Dancing our Way Home: a carnival of self, hope and community

Dance is my home, my meditation, my ground zero. Dance has moved me to find my voice. Dance is my companion, mentor and friend. With that voice, I teach, motivate, organize and engage. Even in spaces of rage, I will always voice and dance the stage.   

                                                      -Alan Faigal

I started studying dance in my early 20s as a medium to cultivate joy and healing following a period of bereavement when I was an undergraduate student. As an educator today, I am driven by that same fundamental sense of purpose, a purpose cultivated from grief and the sudden loss of my mother to a brain aneurysm. The beginning of my dance journey was in the genre of hip hop and hip hop inspired modalities. Immersion in creative movement provided me a medium for healing, literally moving through and transforming grief into vitality, honesty and authenticity. The reflections of this article are from my time spent with a group of theatre undergraduate students, at the same institution where I was a student. The full circle/homecoming angle is not lost on me; here I was again at Sheridan College, sharing space with acting students in their 20s during a time of shared grief informed by the pandemic. Once again, I found myself using movement and dance to crack the shell of grief and reveal the joy and hope that was always there. 

Welcome to The Carnival!

In 2021, amid the isolation, anxiety and loss of the pandemic, I had reached a career crossroad and mourned the closure of a once vibrant agency that I had received from my teaching and performance career. One afternoon I found a posting on the Sheridan College Job Board for a teaching contract within the Theater and Drama Studies joint program with University of Toronto (Mississauga) UTM.  I was interviewed for a course called Mindful Movement and Dance for Actors. Within the next 2 weeks I was submitting my course syllabus, activating my staff card and preparing to return to Sheridan College, my alma mater, for an in-person class. 

I was assigned to teach a 4th year Theatre class, who branded themselves, The Carnival.  They were a close-knit community of creatives who had established a bond since their first year. They all had acting backgrounds, but their experience with dance varied greatly. This informed my design of the course. 

I had to think about what mindful movement and dance for actors entailed when the students already had well-formed relationships. I thought about how to guide these students to navigate  and relearn how to take up space. How might we bring our whole selves, body, heart, mind, and spirit into a shared space?  How might we be fully present with one another?

The intention was to engineer a brave space that would invite authenticity, vulnerability, and ultimately truth. At the same time, I knew it was important to cultivate joy and self/collective discovery of movement with an emphasis on process play-based mediums.  I drew upon my roots as an early childhood educator where I witnessed the pure joy and authenticity with which children move. I wanted to facilitate this kind of space for these students on the cusp of graduating and kick-starting their careers as actors.  Emphasizing process-driven exploration, experimentation, and improvisation in a play-based communal environment shifted the discourse and the practice from the technical to the physical. The class would become a physical release and an energizing dance party where they could work up a sweat and laugh, thus generating a celebratory experience. My hope was this environment would cultivate an embodied confidence by using the body to explore and express narratives and stories. 

Mirroring the more process-driven methodology of early years education, the course was not driven by technique and structure. Rather than step into the role of choreographer, I aimed to create and hold space for students to find their own embodied voice and witness their own embodied truths.

Teaching/Learning Stories

My pedagogy and identity as a dancer (dance educator) is driven by the following 3 core values:

• Sense of Self

• Sense of Hope

• Sense of Community

These values are exemplified in the following activities.

Objects and Texts of Significance

I wanted the students to identify and articulate their worldview, the lens in which they view and move within their lifespan - how we move and how we move through life.  Students were asked to reflect on their childhood and formative years where the seeds of our core values were planted and cultivated. The medium for this: students were asked to select both objects and written texts of significance. These were shared during sharing circles and later in reflective writing. Some of the objects and texts they shared included music boxes, family photographs, picture books, faith-based texts, poems, song lyrics, paintings, and childhood toys.  Deep listening, self-examination and respect were cultivated as they listened to one another’s stories  with open hearts and minds. This foreshadowed, even juxtaposed, the movement narratives and performances that came later in the course. It prepared them for transformation in motion, and led to engaging and impactful performances. 

The assessment tasks below were designed to honour personal story, creative process and the use of technique to present meaning in a clear and artful way.  The assessment criteria focussed on these three main areas:

1. The elements of dance: Body, Energy, Relationship, Space, Time

2. Authenticity in and through commitment to style, technique

3. Embodied storytelling through focus, presence and audience engagement

Dancing our Truths

Another significant influence on my teaching is my background in hip-hop. A key feature of hip-hop is the ability to freestyle and dance our own truths.  An instructor can teach us fundamentals and sequences, yet that alone is not hip-hop or dance.  Your own unique dance is your own truth which is up to you to figure out. Often it starts with vulnerability, understanding how to articulate movement from a place of truth and authenticity.

One of the learning experiences that held particular joy and meaning for the students was an exercise in truth and authenticity, inspired by “Born this Way, by Lady Gaga (2011). I chose a pre-choreographed flashmob as a stimulus because I anticipated that the theme of valuing difference would resonate for them. The goal was to reinvent the piece through the creation of their own choreography; the process of figuring out their own truth. 

One group became a version of the Spice Girls, positioning each performer to adapt a Spice Girl persona. Another group situated the struggle for individuality against a machine-like structure rigidly enforcing cultural norms and suppressing voices. While keeping with a similar trope, another group positioned each performer as puppets, eventually breaking free from the strings of a controlling marionette. Another group examined rigid gender norms and moving beyond the gender binary while presenting the positive side of social media as a medium for community. 

I was told by students that their choreographic interpretations lived beyond the classroom and were performed at various student socials/parties quite spontaneously! I think this is for two reasons. Firstly, the empowering and unapologetic affirmation to live and dance one’s truth mirrored the song’s anthem for the quirky and misunderstood. The students fully embraced this message. Secondly, the focus on creative processes that involved deep listening, experimentation and play resulted in products that they were very proud of. 

Moving Narratives

The course culminated with the students choreographing and performing an original piece based on a narrative or story of their choosing. 

I do not think it was a coincidence that there was a common congruent theme of loss, grief and finding solace in chaos. The COVID-19 Pandemic upended our world and magnified the existing inequities of society. In turn, trauma was housed in our bodies and their movement narratives reflected the continued processing and navigation of complex emotions and tensions during a global health crisis. In response to trauma we can often disconnect or dissociate from our bodies. This assignment invited students to reconnect to each other in an embodied way.

The student creations opened with a soloist who explored the vulnerability in freely existing despite self-sabotage and perfectionism. The movement piece had some autobiographically echoes and reflections on memories of self-doubt, criticism and self-sabotage which led to a disconnection from the body. Rigidity by psyching oneself out and being too caught up in one’s head. Dancing to Barbara Pravi’s “Voila”, the piece was intentionally vulnerable and melancholic. Here is how the student described their intention and creation process:

I wanted to do something that scared me. To try and create a movement piece that matched the song and was a dynamic multifaceted piece that I was proud of. This terrified me! I wanted to make something where I did not hide behind comedic or ironic performance - which I have done in the past.

The piece opened with the student reading an artifact from their childhood; a grade 2 yearbook, echoing our earlier Object of Significance activity. 

I wanted to incorporate it with me somehow to represent my past identity. Not the young adult that my classmates and teacher know, not the photos and stories I told them of my teens. Just a young kid in their school uniform and what they thought their future might be.

As an audience we witnessed a character rehearsing a dance piece and getting increasingly frustrated with the effort to be perfect. After fumbling a few times, the frustrated character pulls a blind over their eyes and begins to dance unhinged, freely moving to the music and revealing true expression and existence in the body. 

When I put my hat over my eyes and just got to dance and move with the music it was great. At that point the music is swelling and I just remember feeling energy in my chest and feet.

The conclusion of the piece was marked by the student/character pulling off the blindfold in an affirming gesture, conveying the resilience and truth found in the confrontation of fear and reclaiming of one’s body. 

The student performances were deeply personal and imbued with meaning. Bearing witness to one another's' embodied truths kindled emotional connections and shared insights.  While the pandemic showed us the fragility of the world, our movement narratives are pervasive and resilient. On a personal note, witnessing The Carnival’s movement narratives allowed me to see my own narrative reflected back to me. In bearing witness, I was able to re-establish an embodied sense of hope and resilience. Reclaiming space through letting go in order to hold on. In many ways, moving alongside grief in order to understand and transform it into a force that propels us forward instead of holding us down. 

Here I Am

Here I am in the noise and the silence

Here I am even if exposed it’s over

Here I am in the noise and the fury too

Here I am Here I am Here I am..

-excerpt from Voila by Barbara Pravi

In closing, I look back to my mother and the path that shaped me as a dancer and as a teacher. My dance journey began through a conversation with my mom one evening before I went to bed. I expressed how I wished I had taken up dance when I was younger. My mother told me that it was not too late to take up dance in my 20s and encouraged me to take a risk. She then leaned in and kissed me goodnight. That was the very last conversation I had with her. The next morning she suffered a severe brain aneurysm. She was rushed to the hospital but was later declared brain dead due to a second aneurysm.  As she was surrounded by family members the doctors disconnected life support. The only sound that remained in the room was the beep of the heart monitor. In almost metronomic fashion the sound echoed for what seemed like an entirety until finally she flatlined. As I kissed her goodbye, I made an affirmation that my purpose in life was to provide environments for all children/youth to feel safe and validated. Her final breath was the unleashing of my sense of purpose and authenticity. I started studying dance immediately after within Hip-Hop based modalities. My mother was a woman who continually challenged traditional norms and ways of thinking. Her ideals and spirit live on as the philosophical backbone to my pedagogy. My time with The Carnival reawakened my own joy in dance/teaching and simultaneously provided a healing medium to process the trauma of the pandemic. As we learn to move, we move to learn, to understand and to transcend. For me this is the gift that a movement artist gives to themselves and to others - the ability to reclaim beauty and space when at times it seems lost. It is because I dance that I have learned the importance of honesty and integrity. I have learned who I am. I have learned the value of friendship and family. I have learned that love is stronger than hate. While death is inevitable, love never dies.

Dance is my home, my meditation, my ground zero.