We have to rethink the concept of leader, because leader implies follower. I think we need to embrace the idea that we are the leaders we’ve been looking for.

Grace Lee Boggs

 My teaching is the bedrock of my identities as both an artist and an anti-racist, queer, feminist community organizer. Guided by the belief that a more just and equitable world is the responsibility of every individual; I aim to foster an environment of collective awareness in my teaching. What does it mean to learn together? How might our individual approaches to shared movement practice test our abilities to show up for ourselves and one another? And how might physical actions move us towards justice via a commitment to radically embodied presence? Ultimately, my mission as an educator is to utilize dance as a methodology for how to cultivate artist-citizens in and of their communities.

Bolstering the mission of education to offer support, resources and access to everyBODY, I strive to create learning environments that not only promote but uplift the impact our identities’, and our ancestors’ identities, have on our physical and collective bodies. I root my pedagogical practice in the words of Queer Black Troublemaker Alexis Pauline Gumbs when she asks, “what is the ceremony for our being together?” Activating this philosophy, I ask myself and my learning communities what movement rituals we need to move in order to orient towards our bodies and one another. And then, we do them.

This past online-based semester, I organized midsemester one-on-one meetings with each of my students to try and supplement the time we would have to socialize and build trust if we were meeting in-person. We discussed visions for the course and strategized for how our learning community might support these goals. I was struck when one student told me that our Introduction to Contemporary Dance for Non-Majors class taught her that her teachers should care about her. In that moment, the simplicity of her statement both cracked and opened me. What if we all felt cared for as we endeavor to manifest our highest learning potentials? How much resistance and discovery might we move through if we felt supported by one another? Through my experience facilitating movement workshops at senior centers, youth cultural centers, and in higher-education settings, I honor that centering an ethics of care allows individuals to build trust in themselves and cultivates an environment of investigative rigor.

Olin – Movement

When designing anti-colonial course curriculum, I take to heart that dance is never void of power and always a site of politics. The body is a container of inherent knowledge, history, and culture—ripe for researching multiple social, cultural, and political realities via an awareness of intersectional identities. Guided by the Náhuatl concept of olin, meaning the preeminence of movement, I challenge myself and my students to think, create, connect and respond to the world and one another through embodied inquiry.

One way I manifest this in my teaching is by designing practices that require students to move between movement, writing, reading, drawing, and discussion in order to delight in how much dance has to teach us about the many meanings of our world. Through these practices, I invite students to theorize about “cultural forms not as a reflection of the social,” but rather, as Alicia Schmidt Camacho says, as “the means by which subjects work through their connections to a larger totality and communicate a sense of relatedness to a particular time, place, and condition.”

Cross-Cultural Connection

My pedagogical goal is to foster a community of learning where participants feel appreciated for the embodied knowledge they arrive with, and also challenged to think critically about how movement provides a living account of culture and history. One way I strike this balance in Dance Technique coursework is by asking students to consider the aesthetic, social, and political values embedded in dance forms.

For example, I introduce biographical information and video clips of choreographers who have influenced the postmodern dance aesthetics present in my technique class. After tracing my own personal lineage, I ask students to describe what they notice about the movement, articulating design characteristics using vocabulary introduced in our daily practice. Throughout this process, I offer students both a comparative analysis of Africanist and Europeanist philosophy/aesthetic characteristics and abstract images for creatively charting the progression of “American” contemporary dance. We discuss this progression further through the lens of assessing appreciation, appropriation, and our personal relationships to all of the above. The investigation continues when we evaluate how different forms feel in our bodies—connecting to a curiosity around how our personal affinities for dance aesthetics might teach us about our values, beliefs and goals. This arc of learning helps students develop skills for critically investigating how dance relates to power, privilege, culture, and, by nature, themselves.

Cruising the Contemporary

Lastly, I celebrate the ways in which I intersect with culturally diverse communities by highlighting the power of the formation and constantly shifting landscape of contemporary dance. Contemporary, by its definition, acknowledges a belonging to and living in the present. Provoking this definition further, I contend that contemporary also holds the future bound potential embraced in José Esteban Muñoz’s queer theories. I am excited by wondering how a pragmatic awareness of the ways the past directly informs our present unlocks a mode of imagining the future (of contemporary dance) as always out of reach. As always striving beyond the limitations of the present in order to demand more liberation. It is the inherent value of the unpredictability of body and the necessary mode of staying present in dance that I see as a powerful springboard for individual/collective transformation.

Presence contemplates a temporal continuum: that now exists as a realization of before and that what's next is an opportunity for participating in the now. Does the student of contemporary dance have an opportunity to take agency over what's next through embodied investigation and practice? With that in mind, how does one prepare for a future which promises a diverse and shifting landscape of artistic values, practices, and styles?  How can this preparation inform one's participation in broader social contexts? While neither rhetorical nor readily answerable, these questions urge me to cultivate a culturally inclusive pedagogy predicated on relentless inquiry, exquisite curiosity, collective awareness and care.  In my wildest dreams, I envision a classroom where students share a joyful, if directed, playground for physical practice and embodied theory that, ultimately, leans into the unknown.