New Guest Post on NDEO’s Behind the Curtain Blog
The Fate of Dance
By Daniel Levi-Sanchez, a Dancer/Educator living with Myasthenia Gravis
“I've discovered that with dance in the public school system, there is nothing that states that we as dance educators should meet every person where they are. Instead, we are expected to treat our students as empty vessels. On the contrary, I believe that we should step into the dance studio with the assumption that our students already know how to dance. Our responsibility is to use what they know, provide them with what they don't know, and guide them on how to use this knowledge for the betterment of their future. Right now, we are often just teaching them dance forms and they are repeating these forms on stage, so that their parents and caregivers can be happy, the teacher can earn the coveted highly effective rating, and for the bureaucracy to say that dance is working. When the children graduate…where do they go…what do they do?”
In this guest blog post, Daniel Levi-Sanchez questions the viability of how dance is often taught in the public school system. He offers comparisons to his experience being diagnosed with Myasthenia Gravis, and examples from his own tenure as a public school dance teacher in Brooklyn, to explore the possibility that dance in the sector may be suffering from a “failure of imagination” that could be impacting the field’s long-term viability. Read more here.