Published by Dancers' Group, In Dance is discourse and dialogue to unify, strengthen, and amplify.
in dance WINTER 2025 DISCOURSE + DIALOGUE TO UNIFY, STRENGTHEN + AMPLIFY
P.14 Same Score
P.26 Gugulethu Ballet Project
P.50 Spirit of Sankofa
CONTENTS
WELCOME by MAURYA KERR , Guest Editor
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The theme of legacy emerged as this issue coalesced—legacies of bodies, of resistance, brutality, culture, art. When I think of the legacies of bodies, I imme- diately think of all those disappeared because of the legacies of oppression. Who is missing from this room, this canon, this legacy, this life? Who gets (a) legacy?
As someone drawn to the dictionary to help me fathom the world, looking at legacy as ‘money or property left to some- one in a will’ leads to the fact that Black folks in America have always been denied generational wealth building. The deadly 1921 Tulsa race riot is just one example of the tactics of white supremacy/violence used to guarantee the destruction of Black legacy—our very lives and economic prospects for future generations. Looking at legacy as ‘the long-lasting impact of a person’s life or particular events in the past,’ one legacy of that race massacre is that in 2022, the typical white household’s wealth was $285,000, compared to the typical Black household’s $44,900 . (An article in The American Journal of Economics and Sociology put the 2018 value of property and assets destroyed in Tulsa at over $200 million. ) From the etymology of legacy comes ‘ a body of persons sent on a mission.’ The history of America is indeed a body of persons sent on a mission—to colonize, oppress, kill. Trump is in office again and the legacy of America marches on and on and on. As do the legacies of radical refusal—Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bayard Rustin, and Recy Taylor, to name just a few—who give us hope that something different, something freer, can exist.
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46/ Improvising with Ghosts Past/Present/Future by Clarissa Rivera Dyas and ainsley e. tharp 50/ Spirit of Sankofa: Bridging the Legacy of BCM and BCF by laura elaine ellis 54/ The Real Cost of Free Dance Classes with Bodies of Empowerment by Kristin Damrow and Shareen DeRyan 58/ Spend a Little, Gain a Lot by Ian McMahan
14 / Same Score by Jesse Hewit 20 / Dancing with Solidarity by Dancers for Palestine 26 / Lessons from 20 Years of Working to Expand Access to Ballet by Kristine Elliott 33 / shuhada: dancing the evidence of Palestine by Leila Awadallah 38/ Book Review: The Choreography of Environments by Marlena Gittleman 42/ Access Guide to Presenting and Touring in the Performing Arts by AXIS Dance Company
In this issue we celebrate and confront, often simultaneously, legacy.
Dancers’ Group gratefully acknowledges the support of Bernard Osher Foundation, California Arts Council, Fleishhacker Foundation, Grants for the Arts, JB Berland Foundation, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Koret Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, San Francisco Arts Commission, Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, Walter & Elise Haas Fund, William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation and generous individuals.
I hope you’re all taking care of yourselves and each other. Resisting tyranny requires deep, intentional self-care and other-care, with mutual aid hopefully a steady practice as we continue aligning our finances with our values. To source from @imperfectactivista , mutual aid is the foundation for collective strength. AWARE-LA has an excellent guide (slide sixteen) I have found helpful in determin- ing a basic monthly redistribution budget. (And speaking of, have you and/or your business paid your annual Shuumi Land Tax ?)
DANCERS’ GROUP Artist Administrator Wayne Hazzard General Manager Kat Koenemann Artist Resource Manager Kim Requesto Administrative Assistant
I hope that we see each other in community somewhere, sometime, soon.
And I hope you’ll join me outside Zellerbach Hall February 22nd–23rd to protest Batsheva’s performances in accordance with the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divest- ment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. To add your voice to the effort to convince Cal Performances to cancel Batsheva’s engagement, click here.
Danielle Vigil
Program Assistant Abigail Hinson Design Sharon Anderson
May we be legacy—a body of people on a mission for justice (and praxis- based) empathy.
Sending care.
Cover Photo: Yuko Monden Juma and audience member at AXIS Dance Company pre-show touch tour. Photo by Adriana Oyarzum
Maurya
Shareen DeRyan, photo by Afshin Odabaee
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Jesse Hewit at Z Space
SAME
RECENTLY, MY FRIEND SIOBHAN (CRONIN) took me up to this clear- ing at the top of Mt. Davidson, where we each found our way into a kind of chi/qi practice. I started slow. The chi took shape in my hands, and my stomach softened. It got broader, along with my breath, and my body started moving in order to track the quick evolutions of the chi. The chi started stretching out to the sky, coaxing me to open my guts and get spread out and lit up, and then it started taking on textures and colors, rapidly. All the surfaces of my body caught fire because they were moving slicing collapsing in order to meet the planes and curves and currents, everywhere. I was dancing.
SCORE by JESSE HEWIT
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moving/elaborating/hypnotizing/ lying/dazzling, anything to create a hook back into before. There was no hook. I wept. Finally. I stayed with myself. It was also around that time that arts funding had finally begun shifting more explicitly in its priorities (thank god!). Our committed and strategic program- ming of underrepresented artists, our barrage of live and written discourse engaging the inequi- ties of the field, and our bold and direct challenges to funders was all taking shape, and accordingly, many of the white male mak- ers like me were staring down a different kind of horizon. As the good news rolled out, I knew that I wasn’t going to try to con- tort myself or my work in order to outrun anything. Instead, I let myself feel the shudder of change, and then basked in the justice of the moment. It was strange and it was right, and it meant that something different was coming for all of us. The next two+ years were foggy. I stopped trying to get my work funded, worked in arts advocacy and administra- tion, danced a bit for/with my friend Sara (Shelton Mann), got divorced, and tried to make sense of how the arrival of a ter- rifying virus was somehow col- laboratting with the sociolog- ical dumpster fire of the internet to reprogram all our nervous systems forever. Also, I was still a dancer and a freak: I made swoopy and crea- ture-ish choregraphies in my live- work studio and wrote long unhinged monologues about the personalities of various shades of purple. I pinballed through days like I always had: sensi- tive and responsive to distance, prox- imity, shapes, color, and emotion, all stretched over the sacred geometry of the world around me. I was the same artist, but without an apparatus to prove it to anybody.
on certain days of the week. I got still, and stood there in my limited body : me as subject, as symbol, as politic, as story, as citizen. Up until that moment in the forum, I had worked for most of my life to make my thoughts and feelings into live art. I had shaped nearly every aspect of myself into someone – some thing !? – who was thrillingly and precisely convinced that my work knew what the world needed. And then, my tiny body standing inside that huge room, trying again to connect everything to everything, just stopped being so necessary. I had come to some kind of end. I tried to imagine myself
In the fall of 2017, I was making a choreographic work at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. It would turn out to be my last for a while. I remember that I was in rehearsal one day, intently whirl- ing around the YBCA forum, brain and muscles workingworkingworking. And then I stopped. Some limit of my body , previously sensed but averted, had finally elbowed its way in, all the way, past everything. This limit wasn’t so much about my physical strength or mobility, but instead, something ecological and of the whole self. It put a new skin on me; one that I had been privately trying on and taking off as of late, but that was becoming too good a fit to only wear
I wondered what it could mean to be quietly happy and helpful, to not peddle or sell or convince, but instead to just serve.
There was a day in 2020, during “lockdown,” that I was walking up Bernal Hill. I perceived myself to have very little life to stand in, aside from the guiding light of my twinkling “sen- sitivities.” I had no real home (I had moved out of the apartment that I shared with my ex-husband and was cat-sitting in exchange for an apart- ment in the Castro), no real job (my gig doing events and fundraising for CounterPulse came to an organic end), and I was still wandering through the residue of my shift away from making dance and art in a public way.
As I walked, I asked myself what I still had. The answer was quick. I had my practice. I had scores and desires and frameworks and rivers for making something useful out of the experience of being with people . I wondered about this thing that I had always been doing, and what form it could take. I wondered what it could mean to be quietly happy and helpful, to not peddle or sell or convince, but instead to just serve. I wondered about money and time and death and fear and art and grief and ease. I imagined ease.
Larry Arrington and Jesse Hewit at YBCA
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I decided that day to pursue psy- chotherapy, and to orient my work toward supporting artists; people who were in the river too, on the ros- ters, on the edges, in the candidate pool, frayed in the fray. I applied to more graduate school, rearranged mostly everything in my day-to-day, engaged in “evidence-based research” in order to learn new ways of doing what I had already been doing, and generally walked right out the door and toward this new thing. I am indeed a therapist now, and, yes, it can be confusing to not know how I will dance. The grief and long- ing are wild and extraordinary some days, but they are not boring, and I remain endlessly fascinated by this shifting life. Nearly seven years after the last public performance of my work, I still don’t know what it means to be standing on the outside of a community and a lifestyle that I once couldn’t even see because I was so obsessively inside of it, shap- ing it. This part remains bizarre, but I’m grateful for the perspective. When I was in my most rigorous and lucrative art-making phase (about 2006-2017), I entered every proj- ect, every inquiry, every performance, with a fairly similar approach: go tenderly into a something, and look around. Listen. Feel the walls. What is already happening? What are the existing modes and languages pres- ent? Who is there and who is not? What is needed? How do you know? How might we curiously shepherd and craft some creative interventions? Of course, this is how I approach my clinical work. The moment on top of Mt. David- son with Siobhan makes me know that I’m okay, and that I will dance. My friend Jesse (Zaritt) and I do dancey drawings together once in a while, and we write things that are dances, that some might think are weird and troubling, but that make us feel alive. My partner gave me crayons for Christmas, and I used them to make a dance therapy
picture just this morning. The cadence and dynamic of my conversations over food with Sara still feel like we are in a studio together, carving away at each other, with love and hunger. I am a dance artist and a therapist, and of course I still don’t know how to explain myself to you any better than I did when I was trying to get you to Come. See. My. Fucking. Show. In my work as a therapist, though, I don’t need you to come see anything or do anything, and I’m glad for that, for now. Recently, in a session, my client (an artist) was stuck in a language- based anxiety loop. His circumstances were untenable, and necessitated that he move his consciousness from his head down into his guts, or he was going to stay stuck. I asked him if he would be okay just getting up, walking around the room, and testing out the textures and densities of the surfaces. He did it. I watched him and tracked his pace and breathing. I moved my breath with his, and flexed my muscles when he pushed on things. When he sat back down, he still seemed a little trapped, but something was brimming. I asked him if we could sit in silence for three minutes. We did. Around one minute in, he wept. Finally. I stayed with him. We were dancing. A quick note to my people, my art- ists, my shades of purple, my adversar- ies, my ghostly ones, my failures, my friends: maybe we will always be in this matrix of abstraction and import, and maybe we deserve to feel okay if we want to. Maybe we sharpen our skills, soften our assessments, and put me out of work, because if there is anything that we know how to do, it is to heal. I’ll follow your lead. Love, Jesse JESSE HEWIT practices psychotherapy in San Francisco, and is faculty at the School of Social Work of San Francisco State University. He also has danced, does dance, and will dance. His crea- tive and therapeutic work continues to be ground- ed in pursuits of connectivity, clarity, and unhinging.
I am a dance artist and a
therapist, and of course I still don’t know how to explain myself to you any better than I did when I was trying to
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DANCING with SOLIDARITY The Case for Boycotting Batsheva and Gaga by BYDANCERS FOR PALESTINE by DANCERS FOR PALESTINE A s organizers with Dancers for Palestine, we’ve spent the last year urging our field to embrace the power of art and culture to advance the cause of freedom, dignity, and self- determination for Palestine. We support a variety of tactics, including direct action, creative resistance, legislative advocacy, organized labor, and Boycott,
Not Another Bomb Protest, NY, Aug 2024
Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). Through our relationships with experienced Palestinian organizers, we have come to under- stand the critical importance of BDS and its cultural component, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boy- cott of Israel (PACBI). We therefore must address the complic- ity of Israel’s most internationally dominant dance institutions, Batsheva Dance Company and the closely affiliated Gaga Move- ment, especially in light of Batsheva’s upcoming world tour.
Initiated in 2005 by a broad coali- tion of Palestinian civil society groups and modeled after anti-Apartheid boycotts in South Africa, BDS has increasingly been embraced by human rights advocates worldwide, including a growing number of Israelis. 1 Unfor- tunately, despite its liberal reputation,
Batsheva has repeatedly refused to dis- avow its role as “cultural ambassador” for the Israeli state and commit to Palestinian liberation. 2 We recognize that members of the dance field often feel conflicted about boycotting dance organizations. We hope that the following analysis can
1 Palestinians, Jews, citizens of Israel, join the Palestinian call for a BDS campaign against Israel
2 Open letter to the Batsheva Dance Company, January 19, 2017
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State-funded, international tours like Batsheva’s are also a part of this strategy, and state funding for internation- ally-facing art contractually requires artists to represent the state and its policies pos- itively. 7 Notably, The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs describes Batsheva as “the best known global ambassa- dor of Israeli culture.” 8 This “artwashing” relies upon international audi- ences, particularly Ameri- cans, believing that a society that creates great art cannot also create immense vio- lence—or at least that the former outweighs the latter. It also disturbingly implies that Palestinians and others in the region are less worthy of life and security because they don’t produce
the impression of authoritarian- ism among international audiences. However, the visible presence of opposition, carefully controlled by the state to remain relatively tooth- less, creates the illusion of political freedom. Naharin explicitly endorses this vision, declaring Israel has robust protections of expression 10 and that there is “no such thing as censorship in Israel,” 11 (even as he is threatened with censorship himself, as discussed below). But such state- ments overlook numerous well- documented restrictions of expres- sion that disproportionately target Palestinian citizens of Israel. 12 Consider the substance of Batsheva’s “resistance” highlighted in the documentary Mr. Gaga . Participating in the 50 year celebra- tion of Israel’s founding, Naharin refused to change the costuming of his piece to appease the sensibilities of religious conservatives, even after the government’s warning and fears of losing funding. Yet the very prem- ise of this event—commemorating nation-building through the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians during the Nakba—was never addressed. Most recently, Culture Minister Miki Zohar has made attempts to halt Batsheva’s government funding for having a Palestinian flag on stage in a dance featuring dozens of other flags. Headlines about this drama fuel impressions of Batsheva as a source of artistic resistance. In real- ity, the piece has no discernable mes- sage of solidarity. Batsheva’s official communication following the Minis- ter’s threats emphasized that the flag appeared “in a broad artistic context,” dispelling any suspicions of alignment with the Palestinian cause. 11 This instance demonstrates the tight ideological restriction that comes with a “cultural ambassador” status. If an incidental reference to Palestine is off-limits, the hope 10 Ohad Naharin: On Love for Israel 11 Israeli Minister Threatens to Stop Funding of Famed Dance Troupe Over Use of Palestinian Flag in Performance 12 Crackdown on Freedom of Speech of Palestinian Citizens of Israel
WHAT TO DO Dancers and dance audiences of conscience should: 1. Boycott Batsheva performances and auditions as well as Gaga classes and workshops. 2. Urge your local institutions to cut ties with Batsheva, Gaga, and other complicit institutions. • Contact Dancers for Palestine (dancersforpalestine@gmail.com) for help drafting outreach language. 3. Protest performances near you on Batsheva’s upcoming tour. • Follow us for updates on protests (Instagram: @dancers_for_palestine) • If you’re planning a protest, contact us to amplify to our followers and to provide you with materials and messaging suggestions. 4. Find alternative dance forms. We encourage you to seek other improvisational, kinetic, and somatic practices that can provide a similar experience without supporting a propaganda arm of a genocidal government.
the same “great art” that Israel does. (Of course, this premise relies on ignorance of Arab and Middle Eastern art legacies.) GESTURES OF “RESISTANCE” B atsheva has been known to offer lukewarm opposition to Israeli leadership, satisfying an international dance sphere that is liberal-leaning but not politically criticalt. Within an Israeli society that is threatened by any mention of Palestine’s existence, vague references to Palestine in Batsheva dances 9 are often interpreted as sympathy. A September 2024 Instagram post, after nearly a year of genocide in Gaza, read “STOP THE WAR NOW. NO MORE BLOODSHED! We support hope, life, dignity and freedom for all.” This limited opposition, to describe it generously, is enabled by the state because it ultimately serves to pro- mote the image of Israel as a diverse liberal democracy. Political homoge- neity and the absence of debate create
that government-contracted artists and institutions could be a serious source of internal resistance is clearly misguided. GAGA W hile Batsheva tours have long been recognized as a BDS target for its gov- ernment ties and cultural ambassador status, there has been less attention placed on Gaga Movement Ltd., the for-profit company dedicated to Ohad Naharin’s “movement language”Gaga. Under BDS guidelines, Israeli companies can be considered boycot- table if they do not publicly recognize the rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law, including the end to occupation, the end to Apartheid discrimination, and the right of return for Palestinian refu- gees. Further, to be non-boycottable, they must end all complicity in whitewashing or justifying Israel’s violations of international law and Palestinian human rights. Because
of Gaga Movement’s close affiliation with Batsheva, it can be considered a co-creator of Batsheva’s interna- tional brand and a member of the same artwashing project. The seductive appeal of Gaga’s aesthetics on the international contemporary dance world in the last 15 years cannot be overstated. Franchised Gaga classes for danc- ers and non-dancers are now offered in dance studios and universities in over 20 countries, as well as online. Various workshops, intensives, and luxury dance retreats are offered in Israel and internationally. Especially for those trained in more rigid techniques, the sensation-based classes can feel like a taste of freedom, seeding fantasies of Israel as a progres- sive art hub. As the elastic movement quality and improvisational skills associated with Gaga have become an expectation for professional dancers and Batsheva a common “dream company,” Tel Aviv has become an idyllic dance intensive destination, with dancer-tourists disregarding the
Demonstration at the Joyce Theater, NY, May 2024
help establish that engaging with Batsheva and Gaga—through buying tickets, attending classes, or audition- ing—has political implications. STATE FUNDING AND BRAND ISRAEL W hile Batsheva is most widely known today for the choreographic work of Ohad Naharin (Artistic Direc- tor from 1990-2018 and current House Choreographer), Batsheva’s relationship with cultural imperi- alism originated much earlier. The company formed 16 years after Isra- el’s founding and was originally directed by American modern dance icon Martha Graham, whose inter- national presence was supported by the US State Department. From the very beginning, Israel and its propo- nents viewed dance as a necessary
component in establishing their cul- tural supremacy over Palestine, 3 much like the US’s vision of modern dance as a weapon in their world- wide campaign against communism. 4 Unsurprisingly, Batsheva has become a useful tool in Israel’s 21st-century Brand Israel strategy, launched in 2005 to revitalize the nation’s image, especially with Americans. The cam- paign explicitly and publicly aims to move Israel’s role in the international public imagination from violence and conflict towards art, culture, youth, and modernity, both through direct government funding and by incentiv- izing private companies. 5 The campaign invests heavily in arts and culture. Israel has long offered celebrities luxurious gifts and trips to win their public approval. 6 3 Social Choreography ‘A Dancing Body Offers Legitimacy to the State’ 4 Dance as Propaganda 5 Brand Israel Brief History 6 Israel Offers ‘swag bag’ to Oscar nominees
7 Putting Out a Contract on Art 8 Culture: Dance 9 Your Curiosity Will Not be Satisfied
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Asian Improv aRts & API Cultural Center present the U.S. Premiere of
A Bridge to Now Un Puente hacia el Presente
A multimedia experience by the award-winning LENORA LEE DANCE in collaboration with MOYRA SILVA RODRÍGUEZ
Protest at 92NY, Oct 2024
guidelines of the BDS Call for Ethical Tourism/Pilgrimage. 13 For young dancers chasing their dreams, the formal separation of Batsheva and Gaga means little to nothing. Many in the dance field are instinc- tively against boycotting any move- ment form. But the BDS boycott only targets official Gaga classes—which are financially connected to Gaga Movement Ltd.—not any aesthetic principles dancers might associate with the form. BDS addresses mate- rial ties, leaving artists to make more personalized choices about how to engage with movement traditions with problematic histories. OHAD NAHARIN B atsheva and Gaga are boycot- table based on institutional complicity alone, regardless of the personal politics of any affili- ated artist. However, because the pub- lic persona of Ohad Naharin is nearly synonymous with the Batsheva/Gaga “brand,” and because his vaguely pro- gressive image has caused confusion
about institutional complicity, his pub- lic politics warrant their own response. Naharin is critical of Netanyahu and the Israeli right wing. 14 Yet this does not make him an ally to Palestinian liberation. Naharin has expressed sympathy for Palestinian suffering but undermines Palestinian political agency when he repeatedly misrepresents the BDS movement. Naharin characterizes BDS protesters as misguided foreigners, detached from Palestine and reality, recently declaring that “when BDS people demonstrate, it doesn’t help the Palestinians, unfortunately, but it does add drama.” 14 He neglects to mention that BDS is Palestinian-led, based on the historical precedent of success in South Africa, and shaped by twenty years of strategic refinement. One can understand why many American artists, working within their own problematic government and funding systems, sympathize with a choreographer who prioritizes funding over political conviction. But those who more easily relate to
one the most powerful choreographers in the world above the many Pales- tinian arts groups—working in much more challenging circumstances and still rejecting funding with political conditions 15 —should reconsider the limits of their empathy. DANCERS FOR PALESTINE (D4P) is an autono- mous group of dance workers who organize in solidarity with the global movement for Palestinian liberation. Formed during Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza beginning in 2023, D4P seeks to both cohere and create a dance community which is vocal and active in its support of the Palestinian people. D4P is a local and international endeavor with a core organizing group in NYC and an ever expanding network of dancers and organizers working toward a dance field free from complicity in genocide, imperialism, white supremacy, and all systems of oppression. D4P’s work has included protest and direct action, political education events, art-based fundraising, and campaigns to move dance institutions into alignment with the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and against repressive anti-boycott policies. To join the movement, email dancersforpalestine@gmail.com and fol- low us on Instagram @dancers_for_palestine
Dance Mission Theater 3316 24th Street (bt. Mission & Valencia), SF, CA 94110 Friday, March 28, 2025 at 8pm Saturday, March 29, 2025 at 8pm Sunday, March 30, 2025 at 3pm with post-show discussion
Tickets & Info:
ABridgeToNow.eventbrite.com More info: LenoraLeeDance.com, moyrasilva.com (415) 570-8615, LenoraLeeDance@gmail.com
13 Do No Harm! Palestinian Call for Ethical Tourism/Pilgrimage
14 On Stage and Off, Ohad Naharin Conveys a Powerful Message Amid Gaza War
15 Against Terrorism and Against Conditional Funding: Statement of the Palestinian National Campaign to Reject Conditional Funding
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of working to expand YEARS 20 LESSONS FROM
with a majority of Black people. Boyd taught in an environment where rac- ism, poverty, AIDS, violence, and shattered families defined the expe- rience of most young people. Dance for All’s work inspired me. Afterward, I wrote to Philip asking how I could help. Gugulethu became the first township I visited and taught in. Under the racial segregation of apart- heid, Black people were forcibly relo- cated from their homes to undeveloped land. Gugulethu, established in 1962, means “Our Pride” in Xhosa. Witness- ing the spirit of people who were able to create a place to call their home out of nothing and call it “our pride” deeply impacted me. I began the work that a few years later I would call Gugulethu Ballet Project and formalize into a nonprofit organization. In the years since, I’ve expanded our work, teaching and provid- ing support to dancers and schools in many other townships: Zolani, Khayelitsha, Eersterivier, Ugie, and McGregor. Yet the ‘Gugulethu’ in our name remains, symbolic of all townships in South Africa and at the heart of our work: building pride through dance. Those of us who love the art form of ballet recognize its positive impact on practitioners: young students and adults alike can benefit from ballet’s lessons of personal discipline, respect for oneself and others, artistic expres- sion, resilience, and focus. We also recognize where it falls short: schools, companies, and stages are not as racially diverse as the world around us, and dancers from racially minori- tized backgrounds face the constant discrimination and inequality of struc- tural racism. Changing these dynamics requires action, a willingness to listen and learn, and an open heart. On the 20th anni- versary of this crucial work, I’d like to share some lessons from my ongo- ing work to provide opportunity and broaden horizons in the dance world.
(Former) LEAP student Keelan Whitmore teaching at Zama School in Gugulethu
by KRISTINE ELLIOTT access to ballet
PHOTO BY HECTOR ZAVALA
IN 2004, I ATTENDED A SCREENING of the documentary Gugulethu Ballet created by Kristin Pichaske, a film student at Stanford University where I was teaching in the dance division. Little did I know this film would launch me on a mission to which I would dedicate the next 20 years of my life. The film focused on former ballet dancer Philip Boyd, who had founded Dance for All, a ballet school pro- viding dance training to disenfranchised children in the impoverished townships surrounding Cape Town. In 1991, during the apartheid regime, Boyd went into the townships to teach ballet because he recognized that there were no Black dancers on the stage in a country
Kristine Elliott sharing a bow at Dancescape Zolani South Africa
Nathan Bartman teaching in Zolani at Dancescape
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1. Do your homework. My first visit to teach in South Africa came just a few years after the fall of apartheid. Many of the people I met had voted for the first time in the post-apartheid 1994 democratic elec- tions. There was palpable optimism now that Nelson Mandela was lead- ing the country. To better understand the political, cultural, and socioeconomic con- texts I would be teaching in, Stanford Dean Arnold Rampersad advised me on which books to read about the history of South Africa. A South African Stanford professor, Grant Parker, taught me a course about the country’s culture. My advisor, Claire Sheridan, the founder of the Lib- eral Education for Arts Profession- als (LEAP) Program at St. Mary’s College, where I was completing my bachelor’s degree, worked closely
elegant begging (fundraising) which continues to this day. My former teacher Richard Gibson offered them a place in his summer course at San Francisco Academy of Ballet, and they lived at my home with my husband and my two teenage sons. [Read an interview with Mbulelo Ndabeni here.] Since then, in 2006, we’ve brought dozens, from two to five at a time, of students over to study, always with a dance academy offering scholarships. Students have studied in training programs associated with American Ballet Theatre, Alvin Ailey, San Francisco Ballet, ODC Dance Commons, Kaatsbaan Academy, New Ballet in San Jose, Peridance, Manhattan Youth Ballet, Zohar School of Dance, Menlo Park Academy of Dance, and most recently Houston Ballet and Alonzo King LINES Ballet. The sup- port and guidance offered by these programs and the indi- vidual teachers and admin- istrators within them always result in a burst in growth in the young artists. At the same time, former students became colleagues
with me to articulate and define goals and desired learning outcomes. Preparing this way—seeking to understand the history and politics of the environment in which I would be teaching ballet and defining what I hoped to accomplish—was critical for my journey. 2. Build your team, and keep building it. Gugulethu Ballet Project has had many different iterations, each shaped by the members of my community, dance or otherwise, who stepped up to make the work possible. The edu- cational institutions I was involved in were crucial to the early years. My first trip to South Africa, I trav- eled alone, financed by a grant from Stanford University. Shortly after my first trip, I worked with Claire to develop a course on
Under the racial segregation of apartheid, Black people were forcibly relocated from their homes to undeveloped land. Gugulethu, established in 1962, means “Our Pride” in Xhosa.
THE
Headshot of Lwando Dutyulwa for Lion King (London)
teaching dance in another culture. This enabled me to bring fellow LEAP students who were profes- sional dancers with me on my next trip, some who brought choreogra- phy from world-famous choreog- raphers like Jir Kylián and Mark Morris, as well as classical variations and original choreography. What an experience for these young peo- ple who had never been exposed to such work, let alone the chance to embody it! For the next five years, the LEAP students who accom- panied me to South Africa gifted the students with many different
perspectives and expertise. They were in turn gifted by the kids with their culture and open minds. In tandem, I identified many prom- ising young dancers and believed the next step was to reveal the possibilities that their talent would provide them if only given the chance. I began working to organize oppor- tunities to study dance in America. From my first trip, two students in particular, Mbulelo Ndabeni and Bathembu Myira, stood out as being ready for an overseas experience— personally mature and artistically strong. In short order, I began my
in the work, connecting me to new communities and expanding our partners in South Africa. As my col- laboration with the LEAP program ended, Nathan Bartman, a multi-fac- eted dancer and musician who I first met as a teen dancer at Dance for All, became my partner for each trip, traveling with me to different town- ships to teach contemporary dance while I taught ballet. While Dance for All was in a primarily Black town- ship, Nathan is from what is con- sidered a ‘coloured background’—a multiracial ethnicity in South Africa whose members may have ancestry
Young student of Mbulelo Ndabeni in Ugie, South Africa
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[Ubuntu] , an African philosophy that believes a person’s individual humanity is caught up in the humanity of the community to which he or she belongs—an individual can’t thrive unless the community thrives.
for dancing, providing breakfast and snacks for the children who don’t have enough to eat at home. Safety concerns needed to be addressed as well—transportation could be dan- gerous and hijacking vehicles is com- mon (one student had to jump out a bus window to flee a gunman). Our support expanded to the amaz- ing teachers doing the work year- round: schools needed support for their wages, a teacher needed a house to live in, and we were able to bring South African teachers to America to participate in teacher training pro- grams. This past year, I worked to develop the Gugulethu Ballet Proj- ect Syllabus: a video compilation of ballet class exercises performed by young African-American women that together create a solid foundation of ballet technique. For teachers who don’t have a chance to travel and gain exposure to other styles of teaching and training, the videos can provide a codified lesson plan with progressive teaching methods modeled by women of color. During the pandemic, we arranged Zoom classes so that students could continue to train from home. This was no easy feat, as access to internet in the townships is extremely limited, expensive, and challenging. And when we work with the students directly, whether on our visits or when they come to America, we see even more needs to fulfill: food stability, dental work, medical attention, help arrang- ing travel, getting passports and visas, funds for audition fees, help taking audition photos and filming audi- tion videos, writing resumes, even just digesting the day’s events when immersed in a new culture. It is not enough to nurture just the dancer. We have to nourish the human and the community as well. And I have come to believe that dance (broadly) and ballet (specifi- cally) cannot become important ave- nues of expression independently of their larger cultural context.
I met Misty Copeland, the first Black woman to become a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre, while teaching American Bal- let Theatre’s summer courses, and we become friends through our shared desire to increase the racial diversity of ballet dancers. I asked her if she could join us in an event to fundraise, and she gener- ously agreed, traveling to San Francisco to do an event benefiting our organiza- tion—a conversation with Laurene Powell Jobs hosted by City Arts & Lectures. The proceeds from that event were crucial to enabling us to proceed with confidence in the work ahead. Finding people who shared our mission and were willing to contribute their time, tal- ent, energy, and money has been crucial at every stage of our growth. 3. Be prepared to discover needs you didn’t anticipate. One of the biggest lessons these twenty years of experi- ence has taught me is what it means to support young peo- ple from rural townships in South Africa. It’s not as simple as giving them a fishing pole and teaching them to fish; in other words, just teaching
somehow infused it with their own unique energy, culture, and history. With their bodies and movements, they had transformed the ballet into something new and fresh. They were expanding the art form, growing bal- let, before my very own eyes. Awed and a bit overwhelmed, I dis- cussed with the South African teach- ers how this had happened. They smiled and replied simply, “Ubuntu.” They explained that ubuntu is often translated as “ I am because we are. ” It’s an African philosophy that believes a person’s individual human- ity is caught up in the humanity of the community to which he or she belongs—an individual can’t thrive unless the community thrives. The dancers understood that their success with their performance depended on more than their individual efforts, but on making sure that everyone else succeeded as well. As a result, the whole became greater than the sum of its parts, and something new materialized. It’s a philosophy I try to keep within my own life, allowing the communities I join to transform me into something new. Gugulethu Ballet Project’s 20th Anniversary Gala, March 2nd KRISTINE ELLIOTT, born in Oakland, California, and raised in San Mateo, trained with renowned teacher Richard Gibson before joining the Stuttgart Ballet at 18. After five years, she joined American Ballet Theatre as a soloist under Lucia Chase and later Mikhail Baryshnikov. After a decade with ABT, she transitioned to teaching, becoming an ABT Certified Teacher. Her passion for sharing ballet's transformative power led her to South Africa, where she began teach- ing young people in impoverished townships, inspiring the Gugulethu Ballet Project, now cele- brating its 20th anniversary. Today, she imparts her love of dance and high professional stand- ards to students of all ages.
There have been so many beauti- ful outcomes, too many to list here, both in and out of the dance world. But to share a few, former students have danced with Lion King (Ham- burg and London tours), Mat- thew Bourne’s Swan Lake , Ram- bert Dance Company, Cape Town City Ballet, Pina Bausch’s recent Rite of Spring , Robert Moses’ KIN, New Ballet in San Jose, Cape Bal- let Africa, and Ohio Contemporary Ballet. Some have graduated from college, founded their own dance companies and schools, become disc jockeys and choreographers, pur- chased homes and married and had children. And Chuma Mathiso, our most recent student to travel abroad for training, is currently a trainee with the Alonzo King LINES Ballet Training Program, completing his second semester. 4. Becoming a part of something larger than yourself will change you. One year, Amy Seiwert, current director of Smuin Ballet, offered a ballet piece entitled The Gift to the young dance students in South Africa. Wanting to honor Amy’s choreography and stay true to her vision, I taught the piece as metic- ulously and accurately as possible, step for step and note for note, with no improvisation. But then an interesting thing hap- pened. When the beautiful South African dancers had completed their rehearsals and performed the piece before an audience, I wit- nessed that despite faithful adher- ence to the original choreography, something new had emerged. The young South African dancers had
Mbulelo Ndabeni
from Africa, Europe, and Asia, and who often speak Afrikaans as well as English—and brought me into his community in Eersterivier. The consequences of apartheid policies still affect a social dis- tance between Black and coloured people in South Africa, but we wanted to serve both communities and also find a way to get them to work together. Nathan’s guidance helped us to bridge the gap, engen- dering artistic collaborations and exchanges between the schools in
each community, such as shared per- formances, partnering classes, and bringing in the Zolani Youth Choir to perform live accompaniment. The next phase of our work required seeking a fundraising part- ner who could bring more expo- sure and donors to our cause. As our offerings grew from annual teach- ing trips to South Africa and schol- arships to study in the US to direct support for partner schools in South Africa, our fundraising needs had grown larger.
them ballet with a level of training that may ultimately result in a job is not sufficient. There are so many disproportionate fields and deficits in these young artist’s lives. Some of these needs you might expect: tights, leotards, shoes. These were the things I thought to bring early on. But the longer I worked with our partner schools, the more needs made themselves known: mirrors in the studios, replacing the splin- tered wood floor with a floor safe
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Bay Area
Mixed Lineages Diverse Ecosystems
Multidisciplinary
shuhada: dancing the evidence of Palestine
Resilience
Improvisational Come as you are
Performance ritual
Ecology Kinship
by LEILA AWADALLAH | FOREWARD BY MAURYA KERR
I first met and was in process with Leila over ten years ago when she was an under- grad at the University of Minnesota, where I was a visiting guest artist creating a work. She was full of a singular and irrefutable blazing vitality that has only illumined and entrenched in the last decade. While I’ve been aware of her presence in the world, we didn’t see each other in person again until this last September when we were both in MN for the McKnight commissioned SOLO performances, she as a 2022 McKnight Dancer Fellow performing a solo by Beirut-based Lebanese Baladi danc- er/choreographer Alexandre Paulkevitch, and I as a choreographer for 2023 Fellow Demetrius (ImagineJoy) McClendon. I was blown away by her solo, Shuhada: a-live- streamed un-ceased Fire . B l o w n a w a y. Leila and the solo / Leila in the solo— brave as fuck, vulnerable, unflinching, stunning, devastating, imperative. Leila’s work on the following pages truly lives as an alternatively embodied companion to her live performance. In my role as ODC Theater’s 2024/25 Resident Curator, I am honored and humbled to bring Leila and Shuhada to ODC’s late-summer State of Play Festival 2025. I hope to see you there. (she/her) is a dancer, choreographer, and community collaborator based in Minneapolis, Mni Sota Makoce, and sometimes Beirut, Lebanon. Palestine roots her within an artistic compass revolving inside Arab American contexts, conjuring mixed Mediterranean ways and waves. In 2021, she founded Body Watani Dance, which she holds with her sister Noelle. Body Watani is a body-as-homeland research practice asking how dance emerges from ancestral intuition, cultural folk experimentation, land-based attunement, and SUMUD in service of PALESTINIAN ALIVENESS and cultural INTIFADA. She is a McKnight (2023), Jerome (2021), and Daring Dances (2019) fellow. Her artistic path was meaningfully impacted by her time working with Ananya Dance Theatre and Theater of the Women of the Camp (Beirut). LEILA AWADALLAH
Reciprocity Stewardship
Huichin Yelamu
Book Us! Classes | Workshops | Team Building | Performances IG @dancing.earth | info@dancingearth.org | www.dancingearth.org/eco-artivism
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