Preserving, Building and Connecting: Addressing Social Justice Issues through Culturally Specific Dance

Culturally specific dance is a lifeline for diverse cultural communities throughout the United States to stay connected to our cultural roots. This article explores the role of culturally specific dancers to address important social justice issues of our time and the capacity building support needed to maximize their impact on the communities they serve as well as the dance sector at-large.

What’s in a Conversation?

“We had an incredible Practitioner Exchange last night!” I tell my Luna colleagues, “I laughed, I even cried, we danced around, and the conversation just flowed.” I realize as I’m saying this, that I’m not fully describing the depth of the discussion, and that in fact, it sounds a bit trite.

In Practice: Out of Practice

One of my jobs is college admissions essay coach. The most popular platform for college admissions is called the Common Application. Over 900 colleges and universities use the Common App as their gateway for admission. The Common App requires the usual stuff:

Welcome

We live in a time where love costs. As an example, I love this country but do I love all the people here? The cost is to feel fully. The cost is to believe that no matter what’s going on in the world there will be grief, goodness, ugliness, rebellion, confusion and love. As the lyrics to the song go, “what the world needs now is love sweet love….”

In Conversation: Claudine Naganuma and Selma Apara

You are reading excerpts from Claudine Naganuma and Selma Apara’s recorded conversation. Listen to the conversation. Transcript of the full conversation

A Conversation on Women in the Arts

Patty Berne is a co-founder and executive director of Sins Invalid (sinsinvalid.org), a disability justice based performance project centralizing disabled artists of color and queer and gender non-conforming artists with […]

Finding Tap in the Bay Area

THE NOVEMBER 2015 In Dance article, Finding Flamenco by Heather DeSaulniers, inspired me to focus my own research on a unique dance form, therefore I have pulled together a variety […]

Images as Inspiration

In 2013, choreographers Christy Funsch and Peiling Kao held a performance in the former Meridian Gallery on Powell Street, where they danced in response to new paintings by British postmodernist Abby […]

New View: Sean Bennett

Tell us about your artistic practice and/or background. I’m a corps de ballet dancer with SF Ballet and I began studying ballet at the age of eight here, through the […]

Dance Discourse Project #22

Dance Discourse Project 22:  animal, human, posthuman Mon, Mar 28, 2o16 7:30pm CounterPulse, 80 Turk St, SF FREE Taxonomies have boxed in humans (and in particular certain humans) as separate […]