Note: This essay was first published in Stance on Dance’s spring/summer 2022 print issue. To learn more, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.

Spoiler alert: I don’t have the answer and I’m suspicious of anyone who says they do.

Across and beyond the field of dance, there is a fascination with decolonization and decoloniality, and how to embody and enact these concepts by engaging theoretical frameworks with tangible action. From broad dialogues on decolonizing dance, to examining issues of decolonizing philanthropy, to even decolonizing stages and dance writing, the conversation is circulating through the field, and yet continues to be a ripe site for inquiry, particularly around performance practice. This endeavor to create a decolonized body is not one that any artist approaches alone, nor is being conducted in a singular way. In fact, many artists and theorists have attempted this ambitious undertaking: identifying approaches to explore these murky waters of decolonization in the space of settler colonization of the US.

Dancers: Bhumi B. Patel and Jordan Wanderer
Photographer: Douglas Calalo Berry
Performance: zero

As I write this, we have been navigating the COVID-19 global pandemic for 24 months. Two years. Though I hope this piece feels alive long after we leave this pandemic, I find that this period of life will certainly be blurry in memory and feel like an embodied reconceptualization of historical time. Maybe even queer time. Over this last year and a half, the work of reconceptualizing time has been at the forefront of our public discourses. We frequently talk about the “before times” and what life will be like when we “get back to normal” or “when COVID is over.” Yet, there is no back to return to. At least not for those of us at the margins.

The discourses around the decolonial have become louder and more visible during this pandemic, and because of this attention, I have been wondering what it means to engage with decolonial praxis in performance. For me, praxis is where practice and theory meet in informed, embodied, committed action. Perhaps to create decolonial performance praxis is to challenge the hegemonic histories of marginalization as a singular, forward-progressing trajectory that is divided into movements or waves or phases. Often this singularity leads to hegemonic viewpoints of timelines of liberation. This, in turn, misrepresents and curtails the ways in which liberatory practices and activisms can be related, conceptualized, and mobilized toward a point at which we never arrive. Perhaps a decolonial performance praxis centers the relationship between liberatory practices and activisms, moving us toward the unarrivable horizon. In Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed suggests that when we are dismissed, like many experiences of oppressed people are, “we experience the world as all the more sensational; what is ordinarily overlooked or looked over appears striking” and that the “past is magnified when it is no longer shrunk” (40). Nothing has been discovered or rediscovered, it is just there and constant; the decolonial can allow space for magnifying a past that is acutely relevant. The past that is embodied in the work is experienced on a scale that is present and real in the here and now. It is magnified because it is no longer held back. The scale shifts, and thus we are shifted with it. Perhaps the decolonial is a shifted scale.

Perhaps time is queered in a decolonial performance praxis. As I continue to reflect on time, I wonder how artists at the margins exist outside of linear structures of time and what that looks like in performance praxis. I wonder about repetition, geologic speed, and continuous weight shifting to challenge linearity. I wonder about nonlinear storynests. Interwoven and messy. What else is possible to transgress structures of time? In Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance, Uri McMillan argues “time recuts, reverberates, and exceeds artificial distinctions between the past and the present. Time is polytemporal; what has come before is not contained in the past, but is continually erupting” (13) and that “black performance culture is ‘propagated by unpredictable means in non-linear patterns’” (200). These patterns are necessary as coding the process(es) of decolonial approaches to creating movement-based performance that pushes back against the structures of power that dictate so much of our ways of being and knowing.

When I have seen what I can identify as potential for decolonial praxis, I have felt an ever-growing sense of a nonlinear history, a tripping over the logics of linear time that afforded the past and present the opportunity to touch, even if just for a moment. Suzette Sagisi reflects on decolonizing the body by building off questions asked in the rehearsal process to outline her experiences with embodied feeling, intentionality, and decolonizing movement and what it felt like. She proposes that the body “decolonizes itself when it sheds what’s been forced upon it” and that “Black and brown movers decolonize themselves when they care for and center themselves, take up space, and move so that they may exist freely and fully” outlining what she holds to be at the center of decolonization of the body (Sagisi 2020). Sagisi’s use of the word “shed” indicates a type of unlearning the things that have been conditioned. These acts of world-creation in unlearning the colonial might get us closer.

Dancers: Daria Garina, Katherine House, KJ Dahlaw
Photographer: Kyle Adler
Performance: the long shadow

Walter Mignolo, in “Looking for the Meaning of ‘Decolonial Gesture’” asks the questions “What are decolonial ‘gestures? […] If ‘gestures’ are signs and if ‘universes of meanings’ are semantic frames, at what juncture could gesture be created or interpreted as decolonial?” (2014). Mignolo postulates that if we can understand gestures as movements of the body or limbs that are meant to be expressive, then a decolonial gesture “is a body movement which carries a decolonial sentiment or/and a decolonial intention; a movement that points toward something in relation to something already constituted that the addressed of the gesture or whomever sees the gestures, recognizes in relation to the ‘colonial gesture’” (2014). For Mignolo, “decoloniality is a complementary mode or even perhaps a successor to political decolonization,” and that “decolonization movements aim to overturn a system of colonial rule; decoloniality, by contrast, is an ongoing praxis that unmakes and reinvents techniques, institutions, and logics” (Spatz 2019, 16). The creation of this type of performance, one that reveals its own decolonial approach demonstrates that the intention of decoloniality is the ongoing praxis to unmake logics that tell us how we should move, and how we understand time itself. If it is ongoing praxis, I must have ongoing inquiries.

What does it mean to have a decolonial body?

What is being put on and what is being shed?

How do we tell the stories of our lives?

Dancer: Danielle Galvez
Photographer: Lydia Daniller
Performance: divisions the empire has sown

As I continue to think about how decolonial praxis can intersect with queer dance, I consider the ways that queerness and non-whiteness interact. But what is queer dance, and how can we be intentional about queerness in the racialized body? Here, I mean queer as in “being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live” (hooks 2014). As dance scholar Clare Croft explains, queer dance is “a force of disruption” against the hegemonic or normative constructs that confine those on the margins. Croft recognizes “the links between dance and legacies of queer activism” and within these links, “‘queer’ signals a coalitional sensibility” and “draws on a more expansive notion of ‘queer,’ a broader challenge to social norms” thereby expanding outward from LGBTQ identities. Croft asserts that dance “has potential to have a particular power within queer work because dance emphasizes how public, physical action can be a force of social change.”

E. Patrick Johnson, in Black Queer Studies, offers that “because much of queer theory critically interrogates notions of selfhood, agency, and experience, it is often unable to accommodate the issues faced by gays and lesbians of color who come from ‘raced’ communities” (126-127). When I think through decolonial praxis for dance as queer dance, it can be about moving and relating to one another and self through a multitude of modalities, but that it requires the attention of decolonial praxis to address issues of communities of color. The work is queer in how it moves and creates relationships about one another and self through a multitude of modalities. I tread lightly on using queer dance because, as Gloria Anzaldúa cautions against, queer can be homogenizing and fail to recognize racial difference (Johnson 2005, 127). In this there is a tension that continues to evolve and at times dissipate, reflecting the tensions between our experiences themselves and the way in which the impacts of experiences change over time.

I wonder if there is a wildness to being free to both metaphorically and literally open our chests to the sky and ask to be carried through the portal toward liberation. I wonder if searching for decolonial performance praxis allows us to imagine how the orientations of time can shift and evolve with us over our, as Mary Oliver says, “one wild and precious life.”

Maybe we’re all just time travelers moving through time and space, bundled together past present future selves reaching out to find home.

Dancers: Daria Garina, Katherine House, KJ Dahlaw
Photographer: Kyle Adler
Performance: the long shadow

~~

References:

Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press.

hooks, bell, Janet Mock, Shola Lynch, and Marci Blackman. 2014. “Are You Still a Slave?” The New School. May 6, 2014. Vimeo. 1:55:41. https://livestream.com/thenewschool/slave.

Johnson, E. Patrick, ed. 2005. Black Queer Studies. Durham: Duke University Press.

McMillan, Uri. 2015. Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance. New York: NYU Press.

Mignolo, Walter D. 2014. “Looking for the Meaning of ‘Decolonial Gesture’”. emisférica: Hemispheric Institute 11 (1). https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/emisferica-11-1-decolonial-gesture/11-1-essays/looking-for-the-meaning-of-decolonial-gesture.html.

Sagisi, Suzette. 2020. “On Embodied Feeling, Intentionality, AND Decolonizing Movement.” HMD Blog, September 22, 2020. https://www.hopemohr.org/blog/2020/9/22/on-decolonizing-movement-embodied-feeling-and-intentionality.

Spatz, Ben. 2019. “Notes for Decolonizing Embodiment.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 33 (2): 9-22.

~~

This essay began through reflection on Alexander Diaz’s performance work, “We’re Getting Closer.” The writing and performance were made possible through the generous support of Pepatián: Bronx Art Collaborative’s Dancing Futures: Artist & Mentor Collaborative Residency 2021, produced in collaboration with BAAD! Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance and funded by the Jerome Foundation.

Bhumi B Patel is a queer, desi artist/activist (she/they) and directs pateldanceworks. In its purest form, her performance work is a love letter to her ancestors. She earned her MA in American Dance Studies from FSU and her MFA from Mills College. Bhumi is currently a doctoral student at The Ohio State University. She is a member of Dancing Around Race, and engages with curatorial practices for both performances and written publications. Making art is her way of tracing the deeply woven connections in which we live–past, present, future–as a way to build communities of nourishment and care.

To learn more about Bhumi’s work, visit www.pateldanceworks.org.

This essay was first printed in Stance on Dance’s spring/summer 2022 print issue. To learn more, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.

The post in search of a decolonial performance praxis appeared first on Stance on Dance.

This year marks Stance on Dance’s 10th birthday. In honor of the occasion (and a bit of a coincidence as well), I am pleased to announce that Stance on Dance has become a nonprofit and received 501c3 status. Stance on Dance’s nonprofit mission is to educate the dance community and wider audiences about dance from the perspective of underrepresented voices and access points. One way my board and I are fulfilling our mission is by launching a twice-yearly print publication that features and supports more dance writers and thus shares more perspectives. We will also distribute copies to dance educational institutions and to our donors who make this possible.

Allow me to wax philosophic about how Stance on Dance got to this point. I started Stance on Dance as a blog in 2012. As a freelance dancer in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time, I felt frustrated with the ways dance was written about. It was often written about by people without a deep knowledge of the artform, it was often review and preview oriented (and the show is but the tip of the iceberg), and it tended to follow the money and cover major ballet and modern companies while overlooking the varied world of freelance artists who pour their energy (and often their earnings) into making their art exist.

My idea was simple enough: I would publish interviews with fellow dance artists in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as solicit and edit content from colleagues. The blog often had a tone of being “on the ground,” as opposed to the more formal reviews and previews I contributed to various publications around San Francisco. I took pride in it being by and for dance artists. I published content once to twice a week, and it generally consisted of interviews conducted by me, essays by various colleagues, cartoons drawn by my roommate Maggie Stack satirizing the dance world, and music recommendations by my friend Jake Padilla. As time went on, my friend Ryan Kelley wrote drink recommendations to pair with various shows, a calendar listing with a twist.

From the get go, I loved producing content about dance and organizing an editorial calendar. And while the bawdy cartoons and drink recommendations were fun, it was the interviews with various dance artists that gained the most traction. I had an affinity for writing, but I was by no means a trained journalist. I was a dancer. As a result of Stance on Dance’s growth during that first year, I started to look into graduate programs in arts journalism. Around the same time, the cost of living in San Francisco started to skyrocket due to the tech bubble, and I felt trapped as a dancer barely making ends meet. I decided my time in San Francisco had come to a close.

In 2013, I entered a master’s program in Arts Journalism at the University of Southern California on scholarship and, through moving to Los Angeles, Stance on Dance began to cover artists beyond the Bay Area. As I developed a more journalistic tone, the blog became more professional in its coverage, transforming from a site that was mostly circulated amongst colleagues, to an online publication that was beginning to command a serious readership. My master’s thesis was a redevelopment of Stance on Dance with a sleek redesign, a more engaged social media presence, and employment of metrics to track and understand readership.

In 2013, I also began working on what would become the book Beauty is Experience: Dancing 50 and Beyond, where I interviewed more than 50 dance artists over the age of 50 up and down the West Coast. I worked with Portland based photographer Gregory Bartning, who beautifully captured each interviewee. Our goal was to showcase the beauty and form in a dancer of any age, as well as to demonstrate how artistry enrichens with time. The compilation was published as a hardcover book in 2017.

After graduate school, I had the amazing opportunity to travel to South Africa to cover the National Arts Festival for Cue Newspaper, a printed daily arts newspaper that existed for the duration of the festival. Aside from the experience being a cultural whirlwind, I also began to appreciate for the first time how different print is from online content. Instead of an endless vertical scroll, themes could be developed across articles with the aid of good design. The reader’s attention is also different, with more sustained focus, as opposed to distraction after receiving notifications on a device. One day during my time in South Africa, I outlined a plan for a print version of Stance on Dance. Of course, I had graduate school debt, no job, and I didn’t even know where I would live next, but the seed was planted.

Upon returning to the states, I moved to Santa Fe, NM, and took a job as the editor of Fine Lifestyles Santa Fe, a glossy magazine that covered restaurants and shops in town. I didn’t care much for the content, but I relished the experience of working closely with a team of writers, photographers, sales reps, and designers to produce a print magazine. I took careful notes on the process, always having in the back of my mind that one day I might apply these skills to a print version of Stance on Dance.

Throughout grad school, my time in South Africa, and my time in Santa Fe working for the magazine, I continued to produce weekly (and often bi-weekly) content for Stance on Dance. As a result of working on the dancing over 50 book project as well as through my various experiences post graduate school, Stance on Dance increasingly became devoted to elevating the voices of those who are often marginalized in the dance world. These include older dancers, dancers of color, dancers who identify as LGBTQ, dancers who have a disability, fat dancers, dancers who live outside major metropolitan areas, women in leadership positions, dancers working outside well-funded institutions, and dancers who practice forms outside the Western canon. Through focusing on perspectives that have traditionally been marginalized in dance journalism, Stance on Dance found its footing as a journal where ideas and ways of working that challenge the status quo are covered and celebrated.

In 2017, I embarked on a second book project, this time in collaboration with Austin/Finland based dance educator Silva Laukkanen, interviewing professional dancers with disabilities. Breadth of Bodies: Discussing Disability in Dance came out this spring 2022 and features 35 professional dancers with disabilities in 15 countries. Through our interviews, Silva and I deepened our knowledge of problematic stereotypes, barriers to education, access issues, and terminology preferences. These interviews are accompanied with whimsical illustrations by San Francisco based artist Liz Brent-Maldonado.

That brings us to the present. After years of publishing weekly online content covering dance artists from many practices and places, Stance on Dance is excited to announce the launch of a twice-a-year print publication that will further promote dance and the many perspectives of its practitioners. This first issue features an interview by Sophia Diehl with dance movement therapist Giulia Carotenuto, an essay by Katie Flashner on relocating her life and dance practice from southern California to Maine, an essay by Cherie Hill on advocating for equity in dance spaces, an essay by Bhumi Patel on decolonizing praxis, three original dance inspired illustrations by Camille Taft, and an interview by Nikhita Winkler with French dance artist Illan Riviere. I also have contributed an interview with Miami-based choreographer Pioneer Winter on his intergenerational and physically integrated dance company, and an interview (translated and facilitated by Lorie House) with Colombian butoh artist Brenda Polo and her collaborators who are studying the effects of butoh on the brain. We will eventually publish all this content on stanceondance.com, but I believe the design and opportunity for more sustained reading brings the content to life in a different, hopefully more enjoyable, way.

Where will you read your copy of Stance on Dance? And will you share it with your friends?

I hope you will consider supporting Stance on Dance in this exciting new format by helping spread the word or becoming a donor/subscriber. Many thanks to those of you who have supported and followed Stance on Dance in its many iterations over the past decade!

~~

To donate to support dance journlism and recieve two issues of Stance on Dance in print a year, visit stanceondance.com/support.

To learn more about the Spring/Summer 2022 issue or to order a single copy, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.

The post Stance on Dance’s Journey to Print appeared first on Stance on Dance.

This transcribed and edited version seeks to continue the conversation. Please feel free to get in touch with emmaly@stanceondance.com or chlocodance@gmail.com with your own thoughts on appropriating gender, sex and identity!

Note: A week after this conversation, Wolfman Books announced it was closing, to be reopened as the QTPOC-led Wolffemme+Them.

Justin Carder, Photo by Anna Xu

Bhumi B. Patel, Photo by Lara Kaur

Grace Towers, Photo by Sloane Kanter

~~

Questions for panelists (given in advance):

1. What do gender, sex, and identity mean to you and how do they manifest in your art form?
2. How do you organize events, programming, and/or performances with gender, sex, and identity at the forefront?
3. How are gender, sex, and identity addressed or not addressed in the arts community? What examples of colonialism do you see as prevalent in the arts?
4. What role do gender, sex, and identity play in funding and grant applications? Are gender, sex, and identity invoked by artists with privilege as a way to gain funding? How can white/cis/hetero artists respect and raise the voice of gender non-conforming, BIPOC, queer folx beyond optical allyship or tokenization?
5. What revolution(s) do you want within the arts regarding gender, sex, and identity? What locations/events/artists do you admire in your field?

~~

Bhumi B Patel:

Thinking about answering these questions was a huge challenge for me. I started thinking: What do I do? What have I done in the past? There was a time when we could gather. One of the ways that I decolonized the system of performance was that, when I put together performances, there would be food, tea, and conversation, the stuff that connects people beyond going into a theater and sitting in a chair. I want to create spaces where we are co-creating as audience, choreographer and performers. We all co-create what happens, which dismantles who holds the power in the room.

Grace Towers:

Yes, and cheers to finding creative ways to make these kinds of systems work. I’m curious Bhumi, and I’ll ask because I’ve had to navigate this myself, having done a weekly five-year run of a drag show that was fed by audience engagement: Have you considered using Zoom or any other internet platform, as far as performance and curation?

Bhumi:

I think about it a lot. Is it possible to cultivate the feeling of the thing without it being the thing? I sometimes tell people if I’m getting on a Zoom call to make yourself a cup of tea, grab a snack, enjoy, and sit in a chair that’s comfortable. We can only see you from the torso up, don’t wear pants if you don’t want to wear pants, you’re in your house, live your best life. It’s not the same but it attempts to create the feeling.

Grace:

Speaking to that feeling, we’ve been doing a drag show on Zoom. It’s been a beautiful platform and a creative way to stay connected as a community. There’s another platform called Twitch that provides a sense of absorption. We try to decolonize the structure by having a post-show where I unmute everybody and have a check-in, even if it’s not in-person.

Justin Carder:

It’s exciting to see people transform what’s ostensibly business software. Zoom is for meetings, and now all these people are making it a club. It’s fun but it’s also hard work. I’m challenged because so much of what I value about performance is everything around it: How to make the space feel nice, how to make the conversation happen.

Then the conversation switched in an amazing way toward the George Floyd protests. We went into direct service mode; our project turned into fundraising. We’re moving toward a more direct service model. Can art more easily direct money to the people who need it?

Bhumi:

There was this month of full throttle, “We are reading White Fragility, we are reading How to Be an Antiracist, we are taking down racism.” Now the Instagram feed is going back to pictures of dogs and homemade granitas, but some of us are in it for the long haul. That’s the thing I’m so excited about in the arts world, or at least the thing that I want to be hopeful about in the arts world: that we are sticking to it. That these solidarity statements that were made literally by everyone, from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to someone I bought a t-shirt from 10 years ago, and everyone in between, that they lead to an examination of what these institutions are. There’s so much more to look at: Who’s on your board of directors? Who are you hiring? Is your work environment hostile for marginalized people? If so, stop hiring marginalized people and harming them. Look at yourself and reevaluate. I feel hopeful that we’re in a moment that could lead to change. Maybe that’s as a result of this perfect storm where the arts industry is being decimated because of the pandemic. We’re not in the theaters, we’re not in rehearsal studios, we’re not creating in the same way. If we go back at some point, at least we can do it in a way that doesn’t harm so many of the marginalized people in our community. That’s my hope for the future.

Justin:

One of the ways our work manifested recently, that I’m thankful for and has been inspiring, was during the protests. Wolfman Books is right downtown in the center of Oakland, across from the Tribune Tower, right next to Oscar Grant Plaza. I was away camping when the biggest protest started and I got all these text messages, “Is the store okay? What’s going on?” I worked with my staff the next night, and we opened the store for people to use the bathroom and get water, hand sanitizer, and snacks. We did this as support for the protestors who were out in the street. It was honestly beautiful to be there, to see all these people come through and hold a space of direct action. It was the difference between barricading and opening our space, showing up to be with people.

Justin Carder

Bhumi:

This interesting thing has happened in the past months, and I’m sure this has happened to a lot of people who maybe look similar to me. I’ve gotten a lot of emails asking about antiracism and queerness. It feels like another tendril of tokenization. I’m not going to speak for all Brown people. I can tell you my opinion, but you need to talk to a lot of Brown people, and you need to not be afraid of Black and Brown people. I don’t know if anyone else has had this experience, but I’ve gotten at least half a dozen people asking, “Can you fill out my Google form and tell me how you think my organization has been racist?” No, I can’t because that requires you going on an inner field trip to think about the actions you have done, the systems you have bought into, and really interrogating that. I’m not doing that work for anyone because I do that work for me. Right? We all live on a spectrum of privilege and marginalization. So I’m doing that work for me.

Grace:

I’ve had friends reflect the same, there’s a lot of people who are reaching out. A lot of my BIPOC friends, my Latino friends, my Black friends are tired, and I’m tired, of doing the work for other people.

Bhumi:

The phrase I’ve been using is “There’s an entire internet out there for you to help you.”

Justin:

Grace, I wanted to put the question to you about events.

Grace:

Being very honest, it’s challenging on many, many layers. A lot of what I do is very social and physical, intentionally so. When I create events or performances, they’re derived from my own personal experience being ostracized as a queer Latino faggot who was kicked out from a home and had to find connection and community through chosen family. A lot of that is found around dinner, around a camping trip, around a sex positive space, around workshops and discussions, whatever it may be. I’ve leaned into my close-knit chosen family to support me and we’re all finding ways to stay connected. And this is one of those ways, right? These virtual platforms.

There are different answers for different events. This past weekend, I was trying to figure out what outside spaces feel right and safe. I’m trying to find site specific moments. I went on a beautiful bike ride to Hunter’s Point. There is a great little outside amphitheater there that I’m going to do a little gathering at. Golden Gate Park has a bunch of meadows that are beautiful, and we do these little bike rides/dance parties/picnics. That’s what I’m envisioning right now.

It’s very clear that we’re not going back into the bars, the clubs, the camp outs. I do drag performance that has shifted into a beautiful adjusted format via Zoom. I’m bringing in people from New York to do my show. I’m doing shows that are hosted and curated out of places that I’m clearly not going to go to at this point. Some of the drag shows that I’m hosting online, I’m able to pay the performers more than I was paying them at bars. That’s a whole other thing to wrap your brain around. It’s not all negative; it’s just a new set of challenges. We do some mentorship programs that are kind of like arts residencies, but drag residencies. I’m considering doing them as an online experience this coming year, though I’m not fully committed to that yet.

That’s something I would rather hold on to: the opportunity to say, “Let’s take a year to reflect, meet, and develop at the organizational level, to take in what we’re learning through these conversations and address holes that we can look into, develop, or change.” That’s been one of the pros of this experience. I’m a pretty “go, go, go” kind of queen and I love that. At the same time, I don’t know that I would have ever been able to reflect or take the time to process what has worked and what hasn’t worked to the extent that this time has allowed me to do. I have to remind myself of that.

Justin:

I’m the same way. I’m just “go, go, go” all the time. It’s been the decision that we made as a collective, and I made with myself, to pull back a little bit right now. I want to listen, watch, see what’s going on, and try to imagine bigger structural changes. This is the opportunity. Maybe this is the chance to build something else that is equitable. I’m excited about that.

Grace:

I do a lot of video and photography, but now I’m having to do it all on my own. This speaks to my process and reflection on productivity: “I’m not going to do anything but read today, what a pleasure. And then the next day, why don’t I look on YouTube and learn about photography?” It’s been powerful to reflect on what we can make the time to learn.

Bhumi:

Something I’ve been grappling with is sheltering in place. It brings up the question of access and how it is incredible how much access there is to artmaking. People could be on this Zoom call from anywhere in the world. I’ve been going to some of the Drag Alive! shows on Twitch and it’s so cool to see people write in from all over the world. There are some dance classes I’ve been taking online through Zoom and folks are invited to share where they’re from. I’ve taken class with someone who is in Thailand and someone who’s three blocks away from me, all at the same time. I love that. It also leads me to this question of who has access to the technology.

Grace:

And to counter that, who doesn’t?

Bhumi:

I struggled with this with my college students. I teach dance technique class at a community college in the South Bay. When we went to shelter in place, our department was immediately told, “Great, start teaching online, here’s a Zoom account, have fun.” And I was like hold on, do my students have computers? Do they have iPads or phones they can use? Do they have space where they can move? Are they caring for children or are they ill? Is anyone in their family ill? The dean of my department didn’t even think of that and I was like, “Really white man? Really? You didn’t think about the young people at this college not having access to technology and internet service.”

Grace:

Lived experiences!

Bhumi:

It’s something on my mind as I think about how we’re recalibrating to this platform.

Bhumi B. Patel, Photo by Douglas Calalo Berry

Audience question:

What role do gender, sex, and identity play in funding and grant applications? Are gender, sex, and identity invoked by artists with privilege as a way to gain funding? How can white/cis/hetero artists respect and raise the voice of gender non-conforming, BIPOC, queer folx beyond optical allyship or tokenization?

Bhumi:

I have so much to say about this. A lot of these conversations about antiracism and dance, about uplifting voices of marginalized identities, really come down to funding because we are required to make art and operate in a system of capitalism. Baseline, I would rather not deal with money at all; I don’t like the transactional nature. However, to answer your question, one hundred percent, yes. I’ve served on half a dozen grant and curatorial panels. I see applications that state: “Because I am a homosexual, I am marginalized.” But you’re also white, cis, and a man, so sit down. Or I see, “I’m a woman and therefore I’m marginalized.” You’re a white woman who is independently wealthy, so actually, no. And I’ve had so many program managers at granting institutions say, “If someone identifies as marginalized in any way, that has to hold the same weight.” And I push back on that because our experiences of marginalization do not hold the same weight in this country or on this planet.

How can white/cis/hetero artists respect and raise the voice of gender nonconforming/BIPOC/queer folks beyond optical allyship? Sit out grant cycles. I would love to see a mass movement of white artists in the Bay Area sit out grant cycles for three years and then see who is funded. And while you’re sitting out the grant cycles, reach out to all the funders who you’ve made friends with and tell them why they need to implement policy changes. Remove colonized language from applications. Stop requiring people to have some sort of white American grasp on the English language. How can you not have accessibility options for your application to be submitted? You’re telling me, the only way I can apply for your grant is if I have a Google account and fill out a Google form? Not everybody has a computer. Not everybody has the skillset to to do that. Figure out ways to disperse funding that don’t require a W-9 or a social security number because there are a lot of people in this country who don’t have access to those things who deserve to get funded for their art. You can’t measure the success of every artist based on how many tickets they sell. That is not every artist’s mode of understanding whether their art is successful. I’m going to pause right there and let other folks respond.

Grace:

Oh my god. Go off Bhumi!

Something I have found refreshing is working with specific folks like Ernesto Sopprani, a Peruvian artist and curator, Kevin Seaman, a wonderful drag queen and performer, and Beatrice Thomas, who also does amazing work in drag. The arts funding system has been in place for a long time. There are things that people know work and a lot of things people know don’t work. When you’re trying to be part of that system, and you’re not in the know, folks like these have mentored me through applications. That approach has been fruitful for me. The whole concept of access – how to value work, who decides what that value is – is super problematic. I’m always thinking about how we can move beyond it. I have more questions than answers.

Justin:

I’ve often seen my role as a bridge between these communities, trying to use whatever I have to support others. Now I’m learning that maybe in addition to acting as a bridge, I can act to dismantle the structure rather than accept the structure.

Bhumi:

What I’m seeing right now is that funders suddenly have a lot of money to disperse. In these applications for emergency grants, I am asked little more than if I identify as Brown, if I identify in some gendered way, if I identify as disabled or as a veteran. These are basic questions at the end of many grant applications as a demographic survey, but now it feels like organizations are saying, “We can see that the pandemic has negatively affected these groups so we’re just going to ask if you’re a part of that group and then we’ll give you money.” I understand artistic merit in granting, but why isn’t this given more weight in a traditional granting cycle when we’re not in a pandemic? All these things you’re asking about – if I identify as queer, trans, disabled – these aren’t going to go away just because the pandemic goes away. These are still going to be institutional things that keep marginalized people down.

~~

To learn more, visit www.chlocodance.com/tabled.

The post On Appropriating Gender, Sex and Identity appeared first on Stance on Dance.

Meet our director and editor:

Emmaly Wiederholt is a dance artist and arts journalist based in Albuquerque, NM. She founded Stance on Dance in 2012. Emmaly earned her MA in Arts Journalism from the University of Southern California and her BFA in Ballet and BS in Political Science from the University of Utah. She further trained at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance and performed extensively around the Bay Area. Her first book, Beauty is Experience: Dancing 50 and Beyond, was published in 2017, and her second book, Breadth of Bodies: Discussing Disability in Dance, was published in 2022. Emmaly is also a master DanceAbility instructor and facilitates movement groups at the UNM Hospital adult psychiatric ward, as well as is a founding member of the dance advocacy nonprofit ABQ Dance Connect. She continues to perform throughout the Southwest.

Photo by Allen Winston

Our contributors have included:

Snowflake Arizmendi-Calvert, a performance artist and organizer in the Bay Area.

Gregory Bartning, a photographer in Portland, OR.

Liz Duran Boubion, the director of the Festival of Latin American Contemporary Choreographers in the Bay Area.

Liz Brent-Maldonado, an artist, writer, educator, and producer in San Francisco, CA.

Michelle Chaviano, a ballet dancer with Ballet North Texas.

Bradford Chin, a disabled dance artist and accessibility consultant in Chicago, IL, and San Francisco, CA.

Shebana Coelho, a writer and performer currently studying flamenco in Spain.

breana connor, an interdisciplinary artist, facilitator + healer in Albuquerque, NM.

Lauren Coons, an interdisciplinary artist, performer, healer and educator in Albuquerque, NM.

Julia Cost, a painter, textile designer, sewist, and dancer in Maui, HI.

Sophia Diehl, a dancer in New York City.

Bonnie Eissner, a writer in New York City.

Katie Flashner, a.k.a. The Girl with the Tree Tattoo, a World Champion ballroom dancer and author in ME.

Micaela Gardner, a dancer and choreographer in Baja, Mexico.

Sarah Groth, an interdisciplinary artist from Albuquerque, NM.

Cherie Hill, a dance educator and choreographer based in the Bay Area.

Lorie House, a dancer, choreographer, and lawyer in NM.

Silva Laukkanen, a dance educator and disability advocate in Austin, TX.

Mary Elizabeth Lenahan, the director of Dance Express in Fort Collins, CO.

Shannon Leypoldt, a dance artist, teacher, and sports massage therapist in Berlin.

Erin Malley, a dance artist and tango teacher based in West Michigan.

Julianna Massa, a dance artist in Albuquerque, NM.

Aiano Nakagawa, a dance artist, educator, facilitator, writer, and event producer in the Bay Area.

Jessie Nowak, a dance artist and filmmaker in Portland, OR.

Kevin O’Connor, a multidisciplinary artist in London, Ontario, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Bhumi B Patel, an artist/activist based in the Bay Area.

Stephanie Potreck, a sports nutritionist and health advocate who currently resides in Germany.

Jill Randall, artistic director of Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in Berkeley, CA.

Kathryn Roszak, a choreographer, filmmaker, educator, and activist in the Bay Area.

Donna Schoenherr, director of Ballet4Life and Move into Wellbeing in London, UK.

Maggie Stack, a dancer and teacher in Reno, NV.

Camille Taft, a CO front range-based mover and visual artist.

Mary Trunk, a filmmaker, choreographer, and multimedia artist in Altadena, CA.

Diana Turner-Forte, a teaching artist, healing arts coach, and writer in NC.

Ana Vrbaski, a body music practitioner in Serbia.

Nikhita Winkler, a dancer, choreographer, and teacher from Namibia who currently resides in Spain.

Erica Pisarchuk Wilson, a dance artist, visual artist and poet in Albuquerque, NM.

Rebecca Zeh, an interdisciplinary artist in Sarasota Springs, NY.

~~

Our board:

Snowflake Arizmendi-Calvert

Cathy Intemann

Alana Isiguen

Courtney King

Malinda LaVelle

~~

The post People appeared first on Stance on Dance.