Black Bodies in Dance Education: Charting a New Pedagogical Paradigm to Eliminate Gendered and Hypersexualized Assumptions

To resist and transform gendered and hypersexualized assumptions and attitudes that cloud interpretations and devalue readings of black and brown bodies, dance educators cannot only facilitate agency for their students, but also help demonstrate an overarching concern for social justice and equality. Dance has the power to transform and redirect energies, intellectually, emotionally, physically, and socially. As such, movement can suggest and facilitate a critical shift in the lexicon of dance pedagogy. Inherent in the dance medium is the ability to explore new territory, particularly culturally specific, personal, and community-identified terrain, in non-threatening ways and thus, cause human beings to pause in the moments when beliefs and assumptions are temporarily suspended. In these interludes lay the transforming power of dance. For dance educators, these cultivated moments facilitate the creation of a new paradigm that challenges and deconstructs dominant gendered and sexualized notions of dancing black bodies.