institutions, but my first job was at Queens State School, which was for children and youth with severe multiple disabilities, both intellectual and physical. I remember standing there in 1973 with my record player as the children came in on carts, unable to lift their heads. Inside, I was afraid and didn’t know what I was going to do. I allied myself with the physical therapists and got a lot of staff development training in Neurodevelopmental Therapy.

What seemed at the time like a crisis turned out to be a major opportunity. I learned a tremendous amount about the nervous system, motor development and therapy. The children I was working with had very little voluntary movement, so I learned from the physical therapists how to hold them so they were stabilized and could move voluntarily as much as possible, as well as how to elicit balance reactions to further brain and motor development.

That learning has been very helpful in my work with children and young people with disabilities over the years. However, the main thing I learned there is that people can grow no matter how serious and pervasive their disabilities are. We had one youngster who was 15 years old and weighed 19 lbs. He couldn’t move or even lift his head, nor could he see or hear. Johnny didn’t show any voluntary movement, but a colleague connected with him by making a little pfwtt sound near his ear. Johnny smiled every time she did it. We were all amazed and deeply gratified by his reaction. Through her persistence and caring, we were able to connect with him.

In my dance therapy groups, I started off with recorded music but quickly switched to singing, which related more to the here and now. I don’t have a good voice, but I felt free with the children. I made up songs all the time, and that really engaged them, along with the movement. It turned into a wonderful program focused on gross motor development, socialization, and language development, especially on the receptive level.

I went to work at the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) and began working with teenagers who were classified as neurologically impaired/emotionally handicapped. I immediately saw that the youngsters who were classified as emotionally disturbed weren’t crazy. I saw how capable they were. They couldn’t read despite being in high school, but I saw a lot of strength in them. Not every teacher felt that way. I actually heard a staff member call one young man a vegetable because he was very quiet. I kept away from those kinds of teachers. I figured out that the best way to be effective was to close my door and do my own thing.

I tried circle dancing first, and the young people asked me, “Why are we doing this?” I told them something about being together and getting in touch with our feelings, but I knew that wouldn’t be satisfactory for long and that I had better come up with something else. My traditional dance therapy Chacian circle did not work well with those youngsters so I had to adapt it. I called them into a circle, and they kept making lines. I’m a quick study, so after a few days I told them to line up. Then they were happy, even though I was uncomfortable. They didn’t want to be equal with me; they wanted me to be their teacher in the traditional classroom arrangement they were familiar with.

I tried doing choreography with them, but they said it was either too hard or too easy. It wasn’t working. In between the steps I was making up, I started going back and forth, four beats this way, four beats that way. This was a pattern I learned from my Haitian dance teacher, Jean-Léon Destiné. He didn’t teach it explicitly. He just did it between combinations and I implicitly picked it up from him. The children asked me, “Miss, what’s that?” I called it the 4’s, and it became a major vehicle for us to dance together. The most important point here is that I didn’t realize the importance of that pattern, but because I was observing and responding to the young people, I was able to see it was important to them.

I wrote at the end of each day about what had happened, and I learned so much from that. Writing is like talking to someone. It forces you to articulate your thoughts and you discover things you didn’t know were there. That’s how I developed my program, by being responsive to the young people, reflecting on what happened, and integrating what I learned into my practice.

That first semester, the students asked to do a show. At that time, dance therapists didn’t do shows, but I said okay. The young people were very worried that other students would jump up on the stage during the show to harass them. I had observed how chaotic and out of control the students were at the informational assembly at the beginning of the year, so I took their concerns seriously. I stacked the deck for the best possible chance of success by keeping the first five rows of the long narrow auditorium for dancers and family only. Families of my teenage students with behavior problems seldom came to the shows, but this created a buffer zone between the performers and the audience. We put on a great show, and it taught the youngsters in the school that they could expect quality on the stage, and it was worthwhile to be respectful audience.

I continued to use the 4’s in our sessions and the young people began to trust me enough to try other ways of dancing. One of the things we began working on that first year was pas de deux, male and female duets that were respectful and lyrical. When people respect and help each other, it’s the highest level of social emotional development. Youngsters in special education are always on the receiving end, and that can be patronizing. I wanted to allow them to support and give to each other.

After the success of the first show, a young man came to me and asked to do freestyle. I didn’t know what it was, so I asked him to show me during lunchtime. He brought his friends and they danced with athleticism, skill and wit. When they told me they “battled” in the streets with dance, I was so excited. They were using dance to express themselves in a very prosocial way, sublimating their aggression through the art form. This was in 1979, soon after the birth of hip hop, and my young people were on the front lines of culture, the avant garde. The first show that they performed freestyle, they wanted to do a freestyle contest. I said, “No, let’s call it an exhibition.” But it turned out to be an exhilarating contest! I did persuade them not to stick up their middle fingers when they made their freezes. The dancing was heartfelt and bravura, and it brought the whole school together.

The music in those early years (Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and others) was beautiful and appropriate for school. Over the years, the young people brought me music by Jay-Z and Sean Paul, some of which had objectional language. We discussed it and I challenged them to get me the radio version. Teenagers are bombarded with explicit messaging from youth and general culture. The thing I wanted to teach them was code switching, to let them consider the context when choosing words. Understand what’s appropriate and who you are speaking to. If you’re working a service job and you say the f-bomb, you may get fired.

Unlike a dance therapist who has open structure, my groups became more about creating dances. We also did a lot of performing at the school, at other DOE functions, and at cultural events and venues such as Lincoln Center. When we just danced for fun, it was usually the 4’s, which had many variations. If someone new came in, I’d ask a group member to help catch them up. There’s a leader who “calls” what to do in the 4’s. It trained students how to receive feedback from the group and learn to take care of each other. One of our most memorable performances was for adolescent in-patients at Manhattan Psychiatric Center. My young people performed a program called The Beat, which culminated in bringing audience members to the stage to dance the 4’s with our dancers. We had come full circle.

Then I went to teach in the South Bronx for 21 years. This was a largely Latinx population, and I learned a lot about Latin music. I already knew merengue and the cha cha cha, and my young people taught me bachata. I used merengue and bachata as a vehicles for choreography and didn’t use the 4’s very much.

I studied salsa intensively with Eddie Torres, the teacher of teachers, and Jimmy Anton. Both are master teachers. I developed skills as a follower, but it wasn’t enough. I needed to learn how to lead. Eddie didn’t teach women how to lead, but Jimmy did, so I apprenticed myself to him for two and a half years, demonstrating and leading in his classes. Once I felt confident in leading and could take any partner and lead them through complicated turn patterns, I felt ready to bring salsa into my program. It took me years before I did that. How can I, a little old white lady, presume to teach salsa to Latinx teenagers unless I’m really competent in the genre? I think it’s important to have respect for the art form as well as to have the credibility of doing it correctly and at a high level before you teach it.

I continued with freestyle, or break dancing, as well. I had a group I called the Fabulous All-Stars, kind of a Venn diagram of the best dancers and those with the most serious behavior problems. I remember when we auditioned for the Apollo Theater for the first time and made it into the showcase. I wondered how anything could ever be that wonderful again. Then the next year, a young man came who did power tumbling but who was very fragile emotionally and very oppositional. All the teachers in the school hated working with him. He told me he wanted a career in dance, so I told him he would have to learn how to teach. A 14-year-old came in that same year and loved what the older youngster did. Even though I usually worked in groups, I held sessions with just the two of them, supporting the older one in teaching the younger one. We made it to the Apollo again that next year, based largely on their dancing. My student is now a street performer, and I see him occasionally around New York. I was so gratified the time he called his crew over and introduced me as his dance teacher. He is now a teacher himself.

I have been teaching at NYU since 1994, and before that I taught in the dance therapy masters program at Hunter College for eight years. My doctorate is in school and child psychology. As a psychologist, I was recruited by District 75 to be part of their three-person Positive Behavior Support (PBS) team. D75 is the NYCDOE district for students with serious disabilities. They have schools all over the city, and my job was to travel throughout the city to train teachers and consult on serious behavior problems. I was open to that, but I wanted to stay with the young people I was working with at the time. I made a deal where I was with my young people doing dance and theater groups two days a week, and teaching and consulting for D75 three days a week.

When I started my career, children with severe disabilities were not permitted in public schools. It wasn’t until 1975 that all children were guaranteed a free and appropriate education by PL94.142. I was on the ground floor to see that change. Fast forward to 1997, when the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was reauthorized. It mandated PBS as opposed to punishment to shape behavior. PBS advocated universal strategies for all students and targeted strategies for those who need a little more to be their best. For example, if I want the students to come to attention, I put my index finger on my lips and raise my other hand. This is an example of a universal strategy. It won’t always work, so I may have to augment it with targeted strategies, like walking closer to a child who is still talking. Universal and targeted strategies help about 90 to 95 percent of students to engage with learning. There are always a few students for whom “nothing works” and an intensive, individualized plan has to be developed for them. This is done through a process called functional behavior assessment (FBA) to determine why the student engages in the behavior and how to effectively address it. My partner on the PBS team and I developed the FBA procedure for D75. I taught a course at NYU for 10 years for classroom teachers which culminated in developing an FBA and behavior intervention plan for their students with serious, persistently challenging behaviors.

Every little thing that happens, even the seemingly bad things, there’s always something in it that’s positive and, at the very least, that you can learn from.

How would you describe your work now?

I retired in 2013 and was recruited to be a mentor for new dance teachers in the NYCDOE. I visit them and watch their classes. Then we talk about what happened and break down what’s going well, what are the challenges and the next steps to address challenges. As someone who comes in supposedly as a leader, I learn so much from the dance educators I work with, including my mentees and students. Since 2006, I’ve been teaching at the Dance Education Laboratory (DEL) at the 92nd Street Y. We offer courses for the dance education community and train Pre-K and now 3-K teachers. I also teach in the NYCDOE Students with Disabilities Initiative for dance and other arts educators who want to learn more about working with youngsters with disabilities. I consult with dance companies and train their teaching artists to work with students with disabilities. I’m currently working on a curriculum for elders with Ailey community outreach.

How has your training and expertise as a dance therapist influenced your work as a dance educator and vice versa?

My training as a dance therapist has been invaluable. It taught me to start where people are and work with their strengths. It also taught me to use the process orientation, where you develop the movement behavior that you see in the group. I think every dance educator should study dance therapy to learn how to attend to the children in their classes and see what they are doing, instead of just thinking about carrying on with the lesson plan. I see teachers with voluminous lesson plans citing all the standards, but they’re not looking at what the children are actually doing. For me, good teaching is starting with a structure, seeing what they do, and then responding to what they’re doing with the material.

Both dance educators and dance therapists need to learn how to organize their classes and groups to create order and engage their students. PBS is a great way to think about this. I tell the teachers I mentor to watch how the students enter the class. If they all run in wildly, it might be better to have them enter together and sit against the wall, have a friendly check-in, and then have them dance one by one to their spots. Make it a routine. That kind of structure is important, and something dance therapists need to avail themselves of when working with youngsters with behavioral issues, especially in large groups.

What changes/shifts have you noticed during your career in terms of dance education for students with disabilities?

There are many more people working with children with disabilities, which is good. However, they need to have training in how to organize their classes and groups to be effective, whether their goals are therapeutic, teaching technique, or dance-making.

Dance educators are increasingly being seen as an important part of the school community. When I first started to work in the NYCDOE, dance was considered a somewhat frivolous extra. I worried that I might have to teach math the next year. That’s why I got a doctorate; I wanted power over my destiny, as well as a deeper understanding and strategies for treating mental illness and behavioral challenges.

I think we as dance therapists have missed so many boats. We were into mindfulness a long time ago, but somehow we weren’t able to be recognized as the professionals who can bring that work to people with a wide range of issues. Psychologists took that one over, using manualized treatment protocols, which is the opposite of process orientation. I often tell dance therapists who want to work with children and adolescents to get certified as dance educators. The dance therapy training, while vital and informative, may be difficult to translate into a job. Dance educators have seen a more upward trajectory in terms of professionalism. Those who are working with students with special needs need to have a more therapeutic orientation so they can engage the youngsters and help them to develop self-regulation and socialization skills, along with knowledge and skills in dance.

What larger trends have you seen emerge in dance education recently?

There’s more collaboration on a lot of different levels. For instance, there’s more emphasis on helping students to collaborate with each other. That’s something administrators are realizing that dance educators can offer. When you break into small groups and do choreography, students have to work together. Then there’s collaboration between dance educators and other professionals who are learning what dance educators can offer. We may collaborate with other arts educators or classroom teachers to connect to curriculum themes.

In the 1990s when NYCDOE District 75 was preparing to introduce the Balanced Literacy curriculum in programs for youngsters with severe emotional disturbances, many staff had low expectations. They complained that it was unfair to ask the children to sit closely together on the rug for the read-aloud.  They feared the closeness would provoke fights. I went to an ADTA conference that October and saw what my dance therapist colleague Rena Kornblum was doing with self-calming and spatial awareness in her anti-bullying program. I realized that these were the academic readiness skills that all children need to be successful in school: the ability to share space and to calm themselves so they can attend to lessons. I began teaching space bubbles to show students how to be aware of and share space and the 4 B’s for self-calming. I included them in the book Dance Education for Diverse Learners, published by the NYCDOE Office of Arts and Special Projects, and in all my teaching. Over time, these valuable strategies have been adopted by many NYCDOE schools.

Broadly speaking, what do you think dance education will look like in 2050?

There’s greater recognition of the importance of dance in human development. Our first language is a body language, and our body’s intelligence, apart from cognition, is finally being formally recognized as kinesthetic intelligence. Issues of proximity arouse a lot of emotion and, in New York City, space is a luxury for everyone. We have to work out space issues in schools. Part of the recognition of the value of dance will be in creating appropriate spaces in schools for children to dance and stretch out. I’m hoping that as time goes on, the need for schools to have a dance studio will become more supported at an institutional level.

I want to see more dance for everyday people in popular culture too. When I first saw So You Think You Can Dance, I didn’t like it. I thought it was too focused on technical skills and tricks. Now I love it and other shows like it for the artistry, but I still think we need to get away from the idea that the arts are a competitive enterprise best left to the experts while the rest of us are simply audience. People come together and dance pleasurably all the time. Children with disabilities can benefit on every level from dancing. Dance engages them and helps them to develop self-regulation and socialization skills. It can also give them a reason to accept structure and rigor. When they perform, the experience of being a part of a thing of beauty is the ultimate affirmation.

I hope to see a dance teacher or dance therapist in every school, a space in every school where children can stretch out and dance freely and safely, and a recognition that everybody can dance. Expertise is beautiful and uplifting to behold, but you don’t have to be a virtuoso to dance. After decades of working with children and young people with disabilities, and going through the aging process myself, I know everyone can dance.

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The post Giving Children Room to Dance appeared first on Stance on Dance.

BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT, PHOTOGRAPHS BY NINA LEWIS

Viva La Free is a nonprofit in Portland, Oregon that creates art healing projects and public art to energize, enchant and heal communities, centering vulnerable and marginalized populations most impacted by systems of oppression and dominance. For the past three years, Viva La Free has been producing Black History Remix, an Afrofuturist multimedia performance. Earth Dance is the first piece of their 2019-20 season and combines dance, sound and immersive tech to explore the human timeline of history; past, present and future. Director and producer Layna Lewis and assistant director and dancer Kayla Banks share the history of Viva La Free and the context for Earth Dance, as well as why Afrofuturism is a powerful tool for activating communities to transform policy, practices, curriculum and culture.

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Can you tell me a little about your dance history and what kinds of performance practices have shaped who you are today?

Layna: I was one of those kids who always danced. I was extremely dramatic, expressive and embodied. It’s the way I move through the world and communicate. I started taking dance class very young. Later, I was on dance team and was a cheerleader. I was the kid who would assign everyone in the neighborhood a role and create a show. I would also propose and perform shows at school. That facilitating, directing and producing element was always there, as well as choreographing, dancing and performing.

Life happened and I got distracted, but I was always immersed in the arts in one form or another. Fast forward to six years ago, I decided to go full time into the arts and create the arts organization Viva La Free.

Kayla: I started dancing when I was young. I danced at a competition studio but most of my experience came from high school, which offered dance and musical theater. Then I went to college and studied performing arts, dance and theater. I trained in ballet and modern with some experience in African dance. I was able to go to various summer intensives to give me a really rounded training. Dance is what I’ve chosen to study, pursue, teach and create.

Can you share a little history of Viva La Free and Black History Remix and how they came about?

Layna: I was born and raised in Portland, so I was shocked and horrified to learn that Portland was ranked number two in child sex trafficking in the United States. This was 2012. I was perplexed that I did not know this, and I believed that if others knew, we would be able to do something to help. I called practically everyone I knew and said, “We have to do something about this. I don’t know how, but somehow art can help.” Out of everyone I called, a group of five of us started meeting every week and we became a de facto focus group. We started researching trafficking locally, nationally and globally. We interviewed survivors, direct service providers, attorneys, law enforcement and the department of child services.

There was one safehouse at the time with seven beds dedicated to child sex trafficking survivors. I went to the director and proposed a weekly art group with the youth. They said yes, and for three and a half years I taught a weekly art class pro bono and funded supplies locally. That’s how Viva La Free started. There’s little research on this specific trauma, but what research there is indicates that when someone is so severely traumatized, they often don’t respond to formal therapies. They do, however, respond to expressive arts therapies. Movement, pattern and embodied sensory practices work to get them into their bodies, because they are often so disassociated.

We painted on large surfaces. I encouraged the children to do repetitive movement with the brush strokes, using their whole body. Movement and repetition, as well as using fields of color and incorporating music, were used based on evidence-based research and were very successful. The staff reported that the youth were much calmer after these sessions and it changed the group dynamic. Art gives people autonomy in that they are able to self-determine their own process of healing. And these kids just needed to have fun, simply throwing paint around, creating a mural, taking off-site photography hikes, and building sand sculptures on the beach, some for the first time ever.

Recently, the house closed. Viva La Free went on to make a film, curate art action pop ups, paint murals, and create and produce an original theatrical performance, Black History Remix. One of the first visions of Viva La Free was our artist apprentice program. Viva La Free’s innovative model provides access, inclusion and opportunities for artists that encourage them to pursue creative vocations. Often our most marginalized, underserved communities are discouraged from pursuing the arts, and rarely have the privilege of an arts education. I take the apprentices through every aspect of production, pre and post, including visioning, research, acquisition, grants, fundraising, marketing, office politics, building and maintaining industry, business, and client relationships, as well as developing their artistry and craft.

Black History Remix was originally a project at Irvington Elementary School, where both of my daughters went. The school did programming around Black History Month, and it was usually a play. I knew that one of these years I would direct the play, but I kept that a secret, even from myself. Several years later the opportunity arose and I took it. In 2016, one of the PTA members, a friend of mine, said there would be no play that year. I surprised myself by proclaiming I’d do it. She told me I needed to present a proposal the next week, so I created a student driven curriculum, timeline, budget and summary. After a lot of resistance to that idea, it was finally approved.

Black History Remix is an innovative student-centered model comprised of six weeks of workshops to explore history and themes of Afrofuturism with improv, theater games, writing prompts, and guest artists, all to encourage uninhibited play and creativity. We devised a plot and I wrote a script. We then spent six weeks in production, culminating in one performance, the first Black History Remix.

Black History Remix is a three-act original play using the genre of Afrofuturism to reimagine past, present and future. I structured Black History Remix to be evolutionary and sustainable, to grow to encompass more students, artists and art forms. Last year, we expanded into other schools and communities, added scenes, included immersive tech, and partnered with other organizations.

Kayla: I just moved to Portland from Colorado after establishing my LLC, Banks Movement. I’ve been exploring different work options and, in the process, met Layna. Our relationship started with me working with her daughter. The opportunity came up to work with Viva La Free and, as my schedule cleared, I was able to give more of my time and attention. The opportunity Layna has given me is amazing because I love dance but am interested in gaining director, producer and admin experience. Coming on late January, I knew Layna wanted Black History Remix to incorporate more movement expression. I jumped on board.

Can you share more about what Earth Dance is?

Layna: This year, I structured Black History Remix to be completely nonverbal. It is vastly different than previous years. We are exploring subtexts and overarching themes of the original script through movement, sound and tech. We’re no longer at Irvington Elementary School either. I wanted to expand into dance and sound because words often fall short. It’s important to clarify that our programming goes from March 2019 to March 2020. We’re purposely expanding and exploding the idea of Black History Month beyond February.

Earth Dance is a full-length piece exploring Afrofuturism through movement, specifically as a human timeline. The show starts with projections on a 20 x 50 ft. wall. There’s also a projection on the floor. Lola Lewis appears as the divine feminine cosmic force, moving from cosmos to earth, Africa and the birth of humanity. The dance starts with the heartbeat and moves through body percussion, then into Pan African dance, the passage to the Americas, Ring Shout, Spirituals, Samba, Barrelhouse Blues, Civil Rights/dances of the 60’s, Hip Hop, House, and back to Pan African drums ending with the heartbeat.

Choreography was created by Bobby Fouther, Rashad Pridgen and Kemba Shannon. Lola Lewis was the vocalist and costume assistant to Bobby Fouther. The eight dancers included Amaya Addy, Malik Delgado, Ashley Morton, Serelle Shannon, Sean “Hobbs” Waters, Kayla Banks, and artist apprentice Quay Matthews. I directed the piece and produced the immersive tech content with Monica McCrane, Marin Vesely and Hillary Tsao. We premiered Earth Dance on April 26th at Pacific NW College of Art. Earth Dance is funded by RACC, Viva La Free, PNCA Undergrad Student Council, PNCA Student Life and PNCA Dept of Inclusion and Equity.

Kayla: All of the dancers are Black/African-American identified. We worked closely with choreographer Mr. Bobby Fouther, a second-generation Portlander who has connections throughout the community. He brought in Rashad Pridgen, Kemba Shannon and three of the other dancers. It became a team effort. Rashad choreographed percussion, Ring Shout, House and some of the Pan African movement. Malik Delgado, who recently moved from NYC, choreographed the Hip Hop.

What do you believe audiences took away from Earth Dance?

Layna: April 26th was our first performance and will set us on a trajectory for the rest of the year. There was so much juice with this group coming together to make something in a short amount of time. One of the most amazing things from the experience was the vast knowledge of African ancestry, traditions and symbolism. It was like tasting water for the first time and not knowing I was dying of thirst. It was such a profound experience and I felt we were sharing something so precious. It was deeply meaningful to me. I was honestly brought to tears on more than one occasion just through holding the space together. We had a good turnout and it was breathtaking. The immersive tech brought it all together with the thrilling artistry of the performers.

Kayla: Though my background is in classical ballet and modern, my mission has been wanting to seek out and explore more dance forms that are not mainstream. In the piece, the duet I performed was a traditional Lamba ceremony that represented the passing of our ancestors and celebrating their passage, but also experiencing the trauma of African American ancestry and being enslaved and taken from your ancestors’ home. That duet was choreographed by Mr. Bobby who studied with Baba Chuck Davis and Katherine Dunham. That experience is precious to me.

What’s your next project or focus?

Kayla: I believe Earth Dance can be a staple piece. My marketing mind makes me think it could be brought to different spaces in Portland, especially educational and culturally representative spaces. This piece is something I think could be brought into schools to give students more perspective. We’re at a time in our society when there is more POC content coming out that tells history through the perspective of populations/communities/ethnic groups who are historically and currently erased and suppressed by dominant culture. This is important because the history taught in schools is centered through a white male lens. Earth Dance is relatable and offers an alternate lens of history’s timeline.

Layna: Earth Dance is an innovative archival history of humanity in general and of Black/African art forms in particular, which lend themselves to an embodied practice applicable to workshops, educational curriculum, and ritual. Earth Dance will function as a rubric of time-based performative work that activates space, creating a portal, beyond words, towards healing, towards liberation.

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Website: https://vivalafreepdx.wixsite.com/arts 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vivalafreeportland/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/viva.la.free.pdx/ 

The post Exploring Afrofuturism through Dance and Art appeared first on Stance on Dance.

BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT

Amelia Uzategui Bonilla is a dance artist and educator who regularly performs and teaches in the United States and Peru. In 2013, she founded the Río Danza Comunitaria in Peru, an organization that protects water rights through community performance and arts education. Now in the midst of a master’s program in Germany, she continues building her passion for arts education, performance and social justice.

Presenting choreography at the Finnish Hall in 2018, Photo by Martyn Andres Bonaventura

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Can you share a bit about your dance history? What are some key moments or inspirations that have shaped your path?

I attribute my entry into dance to my mother. My mother is a traditional Peruvian dancer. She danced her whole life, and in her adult years, she was able to train at what is now the José María Arguedas School of Traditional Dance Practices in Peru. We immigrated to the United States when I was about 18 months old. My earliest memories include watching her practice. She has a memory when I was very small of asking if she could teach me, and I responded “I already know how. I want to watch you.” It points to something I’ve always loved in dance: watching and providing space for others.

My mother suggested I take ballet classes starting when I was seven. I trained with Meredith Baylis until I was 17, which is how I managed to receive sufficient training to get into Juilliard. I didn’t have the “ballet body.” My teacher had been a Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo dancer, and had travelled to South America on tour. She understood where I was coming from and could foresee my career wouldn’t be solely as a performer. At about age 15, I began to direct and organize recitals and studio showings for friends and family. I saw dance as something that was serious and exciting. I didn’t have the opportunity to go to an intellectually stimulating high school, although I got good grades, so I found my stimulus in dance. There weren’t any grades, but there was always room for improvement and discovery.

I graduated from Juilliard in 2007 and did freelance work in New York for three years. There weren’t a lot of options for someone who looked like me, regardless of my skill, and I got that right away. I travelled back to Peru in 2005 for the first time. My family hadn’t visited when I was a child because there were hard moments politically and economically in Peru in the late 80s and 90s. While visiting, I had a chance to meet a woman who was a pioneer of Afro-Peruvian dance and theater, Victoria Santa Cruz. We had many conversations over the course of several weeks, and she changed my life and perspective. It was hard to go back to Juilliard after that. What I was looking for wasn’t in that trajectory. I wasn’t interested in dancing for a rep company, and there weren’t a lot of people who looked like me in those companies.

I worked with an artist, Tino Sehgal, who suggested I go to Europe. That’s where I saw a reconstruction of Anna Halprin’s famous piece Parades and Changes. I went to Europe to seek the avantgarde but was moved most by a piece that was made decades ago in California. That was the same year that Breath Made Visible came out, the documentary about Anna. I saw Anna speak, and she inspired me to move to Peru. I had wanted to live in Peru for a long time but didn’t have the courage to do it. New York City has an attitude that if it doesn’t happen in New York, it doesn’t matter. Anna had moved to San Francisco at a time when there wasn’t a lot going on there. So I moved to Peru.

Healer and artist Makita Mishti leads a cleansing ritual for the river in Cusco, Peru during Río Contigo Cusco project in 2014, Photo by Río Danza Comunitaria

I had to ask myself: What does it mean to be a Peruvian person? I understood that my body represented something when other people looked at it, but I myself didn’t have a lot of embodied knowledge. For all I knew, I was American, but I wasn’t always treated as American. I was often assumed to be an international student at Juilliard.

Four and a half years after moving to Peru, I moved back to California and did the leadership training at the Tamalpa Institute. My mom got cancer, and it shifted my priorities. I wanted to be closer to her, so I went back to California. There was a short workshop happening in nature through the Tamalpa Institute, and it made sense to take it because it was part of my interest already, especially after initiating the Río Danza Comunitaria in Peru. I did the workshop with my mom, and it was four days at Pt. Reyes. It was a dance workshop like none other because it was so inclusive; my mom and I both had wonderful and unique experiences which one workshop could contain. My mom encouraged me to do the leadership training.

What are you currently working on?

Currently, I’m in Frankfurt working on a masters. I’ve spent the past half year researching William Forsythe’s improvisation technologies. Forsythe was based here in Frankfurt for 30 years. It was part of an assignment for my program to research a particular technique through literature and multimedia. I was using the improvisational technologies CD, which is luckily all on YouTube now. I also interviewed several of the former Forsythe dancers working in the region. I researched six former Forsythe dancers, putting together a different idea of Forsythe’s technique and work than I had from my exposure to his work in New York. At Juilliard, I got the message that I wasn’t a Forsythe-type dancer, and I wanted to question that message – why did I think that? This inquiry has informed and motivated a renewed interest in my own dance practice, especially questioning tradition. This has been hard for me; I learned the techniques of revered American modern dancers in a way that was the most authentic possible, from someone who had performed with the company. Those techniques were presented as something that can’t be messed with or played with. Forsythe really challenged those questions. He used ballet, but his improvisational tools could be applied to any tradition. I’ve been applying it to Afro-Peruvian dance and my own phrases.

Can you tell me a little about the Río Danza Comunitaria and how it came about?

One of my colleagues in Peru found out about Global Water Dances and organized it in Lima in 2011. In 2013 when it happened again, I decided to lead it, as my colleague had moved. I decided to use it as an opportunity to bridge communities of different dance genres to focus on economic water injustice. There are still parts of Lima that don’t have running water. They pay more per liter of water than richer folks who can get it from the tap. What really surprised me was that over 100 people got involved. I got support from the university where I was teaching, as well as through the municipality of Lima. The mayor at the time had a daughter who was a dancer, so she supported dance. Our costs were covered in terms of presenting the performance in a public space.

Global Water Dances performed in Downtown Lima, Peru in 2013, Photo by Wes Roe

Afterward, 11 dancers came up to me either individually or collectively and wanted to continue. They asked me, “What’s next?” The Río Danza Comunitaria was born as a collective that takes dance with the theme of water into spaces that don’t usually have access to dance. I left Peru as a result of my mom getting sick, and as part of the transition, the collective developed written projects together. We were looking for ways of applying what we had learned from the initial project and expanding upon it.

We traveled to Cuzco, where there is a significant community of healers and shamans who live in the sacred valley. Several of them participated in our project. This was a huge learning opportunity, as they have a profound and deep knowledge and tradition. That traditional Andean connection to nature shaped my understanding of events like the controversy over the Dakota access pipeline. There’s an ancestral knowledge that water should be protected.

The Río Danza Comunitaria has slowed down in the past year. They have led and continue to lead many artistic and educational activities, including consistent and multi-city participation in the Global Water Dances project in 2015 and 2017. It’s the economical piece that frustrates the project from growing as many invitations for Río Danza’s participation are not remunerated. I imagine it speaks to a larger, world-wide issue on the lack of value given to cultural labor.

What are some of the effects or results you’ve seen come about from the Río Danza Comunitaria?

It really helped to foment some courage for dance leadership, and particularly spurred interest in projects that make contemporary performances based on Peruvian traditional practices. Members of the collective continue to offer free decentralized workshops outside of the wealthier parts of Lima. The model has been replicated in different communities, including in impoverished beach towns south of Lima. One project leader developed a project in her hometown, and has been hosting Global Water Dances since 2015. She’s encouraged other members to continue educating themselves and stepping into their own power.

Can you share a little about your performance practice, particularly your recent solo Sin Adjetivos?

Sin Adjetivos is about being consequent with myself. The title is from a quote by Victoria Santa Cruz, and it refers to a concept she stressed: being dedicated to something without an adjective in front of it, to be present in the moment without a warmup, without an adjective. My understanding of it has to do with going back to how I’m viewed. I realized that in Peru I didn’t have to explain where I was from; I was accepted as another Peruvian person. Even in liberal San Francisco, I had all these adjectives and expectations to deal with. My work as a Peruvian female immigrant artist had all these adjectives attached. I really wanted to explore what it would be like to perform without adjectives or playing the role of the other. It’s still something I don’t have a clear answer to.

It has to do with the allowance to take from all my experiences and heritages, from Europeans who colonized, Africans who were forced, and Natives who survived, as well as my identity of being a woman. How do I let all that be without it being a mask?

How would you characterize the dance scene in Peru?

Peru equals diversity and history. For economic and sociopolitical reasons, it has been isolated. In general, Latin and South American countries are isolated from each other; there’s not a lot of travel in between, even in dance communities. There’s not a South American dance festival because there’s so much instability within the individual countries. What we do have is a rich history of traditional practices that are similar to what my mom experienced and studied. I’ve had a chance to witness and be a part of my mother’s dance world. I was expecting this from my conversations with Victoria. What I wasn’t expecting was the boom of hip hop dance. In the 80s, young people taught themselves from VHS tapes, and now they teach each other the newer styles from the internet. They educated me on popping, locking and breakdancing. I participated in a dance company that was commercializing this phenomenon. It was great to recognize Lima as an urban center of an arts movement.

Río Danza’s 2015 Global Water Dances led by David Sanchez, Photo by David Sanchez

What I did notice about Lima’s dance community was that it was quite separated – the contemporary dancers were together, the ballet dancers were in their own institutions, then there was the traditional dance school my mom did her training in, and there were the urban dancers on the street. There was so much great dance happening, but it was all spread out. With Facebook becoming more popular in Lima, I was able to find out what others were doing. I had a studio practice while I lived there where I would offer workshops, which ended up being a convening of dancers from different areas who were interested in what I had to offer.

How do you hope to use your masters to add to the work you’ve already been doing?

I’ve been going back in forth in varying directions. I always wanted to go to grad schools but didn’t find the economic possibility to do so. It’s taken awhile to get here. I’m very happy with my program. I see it as an opportunity to become a more well-rounded dance professional in terms of learning critical discourse, theory and writing. I didn’t have access to those skills in my practice-oriented bachelor’s degree.

Studying abroad with international classmates, there’s the idea of cultural translation. So often, dance communities become insular with the dialogues they are having. I’ve seen this in myself, that it becomes difficult to critique the work of artists I love and know. It’s important to find ways to process and synthesize information so that it can be transmitted in a way that is culturally diverse. For example, when I talk about issues of race in Germany, I have to paint a different panorama than in the US where we all know what we’re talking about. I’ve come to appreciate that because it doesn’t take anything as a given; there’s no common knowledge we should or shouldn’t have. What are the important references and who is the audience? This helps provide the links and entry points into the physical practice.

Any other thoughts?

Of course, Anna Halprin has been a huge influence on my life. Last time I was in the Bay, she had this advice: Keep doing what’s fun. That’s something I’m grateful for, meeting artists who keep me growing and developing. It’s something I know I deserve and I believe all of us deserve. And I hope to provide those containers for the artists of tomorrow.

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To learn more, visit ameliauzategui.com.

The post Dancing With and Without Adjectives appeared first on Stance on Dance.

BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT

Heryka Miranda is a dance artist in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada who has been using approaches in expressive arts and dance movement therapy to work with migrant farmworker communities. Alongside Juan Luis Mendoza de la Cruz, she created The Sunflower Man using Indigenous land dance methods to showcase Luis’ experiences as a migrant worker on a sunflower farm in Canada for almost 30 years. Here, Heryka shares her process and some of the unexpected outcomes.

Photo by Deigo Mendez

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Can you tell me a little about your own movement/dance history?

I’ve been living in Ontario, Canada for 11 years. Before moving to Canada, I lived in the mid-Atlantic USA – Baltimore, MD and Washington, DC. I was born and raised in White Plains, NY. Dance has always been part of my life, though not necessarily in terms of me going to formal and structured dance classes. Living in a vibrant and predominantly Latino community in White Plains, I lived with people from Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. Dance was very much a part of my life growing up, especially break dancing. A lot of kids in the neighborhood made opportunities to break dance in the streets and alleys between apartment buildings. We made good use occupying those spaces. These experiences were informal in terms of my appreciation of movement and dance, and were wrapped up in immigrants coming together to celebrate through dance and music.

My family moved from White Plains to Baltimore County when I was 11 or 12 years old. A dance school opened close to my house. It was the first time I’d ever stepped into a dance studio, and I begged my mom and dad for classes. I started there with a lovely Greek woman who taught ballet and jazz. My parents invested in dance classes as much as they could, however, it was expensive and so my dance education was a series of interrupted formal trainings. As a teenager, I was able to take classes through work exchanges with this studio. After high school, I went to community college and became president of the dance company on campus, called Dance Express. I kept finding opportunities to learn dance, and fell in love with modern and contemporary dance.

Dance has always provided me a great sense of pleasure and freedom, as well as a tool to use when feeling sad, anxious, scared and deeply vulnerable. Many times, I would close the door of my bedroom and escape within my own dance. It helped me process and express my emotions with no judgement or pressure to perform or create a tangible dance work. I’ve been a student of expressive arts therapy for many years now, and I had no idea that I was already using approaches in expressive arts as a form of healing as a teenager. When I go back to my old teen diaries, I find poems and bits of writing responding to what I was dealing with through movement.

I identified as a social justice activist as a young adult in response to witnessing some of my family members and Central American and Mexican communities being discriminated against and treated unfairly. I started creating dance pieces as a response to injustices, in particular around immigrant rights or lack thereof and issues around my bicultural identity and feelings of anger, sadness, and my Latina pride.

In terms of genres, I spent a lot of time studying modern dance, Afro Cuban, Afro Brazilian, flamenco and Indigenous dance/theatre. I had incredible teachers in DC and Toronto. In my early 30s, I started to see myself as a professional dancer. My first dance piece in Toronto explored my experiences of being a child of Guatemalan immigrants and the shame I felt for the role that the US government played in the horrific Guatemalan Civil War. It was entitled, ‘Ni Soy de Aqui, Ni Soy de Alla – I’m Neither from Here or There.’

How did you become passionate about working with migrant workers through movement based expressive arts therapy and dance movement therapy?

I was introduced to dance/movement therapy in DC while working with undocumented children and youth through an after-school program. I noticed that, in addition to learning English, they were learning a whole different culture and going through some traumatic experiences. Reading and writing was very difficult for these kids, so I started movement workshops. I ended up using some movement-for-play approaches that I had learned through some creative movement training that I invested in to teach at affluent Montessori schools.

Around that time, I met a dance therapist and became interested in her work. I’d been working with vulnerable communities, including people with disabilities who are non-verbal, and I decided I wanted to pursue dance movement therapy. I moved to Canada and found a school called The CREATE Institute. That’s where I learned about expressive arts therapy, which uses the arts to heal and respond to human suffering. I spent an intensive year in 2008 with the program. It’s a three-year program, but I only did a year because it was very visual arts heavy and I wanted more dance and movement.

The CREATE Institute is where I started to meet gifted practitioners. I met Norma Araiza from the Yaqui nation (located in Sonora, Mexico), who took me under her wings and introduced me to many Indigenous choreographers. One of them was Rulan Tangen from Dancing Earth, who introduced me to the world of land dancing as a method. I started realizing that the origins of dance movement therapy began with First Peoples/Indigenous peoples. I also learned about Anna and Daria Halprin and their movement-based expressive arts therapy method. Through these teachers and practitioners, I could see/feel the healing power from being in direct contact with the land through movement/dance. It’s such ancient medicine and I appreciate that these practitioners of land dance and dance therapy put a language to it. These practices hold embodiment as the leading source of learning; there’s an intermodal quality that honors intuitive imagination and doesn’t impose agendas.

Photo by Diego Mendez

I was going to move to Boston to study dance movement therapy, but my husband got sick, so I ended up staying in Canada and going to Brock University to do a research program in the field of Applied Health Sciences. My supervisor was really supportive of my interest in movement-based therapy and land dance.

In close proximity to the university were migrant farm workers. A dear friend of mine, Evelyn Encalada, had been working with migrant farm workers as a community organizer and researcher for over 15 years. She introduced me to my migrant farm worker neighbors from Guatemala and Mexico. She took me to a residence and introduced me as the woman who does healing with dance. I did an impromptu movement session that explored elements on a day in the life of migrant women. There was something about that experience that really hit my heart and took me back to similar work I had done with Mexican and Central American immigrants in DC.

I ended up building relationships with various migrant farm workers. One man in particular who I became very close to was Juan Luis Mendoza de la Cruz, who had been coming to Canada to work as a farm worker for 28 years. I also became very good friends with an Anglican priest from Colombia, Padre Javier Arias. He had started a mission at his Anglican church in the Niagara region to find creative endeavors to integrate migrant farm workers into their rural host community as a way to lessen isolation and loneliness. His church became a hub for the predominantly Spanish speaking migrant farm worker community as it provided a variety of supports and services to them. Padre Javier was interested in working with me, as he was always looking for people to work creatively with migrant workers to not only integrate the workers into the community but also to find ways to alleviate stress and anxiety.

I introduced myself to migrant workers as a dance artist and grad student who was conscientious of the hardships involved in forced migrations and the lived experiences of family separation who wanted to bring dance arts to migrant worker communities as a medium to tell stories through the body, alleviate stress, and build community. When I met Luis, he asked me: What do you mean when you say that we can tell stories through the body? Instead of explaining to him and other workers, I showed them. It was again an impromptu experience in the moment at the church space with a group of migrant farm workers. I became close to many of the migrant workers and did four workshops at the church with a mixed gendered group of migrant workers. I did another four workshops with a group of Mexican men at their residence at a grape farm. I did two longer workshops with migrant women, and for those workshops I was able to use the dance studio space at my university and arrange for transportation.

What did your practice with the migrant workers look like?

It was very interesting. Sometimes I only had between 15 to 45 minutes with them. I didn’t know what space would be available or who would come. I would start with a warm up that would include a head to toe body scan with breathing. Then I would ask them to share a body part they use in relation to the work they do. Strawberry pickers, for example, would show me their knees. Workers would also commonly show me their elbows, fingers, hands and wrists. They told me: “We don’t get to show this to people; we’re not allowed to say we’re in pain because we’re easily disposable.” In our workshops, the need came from them: Was there a place in the body that needed some extra love and care? Then I would ask them to, for example, give their knee a sound. At first it was weird and awkward, but they were very trusting and went there with me.

Because so many of the workers are far from their families for eight to 10 months a year, we would create friction with our bodies, starting with our hands and placing our hands on our hearts, to create an imaginary fire and blow the smoke as a wish to loved ones. We used these physical metaphors to send messages to husbands, wives and children. Then we would take those wishes and create tableaus of meaning. Finally, I would ask them: If they could give the tableau a name or a title, what would it be?

The workshops really depended on where it took place. Some spaces were not big enough. If it was a nice day, we would go outside. Evening was the only time available for the grape farm workers because they had to work during the day.

Photo by Farrah Miranda

With the migrant women, I was able to have two hours with them, but only for two sessions. I was able to use the university, which was huge. Many had never been to a university or a dance studio before. We started with a body scan and breathing. I then asked them: “Who are you?” They responded through words or movements. They would say something like, “I am Ariana, the woman of the shooting star.” Ariana shared that she’s the woman of the shooting star because, by sending money home to her family, she’s able to make the wishes of her family come true despite having horrible back pain and arthritis in her wrists. We ended up creating a short dance to show the work she does and how it makes her feel.

All the participants were able to work on their own short pieces and then share in pairs with each other. This is when I started to understand the importance of witnessing. Being seen brought subjectivity and meaning back into the women’s lives. We explored what it means to feel lonely and witness that. A lot of the women said they felt weak by allowing their isolation to dominate their feelings. It was something they felt they needed to conquer. I felt like they were punishing themselves for being human, but they felt like they were the lucky ones because they had jobs. They told me: “Here we are with the opportunity to send money back, so we just need to suck it up.” It was interesting to see them go through that, and then cry and show how devastating it feels to be away from loved ones, including children who aren’t even two or three years old.

I found the movement based expressive arts framework as an important tool, but I had no expectation to create a performance piece. I just honored the process of the framework and allowed the participants to give emotion a voice and a shape. Each time I was with them was very different. For example, I could only do two sessions with the women at the university because their work was really unpredictable. After the second Saturday, they messaged me that they couldn’t continue because they now had to work on Saturdays.

Can you tell me a little about how The Sunflower Man came about and the different ways it’s been shared?

While I was facilitating the dance sessions with the workers, I was also working with Juan Luis Mendoza de la Cruz. I met with Luis every Sunday in August 2015. I would go to his farm and spend two to three hours in the sunflower fields with him. He would tell me about the lifecycle of the sunflowers, as well as show me the various work he does to care for them. I told him that he, along with the other migrant workers, create works of art in the sunflower fields. He loved that I described him and his co-workers as artists.

Little by little, I invited actions: shoes off, walking through the field, looking up at the horizon, embracing the sweat on his skin from the hot sun, caressing the sunflowers, melting bare feet into the wet soil, etc. I suggested he walk barefoot on the soil he tills every day, on his only day off. The first time he took off his shoes and socks, he was shocked as he had never walked barefoot on Canadian soil in his 20+ years working on the farm. I asked him what he loved about working in the sunflower field, and he responded that he gets to see the sunrise at every morning. He gets to see Mother Earth being born every day. I asked him to show me that with his body, so he raised both of his arms up and then brought his arms into an embrace. We explored different types of metaphors. I would ask him how he felt with the sun on his face, since he works during the hottest temperatures. He said it feels good to sweat. The sweat from his skin was something we used as inspiration for movement. He would move the sweat from his face, move it down across his body, and it became sensual through touch. There was a spiritual sense of reciprocity that became more evident between the relationship he has with the sunflowers: As he takes care of the sunflowers, they take care of him.

Photo by Heryka Miranda

I had an opportunity to perform with Luis at a local arts festival in April 2016. I worked with him through August 2015 and, when he came back in February 2016, I worked with him again until April when we performed our 15-minute dance at the festival. Not only is Luis a knowledgeable and expert in the field of farming, but he always wanted to be a dancer. He never took formal classes, but he always loved dance. He taught himself the guitar, as well as sings and writes poetry. He’s such a multi-talented and detail-oriented man. The impetus for him performing with me, he admitted, was that he didn’t want to be another worker who goes unnoticed. He said, “If you think dance can give me hope, then I’m open.” When I met him, he was going through a difficult time. He had just turned 50 and felt unsure about how much longer he could work. He told me that dancing and moving his body in a different way besides working on the farm was life changing.

Around that time, I happened to meet a filmmaker, Monica Gutierrez, who came and documented the work I was doing with Luis. There was no funding for any of us, and she didn’t live in the region. She drove up from Toronto to take footage. At the festival performance, she took more footage and interviewed us.

There was a write-up about our dance piece in a local newspaper, and a member of Parliament read it and sent us an invitation to present The Sunflower Man at Parliament Hill in October 2016. Unfortunately, Luis had to leave back to Mexico before the date. He became determined to stay, and Monica would check in with us about his progress. The Mexican Consulate denied him a tourist visa two times. Finally, the Parliament member who had invited us wrote a letter of invitation requesting Luis’ presence at a forum and Luis was able to get a tourist visa to stay to participate in the forum. Him getting this type of visa was unheard of. We went to Parliament to perform, and Monica came with us again. From all that footage, she created The Sunflower Man film and has shown it at several festivals. Both Luis and I have been able to come to a couple showings.

This whole experience was unexpected. It showed me how powerful the tool of dance for social justice is. I could see the changes in Luis. He used rehearsals and performances as a form of resistance to precarity, as an opportunity to bring visibility to the lives of migrant farm workers, and as a way to advocate for migrant justice. “Canada owes me something,” he would say. We presented our dance piece in Parliament, and then he was able to speak at Parliament Hill and say to lawmakers that Canada owes migrant farmworkers permanent residency status and a path to citizenship.

Through your work, have you noticed any shifts in awareness or attitudes, either in the migrant workers themselves or in the public?

The work with Luis continues. We’re going to Concordia University in April 2019 to present the piece again. We’ve received many invitations and he is often unavailable. One time we showed the film and he was able to Skype in from Mexico.

Through the work I did with grape farmworkers, I was able to collaborate with another artist named Farrah Miranda. She was inspired by my work with Luis, so she hired me as a choreographer to facilitate land dancing sessions with grape workers. We made a piece called Speaking Fruit, an installation using a trailer converted into a fruit market. There are messages on the fruits gathered from various migrant farmworkers in the Niagara Region. Inside the trailer is a virtual reality video that captures the grape workers interacting with various grape plants in the vineyard through movement/dance and music. Many of the grape farm workers happen to be musicians, so their music was also recorded and used as part of the soundscape for the short film.

How would you like to expand your work next?

I would like to apprentice with Rulan Tangen from Dancing Earth and learn more about the methodology that she uses as a creator and choreographer who uses land dance. I am hoping to work with her in the Spring/Summer 2019. I am very interested in building my repertoire in providing accessible and inclusive dance facilitation with systemically vulnerable communities. In the meantime, I am teaching my first university course at Brock University called The Arts In and Across the Curriculum that focuses on using dance and drama strategies/choreographic forms and elements of dance as tools for learning. I am working with adults with disabilities on a research project using arts-based inquiry methods, including movement based, expressive arts therapeutic approaches to explore their life aspirations and the various ways in which they would like to contribute to their local communities, among other life interests. I am also writing a chapter about The Sunflower Man as part of an anthology book project for artists of color who have Indigenous heritage. I’m very excited about these opportunities and seeing where this work can continue and expand.

Photo by Teni Brant

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The post Dancing Migrant Farmworkers’ Experiences appeared first on Stance on Dance.

Raissa Simpson is a San Francisco based choreographer and the artistic director of PUSH Dance Company, which uses contemporary dance to vivify the stories of individuals from unique and overlooked communities. Raissa shares the challenges she faces as an African American mixed ancestry choreographer in the gentrifying cityscape of San Francisco, her perspective on choreography as an act of resistance and, as a new mother, how Afrofuturism has taken on new significance for her.

All photos by Robbie Sweeny from Raissa Simpson’s Codelining.

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Can you tell me a little of your own history and how you came to see yourself as a choreographer?

My history as a choreographer evolved by working with those voices that are unheard or rarely seen in the public light. In return, I take these personal stories and histories to create themes, gestures and movement. Choreographing is an act of resistance. I think I cultivate resistance first and then make a dance. Perhaps because I enjoy being quiet and reserved in my personal life, I consider myself a dialogist during my process; it’s important for me to dialogue with my cast. I remember my first neighborhood process at 3rd St. Youth Center & Clinic. This was around 2008, only about three years after PUSH was formed, and I was working with a very opinionated group of youth ages 12-24 from Bayview Hunters Point. They added their thoughts and input into how the dance should be shaped. After presenting the theme, I found it evolved as each pupil gave their own input into the process. This sense of agency continues to be a qualifier for the dancers in my company — to influence the outcome of the work — through discussions and movement.

How would you describe your work to someone unfamiliar with it?

As someone of African American mixed ancestry, I am rooted in the experiences of mixed and multiracial heritage. Ergo, I seek out performers and communities of color who have been historically overlooked and underserved within the broader context of racial identity. Through PUSH, I explore the world through my own experience and then invite performers or people in the surrounding community to share in creating the work. Through this neighborhood art process, I create original choreographic works and a space for multidisciplinary projects rooted in how identity oftentimes forms across different communities and cultures.

Someone unfamiliar with my work would see multi-racial/ethnic bodies sharing the space. They would see joy because I laugh all the time, even in the most inappropriate situations. There would possibly be some sort of collaboration going on with music, media, etc. The movement may be derived from contemporary forms or even pop culture. In the end, whoever is in the room, as I like to say, influences the ultimate outcome of how the dance looks. It sure doesn’t feel like “work,” but instead a ritual taking place with a ceremonial evolution of dance in the end.

What does your work process generally look like?

Depending on who I’m working with or what theme comes to mind, the work can look like any number of things. However, I would describe what I do as a research-to-performance process. By researching the theme of the work, I can bring in materials for rehearsal meant to directly affect the multidisciplinary elements that will play out in the dance. One work called Point Shipyard Project took me two years to research before I landed on what I’d choreograph in the studio. Because I felt like I needed to know more about the toxic cleanup at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, I took a couple of bus tours on the site and had conversations with members of the EPA, and eventually worked with residents in the area to create spoken word and music composition.

Lately, I’ve been diving into scenography because although I have the bigger picture in my mind of what the work will look like, the performers do not. Bringing in images, set design and new technology (i.e. drones, wearable sensors, etc.) all help everyone capture the possibilities of what we’ll come up with in the end. This process tends to start by dialoguing with the dancers where I bring up the theme of the piece and they add to its creation. We discuss what tension remains between resistance and human potential.

Looking at your choreographic history, are there certain themes or issues you feel are particularly important to you to keep tackling and addressing?

Looking back at my history, I was making works about social topics with modern dance before it was cool. What I mean by social topics are current affairs and even politics. I practiced speaking to people in San Francisco about their lives and changes in their neighborhoods. All these events were uniquely essential in forming my worldview on Black Dance. I learned about traditions from various Africanist principles, its spiritual connection to dance as a translation of language, and how migration — forced or otherwise — is a form of survival. Being Black in San Francisco is sometimes like living in a dystopian society. There’s a lot of anti-blackness in a city that champions itself on being progressive. My history as a San Francisco choreographer involves watching my community diminish and a grieving process that comes with it. I’m a part of Hope Mohr’s Dancing Around Race, which is headed by Gerald Casel. In this group, we work together to address racial equity.  I’m reminded that Black and Brown bodies are in crisis in San Francisco. I hope not to lose one more dancer, friend or neighbor to gentrification, but I might lose myself in the process. Issues I tackle are from the heart more than the mind, and the possibilities are endless.

You just had a baby! Do you have a sense of how being a new mother is going to affect your work process?

To talk more about survival, being a Black mother in San Francisco means having a really good network of family and friends who will help you through the medical field and a lot of interpersonal obstacles. San Francisco has the highest infant and maternal mortality rate for Black women when compared to national statistics. In fact, after leaving the hospital, I had to be readmitted for health complications. Perhaps these health issues should’ve been taken care of before I was released? I don’t know. But I really wonder what would’ve happened if I wasn’t my own greatest advocate. One particular theme I’m exploring is Afrofuturism. While working with a group of Black mothers, I found it was almost impossible for us to plan or conceive of a future. We were so consumed with living in the present, we operated in a survivalist mode. Each decision we made in that moment had dire consequences, even if it was a five-second decision. It seems various marginalized groups feel excluded from cultural imaginaries. Our ability to dream and envision our future is our ability to survive.

In your experience, are platforms for and representation of African American dance artists improving over time?

I’m here because I stand on the shoulders of those Black choreographers who paved the way for me. There’s a great sense of responsibility, I realize, to continue creating spaces and platforms for African Americans dance artists. There’s a lot more work to do. After a show in Chicago, I went out to eat with a few of my company members. We had just wrapped up performances of Whispering Tenderness with music by jazz musician Idris Ackamoor. They expressed how the Chicago audience members came up to them and personally thanked them for their performance. They were puzzled as to why this phenomenon was taking place and why these audience members felt so inspired to thank them and shake their hands. Representation is real. I reminded my dancers how a lot of people don’t usually see People of Color touring companies unless it’s a major group like Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Perhaps someone else can’t relate to the importance of seeing someone who looks like them on stage, but for minorities, it’s an act of resistance. What we continue to work on as People of Color and as Black choreographers is how we’re represented on the professional stage. If I can create a platform, no matter how small or how much time it takes, it’s worth the effort.

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To learn more, visit www.pushdance.org.

Raissa Simpson is an interdisciplinary artist best known for her choreography and social activism in San Francisco. She founded PUSH Dance Company to instill her deep interest in little known or untold stories seen in the public eye. Raissa has presented her works in over 50 venues across the United States. Recent highlights include Dance St. Louis’ Spring to Dance, Links Hall in Chicago, Ferst Center for the Arts at Georgia Tech, Joyce SoHo/NYC, Washington Ensemble Theater, Evolve Dance Festival/New York, Los Angeles Theater Center, and the Black Choreographers Festival in San Francisco. Her company will tour to Launchpad and the Aspen Fringe Festival in Colorado in 2019. PUSH also presents the annual PUSHfest for emerging and mid-career choreographers.

The post Choreographing Resistance appeared first on Stance on Dance.

BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT

Youth Protection Advocates in Dance (YPAD) is a non-profit dedicated to building empowered dance communities and keeping youth happy, healthy and safe in all dance environments. YPAD’s focus is on providing dance studios, conventions, competitions, instructors, dance professionals, parents, community members and dancers with the support, education, tools and resources they need to make healthy choices in the dance environment and the wider world. Here, founder Leslie Scott shares her own story, how others can get involved, and why YPAD’s mission is more important than ever.

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Can you tell me about the history of YPAD and how it got started?

YPAD was an idea in my mind over 10 years ago. I spent almost 20 years in the Hollywood area, and during that time I was on faculty at Edge for 14 years and at Millennium for 12 years. I eventually felt like there was something amiss in terms of a healthy community and holistic wellness. I was witnessing in myself a negative impact on my own physical and emotional health due to body image expectations and comments, a cultural normalization of absent boundaries, sexualization, sexual harassment on jobs, pressures to dance through injury, etc. I knew I was not the only professional dancer experiencing this. It started to become clear to me as I would stay after class speaking with parents that everything we as adults in the professional industry were going through was trickling down to the children who follow us and look to us as role models.

The proposal to use social media as a primary platform to promote dance, coupled with entertainment media, has put youth in the performing arts in the spotlight. Through this, I’ve not only witnessed healthy boundaries for adults being compromised, but also the exploitation and commodification of children. For example, TV programming in dance has increased 500 percent over the past 12 years. Through that increase, we risk commodification and exploitation of those who use their bodies as a tool.

I was on the other side of this issue for a long time. When I moved to LA from Arizona, I was told by superiors and colleagues I would book more jobs and pack my classes if I showed my body more, lost weight, played more sexually explicit music, and created more explicit choreography and concepts. Through self-objectification and self-sexualization, I increased my profile as an in-demand dancer and choreographer, but I lost a healthy mind, body and spirit.

Before moving to LA, my heart was very much in community building and inclusiveness. When I was at Arizona State University, I created the Hip Hop Coalition, which was all about using dance as a vehicle to highlight social justice issues. I allowed this focus to very quickly shift in LA. I altered my choreography, dieted, and dressed more promiscuously. This was the recipe I was told and witnessed worked to “make it” in Hollywood, and it afforded me a great professional career that I now look back on and feel sad I not only allowed others to objectify me, but did so myself. I also never thought about all the children who came every summer from around the world to train at Millennium and Edge.

I was too caught up in my desire for validation to even consider how I was impacting all these kids through my clothing, music and choreography choices, even my behavior online. At first it was YouTube, now it’s Instagram. It was just the beginning of class no longer being for training. The last 15 minutes of class, the best dancers, who maybe didn’t even pay for class, would take footage dancing the choreography to post online to try to go viral and get followers. The students who paid for class basically stand there looking at a show they did not sign up for. As that phenomenon caught on as a recipe for success, at first I didn’t see how demeaning it was to the sacred training environment. Now many of our eyes are open.

In 2011, I had an opportunity to choreograph a Christmas show at an orphanage in Mexico called Casa de la Esperanza. I had never used my talents and love of dance in that capacity, and it profoundly changed my understanding of the healing effects of dance. The children had been traumatized, raped, found in dumpsters, and abandoned on corners. Watching them come to life because I showed up for the opportunity to share expression through dance was more satisfying that any carnival I had choreographed or celebrity I had worked with. Accolades in LA were never satisfying because the next thing I needed to do was book something more impressive.

I had to take a long hard look at myself and how my choices were impacting the children and adolescences I was influencing. I realized that nobody was advocating for children. That’s how the idea of creating YPAD came into place.

When I started to speak out, I was bullied profoundly. I lost many friends and opportunities. It’s important people understand the pushback YPAD has received for bringing up this issue and the power they have to counteract through evidence-based research and strength through numbers. There are powerful entities that are succeeding because it’s lucrative to commodify and sexualize. When you’re using the vulnerable population of children, and parents who may be tempted to live vicariously through their children, it’s even easier for commodification to play out.

How is the organization structured?

It’s been phenomenal to see the volunteer steam behind us. Last year, we had over 4,000 hours of volunteer work done by 18 people. We have grown to 25 advisory panel members. Advocates like Lisa Phelps, Tiffany Prout-Leitao, Joseph Zanovitch, Katie Gatlin, Jill Williams, Jen Ray, Dr. Christina Donaldson, Jennifer Jeter, Vanessa Terrell, Hannah Burkholder, Sammi Rader, Tricia Gomez, Rachel Duggan and so many more have donated countless hours and heart. More Than Just Great Dancing (MTJGT), created by the amazing Misty Lown, became our first visionary sponsor, which paved the way for so much growth. MTJGD and Misty’s Dance Unlimited were first to be YPAD Certified! We have awesome affiliates such as Curtain Call Costumes, who became the first certified costume company and sponsor, guiDANCE Experience (our first certified competition), 360 Dance Festival (our first certified convention), RWID, AcroArts, Acrobatique, NDF, Apolla, Wingman for Dance, Dance Recital Ticketing and more! YPAD’s incredible advisory panel of doctors, therapists and specialists allow us to move this message forward using evidence-based research over opinion.

Things started to take form when I reached out to Dr. Tomi-Ann Roberts, one of the lead researchers on the American Psychological Association’s taskforce on the sexualization of girls. I contacted her and asked if she was aware of the epidemic of sexualization of youth in dance. She quickly came on board and started doing research studies analyzing viral videos. At the time she was the Director of Psychology at Colorado College and has since partnered with YPAD on our social media fast research.

For the past two years, we’ve taken children off social media for three days and done a pre and post survey with them to see if we could, in just three days, shift the participants over into other activities that require self-care, eye contact and relationship. We also ask them to reflect on how social media impacts them as dancers and people. In the subconscious, as you’re scrolling, your self-esteem can be impacted. Because it can be such an unconscious act, we need to slow children down and notice how different posts might lead them to feel envious or over-weight, for example, which can lead to unhealthy behavioral choices.

The research was just published and presented at a conference in England. We found that in just three short days, taking children off social media and having them do journaling and self-reflection increases body positivity, decreases anxiety, and increases mental focus. This was just three days!

On our advisory panel, we also have Dr. Steven Karageanes, our nation’s first orthopedic certified specifically in treating dancers and performing artists, as well as specialists in eating disorders, bullying, conflict management, anxiety, depression and self-harm. Our children in dance experience all these, and dance can often exacerbate it.

YPAD’s incredible advisory panel led to the YPAD Certification, which took two and a half years to develop. Lisa Phelps and Joseph Zanovitch were my partners in creating it along with several advisory panel members. We now have certification available in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and soon more. We believe education can lead to self-regulation. There are two ways to become certified: online or in-person. It’s a 12-hour training over two days at one of our events, or people can do the training online, which takes 6-8 hours and is so simple because it’s self-driven. The certification covers many topics, including social media literacy, body image, bullying, eating disorders, nutrition, sex-abuse and inclusiveness, to name a few. If you’re a studio owner or run a dance-related organization, there are slightly different compliance requirements depending on the entity.

We have an abuse and exploitation module for people to recognize the signs of when a youth has been sexually, emotionally or physically abused. I want to be clear that abuse in all forms is NOT specific to dance. All youth-centered activities run the risk that a perpetrator will infiltrate, but one of the things unique to the dance environment is the fact we have an abundance of passionate teachers who are not generally educated on what to do if they suspect abuse, or even what the red flags are. We educate the signs of grooming, how to take a first disclosure, and how to report, which are incredibly important. As dance teachers, we generally spend more time with these kids than a math teacher, and it is not unusual that they confide sensitive information to us. In those first moments, it’s important not to have a response that could further traumatize the child or teen.

For studios owners and organizations, we have three extra modules; conflict management, hiring tips and branding as a YPAD Certified organization. We really believe that we don’t need to be a watchdog by pointing fingers and “calling out” organizations that are making choices that could harm children. We believe we just need to speak louder about all the great things we’re doing and differentiate ourselves with the YPAD seal.

We launched the certification in 2017, but the first year and a half we only had in-person certifications. Hence, my toddler has been on 103 airplane rides. We call her the YPAD mascot who was born into the job! We’ve travelled all over Canada, the US and Mexico on behalf of YPAD. In the past half year, we launched the online certification. About 800 individuals have become certified to date, as well as about 40 studios and organizations. There are about 34 currently in process. Our goal is to certify 100 organizations by next year.

We also offer an option to audit the certification. Let’s say there’s a dancer who’s not sure they can clean up their social media and stay in compliance with our standards. We believe they can benefit from the overall education. We’re going for progress, not perfection. Education is empowerment, and that creates changes that create shifts. The audit option doesn’t require a background check or CPR card like the full certification.

People like to talk about sexualization, but there are so many other things under the umbrella of inappropriate-ness. What about pushing a child through injury or the worship of hypermobility at the expense of health? We put evidence-based research to the term “appropriate.”

YPAD HAS GENEROUSLY OFFERED STANCE ON DANCE READERS 15% OFF THE CERTIFICATION. ENTER THE DISCOUNT CODE SOD15 TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THIS GREAT RESOURCE! GO TO: ypad4change.org/certification TO REGISTER!

What are some ways YPAD is spreading its message?

Our YPAD consultant group works one on one with educators and parents every week to address their specific concerns and needs. We offer seminars for dancer 7-11, 12-18 and for dance parents on a variety of topics related to holistic wellness. We also use our social media presence as well as several partnerships with like-minded organizations who have been awarded the YPAD seal of approval by completing all the certification compliance requirements. One basic thing we all believe in is that no teacher should have access to children without getting a background check. That does not mean we can avert all instances of abuse, but if something happened, the first question would be, “Was a background check done?” This is required of most other teachers, coaches, and volunteers who have access to children. All our affiliates have been background checked. It’s a good business practice that not only protects our kids but also protects us.

From your perspective, has the overall environment for young people in dance been improving over time?

We’ve had a spectrum of wins and heartbreaks. We know people can change. I changed. I know what it’s like to be desensitized when you’re making potentially harmful choices. People thought there was no chance we’d ever have a certified costume company (Curtain Call), competition (guiDANCE) or convention (360 Dance Festival), let alone dozens of certified studios and hundreds of certified educators throughout the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. I think it’s important we recognize changing trends, choices and behaviors that are insidious and pervasive in our culture is a marathon, not a sprint. All these wins are truly remarkable and required commitment and unity by many.

It’s also important to recognize these issues are not just happening in dance; it’s happening in the greater culture, which trickles down to dance. We don’t need to get defensive, ashamed or embarrassed that harmful trends are happening in dance. We just need to get educated and start shifting the wind.

Many have seen what has happened in gymnastics. They have a governing body and tremendous oversight but many were complicit in covering up an extensive sex abuse scandal. This is why we just launched Youth Protection Advocates in Gymnastics in April. A governing body is not the answer. Education and advocacy that is led by people of integrity who are not beholden to politics, ego, money or fame and who walk the walk, is.

Our YPAD consultant group is something I’m really proud of, and I don’t use that word lightly. The fact that dance teachers travel with children and spend days with them at events puts us in a privileged position to recognize problems. In the past, as a dance teacher, I have functioned as a nutritionist, a physical therapist, a psychologist and a mediator. I don’t have credentials in those areas. The YPAD consultant group is currently nine doctors, therapists and specialists who specialize in emotional, physical and sexual health. You can visit www.ypad4change.org/consult/ and fill out a privacy agreement to get the bios and credentials of the consultant group, and you can email them confidentially to get consultation on whatever you’re specific issue is, and YPAD pays for it. You will receive a response in 24-48 hours.

This is one reason why we’re hoping people will consider generously giving to our non-profit. Every week, many teachers and parents reach out for consultations. I want the public to know about it so they can utilize it, as well as consider supporting it. Our entire program is funded by people who do the certification or who make donations.

How can people get involved?

People can donate or choose YPAD on Amazon Smile (log on to smile.amazon.com and select Youth Protection Advocates in Dance). It’s such a tiny percentage of your purchase, but it adds up and makes a difference in our ability to provide services and resources when many people do it!

If you hold a credential – maybe you’re a psychologist, nutritionist or physical therapist, or even just great at admin – we need people to volunteer. YPAD is not me; I want people to take responsibility and ownership of this mission. It’s phenomenal we’ve been able to get this far and that is due to all the amazing volunteers, those who have become certified, and donors.

Any other thoughts?

I have witnessed so many ethics exchanged for notoriety and popularity, including my own. That’s become more important than boundaries and education. Many people in dance – and I put myself in this category – have made bad choices because they’re not educated. It’s not because they are bad people. I loved my students when I was making poor choices that impacted them, I just needed more education and healthy mentorship. And it’s not about censorship. If you’re a choreographer who wants to make a piece that could be triggering or harmful to a minor, use adults. Please don’t use children as unknowing vehicles to express your art when it could have a negative impact on them. I believe in freedom of artistic expression, but not at the expense of children’s safety. We can create important art, make a living as a dancer/educator, AND keep youth happy, healthy and safe!

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As the Senior Director of NYC’s home for cutting-edge performance and discourse, Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, we urge you to initiate a public discussion about the ethics of Jan Fabre’s work practices and Mount Olympus.

Specifically, we feel that presenting Jan Fabre’s work is a form of complicity with his practices. If you do not support sexual harassment, bullying and denigration of performers, and underpaid or unpaid work hours, then we feel that you are responsible for addressing the publicly available testimonies rather than presenting the work without comment. 

According to the New York Times article from September 23rd, “The Skirball Center said that it was aware of the allegations [against Fabre] but that it had no comment.” Given your other current programming and agendas (i.e. the Marx festival, Angela Davis’ speaking engagement, a claim to be NYU’s largest classroom), it is hard to understand the absence of discussion around the working conditions and practices in the Troubleyn company. These are burning issues in the work and the world at large right now. We would like to see that information and dialogue made readily available and more prominent on your website, as well as available to the audience on performance day.

We find the presentation and organization of materials that you provide on the PrepSchool page insufficient and problematic. The three essays and program notes you do offer are each penned by a white man and are featured on the page. They celebrate and glorify Fabre’s work, while only much farther down the page there is mention of the wetoo and metoo allegations against Fabre. This presentation evidences an ongoing power dynamic that will not change until it is forced into dialogue. The Lehmann essay cites Fabre’s “violation of taboo” as a necessity in the creation of tragedy, uses Aristotle to justify the work as “beyond morality,” and mentions the humiliations that Troubleyn’s “warriors of beauty” go through onstage, all as naturalized matters of fact, not problematized in the least. Van Den Dries’ essay depicts the senseless obscenity of Fabre’s approach to greek tragedy. There is so far no critical link made between the work itself as an aesthetic experience and the underlying problems of its creation. You are perfectly poised to bring these urgent points into a public and transparent discussion of the profound interrelation between ethics and aesthetics. There are plenty of people in your immediate artistic and academic community who could be gathered for such a discussion.   

We hope that your dictum to present “adventurous, unorthodox, and pioneering artists” is not an alibi for glossing over unsavory realities. Because your stated mission is “to present work that inspires yet frustrates, confirms yet confounds, entertains yet upends,” and to “embrace renegade artists, academics, and thought-leaders who are courageous,” we expect you to act with courage by confronting the politics of this work. As a programmer, silence is your privilege, but breaking it is your responsibility. That way, you don’t just program cutting edge work, you do cutting edge work.

Your community needs to know why you have made this programming choice and why you are presenting it in this context. We urge you to take a stance. 

We remain most sincere, and as always, available for communication and dialogue,

Engagement Arts in collaboration with the New York based Dance Community and Whistle While You Work

The post A Call for Public Discussion appeared first on Stance on Dance.

BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT

Kathleen Rea is a dancer, improviser, choreographer and activist in Toronto, Canada. In 2000, she formed REAson d’etre dance productions, a dance company that promotes contact dance improvisation. Through her company, she has produced the Wednesday Dance Jam, the Contact Dance International Film Festival and the Moved By Natural Forces Retreat. After publishing guidelines clarifying appropriate and inappropriate behavior for the Toronto Wednesday Contact Jam, she received a spectrum of praise, harassment and critique. Then, this past year, Kathleen distributed a petition calling on Les Grands Ballet to hire a female choreographer after the company hired three male choreographers for a program entitled “Femmes.” Kathleen’s petition garnered much attention, making her an advocate for women in dance and forcing her to reconsider her own history and trajectory.

Kathleen Rea, photo by Simon Tanenbaum

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Can you tell me a little about your dance history and how you came to be passionate about contact improvisation?

I trained as a ballerina at the National Ballet School of Canada from the age of 10. I was a free-spirited dancer trying to fit into a precise mold. It seemed that I could never quite get my body or spirit to conform. I loved to dance but I was in a battle between myself and my art form. I discovered contact improvisation towards the end of my ballet career, and it felt like I had come home. I was living in Innsbruck, Austria working for the Tiroler Landestheater. I had this group of non-dancer friends who were always going off and doing this weird thing called contact improv, and they would frequently try to get me to come. They kept saying it would be good for me. I told them, “No thank you.” One day they said they were going to a contact workshop in the mountains, there was an extra spot in their car, and I could hike if I didn’t like it. I climbed in the car and an hour later I was doing contact improvisation. I had a “sky-opening-angels-singing” epiphany that I would do this for the rest of my life, and that is what I’ve done.

With contact improv I can make choices. I don’t have to fit my body into a predetermined form. I love the expressive potential and how stories spontaneously emerge in a dance. Growing up, I sat in the wings mesmerized by classical story ballets. In my choreography career, I morphed my two loves – story ballets and contact improv – into a kind of dance theater where there’s a plot, characters and script, and most of the story is told through contact improvisation scores.

When I left company work, I missed having a group of people to dance with on a regular basis. They had been my family. I started the Toronto Wednesday Contact Jam 19 years ago so that I would have a community to dance with again.

There came a point when my body gave out and I was in pain every moment of the day. Dancing a 30-hour work week for so many years had worn away all the cartilage in my knees. I was heading towards a knee replacement until I discovered the Axis Syllabus. The Axis Syllabus is a collection of functional movement concepts that are safe and energy conservative and work in relationship with anatomical structure. I became a candidate teacher and started the process of working with my body instead of against it. I now practice and teach contact improvisation through the lens of the Axis Syllabus. I am fast approaching 50 and I am just reaching the top of my form in terms of quality of movement, strength and artistic expression. If you had told me when I was 15 that I would be at my peak some 35 years later, I would have thought you were joking.

Why did you start writing about dance?

Ironically, it was the harassment I faced over my jam guidelines that got me writing. I was one of the first people in the contact improv world to be so specific in my guidelines. For example, I named and defined nonconsensual pass-by pokes, tickles and massages as things that were causing harm at jams. I was describing behaviors, but I realize now I was inadvertently referencing the systemic sexism and rape culture that we all stew in and that contact improv is not immune to. I think the level of specificity in my guidelines was unsettling for people. Some felt it undermined the “first rule” of contact in which everyone is asked to be responsible for taking care of themselves. With the “first rule” in place, many felt no other guidelines were needed as it covered every situation. Some people told me that the guidelines were taking away their freedom and insulting women as being incapable of defending their own boundaries. Also, to face that such guidelines might be needed brought discomfort because it meant there was a problem. It is comforting to think the contact improv world is a utopia free from sexism. But then there was me say, “Hey,” and by doing so I think I was breaking people’s “bubble.”

Some people debated with me, trying to convince me I was going in the wrong direction. Others were more aggressive and scared me with bullying type behaviors online and in person. After these experiences, I would just get on my computer and start writing out my thoughts to organize and prepare myself to defend against attack. I self-identify as having high functioning autism and one of my spectrum characteristics is being able to sift through details and organize them and to repeat this process for months and years until a crystalized idea emerges. I did all this for myself but then realized it was also relevant for others. I started the Contact Improv Consent Culture Blog a year ago to publish some of my work.

I had been blogging already on various subjects such as parenting, cooking, health and expressive arts for 10 years. I did it just for fun and no more than 40 or so people would read my posts. I had no reason to believe the Consent Culture blog would be any different. But with my first “That Lady” post, in which I described the push back I had received about my jam guidelines, my year of accidental activism started. I say “accidental” because I had no idea what was coming when I clicked “publish.”  My “That Lady” post was read by 35,000 people in a few weeks. Messages started pouring in from all over the world. A few were vehemently against my viewpoint, but most were stories of abuse people had faced in social dance settings.

Why did you feel the need to put together guidelines outlining boundaries for what is appropriate in a contact jam? Was there one incident, or did the need grow over time?

My first day doing contact improv, the teacher took advantage of my blissed-out epiphany state and his position of power in relation to me being a newcomer. He added in a few other predator techniques to sway his position of power over me in his favor and made advances on me. The “whisper chain” reached me a day late. Whisper chains occur when the only prevention against harassment is a whispered warning from one woman’s ear to the next. I was warned that he was a teacher well known for this behavior after something had already happened. I will always have my first epiphany in contact dance intertwined with this memory.

As I became more contact dance savvy, I wanted a space to dance where I didn’t have to defend against sexual harassment. In private conversation, many women talked about the pass-by-pokes, tickles and massages in which someone would come up to them from behind. One woman said “Yes, I can defend my boundaries, but I get tired doing so… I just want to dance.” And so I began to craft guidelines that taught people a general understanding of consent to help address this issue and many other issues happening at the jam.

How have your guidelines generally been received?

When I first wrote them almost 20 years ago, people thought I was crazy. Then there started to be a slow growing understanding of consent issues and systemic sexism. When the #metoo movement hit, there was a wave of understanding as to why I had written them.

In the first decade of the Toronto Wednesday Jam, several women approached me with a thank you, and we would exchange a silent and knowing nod that spoke a hundred words. Back then, the community of women, myself included, were not talking publicly about boundary issues. It was all conversations in private. We did not have language yet to address, describe, or even to understand the issues. For example, I felt so icky every time I thought about my first contact teacher, but I did not have words to describe what had happened, or even an understanding of how he took advantage of me, until almost 10 years later.

Many years ago, my guidelines were put in a compendium of other guidelines and started triggering a lot of conversation and push back. I became “that lady” who made those guidelines. When I realized the attention my guidelines were receiving, it became even more important for me to sift through them carefully. Even today, I make changes to them every few months. They are really a 19-year project at this point.

Now there’s a front page in which I explain that I believe diversity in types of jams benefits community and that each jam can have its own mandate and ways to support it. In terms of building consent-based jam communities, providing guidelines is just one method. You also can offer training that builds capacity, education so people understand consent better, or lead through principles.  My very specific guidelines are just one way, and there’s space for other ways.

I added a whole section on how to promote boundaries. When newcomers arrive, I refer to that page as I give them an introduction on the basics of boundary setting within the dance form, such as how to redirect or end dances. I also educate people about the power imbalance between newcomer and advanced dancer that resolves after the newcomer has acclimatized themselves to the form.

I think I have seen changes over the years. I used to see a lot of pass-by-pokes and tickles, or people starting dances by coming up from behind so the other person couldn’t see them. I hardly ever see these things anymore. Also, I think newcomers are going out onto the dance floor with a bit of know-how, and our community now understands taking advantage of their lack of knowledge is just not acceptable anymore. It is still a work in progress with lots of work ahead, but I have seen change.

Kathleen Rea and Michael Haltrect, photo by Jeff Moskal

Earlier this year, you confronted Les Grands Ballets Canadiens about their programming of three male choreographers to create pieces on the topic of women. You garnered a couple thousand signatures on a petition in a few days and were able to meet with the artistic director and voice your protest. Although unable to convince him to hire a female choreographer, he did change the topic of the show. How has the episode affected your own work, either choreographically, via writing, or hosting the jam?

Yes, that was the second half of my year of accidental activism. One night I was so mad about their programming choice that I went to change.org and within 15 minutes I had launched my petition. Really, I was expecting only about 100 people to sign it. I did it because I needed to do something with my anger. Once again, I clicked “publish” with no idea what would unfold next.

Within a few days, the whole thing was blowing up and I was doing about four interviews a day. The Guardian picked up the story and it went international. It was a crazy ride that I was on while still managing family life. One time I was wiping my toddler’s bum and picked up the phone and it was a request for a live interview on CBC happening in the next 10 minutes. I was doing interviews while walking my kids to school, during nap time, while making lunches.

People saw that I had the “stage” and I received secret coaching calls from both prominent and disempowered people in the ballet world who requested not to be named. “You have to say this in your next interview… “you need to bring up the race issues…” “this bit of info will help your argument.” I felt responsible to use my time in the limelight to get an important message across and to be the voice of many as best I could amidst the chaos of parenting! My kids ended up watching a lot of Netflix cartoons with headphones on that month as mommy was busy taking on the world.

I also thought about my own history and my time at the National Ballet of Canada. I danced about 40 different ballets there, and only one was choreographed by a woman. That was the Nutcracker. And then a few years later, they rechoreographed their Nutcracker by a man. As an aspiring young female choreographer, my future looked bleak.

When I met with Les Grands, I pointed out to Ivan [Ivan Cavallari is the company’s artistic director] that in the next season they had planned eight choreographies, and only one was by a woman. He told me I wasn’t counting correctly: “Giselle and Swan Lake are classics. Classics are always choreographed by men. That’s not our fault, so let’s take it off the count. Nutcracker, well it is just the Nutcracker so let’s take it off the count too. And Cathy Marston has an entire evening, so let’s count her as two.” Why would a woman count as two for having a whole program when so many times men receive whole programs? It should just be normal that women choreographers can get a whole evening. For most of my time speaking with him he was trying to convince me that he was not a sexist man and that he was the victim of the situation. He could not make the leap towards talking about systemic sexism and the role we each play within the system.

From your perspective, is the sexual abuse your contact improv guidelines seek to protect against and the incident with Les Grands Ballets part of the same patriarchal patterning?

I like to think that contact dance is more evolved in terms of boundaries than the ballet world. But we all simmer in the stew of systemic racism and sexism. Contact improv does not get a free pass from that. I do think ballet struggles more with boundary issues. At least in contact improv we are taught to be in charge of our own safety. A sense of agency is a key part of the form. As a ballet dancer, I was taught to say. “Yes, I will jump,” “Yes, I will dance several hours straight,” “Yes, I will dance until my toes bleed through my shoes,” “Yes, I will starve myself.” Such conditioning leaves young ballet dancers vulnerable to various types of abuse. I had an eating disorder for 10 years. I was talented enough to get good jobs, but once I got those jobs, I’d hear, “If only you were a bit thinner.” The only way I could maintain my low performance weight was to starve. Luckily, I did recover, but it took me two years in therapy to learn to assert my boundaries and to learn how to say “no.”

Do you feel like conditions for women to make work/take on leadership/have a strong voice in dance are getting better with time, or staying the same?

The alleged stories of sexual harassment and abuse that have recently come out are quite horrific – Royal Winnipeg Ballet, New York City Ballet. I think in many ways there has not been change but at least the conversation has started spurred on by the #metoo movement and by brave women coming forward.

When I was recovering from an eating disorder, I told the National Ballet I wouldn’t be at my performance weight for a couple of months, so they fired me. I was literally told, “You’re too fat, so we’re firing you.” Nowadays, it’s not as overt. They do not dare say that so openly anymore because there have been too many court cases. Thing are more sugarcoated now.

As always, there are pioneers. At Canada’s Ballet Jörgen, the dancers have more diverse body shapes and are not pressured to be thin. Since their inception, they have also hired 50 percent female choreographers and not because they were trying to hit any target. They just did it without even realizing they were doing it. I teach at Ballet Jörgen School and all faculty are banned from starting conversations about students’ weight. It’s just a no-go topic.

There are also ballet dancers like Misty Copland who are paving the way for change with a muscular physique. She is a picture of strength that is an empowering role model for young girls. Simone Orlando, the artistic director of Ballet Kelowna, recently did a program of all female choreographers. There are many pioneers out there making a difference.

In terms of looking at numbers, I would say both the contact improv world and the ballet world are skewed toward male power. While there are many women in low paying or volunteer positions, the list of headliner male teachers/choreographers is extensive in both scenes when compared to the female count.

So many female choreographers have had to go out and make their own careers, myself included. The commissions are not coming in, so we start our own companies. We fundraise. We make the work happen. There is a lot of female talent out there crafted through sheer willpower to keep going despite the challenges.

Can you tell me a little about the Contact Dance International Film Festival? What was the impetus for it, and how has it gone thus far?

One of the reasons I started it was because I was starting to feel disempowered being an aging woman in the youth orientated dance world. I wanted to do something that gave back and would at the same time empower me, something that I could do regardless of the amount of cartilage left in my knees or how old I got. There wasn’t a contact dance film festival, and I was always finding amazing contact dance films online and wishing there was a way to screen them.

We’re going into our fourth season this spring, and it runs every two years. Usually we get over 100 films submitted, and we are able to screen about 40 of them. There are also workshops, jams, receptions and an award ceremony. In keeping with the all-levels approach in contact improvisation, we welcome submissions of all levels. It could be filmed on a cellphone at a jam late at night and if it’s something that shows a beautiful relationship we’ll program it. We’ve had both student projects and professional films with amazing cinematography programmed right after one another. This next year, we’re bringing in Tiina Jääskö as our headline teacher.

Kathleen Rea still from film by Olya Glotka

You mentioned to me your reach (in terms of audience/readership) has grown immensely due to the events of this past year. Has it changed your approach to your writing or choreography?

I got so involved and pulled into my year of accidental activism – answering emails, doing interviews, writing – that I lost the thread of my paid work. My earnings went down significantly, and this affected my family. By the end of the year we were struggling with the bills. Yet, I was called upon to do this important volunteer work. I had a platform, people were listening, and I felt a deep responsibility to give voice to many who had been silenced. It was tiring, and I had to come to terms with my own ballet career and the lack of work I’ve gotten as a choreographer, as well as the level of sexual harassment in the contact world. There were moments when I felt that I did not have the strength for this activist role. I did not feel brave. Yet there I was, being brave anyway. There was a cost both financially and emotionally. I entered a deep state of grieving. I was being called upon to face what I had faced as a young female dancer, to deeply feel the pain of it and the pain of others who had faced similar things. I really could no longer pretend that things were okay. And there is much self-work and world-work in that realization.

Any other thoughts?

Yes, in Toronto, after the #metoo movement hit, many men were feeling too scared to attend jams.   Women had come to jams for years and practiced navigating contact improv with a certain level of fear and lack of safety. Much practice made us pretty good at the task. For many men, managing chronic fear at a jam was new for them. I realized the men needed support. So, this past year, I organized men’s circles in our contact dance community. They were a place for men to talk and figure their way through.

Also, there has been a shift in our Toronto Community. It used to be that to be banned, one’s behaviors had to be extreme and be repeated even after a warning.  Many of us realized that when we ban someone without any attempt to educate them, they are likely to just find a new community and repeat their pattern. In Toronto, we now make every effort to have “calling-ins,” in which we seek to enter conversation and to educate. If this process does not work, we move to a ban. We also realized that there is a whole spectrum of issues and some are milder than others. An example would be a person who is generally respectful of boundaries but has a habit of starting dances in a way that the person can’t see who they are. I might sit down with them on the context of being a jam facilitator and say, “Look, unless you are at a blindfold jam, in general it is best practice to invite a dance in a way that the person can see who you are.” I explain that “best practice” means we aim for that and understand it will not be perfect. This is an example of a “light” consent conversation. I offer that we can start having conversations about consent all the time and not save these conversations for extreme cases, that conversations about consent become the new normal.

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The post Promoting Boundaries and Pushing for Equality appeared first on Stance on Dance.

BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT

Anne Bluethenthal is a dancer and choreographer in the Bay Area, and artistic director of ABD Productions and the Skywatchers Program, which brings residents of San Francisco’s Tenderloin District into partnership with professional artists to create multi-disciplinary, site-specific performance installations that amplify the rich and complex stories, life experiences and talents of community members. Here, she discusses how it all got started, as well as what it means to engage in community-based art.

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What is your dance background and how did it inspire you to initiate a program like Skywatchers?

I started making dances in the late 70s. From the beginning, it was my way of metabolizing life. I grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina during the civil rights movement. My parents were activists, and were instrumental in the desegregation of our town’s school system. Social justice was part of my life for as far back as I have memory.

Dance started as a very personal journey translating the politics of my youth into the psycho-physical discipline of dance. I explored how politics are embodied, and how our bodies are colonized by the dominant culture. Over three decades, my work grew more ambitious in subject and scope, addressing whatever social issues were burning for me at the moment. I’ve made work about subjects ranging from the environment to gender politics to genocide.

What was the impetus for starting Skywatchers?

I was searching for more lasting relationships in the creative process in terms of the impact art can make. I did a piece about genocide that involved a number of local, national and international organizations. It was a massive two-year project that engaged communities across the globe, but it was over in a matter of four days.

Most of the work people like me make in theaters is of the people but not by or for the people. They are subject matter but rarely creators or witnesses. I wanted to create more lasting relationships in the building of work, and to allow those most affected by the issues to be the people who were crafting and performing the work.

While contemplating this and exploring ways of entering and working in collaboration with community, I was also challenging the theater-economy of dance, which propelled me into a “Year of Guerilla Art: 50 Random Acts of Dance.” My dancers and I would leave the studio once a week, arrive at a unique site in the city, perform, and leave. It was a practice of giving dance away as a gift. By the end of the year, hungry to stay in one place, I landed at the Tenderloin National Forest, created by Darryl Smith and Laurie Glaser of Luggage Store Gallery. It’s a gorgeous living green art space, now over 15 years old. I wanted to make a piece there.

I started talking to people who lived in the adjacent Senator Hotel. As soon as I started to talk to people, my whole concept changed. I was no longer doing a site-specific piece; I was building relationships with people living in supportive housing SROs (single room occupancy hotels), which provide subsidized housing and support services to people who are not housed or who are low to no income.

After a successful first performance in the forest, more residents wanted to participate. Once people saw that the program was accessible, and that I wasn’t going anywhere, they became more interested. By the end of the first performance, I was coming every week with pizza and hanging out in the tenant lounges with whomever showed up.

The first person I interviewed, Janice Detroit, called herself a skywatcher because she lived in the top floor corner apartment. She told me she watches the sky and looks over the neighborhood, and she’s there to take the tears away from all the children below. She gave us permission to use the name Skwatchers for the program I was slowly developing. By the third year, it was a phenomenon in the neighborhood. People were starting to see it as their own ensemble.

How is Skywatchers organized?

I started at the Senator Hotel, bringing food and listening, capturing stories, insights, dreams, ideas, and spontaneous poetry or song as they arrived. By the end of the third year, I was also going to the Cambridge Hotel, and I started bringing another artist with me. Seven years later, we have five Skywatcher Artist Facilitators who spread out to six different SROs, plus a youth program at Larkin Street Youth Services. We work individually at our different sites, listening deeply, building relationships and making note of what seems urgent. We try to create art around those concerns. We do that individually at our respective sites, and we also come together collectively to discuss how to advance themes that are arising. Depending on the year, we usually have one large annual performance event, and five to six smaller events.

How has your own understanding of the Tenderloin community evolved?

My understanding of the Tenderloin hasn’t changed so much as deepened. I knew the Tenderloin was treated as the containment zone of San Francisco, into which we’ve pushed most of our people of color and most of our poor. I understood it as a place where people were afraid to go. I personally never felt afraid or threatened, but that’s probably partly my own privilege as well as my curiosity.

It is a harsh reality, the kind of poverty we have in our backyards. Getting to know so many amazing, brilliant, wise and talented people; listening to those stories every week has changed me. I’m passionate about making visible how the most vulnerable in our society live, and to celebrate the beauty, wisdom and brilliance of that community.

What obstacles have you faced keeping Skywatchers going?

Poverty is trauma. At any given moment, there’s the immediacy of people’s lives that we’re intersecting with and creating the space in which to discuss. Survival is the biggest challenge, how to support each other in surviving.

On a purely logistical level, residents don’t necessarily have phones or internet, so reaching people to let them know where to be at what time can be a challenge. They don’t have all the communication resources we take for granted. Sometimes just showing up is a heroic act.

Has your race and class influenced how you approach Skywatchers, especially being a white woman going into a community of color?

It’s a precarious position to put oneself in. I am very aware of the problematic nature of my presence. The way I look at it is: I’ve been doing anti-racist work since I was young; issues of race and privilege are part and parcel of the work I’ve been doing most of my life. To not put myself in an SRO where I am a conspicuously middle-aged, gray-haired white woman in a community of color would be easier in many ways. I believe we have to work together to make change. And too many people with privilege avoid interacting directly with those who are vulnerable, suffering and hurting in our society. I am interested in leveraging the privilege I have to expose, collaborate, agitate, support and create toward disrupting and making positive change. By just placing myself in the Tenderloin, I’m creating social change. I may be encountering problematic issues along the way,  but I think those are the noble problems. I’ve been working in the TL for seven years on an almost daily basis. Creating trust across chasms of power and privilege takes time and commitment, and I’m excited about doing it.

What advice would you give to an artist who is interested in doing community-based work?

When I teach community practice, I have students start with their own identities. People with skin, class and education privilege often don’t know how to identify their own communities. I suggest starting with the communities in which you are naturally situated. What kind of work is being done in those communities, or what would you like to see? Start there. I spent several years getting my chops in my own communities. Getting chops and the accompanying confidence made it possible for me to go sit in an SRO and feel confident that whatever came up in the room, I would be able to craft into a piece of performance. There’s nothing beyond years of experience that will give you that.

So my advice is to have a practice you are deeply committed to, and to begin where you are situated. If you are called into a community that is different than your own, ask yourself if you’re being called by your own desires or by the desire and need of the community. Ask yourself what you’re offering as well as what you’re receiving. The mindset of helping can be one of the most damaging attitudes. Standing together, walking together in the struggle and, of course, creating together… it’s about radical reciprocity. And it’s about relationships. And it’s slow art—it can’t be done as a one off, so make sure you’ve got the capacity for durational, relational work. It’s the most rewarding thing going!

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To learn more, visit www.abdproductions.org.

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