Transcending Words: Dance For Tolerance

Virginia Moreno dancing in the Mapele Circle during the Collaboration Dance at the Red Hook Waterfront Arts Festival. Photo by Julia Rose

“Dance is like life — permanent movement and transformation, a way to change society,” says Tatiana de Jesus. The Brazilian teenage girl sits on a folding chair in a circle in Brooklyn, black ribbons spiraling around her arms and flesh-colored fabric stretched across her body as she watches a translator articulate her statement in English. It is May 30, 2007, and I am sitting in a circle at the International Center for Tolerance Education listening to teenagers talk about dance as a form of survival. The room is vibrating with excitement and energy from recent performances by two companies of young dancers from Cali, Colombia, and Fortaleza, Brazil. Part of a thrillingly unique project called Dance For Tolerance, Tatiana has been in New York City for the past week with other teenagers from her impoverished favela neighborhood proving that dance might just be the ideal medium for intercultural dialogue and positive social change.

Dance For Tolerance began as a gesture in the mind and heart of Marco Stoffel, the visionary founder and president of the Third Millennium Foundation, and it has exploded into a dance symphony. While in Cali, Colombia, in April 2006, he visited the remarkable Francisco Esperanza Dance Troupe, a community-based company that reaches out to disadvantaged youth through dance. Amazed, he challenged them to create a new piece that would not only represent the concept of “intolerance,” but also illuminate ways to overcome it.

In this city of 2.5 million people, murder can become currency. Almost every one of the ten teenage dancers in the company has witnessed or been a survivor of an act of violence. A boy dances despite a gunshot wound in his foot. A girl dances through the memory of her brother's murder over a pair of sneakers. Instead of joining their peers in gangs and revenge killings, these young people have found an outlet for their pain and anger. They have discovered a way to channel this energy into something creative. “My passion comes from the fact that I see violence happening all around me and my dance is a form of protest. A big NO to everything we see around us. I am so tired of this situation and I want to STOP it!” exclaims dancer Kelly Rivas. Jose Miguel Quinonez passionately adds. “We are now known more as dancers than as gang members in the neighborhood.”

Spreading Seeds of Tolerance

The Third Millennium Foundation (TMF) is bold in its wide-reaching mission to promote tolerance. Its ambitious goal is “to reach a global audience to enlighten, inform and educate on the subject of intolerance —‘spreading seeds of tolerance’ and ultimately changing behavior.” Stoffel's dream is a world where intolerance is obliterated. He insists that in order for the future to bloom with new, colorful life, we must plant the seeds today. Number 6 on TMF's list of “Ten Tips To Spread the Seed of Tolerance,” is: Take a walk in a different neighborhood. Stoffel took this tip to the bank and provided funding for the troupe from Cali, many of whom had never left their neighborhoods, to travel to New York City, share their dance, participate in a week of workshops and walk in a few different neighborhoods. He hired dance educator Martha Bowers, founder and executive director of Dance/Theatre/Etcetera in Brooklyn, to serve as director of the Dance For Tolerance initiative and help launch the project.

Warming up for a Dance for Tolerance workshop with all three groups at Brooklyn International High School. Photo by Julia Rose

In addition to Colombia's Francisco Esperanza Dance Troupe, Marco invited Brazil's EDISCA, a nonprofit organization that serves socioeconomically disadvantaged youth in Fortaleza, Ceara, Brazil. EDISCA's mission is “to promote the human development of children and adolescents with the aim of preparing them to live in society as sensitive, creative and ethically aware adults through the use of transforming pedagogy centered on artistic experience”

“Most of the children who enter EDISCA can't read or write,” said EDISCA Founder Dora Andrade in Time magazine in 2001. “Many have health problems and are close to running away from violent homes or being lured into child prostitution. Dance is the pillar of the school. [Through dance] a seven-year-old learns about vision and order, about creativity.” Stoffel extended to EDISCA his challenge of creating a dance that proposes solutions to intolerance. They accepted. In May 2007, ten young Colombian dancers and seven young dancers from Brazil flew to New York City to explore these issues with a group of dancers at Brooklyn International High School and to prove to their communities that youth can raise their fists not as acts of violence but as creative gestures in a dance for social change.

Community Dance

“I was eager to make dances about something,” wrote esteemed choreographer Liz Lerman in a 2002 article about community dance “I felt it important to find another way to describe dances about something in addition to the movement… In my early years, I even went so far as to call some of them nonfiction dancing.”

Lerman says there is an urgent hunger in the field to acknowledge dance as a form with power beyond beautiful movements and stage images. Dance can tell stories, stories of our community. In promoting storytelling between cultures and in sharing personal narratives about violence, fear, hope and love, dance can become a form that transcends language barriers by slicing through the singular definitions of words and expanding into the language of emotion and metaphor to express themes that do not need translation.

“I think it's really important that dance gets recognized as a vital component of community arts,” Martha Bowers passionately declares. “I think the community-arts field tends to focus more on theater. There's a lot of great dance stuff going on and it is such a beautiful medium for cultural exchange that surpasses language.” When I asked Bowers to describe the dance that was created collaboratively by youth from Cali, Fortaleza and Brooklyn as the Dance For Tolerance, she kept spouting phrases like, “slow motion” and “abstract movement,” then eventually she just stood up, extended her long, graceful arms and began to show me the dance. This article attempts to assign words and text to the experience of community dance, to tell the story of this impossible project that partnered youth from two continents together and gave them the space to exchange rhythms, create phrases and find a language of emotion, shared pain and tolerance — through dance.

Dance Tourists

During the eight days of sightseeing, peer-to-peer workshops, dance exchange and school performances, the South American visiting dancers were taken on a whirlwind tour of New York City. In addition to Brooklyn International, they visited Brooklyn Friends Middle School and Berkeley Carroll School, where they performed their dances and then engaged with the students in a talkback or dance workshop.

Bowers explains:

The idea was to do as much exchange as possible. The real learning that was going to happen, and what I consider the tolerance education part of it, was that young people in the United States really would benefit from understanding what young people in other parts of the world face — an entirely different set of challenges and an entirely different environment. I purposely chose going to these wealthier private schools because [the private school students] need to know [about these issues such as poverty and violence] and they are going to [grow up to] be people who have power and money to make choices and decisions and influence policy.

With these deliberate, strategic decisions, Martha Bowers is leading a new movement toward creating social change through dance. She is keenly aware of the power dynamics and class divisions between the South American youth and the New York City private school youth. She uses dance as the lens through which to look at inequality and intolerance. The South Americans do not sit on a stage and tell their stories of violence, abuse and poverty to these children of privilege. Instead, they dance. As they dance, Bowers describes, the kids in the audience stare transfixed. She imitates the students in the audience by extending her long neck, dropping her jaw and widening her eyes. Through witnessing the urgency, fire and passion being expressed through movement, these students will have images burned into their minds that will last longer than words ever could. They will associate the city of Cali, Colombia, not just with the horror of the local news stories, but with the beauty, inspiration and strength of its youth.

“From a personal point of view I know that when I was in high school and had a chance to work with other cultures, it totally changed my life. I had no idea about certain conditions within this country and abroad and that kind of cultural exchange totally changed what I wanted to do with my life,” Bowers shares later.

Dance workshop in the Tolerance Tent at the Red Hook Waterfront Arts Festival. Photo by Julia Rose

“I think [it's important] for young people in America to be reminded that there are different ways to be,” She pauses and looks around her sun-filled studio crowded with cardboard boxes still waiting to be unpacked.

That it isn’t a given that you have to just achieve all these things and be bored with life. I'm very excited that we're using dance as a medium to engage in that kind of conversation, about how you start to change young people's thinking about how to relate to other human beings, to develop a more informed vision of one’s place in the world. Early on.

Surpassing Language

Let's go back to that room at the Center for Tolerance Education and look at the dances that traveled across continents. Six girls and one boy bounce across the floor as if it were sprung with elastic. Their costumes are a swirl of black ribbons evoking bondage or prison bars across their butterscotch-colored skin. Peach, amber and burgundy tulle flutters around them as these Brazilian youths twist and twirl through the space, blazing eyes lined with streaks of turquoise and violet. Their years of training is obvious. What is unseen is the neighborhoods' violence and poverty they left behind as their joy for movement motivates each leap, spin and kick. The trust and support they feel for each other sings an unspoken dialogue. Their dance tells their story of hope, passion and faith. After the roaring applause from the audience, the dancers beam and glow and clap back to the audience and then to each other with pride.

Where the Brazilians explored violence through emotions and abstracted movements, the Colombians' dance uses more literal “real-life” techniques. It begins with the four males and six females strutting across the stage boldly in the universal teenage costume of jeans, t-shirts and sneakers. The movements quickly escalate into choreographed simulations of violence, anger and desire. The threat of rape, of shooting, of solitude permeates each duet and motivates the different phrases of movement. The ensemble splits down the middle and “stage left” challenges “stage right” to a duel of the dance, à la West Side Story, but the ferocity, rhythms and urgency reveal a situation more horrific than the Broadway musical. In an instant, the stage parts, lines are redrawn and threats renegotiated through pivots, lurches and turns. Each simulated act of violence crashes into a wave where another erupts behind it and another ripples beyond that. In the final climax, a lone, mourning angel figure, a striking young woman with skin almost as dark as her raven hair, slowly glides through the chaos.

Following the two dances, Bowers invites the dancers and the community audience to make a huge circle and have a conversation. She facilitates a dialogue where the South Americans share stories of the impact their dancing has had on them and their communities. She begins with asking everyone to introduce themselves. Translators are scattered around the perimeter as each phrase is repeated in Portuguese, Spanish and English. The rhythm of this tripling of language calms the energy from the frenzied dances. As I listen to each of these languages repeated and repeated, the scope and impact of this project becomes clearer. When they were dancing, we all knew what everyone was “saying.” Suddenly speaking in various languages reinforces boundaries between our homes and cultures. The dancing, though, has brought these groups closer. It is obvious as I see one of the Brazilian girls sitting on the floor leaning against the legs of a Colombian boy. “I am Andres. I am a dancer,” one of the boys slowly articulates as the kids from Brooklyn around him erupt in laughter and applause. A translator beams and explains that those are a few of the new English words he has learned. He is a dancer. He learned the most important word to him that week.

Bowers then asks, “What is the spirit that moves behind your dancing?”

“What moves me first is my love for dance, but also I want to be a model to other kids in my community to show how art can be a tool for change,” says one of the Brazilian girls. “Our love for dancing and music is what brings us together,” a Colombian boy chimes in.

When it seems that all have expressed what they could through nouns and verbs and adjectives, Bowers stands and announces, “Let's teach each other and speak through dance.” Suddenly Sinton Vignos, the blond DJ from Georgia turns up the volume and starts spinning beats, the chairs are pushed against the walls and the room erupts with stomps, hips, shoulders and claps. A luminous 60-something African-American woman from Brooklyn in a long flowered skirt announces, “I'm gonna teach ya'll a line dance that we do in church!” In less than four counts of music, the room has adjusted into lines of bodies stepping together, laughing and stumbling as they follow her feet. Then a man with a clipped French accent interrupts and exclaims, “I am Jean. I am from the Ivory Coast in Africa and I'd like to teach an African dance!” Soon silver belt chains are clanking, wooden bead necklaces are knocking, bare feet are slapping the ground and tulle is flying as this motley crew from at least three continents shares a dance.

Intercultural Dance Making

In addition to performing their dances in schools and venues around New York City, the visiting dancers collaborated with Martha Bowers' afterschool Performing Arts Workshop at Brooklyn International High School (BIHS) to create a brand new dance, the Dance For Tolerance. Though time was limited and rehearsals were squeezed in between tours of the Statue of Liberty and performances in middle schools, this collaboration was a vital and richly successful part of the initiative to build tolerance through dance.

Backstage at the Red Hook Waterfront Arts Festival. Photo by Julia Rose

Fedia Louis, a slender, dark-skinned 16-year-old student at Brooklyn International High School wrinkles her nose as she dramatizes the disgust she thought she would feel towards these visitors. “I thought that when Martha said ‘Colombians and Brazilians’ that they was gonna look so different from us.” Her face lights up and she beams as she explains the rest of the experience. “But then when I saw them, it was like, ‘They just like us!’ and then with the dance too. I thought their dance was going to be like completely different. But it was like — kinda the same thing. When they was dancing in their language, their dance was kinda like us. I was like shocked to learn that.” If Fedia's experience is any indicator, it is harder to maintain stereotypes and discrimination when you realize that the people you are pigeonholing, are actually quite like you.

The Tolerance Tent

June 2, 2007, at the 14th Annual Red Hook Waterfront Arts Festival, the Dance For Tolerance project hosts a series of dance workshops in “The Tolerance Tent,” as part of a full day of programming presented by the Third Millennium “Seeds of Tolerance” social-awareness campaign and Dance/Theatre/ Etcetera. The morning begins with an Arab-Israeli dance collaboration called “Root and Branch,” and the day unfolds with cross-cultural dance exchanges, peer-to-peer education performances, films, youth media presentations and, later that day on the main stage, the world premiere of the Dance For Tolerance piece collaboratively choreographed and performed by the 30+ youth from Colombia, Brazil and Brooklyn.

Story Circle at the International Centre of Tolerance Education. Photo by Julia Rose

Bowers describes the creation of this dance as her favorite part of the week. “Because it wasn't easy,” she remembers with a laugh. “It was actually very difficult and we didn’t have enough time and we didn’t have the right kinds of spaces and people were tired and it was really hot…”

Collaboration is challenging even when everyone speaks the same language. Different styles of creation emerge, clash and find harmony through their dissonance. The Colombian troupe was used to taking lots of time to sit in a circle and talk to each other before getting up and moving. The Brooklyn students were accustomed to working in the frenzy of two-hour afterschool timeslots. The Brazilians were used to training for hours a day. Yet somehow, despite the differences, the dancers shared ideas and began to get up on their feet. Woldine Destin, a soft-spoken teenage girl from Brooklyn International, explains the process, “it was hard for us to communicate, but the moment they stop sayin something and they just doing the move, then you can understand.”

The Dance For Tolerance:
Beginning- slow motion, abstract movement
Thirty teenagers enter
Soloists improvising duets of miscommunication
Slow motion reaching for each other
Missing each other
Voices as music
Articulating definitions of “tolerance” and “intolerance”
Portuguese
Spanish
English
“It's more important to talk to your enemies than your friends”
Drums play
A circle erupts
“Mapele” — an African dance form with a soloist in the circle's center
“Mapele” — the name of a fish that moves its whole body in the water
The girls sing
“Just call on me brother when you need a hand, we all need somebody to lean on…”
Hip-hop infused movement
Ending — slow motion
Bodies rolling against each other
Reaching and touching
Finding.

Still from Blair Johnson's video of Dance for Tolerance at the 2007 Red Hook Waterfront Arts Festival. Click here for video.

A week later, after the planes carrying the exhausted, exhilarated young dancers have safely landed in Brazil and Colombia, Bowers invites me out to Dance/Theatre/Etcetera's new dance studio/office space in Red Hook to talk about what happens next.

People were very excited about the idea of this Dance For Tolerance festival and that it might move between Brazil, Colombia and the U.S. to challenge others to make work that incorporates the idea of tolerance into their programs and it could be sponsored by different communities. We learned a lot this week about what worked and what didn’t. We have to have more time. BIHS [students] should be excused for a week. Here, you're always fighting against – “Oh but it's the arts.” Personally, I hope to travel to Colombia and Brazil to see these extraordinary programs in action and learn about their methodology.

As is true in most of our projects, there is the actual choreography of the work, and then there is what I call the essential, invisible dance. This is the dance of unlikely encounters that takes place as artists and community members work together, become friends, develop relationships, compare life stories. It is this dialogue that informs the piece.

In just eight days, the young people of the Dance For Tolerance initiated a process of listening with their bodies, telling stories through their rhythms and putting hope and understanding into their bodies. These teenagers will return to their communities with hearts a little more open and minds a little less closed. They will return with new creative strategies to engage their peers to challenge the manifestations of intolerance they witness around them. The seeds have been planted in their bodies and with every step, turn and leap they will extend their branches.

Dana Edell is the co-founder and executive director of viBe Theater Experience, a nonprofit performing-arts education organization that empowers underserved teenage girls to write, record and perform original theater, publications and music that transforms themselves and the community. She wrote about viBe for CAN. She is also a doctoral student in Educational Theatre at New York University.

Sources

Bowers, Martha. Interview: Brooklyn, N.Y., June 7, 2007.

Bowers, Martha. “Letter from an Artist: The Dream Life of Bricks.” Community Arts Network, December 2002.

Destin, Woldine. Interview: Brooklyn, N.Y., June 11, 2007.

Downie, Andrew. “Teaching the Dance of Life.” Time, June 18, 2001.

Lerman, Liz. “Dancing in Community: Its Roots in Art.” Community Arts Network, September 2002.

Lindqvist, Elin. Interview: Brooklyn, N.Y., June 7, 2007.

Louis, Fedia. Interview: Brooklyn, N.Y., June 11, 2007.

Original CAN/API publication: July 2007