Photo provided by Kristine Elliott
[ID: Nathan Bartman teaching and assisting in a ballet class at Dancescape school in Zolani, South Africa as part of the Gugulethu Ballet Project team! He is giving corrections and information to young Phelo who is now training at Jazzzart in Cape Town]
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 providing 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 with a majority of black people. Boyd taught in an environment where racism, poverty, AIDS, violence, and shattered families defined the experience 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 apartheid, Black people were forcibly relocated from their homes to undeveloped land. Gugulethu, established in 1962, means “Our Pride” in Xhosa. Witnessing 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 providing 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.
Changing these dynamics requires action, a willingness to listen and learn, and an open heart. On the 20th anniversary of this crucial work, I’d like to share some lessons from my ongoing work to provide opportunity and broaden horizons in the dance world.
- 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 elections. There was palpable optimism now that Nelson Mandela was leading the country.
To better understand the political, cultural, and socioeconomic contexts 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 Liberal Education for Arts Professionals (LEAP) Program at St. Mary’s College, where I was completing my bachelor’s degree, worked closely 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.
- 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 educational institutions I was involved in were crucial to the early years. My first trip to South Africa, I traveled alone, financed by a grant from Stanford University.
Shortly after my first trip, I worked with Claire to develop a course on teaching dance in another culture. This enabled me to bring fellow LEAP students who were professional dancers with me on my next trip, some who brought choreography from world-famous choreographers like Jiří Kylián and Mark Morris, as well as classical variations and original choreography. What an experience for these young people who had never been exposed to such work, let alone the chance to embody it! For the next five years, the LEAP students who accompanied 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 promising young dancers and believed the next step was to reveal the possibilities that their talent would provide them if only given the opportunity. I began working to organize opportunities 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 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 support and guidance offered by these programs and the individual teachers and administrators within them always result in a burst in growth in the young artists.
At the same time, former students became colleagues in the work, connecting me to new communities and expanding our partners in South Africa. As my collaboration with the LEAP program ended, Nathan Bartman, a multi-faceted 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 townships to teach contemporary dance while I taught ballet. While Dance for All was in a primarily Black township, Nathan is from what is considered a ‘coloured background’—a multiracial ethnicity in South Africa whose members may have ancestry from Africa, Europe, and Asia, and who often speak Afrikaans as well as English—and brought me into his community in Eersterivier.
The next phase of our work required seeking a fundraising partner who could bring more exposure and donors to our cause. As our offerings grew from annual teaching trips to South Africa and scholarships to study in the US to direct support for partner schools in South Africa, our fundraising needs had grown larger.
I met Misty Copeland, the first Black woman to become a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre, while teaching American Ballet 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 generously agreed, traveling to San Francisco to do an event benefiting our organization—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, talent, energy, and money has been crucial at every stage of our growth.
- Be prepared to discover needs you didn’t anticipate.
One of the biggest lessons these twenty years of experience has taught me is what it means to support young people 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 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 splintered wood floor with a floor safe 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 dangerous and hijacking vehicles is common (one student had to jump out a bus window to flee a gunman).
Our support expanded to the amazing 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 programs. This past year, I worked to develop the Gugulethu Ballet Project 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 arranging travel, getting passports and visas, funds for audition fees, help taking audition photos and filming audition videos, writing resumes, even just digesting the day’s events when immersed in a new culture.
There have been so many beautiful 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 (Hamburg and London tours), Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, Rambert Dance Company, Cape Town City Ballet, Pina Bausch’s recent Rite of Spring, Robert Moses’ KIN, New Ballet in San Jose, Cape Ballet Africa, and Ohio Contemporary Ballet. Some have graduated from college, founded their own dance companies and schools, become disc jockeys and choreographers, purchased 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.
- 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 meticulously and accurately as possible, step for step and note for note, with no improvisation.
But then an interesting thing happened. When the beautiful South African dancers had completed their rehearsals and performed the piece before an audience, I witnessed that despite faithful adherence to the original choreography, something new had emerged. The young South African dancers had 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 ballet, before my very own eyes.
Awed and a bit overwhelmed, I discussed with the South African teachers 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 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. 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.
This article appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of In Dance.
