Dance Program Statement in Response to the Murder of George Floyd

Dear UMTAD community,

The Dance Program asserts that embodied research, education and creativity can be powerful tools for social change and justice in order to address historic and ongoing legacies of white supremacy, violence and oppression against Black, Brown and Indigenuous Bodies in the United States and the world beyond. We call on the white people within our community and beyond to self-examine and acknowledge racism and white supremacy in all their implicit and explicit forms in order to make intentional change within themselves and their communities of friends and family. 

Moving forward, the Dance Program Leadership Group will focus on what we can do in the immediate future to create a more just and equitable artistic and learning community as our substantive response to the George Floyd tragedy and the systemic injustices inherent to our nation’s institutions and communities. We will: 

1. Consciously become an anti-racist program, which will require a commitment of resources to regular workshops and trainings for our staff, instructors and students. 
2. Each year the dance program identifies numerous prospective students of color it believes will succeed at our program only to have their applications rejected by the University’s admissions office. We call upon the University to re-implement past and develop new programs to support incoming students whose high school systems may have failed to adequately prepare them for college.
3. Aggressively work towards an administrative and instructional staff that is representative of the Twin Cities population in terms of race, ethnicity, economic background and gender.  
4. Continue and expand our decision-making around guest artists and scholars that visit our program in terms of representation as a critical tool to creating a safe and culturally responsive learning environment for all. 
   • We will dedicate each public dance program event for the next two years in the name of specific persons killed in the United States and beyond by state sanctioned violence.  
   • We will work with the Student Dance Coalition to identify a student representative to join the Dance Program’s Guest Artist & Scholar review process.  
5. Utilize the plan created by our Spring 2020 Choreographing Social Justice Course as a blueprint for an embodied practice acknowledging that the Barker Center for Dance stands upon stolen indigenous lands and to recognize in active ways the legacies of historic and ongoing violence against indigenous bodies in our building and learning environments. 
6. Build a stronger program community. Towards that end, a pilot program will be established for our various contemporary technique tracks to meet once a week collectively. These collective class sessions will be used for collaborative teaching by the course instructors, guest instructors classes, program town halls, and workshops on critical social issues and anti-racism. 

The Dance Program Leadership Group calls on our entire Dance Program community to join us in supporting these pledges and working with us towards realizing our goals.
 

Sincerely,

The Dance Program Leadership Group: Ananya Chatterjea, Joanie Smith, Carl Flink, Nora Jenneman, Michelle Kinney, Andrea Reynolds, Erin Thompson, Maggie Bergeron, Laura Virtucio-Selle and Mike Grogan.