3 minute read
Faculty/Staff Spotlight
In her six-year tenure as chair of CSW’s acclaimed Dance Department, Nailah Randall-Bellinger has enriched the lives of countless students with the power of movement. Known for her high-energy, no-nonsense teaching style and extensive knowledge of dance technique, history, and culture, Nailah’s classes have come to serve as a quintessential part of the CSW experience.
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You seem to have this magical way of getting kids who would never have dreamed of dancing before to fall in love with the art. How do you do it?
It’s the culture here. One of the things that attracted me to CSW was how integral the arts are to the academic curriculum. Here, a student experiences the arts in the same way they would science or history or math. More than that, the type of classes we offer are less intimidating and more inviting to exploration and inventiveness and selfaffirmation. A lot of schools only offer the strict technique classes in ballet, modern, jazz, hip hop — which are all good, I’m not refuting that — but it doesn’t leave room for students who don’t see themselves in a codified dance class experience. Now, they’ll get there once they dig their toes in the experience of moving, but you first have to get human beings comfortable with moving through space, and understanding that that movement in itself is a language and a way of communicating. Once they become familiar with that, they will then continue on.
What do you say to people who try to make the case that dance is more of an extracurricular than an academic?
Dance is an epistemology. Dance speaks to what’s happening at any given time. And if you understand that, you can appreciate dance as an academic subject, examining it through the lenses of philosophy, history, religion, and sociology — all subjects dedicated to understanding the human condition. If you know what people dance, and why they dance it, you can place it anywhere in the historical timeline. Take the example of minstrelsy, a dark period of American history when White men would blacken up with coal to portray Black men in a very grotesque way, and mimic the Black dance vernacular. You ask yourself, why? It wasn’t just entertainment, it was propaganda meant to keep Black people in their places. We’re not just studying steps, we’re studying the way that people think about the world.
What are some of the trends you are seeing in the dance world right now?
I think that hip hop in itself is evolving to be more than just street battles. Now it’s becoming part of the concert stage expression, more and more. And so then we get into the question of what contemporary dance is. Contemporary dance is the evolution — or let’s say the merging — of all dances that came before it. In contemporary dance, you’ll find movement that is hip hop in nature mixed with modern with a waltz line, waltz technique line, or grand contraction, or release technique, or counter technique approach to moving a body. Oppositional pull is everything, and I think that’s what dance is right now in America — and the world.
You make a point of saying that Dance is for all bodies. Why is that such an important distinction to make?
Because first of all, if we’re talking about diversity, you have to be talking about true inclusivity, and to have all body types in a room moving together is the best way to show equitable evolution. More importantly, I can give a phrase to the whole class and the way that someone who is much smaller in stature moves in comparison to someone who is much larger in stature is so interesting to watch. It shows a different look, and I think that it can be shocking at first to kids who come to CSW with preconceived notions of what a dancer should look like. I don’t care who you are and how long you’ve been dancing, you’re going to get a different experience here. Every BODY can dance. I don’t care what size you are, what skills you come with, what ethnicity you are, what type of training you have or haven’t had. You can dance here at CSW.
