Abstract
The chapter looks at dance education through a critical race theory and whiteness theory lens. With experiential counter-narratives, the authors assert Whiteness is the “homeowner” of concert dance and dance education, while Black dancers and forms categorized as “Black dance” are renters of the landscape. Whiteness’ homeownership manifests in naming, defining, categorizing, establishing value, and assessing dancers and forms and is reflected in dance terminology, technique, pedagogy, curriculum, and evaluation. The authors argue that the treatment of dance forms other than ballet and modern, along with biases existing in Laban Movement Analysis, result in an unlevel playing field for Black dancers. They offer recommendations for alternative pedagogical approaches and institutional policies that can interrupt the systemic inequity which results in microaggressions and White privilege.
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Notes
- 1.
In addition to adhering to APA format, we choose to capitalize “Black” and “White” when referring to racial classifications as their meaning is no longer referring to skin color but to a social construct (American Psychological Association, 2010).
- 2.
Given the multiplicity of its uses and definitions, as a concept and term, “Whiteness” has been alternatively criticized for being imprecise, or too monolithic and over-generalizing, (Stein, 2001). But Whiteness itself is, as Black studies scholar Jared Sexton astutely describes, “supple, elastic, expansive, ambiguous, continually altered and bringing in new elements” (Sexton, 2008, p. 193). Furthermore, while Whiteness is not a monolithic entity but rather lived through intersectional identities including gender, socioeconomic class, religion, historical circumstance, and geography, Whiteness nevertheless functions as the presumption of commonality, the sharing of a sameness. Erasure of its own mutable history and its conceptual instability functions to generate this sense of connectivity, a key component to White power structures’ reliance on bonds formed between White people. We believe it is worth the risks of simplifying White identity to elaborate how contemporary structures of Whiteness, in their own operations of overgeneralization, draw White people together to keep others excluded from networks of resources and power.
- 3.
While other marginalized racial groups experience this “renter” status, in this chapter we focus on Black dancers. There may be similarities in the experiences of dancers from other racial and ethnic backgrounds, but it is not fully commensurate with Blackness’ specific relationship to Whiteness (Sexton, 2010).
- 4.
Laban Movement Analysis is a movement theory developed by Rudolf von Laban. This movement theory system is used to generate, refine, and record movement using his theoretical language and symbol system (Bradley, 2009).
- 5.
These also affect the subordination of the entire field of dance, deemed inferior to other art forms because it is considered an act of the body, not the mind.
- 6.
Columbia College in Chicago is paving the way in this regard. For example, their approach to teaching contemporary dance examines contemporary dance as an intersection of modern, ballet, and West African forms (Dance undergraduate courses, n.d.).
- 7.
Paulo Friere describes the “banking method” of education wherein the teacher deposits information into the brains of students in a similar way as one deposits money into a bank. He instead advocates for encouraging curiosity and student agency in discovering knowledge instead of this banking method model of education.
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Davis, C.U., Phillips-Fein, J. (2018). Tendus and Tenancy: Black Dancers and the White Landscape of Dance Education. In: Kraehe, A., Gaztambide-Fernández, R., Carpenter II, B. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65256-6_33
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