June 5, 2006

Integrating Dance into Our Contemporary Discourse

Dance and movement can offer important insights into the pressing issues of our time. Dance can also serve as a powerful springboard for encouraging conversation, building community, fostering understanding and inspiring action.

Yet while performances often encourage audiences to see contemporary topics from different perspectives and address issues that do not receive sufficient coverage in the media, dance is not in any meaningful way an integral element in how our society thinks about, reflects and reacts to the world in which we live.

Imagine an alternative reality where every time a newspaper, a TV show, a community group, a cultural organization, a governmental department, a non-governmental organization (NGO), a website, a blog, a trade association or any other entity addressed an important societal or political issue that they turned to dance for the answers.

Take some of the important and sometimes controversial topics and issues of the day: immigration, race, genocide, gender, gay marriage, gay lesbian bisexual and transgender (GLBT), environment, bio-ethics, poverty, war, education, disabilities, healthcare, natural disaster, AIDS/HIV, physical abuse, incarceration and many others. How often do the people and organizations that are devoted to addressing these topics actually turn to dance for answers and insights?

The answer is not very often.

But it doesn't have to be this way. Dance can be integrated into the overall fabric of how we contemplate challenging issues and think about taking action.

Two of the main challenges to achieving this goal, I believe, are 1) that most people don't know about the many dance programs that already exist for addressing contemporary topics and 2) there are no online resources that aggregate these dance programs (performances, workshops, educational programs and outreach initiatives) by theme and subject matter.

One of the things I'm thinking about doing is creating such an online resource in the form of a blog that groups the politically, socially, economically and culturally-focused efforts of dance companies on a thematic basis. So a user could visit this weblog and find dance-related content for any of the topics I listed above (plus other issues).

So, say, a person from an organization that addresses race and poverty issues is seeking dance resources regarding this topic. Through such a blog, they could quickly learn about dance companies that do performances, workshops, and community outreach programs that deal with race and poverty. Even more helpful, in some cases they could find video clips, audio programs, pictures and other multimedia resources that were already online and immediately available for use. And, in the future, there may be a way to license this digital dance content and add it directly to an organization's website. This way this hypothetical community group that addresses race and poverty issues could integrate directly into their own website dance programs that encourage their website visitors to think about these issues in new ways and, hopefully, inspire action.

I'll write more about this new dance resource soon. But for now, I thought I'd do some initial research and explore how dancers have been or are currently addressing some of these topics. Here's an list of eight annotated resources that explore what dancers are doing on a number of fronts - I came across a lot more, I just didn't have time to include them all. I think it would be great to conduct audio interviews for my podcast with the dancers below to learn more about their dance programs and how they hope to inspire their audiences to learn, contemplate and take action.

- Saturday night I saw a wonderful community performance of Liz Lerman Dance Exchange's "We Are Still Crossing," an updated version of an 1986 commission that celebrated the one-hundredth anniversary of the gift of the Statue of Liberty from the French to the US. The current version incorporates themes, stories and movement that reflect upon the current debate over immigration and the building of a wall between the US and Mexico. "We are Still Crossing" integrates both the company's professional dancers with community participants.

- Jennifer Monson's "Flight of Mind" dance performance is based on her multi-year study of the migration paths of birds and whales. This project includes the "Bird Brain Educational Resource Guide" for grades 3-6. (Download PDF classroom guide.)

- Anne Bluthenthal and Dancers performance of "Unsing the Song" deals with the nature of genocide. Part of a multi-arts exhibit that addresses Rwandan genocide, rape and deliberate attempts to spread HIV. You can learn more about this grassroots oral history project.

- Pat Graney Company's "Keeping the Faith - The Prison Project" is "designed to enable incarcerated women and girls to discover a sense of identity within themselves and to develop that identity within the context of community - through the vehicles of performance, video documentation and a published anthology of their writings. . .Each year, the program culminates in performance where the participating women perform their own movement and writing, and display their own visual art for 200 members of the general public, 500 of their incarcerated peers, and the prison administration."

- David Popalisky, director of Santa Clara University Dance Program, created and performed "Barred from Life" which explores issues of wrongful conviction "...through a combination of media including dance movement, video imagery, [and] excerpts from interviews with exonerees..."

- Urban Bush Women (UBW), founded in 1984, "is a performance ensemble dedicated to exploring the use of cultural expression as a catalyst for social change. Programs such as "Batty Moves," in the Caribbean "batty" means buttocks, "directly challenges the audience to question their own notions of physical attractiveness and appropriate movement. Now Urban Bush Women hosts "Batty Parties" to expand its civic dialogue practice to discuss positive body images."

- Dream Dance Company "brings innovative urban folk art and culture to the stage to tell personal and collective stories of struggle, transformation and inspiration. Their electrifying pieces fuse an incredible breadth of African diasporic movement (including Hip-Hop, House, Break, Funk and Afro-Caribbean dance) with theater, rap, beatbox and live music." [quote link] Their full-length production, "Dig Us Now," "shows how these rich cultural forms have flipped the script on the ugliness of poverty and racism to reflect the beauty and wonder of everyday life."

- Jena Marie Griswold has always been inspired by dance and "its capacity to facilitate cross-cultural understanding." As one of 50 graduating seniors this year who was honored with a Thomas J. Watson fellowship, Griswold will spend the next year traveling four continents pursuing a project she calls "Salsa: Spicing Up the International Dance Scene." Griswold who is motivated by her passion for social justice, will be researching how Salsa and Hip-Hop are both physically and socially reinterpreted as she moves from one destination to the next. (Her journey and exploration of dance would make for a wonderful on-going blog project as well. I'm going to email her to see if she plans to do this.)

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