By Kate Feinberg Robins, PhD

In my blog post Addressing Race in Ballet and Capoeira, I discussed Find Your Center’s commitment to bringing race and social justice explicitly into our dance and capoeira classrooms. Here I share my experience doing this with my Children's Ballet class for 7-10 year-olds in early June. This is part of an ongoing effort to incorporate history and context into our dance and martial arts curricula. 
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• ​Make it relevant. Find the underlying emotions and experiences that children can relate to. Invite children to talk about their experiences, but don't insist if they don't want to.
• Draw on school knowledge. Ask open-ended questions about what your students have learned in school, and build on that knowledge in your conversation. 
• Use what children tell you, not what you assume. If a child shares their family history, identity, or experiences, then build on those to draw connections with the material you're teaching. Don't assume that a child or family identifies with a particular racial or ethnic group.
• ​Don't put anyone on the spot. You may have some children & families who have more personal experiences with racism than others. Don't make assumptions about their experiences,  and don't expect that those who have experienced racism directly will want to share. 
• Relate it to your subject matter. It's okay to get off topic when there's something that needs to be dealt with immediately. But the long-term goal of embedding racial equity in your curriculum requires figuring out how it relates to what you're already teaching.
• Make it your own. Leave out the questions and discussion points that are less interesting to you. Let your own and your students’ experiences and knowledge guide you.

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Children's Ballet is a 60-minute live online class that I teach for 7-10 year-olds. The class follows a typical ballet format with floor warm-up, barre, and centre exercises. I incorporate history, context, and critical thinking in a variety of ways. In this class we watched the 6-minute video "Dance Theatre of Harlem: Arthur Mitchell Tribute" published in 2019. This lesson built on another one that I discuss in my post on History and Struggle.

Dance Theatre of Harlem: Arthur Mitchell Tribute

Learning Objectives

• Students will be able to appreciate the contributions of Arthur Mitchell and Dance Theatre of Harlem to American ballet.
• Students will be able to reflect on their own experiences of belonging and not belonging.

Introduction (Pre-Video)

• Has anyone every heard of a place called Harlem? Harlem is a neighborhood in New York City. Have you heard of New York City?
• Has anyone been to a big city like Seattle?

Insert here any big city that is close to your students.

• In big cities there are lots of different neighborhoods. Sometimes there are whole neighborhoods that are mostly just one ethnic group. 
• In our last class we talked about African Americans and European Americans and Mexican Americans. These are all different ethnic groups. They are groups of Americans who have common cultural roots. 
  
• An ethnic group might have a common language or a common way of speaking English. They might have common cultural practices, like religion or clothing or food or celebrations. They might look similar to each other.
• Even here in our small city of Pasco, we have parts of the city that are mostly Mexican American, where it's common for people to speak Mexican Spanish, wear Mexican cowboy boots, eat Mexican food, and celebrate quinceañ​eras. That's what downtown Pasco is like, where we used to have our classes before we moved everything online.

Give a local example that your students are likely to be familiar with.

• So Harlem is a neighborhood in New York City that is mostly African American. Most of the people who live there have African ancestry. That means that either they or their parents or grandparents or great-grandparents or someone in their family a long time ago came from the continent of Africa. Because they're African American, their families share common experiences. They also look similar to each other. Most have dark skin and would call themselves Black.
• This is a video about a ballet company that is called Dance Theatre of Harlem. It's based in this neighborhood called Harlem.
  
• The man who founded the company is Arthur Mitchell, and we're going to learn about him and why he started his ballet company.

 
Wrap-Up (Post-Video)

• ​Why do you think Mr. Mitchell left New York City Ballet to start a different company?

If students have a response to this question, make sure you acknowledge and discuss their ideas.

• Have you ever been in a situation where you felt uncomfortable?

One of my students described an experience where she had to give a speech onstage at school and everyone was staring at her and it made her feel uncomfortable.

• When Arthur Mitchell was dancing for New York City Ballet, he might have had that same feeling, like everyone was staring at him. Not because he was performing onstage--that was normal, it was his job. But he might have felt like everyone was staring at him because he looked different. In the video they showed that he looked different than the other dancers at New York City Ballet. He was the only one who was Black.
• He might have felt different than the other dancers too. Maybe he felt like he had to change the way he talked and the clothes he wore so that he could fit in.
• Even though he was one of the best dancers in the New York City Ballet, maybe he quit because he didn't feel comfortable there. 
• Maybe he wanted kids in Harlem, the neighborhood where he grew up, to be able to learn ballet without feeling uncomfortable--without feeling like everyone was looking at them because they looked different, and without feeling like they had to talk and act differently than what they were used to.
• Mr. Mitchell brought ballet to kids in his ethnic neighborhood, instead of bringing them out of their neighborhood into a place where they might not have felt as comfortable, like he had to do when he wanted to learn ballet.
• At Find Your Center, we did something similar. We taught our classes in downtown Pasco and in Spanish, so that it would be comfortable for the families who live in that part of town, instead of forcing them to go to another part of town where they might not feel as comfortable.

Pay attention to how your students respond to your words. Make sure to offer opportunities for your students to contribute their thoughts, and make sure to acknowledge and build on their comments.

• Does the Dance Theatre of Harlem look like a fun school? Maybe someday we can go visit. For now, let's take that fun energy and put it into our own dancing for the rest of class!

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I like this video because it's joyful and celebratory. It reminds me of the triumphs that come out of struggle, the strength and resilience of communities, and the power that each of has to create a vision and see it through. These reminders are important in moments when it feels like we're struggling against all odds. For children who may not be as aware of the broader issues our society is struggling with, this video offers inspiration for the great things they can accomplish, both as students and as they grow up and become professionals.

This video also offered opportunities for my students to draw connections with their own lives. It gave them a window into a professional ballet school, which helped them contextualize their own training at a recreational school and gain respect for the art of ballet. It allowed us to explore in more depth the concept of ethnicity, which I had introduced in the previous class. We were able to make connections with ethnic groups in our own city, and with personal experiences of belonging and not belonging, social comfort and discomfort.

This video brings up many complex issues that can be discussed with adults and teens as well. It's great for all age levels because there are many subtleties that can be addressed or left alone, depending on the age group.

By Kate Feinberg Robins, PhD

In my blog post Addressing Race in Ballet and Capoeira, I discussed Find Your Center’s commitment to bringing race and social justice explicitly into our dance and capoeira classrooms. Here I share my experience doing this with my Children's Ballet class for 7-10 year-olds in early June. This is part of an ongoing effort to decolonize our curricula and educate our students in social justice as well as dance and martial arts. 
​​

• ​Make it relevant. Find the underlying emotions and experiences that children can relate to. Invite children to talk about their experiences, but don't insist if they don't want to.
• Draw on school knowledge. Ask some open-ended questions about what the kids have learned in school, and build on that knowledge in your conversation. 
• Use what children tell you, not what you assume. If a child shares their family history, identity, or experiences, then build on those to draw connections with the material you're teaching. Don't assume that a child or family identifies with a particular racial or ethnic group.
• ​Don't put anyone on the spot. You may have some children & families who are more likely to have personal experiences with racism than others. Don't make assumptions about their experiences,  and don't expect that those who have experienced racism will want to share. 
• Relate it to your subject matter. It's okay to get off topic when there's something that needs to be dealt with immediately. But the long-term goal of embedding racial equity in your curriculum requires figuring out how it relates to what you were already teaching.
• Make it your own. Use my discussion points as a guide, but put it into your own words. Let your own and your students’ experiences and knowledge guide you.​

​

​Children's Ballet is a 60-minute live online class for 7-10 year-olds. The class follows a typical ballet format with floor warm-up, barre, and centre exercises. I incorporate history, context, and critical thinking in a variety of ways. In this class we watched the first 3 minutes of the video "Revelations from a lifetime of dance - Judith Jamison and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater," a TED Talk published in 2019.

Alvin Ailey's "Wade in the Water" from ​Revelations (0:00-3:00)

Learning Objectives

• Students will be able to appreciate the work of classically trained African American dancers and choreographers.
• Students will be able to reflect on historical struggles experienced by African Americans and other ethnic groups.

Introduction (Pre-Video)

• This week we're talking about African Americans in ballet. Does anyone know what African American means?

One student guessed that African American might mean Africans who are in America.

• African Americans are Americans whose families, maybe recently or maybe many generations ago, came from Africa.
• All of us are American because we live here in America. But most of our families came from other places before living here. Do you know if your family came from another place?

​One student said her grandparents came from Germany. Another said that her mom came from Mexico.

• If our family comes from Germany, we might call ourselves German American, or European American because Germany is in Europe. If our family comes from Mexico, we might call ourselves Mexican American, or Latina because Mexico is in Latin America. People whose families come from a country in Africa might call themselves African American.
• Many African American families first came to this country as slaves. They were taken from their homes and forced to come here and work for other people without getting paid. Have you learned anything about this in school?

​My students nodded but didn't offer any details.

• This dance company is a mostly African American dance company, and a lot of the dances they perform are about African American experiences.
• The dance we're going to watch is to a song called "Wade in the Water," which is an African American spiritual, a song people sing in church.
• Do you know what it means to wade in the water? ...Wading is walking through water.

One of my students remembered learning in school that slaves walked through rivers to escape the dogs sent after them when they tried to escape.

• So when they talk about wading in the water in this song, they're talking about African Americans escaping from slavery.
• It can also be about Jews escaping from slavery in Egypt. Does anyone know about that story in the Bible?

One of my students remembered the Bible story.

• ​It can also be about anyone who is escaping a difficult situation, like maybe people crossing the river between Mexico and the United States to escape civil war and other kinds of violence.
• So this song and this dance are about struggle and hope and fighting for a better life. Let's watch.

Wrap-Up (Post-Video)

• ​What did you think of the dance? How did it make you feel?

My students said they liked it, and weren't sure how they felt.

• There are some things that are difficult to talk about, or that we don't know how to talk about, and sometimes we can express those things through dance.
• One thing I think is really cool about this dance is that we can relate to it emotionally, even though it's about something that we've never experienced ourselves. None of us have escaped from slavery. We can't really imagine what that's like, but in some way we can relate to the experience through this dance.

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I like this clip for school-aged children because it draws on a historical story that they have probably learned about in some form, and makes it relatable through dance. It addresses violence implicitly but not explicitly, offering children tools to process a mature subject without exposing them directly to violent content.

My pre- and post-video discussion helps kids of all backgrounds relate to the experience that the dancers and choreographer are expressing. The video shows one of the best modern dance companies in the world, and exemplifies the power of the arts to help us as a society process complex social issues.

​For adults and teenagers, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater offers a wealth of powerful performances by world-class dancers and choreographers portraying some of the most difficult moments in our history. "Wade in the Water" emphasizes triumph and hope in a way that is accessible for school-aged children, and gives them context to process the historical struggles that they'll come to understand more deeply as they get older.

By Kate Feinberg Robins, PhD

In my recent blog post Addressing Race in Ballet and Capoeira, I discussed Find Your Center’s commitment to bringing race and social justice explicitly into our dance and capoeira classrooms. Here I share my experience doing this with my 2-4 year-old Bilingual Creative Movement class in early June. This is part of an ongoing effort to decolonize our curricula and educate our students in social justice as well as dance and martial arts. 

• Make it relevant. Find the underlying emotions and experiences that young children can relate to. 
• Use nonverbal communication. Have kids participate through moving, clapping, and body language. 
• Don't put anyone on the spot. You may have some children & families who are more likely to have personal experiences with racism than others. Don't make assumptions about their experiences,  and don't expect that those who have experienced racism will want to share. 
• Relate it to your subject matter. It's okay to get off topic when there's something that needs to be dealt with immediately. But the long-term goal of embedding racial equity in your curriculum requires figuring out how it relates to what you were already teaching.
• Make it your own. Leave out the questions and discussion points that are less interesting to you. Let your own and your students’ experiences and knowledge guide you.

​

Bilingual Creative Movement is a 30-minute live online class for 2-4 year-olds. I teach the class in Spanish and English and teach pre-ballet and pre-capoeira concepts through creative movement. I've written this lesson plan in English, but my discussion with the children was bilingual. It was centered around the video "Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater" on the channel The Call to Unite.

The Call to Unite - Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

Learning Objectives

• Students will be able to appreciate African American contributions to dance and music.
• Students will be able to appreciate their own beauty and that of each individual.
• Students will be able to experience and/or articulate how coming together can help us through difficult moments.

Note: I skipped the introduction and started this video at 0:59 to make it shorter for my young audience. I could teach a whole different lesson just using the first minute of this video. I would focus on the concept of English and Spanish (which we speak in our class) being different languages, and tell the kids that people speak lots of different languages all over the world. I would ask the children if they recognize any words they hear in the video, and if anyone in the video speaks or looks like anyone they know. I would remind them how we say hello to each other in Spanish and English in our class, and then we would transition into the next part of our class.

Introduction (Pre-Video)

• Do your parents have jobs that they do all day? For the people in this video, their job is to dance.
• The dancers in this video are in their separate homes but dancing together through their computers, just like we are. You can dance along with them if you want to.
• When do you get sad? Angry? Who do you like to be with when you’re sad or angry?

My students said they like to be with their stuffed animals and dolls.

• Even though we’re all separated in our own separate homes now, just like these dancers in the video we come together to dance and dancing together can make us feel better when we’re lonely or sad.
• Do you know any of the letters you see on the screen?

My older students recognized the letter "A" and the letter "m," which are in their names.

• It says, “The most beautiful thing in the world is you.” – Alvin Ailey.
• Alvin Ailey is the name of the person who said this, and the person who created this group of dancers and the dance that they are doing.
• When you dance along to this video, you should feel beautiful and see how beautiful all the dancers in the video are too.

Wrap-Up (Post-Video)

• Did you have fun dancing? Did you feel beautiful?
• Did you like the moves they did?
• Did their dance look like things we do in our class?
  
• They did some ballet steps. They did some West African dance steps, which are similar to capoeira movements. They clapped their hands to the music like we do.
• The steps they did are harder than what we do, because they are professional dancers who have been practicing a lot more than us!

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I like this video for young children because it is joyful while also acknowledging sadness. The "Bosom of Abraham" referred to in the song is a place of comfort. Children don't have to understand the reference or be raised in a Biblical tradition to understand the concepts of sadness and comfort. Families are dealing with the stresses of a pandemic, social unrest, and economic uncertainty. This lesson validates the negative emotions children might be feeling in their households, and helps them deal with those emotions by coming together through dance and music.

​The coming together that children see in this video is multiracial. Because we are meeting online from our homes and the dancers in the video are also meeting online from their homes, it feels like they are coming into our classroom. We see dancers who look predominantly Black and mixed, joining a classroom of children who are white, mixed, and Latinx. This normalizes Blackness and normalizes racial diversity. 

I also emphasize to my students that the dancers in the video are different from us in one important way. They are professionals. They do what we do, but better. These are the people we should look up to.

By Kate Feinberg Robins, PhD

Racial equity within ballet and capoeira has always been an important part of our mission at Find Your Center. It is implicit in everything we do. The events of the past few weeks have led us to realize that we need to make this work more explicit: 
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• It is not enough to welcome students of color into our classrooms. We also need to talk with all of our students about why most American ballet schools are so overwhelmingly white.

 

• It is not enough to teach a martial art with African origins. We also need to teach our students how those origins have been obscured and appropriated by white institutions.

 

• It is not enough to be a Black- and woman-owned business. We also need to show our students Black dancers and capoeira masters who they can look up to.

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• It is not enough for me to use my skills as a cultural anthropologist to communicate competently with families of color. I also need to facilitate discussions of race and diversity in my dance classroom.

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We believe that race and social justice are relevant in all of the work that everyone does every day, not just during moments of crisis. Joining together in protest, advocating for justice, and demanding humane policies are our duties as citizens, in whatever forms these actions take for each of us. Beyond this, our everyday work needs to be guided by respect, compassion, a willingness to see, and a willingness to listen.

We are committed to bringing social justice explicitly into our dance and martial arts curricula from here on out. We want every student at Find Your Center to be able to express, in age-appropriate ways, issues of racial inequity in the arts they are learning. All of our students should be able to appreciate the struggles and contributions of Black dancers and martial artists, as well as other marginalized groups.
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As an anthropologist running a dance school, I recognize that I am possibly in a unique situation. Most dance teachers are not trained to facilitate discussions of race. I believe that needs to change, and I hope that the work we are doing at Find Your Center will help change it.

Predominantly Black dance schools and companies like Dance Theatre of Harlem and Alvin Ailey do not have the luxury of not talking about race. It is a privilege of predominantly white dance schools to be able to remain silent. White dancers cannot continue to put the burden on our students and colleagues of color to educate us about their experiences. We need to make sure that our students see. We need to give our students space to talk respectfully, space to remain silent, and space to express their complex emotions through movement.

We must make mistakes—and correct them—in order to learn. This is true in dance and martial arts, and it is true in discussing race and inequality. We don’t always know what to say. Sometimes we hurt each other without realizing it. Our job as teachers is to make our classrooms supportive spaces where we can call each other out on our mistakes, correct them, and learn.
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Art is a powerful tool for communicating experiences that we don’t know how to talk about. As an art whose canvas is the body, dance is a particularly powerful tool for conveying the kinds of unspeakable acts that we as a society are grappling with now—brutality, genocide, claiming ownership of other people’s bodies. Dance performances that address these issues can serve as prompts for discussions and reflection on racial injustice in churches, homes, and workplaces, not just dance schools.

Dance is also a powerful tool for communicating emotions and encouraging children to express their emotions in productive ways. Some children are experiencing racial tensions personally and emotionally, while others have little awareness of them. Dance videos can serve as inspiration, permission, and an invitation for children to share emotions they may not understand.
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By sharing and valuing the contributions of Black artists in ballet and capoeira, we also teach our children to look up to Black role models. We make race visible. We don’t allow ourselves to look the other way. 
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Click on one of the blog posts below for examples of how to bring race and social justice into your dance and capoeira classrooms in age-appropriate ways:

Teaching Race to Young Children: Unity and Black Role Models
Teaching Race to Grade School Children: History and Struggle
Teaching Race to Grade School Children: Ethnicity and Belonging