Community Dance Class with Crystal U. Davis

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Crystal U. Davis

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Crystal U. Davis

A Guest in a Dance Home: Implicit Bias in Learning New Dance Forms

Community Class (Open Level)

All ages welcome

Monday January 15th

2-3:15pm

$20

In this class, we will explore how to acknowledge our likes and dislikes, challenges and strengths through dances from across the world. This class will introduce how to learn new movement from different cultures as an outsider of that culture. How do you avoid your movement in learning a new dance looking like the dance form you are most familiar with? How do you learn what aspects of the movement are most important and not as important? How do you remain open to new rules, expectations, and cultural values when learning a new dance form from a different culture? In this class, through non-Western dance forms including East Indian dance forms, dancers will explore these questions and focus on how implicit bias affects how we learn dance.

Crystal U. Davis, MFA, CLMA is a dancer, movement analyst, and critical race theorist with twelve years of experience teaching in P-12 education and seven years supervising dance educators. Her research explores implicit bias in dance and how privilege manifests in the body. Her work has been published in the Journal of Dance Education and in her book, Dance and Belonging: Implicit Bias and Inclusion in Dance Education. As an artist, her performances include Rajasthani folk dances, Classical Indian dance forms, West African dance forms, to Modern and Contemporary dances with choreography examining incongruities between what we say, what we believe, and what we do. She is an Associate Professor of Dance Performance and Scholarship at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she teaches dance and theatre teaching courses, modern technique, somatics, and movement analysis.