Dance Education for All

Lately, because of some recent discussions with the board of our local Windfall Dancers school and company here in Bloomington, Indiana, I’ve been thinking about the nature of dance education and, to be frank, its general absence from the public school curriculum. Dedicated dance classes are a rarity, and dance departments are virtually unheard of (though, of course, there are exceptions).

One reason for the absence of dance in the curriculum is lack of recognition that dance is a kinesthetic art form from which all students would derive benefit. In most schools, if dance is touched on at all, it is in the context of physical education. The physicality of dance gets it lumped in with dodge-ball and track. Indeed, acrobatics have long been a part of the dance repertoire. Take a look at the Nicolas brothers, Donald O’Connor, or contestants on the popular television show, “So You Think You Can Dance.”

But dancing and dance education are about more than physicality. Poet John Dryden called dancing “the poetry of the foot.” To Martha Graham, dance was “the hidden language of the soul.”

Isadora Duncan summed up the art this way: “There are likewise three kinds of dancers: first, those who consider dancing as a sort of gymnastic drill, made up of impersonal and graceful arabesques; second, those who, by concentrating their minds, lead the body into the rhythm of a desired emotion, expressing a remembered feeling or experience. And finally, there are those who convert the body into a luminous fluidity, surrendering it to the inspiration of the soul.”

Thus it always has been difficult to situate dance in the school curriculum, and this difficulty often has relegated dance education to the fringe — and add-on rather than a core subject for all students.

Merce Cunningham, the renowned dancer and choreographer who died at age 90 in April this year, spent much of his life as a teacher of dance and as a strong advocate for dance education. But he also recognized the challenges not only of dancing but also of teaching others to dance. Dancing is movement, and movement by its nature is ephemeral. Cunningham put it this way: “You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls.”

And so the challenge for educators who believe, as I do, that the arts — all of the arts — are fundamental to our development as holistic beings, is somehow to capture the ephemeral that is so much the reality of dance and situate it in the core of schooling. Dance should not be merely an add-on, an occasional lesson in P.E. class, an after-school activity, or something a few students do in the context of other activities, from glee club to show choir. Dance is something that all students need to experience.