Yes, and...
Catherine Cabeen
I am an artist and a teacher.
I grew up listening to the common and destructive mythology that “those who can’t do, teach.” I resisted a full-time teaching job for a long time because I thought there was valor in being an artist and that teaching was only something people did to pay the bills. As I came into adulthood, peers and family members all around me repeated the refrain that education is an institution that preserves the status quo, and that art is the only way to make a subversive impact on society.
However, I can see clearly now that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. By not acknowledging the creative and activist potential of progressive pedagogy, we shame those who are willing to do the hard work of socially-engaged teaching, a job every bit as all-encompassing as being an artist. When teaching is approached as a way to pay the bills rather than as a way to participate in the conscious construction of society, it can easily become a facade for the establishment. In a time when the very foundations of that establishment are being revealed as rotten, however, both artists and teachers are being called to speak truth to power. Teaching requires incredible humility, bravery, and a willingness to support critical thinking and civil discourse. Simultaneously, it is an opportunity to celebrate embodiment and community. There is great creative potential in teaching, just as there is tremendous educational possibility in the arts.
I see both teaching and art making as creative endeavors. In both callings I engage in embodied and historical research within a community, in order to facilitate spaces for discourse, learning, and connection. I approach both embodied practices as opportunities to work through ideas in diverse communities as a form of activism. I am deeply aware of the politics of the body in all of my work. My positionality as a queer white woman who is quite young for an academic, but quite old for a dancer, informs my work as an artist and teacher. Much of my choreographic work has been based in fourth-wave feminism, LGBTQ+ advocacy, and an articulation of the subversive power of embodiment within cultures that are heavily informed by Cartesian duality, such as academia.
The classical separation of the mind and body in Western education systems is built on Descartes’s seventeenth-century philosophy, which claims that the “rational” mind is superior to the “carnal body.” This concept has been used for centuries to celebrate logical and systematic thinking and to devalue kinesthetic and emotional intelligence. It is at the root of the hierarchies that exist between genders, between humans and animals, and between industry and the earth. Cartesian duality is also used to justify the idea that the arts, and dance in particular, are an indulgence of the body rather than a means of knowledge production. However, numerous fields, including Cognitive Science and Biology, are now acknowledging the vast interconnectedness of the human mind and body in constructing experience. As a result, progressive pedagogues are able to justify the use of embodied and kinesthetic teaching methods in a variety of classes, but in doing so, we are arguing against some of the core foundations of “higher education.”
Despite the proliferation of evidence that embodied pedagogy is highly impactful and affective, long standing institutions tend to be adverse to change. I will outline some of my subversive strategies for dealing with this resistance, shortly. In recent years, my focus has expanded to actively embrace anti-racist work. This interest has emerged in response to contemporary cultural concerns in the world at large, as well as in my more immediate community. The relationship between Cartesian duality and racism is being articulated by contemporary scholars as another reason to question and reimagine traditional, top-down educational models. The active way in which working with race forces me to face my privilege is a transformative site of growth for me.
In August, I began teaching a college course at a maximum-security prison, which has made quite vivid the intersections of racism and mass incarceration, as well as between trauma, dehumanization, and disembodiment. Engaging people who are pushing against all odds to self-actualize through education, is deeply invigorating. Doing so through the treacherous labyrinth of the U.S. “justice” system however, is vividly challenging. The cognitive whiplash I feel teaching in the prison system, between being so inspired by the students and so disturbed by the system they are navigating, is overwhelming. It is unavoidable subject matter for both my creative practice, and my understanding of teaching as activism, as both of these branches of my life evolve with my consciousness of the world around me.
In order to teach at the prison, I had to create a class that would fit into the B.A. in Political Science curriculum at my college. All students in the program have this major. I created a critical dance history course that looks at twentieth-century American dance through the lens of race and racism, which fit the bill. To get this class through the curriculum committee at my college I argued for the relationship between dance and cultural identity, and included the reading list and written assignments in my “sample syllabus,” while leaving out how much of the class would actually be taught through movement. I have great faith in the value of dance and embodiment practices for supporting learning and wellness. In addition, I see dance as a site of knowledge production that reveals a great deal about the beliefs and value systems of various communities and historic periods, but I know this perspective on the value of dance practice is not shared across disciplines.
When I first proposed the course to the college, the final project was performative. I was told that creating a dance was not a scholarly enough activity to demonstrate the acquisition of knowledge. Interestingly, when I used the exact same rubric and assignment description, but replaced the word “dance” with “paper” and the number of minutes with a number of pages, the course passed inspection without question. This gauntlet was clearly being policed by people who have never tried to make a dance. I gave them what they wanted to get in the door; a description of a course about dance. Then did what I knew would be affective in the classroom; we actually danced.
As a dancer and dance teacher, I have been trained my entire life to read body language. Dancing professionally has given me a thick skin, but my participation in the arts and teaching has also made me extremely empathetic. The first few weeks of teaching in the prison overwhelmed me emotionally. When all of my knowledge of statistics and both conscious and unconscious stereotypes were met with the faces of actual people, all of those numbers and biases took on a new life. The effects of incarceration on one’s body and mind are manifold. The lack of bodily autonomy inmates experience every day has left them shuffling instead of walking, breathing shallowly, and afraid to close their eyes during a somatic meditation.
Every week I am inspired by the drive, curiosity, and cunning I see in the students’ eyes. At the same time, I see the effects of incarceration on their posture, range of movement, and (lack of) willingness to be physically expressive. They began the semester willing to speak about what they know and think, but not what they feel. However, as we move together, I am watching the students’ bound, hyper-vigilant embodiment shift and open through the course of the semester. We begin every class with some sort of meditation and then a brief writing practice for the students to record how they are feeling in their body/minds. After discussing periods and/or genres in dance history we get up and create dances based on the core principles of the dances we have just discussed. These dances range from being autobiographical to social. We accommodate differently-abled bodies so that everyone can participate, and work around the fact that we are not able to play music in the prison, by creating rhythmic sound scores with voices, stomping, and body percussion. The sense of community that has developed between the students through dancing together, creates a rich environment for discourse and learning on every level.
In the prison classroom, like in any classroom, I perform a practiced calm and even temperament as teacher. I facilitate the discourse and conversation that are the foundation of student-centered learning. For most of my teaching life, this temperament, informed by decades of yoga and meditation study, is similar to the one I walk through the world with. However, during the first few weeks of teaching in the prison, I struggled to maintain my own emotional balance. I was thankful for the truths that were being revealed, but they were also deeply disturbing. For example, most of the students in my class are in their 50s. They were incarcerated in their 20s. The thought of still being judged for the poor choices one made several decades ago seems unfair and unnecessarily cruel in most cases.
In order to process my own emotional overwhelm after the first few weeks of teaching in the prison, I built a ten-minute dance-theater solo to unpack and express my experience. I created a sound score for the work that incorporates found text, written by notable scholars on racism, mass incarceration, and critical dance history, all of whom we are reading in class, such as Michelle Alexander, Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Tommy DeFrantz, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
This solo will likely never be performed. Here is another childhood myth I find myself up against: does the performance of something make it “real” or can the integrity of the process fulfill a dance’s purpose? How do I validate my experience to others? How do I validate it to myself?
I am still wrestling with these questions, as mental habits are hard to break. What I do know, is that as soon as I created the work and began to rehearse it, I was able to teach at the prison more effectively. My heart no longer got caught in my throat while listening to the students’ stories because I was better able to focus on their need to express their experience. The claustrophobia I battled every time I was processed into the prison through a seemingly endless series of heavy metal doors no longer clouded my vision and I was able to see the space of the classroom as full of possibility rather than a labyrinth of limitation.
I needed to make art about my experience because I think through my body. I think through sound, movement, text, and space. The piece reflects on the humanity of incarcerated people, seeing them as individuals in process, not just a bundle of statistics. It explores the potency of somatic experience in educating adults and the unquestionable power of dance to heal and transform. The work also expresses the overwhelm I feel as an educator, artist, and activist in confronting systematic oppression in order to support the integrity of these students. Moving in our classroom helps my students to understand and feel the power of physical expression to create community, solidarity, protest, and wellness. Similarly, I needed to engage my own physical and creative practice in order to be grounded in this challenging environment and act as an effective educator.
There is a lot of pain in this work, but there is also a great deal of laughter. Teaching dance history through the lens of race is to teach an outrageously inspiring story of bodily agency and celebration, in the face of unrelenting oppression. These students are seeing that. They are seeing dance survive displacement, slavery, segregation, attempts at erasure, and bias. They are seeing beautiful examples of community and strength rise out of struggle. In this they are catching glimpses of themselves and their own potential. The more we move together, the more often they surrender to a smile or a giggle. This class is about a revisionist history that speaks up against injustice, but it is also about the profound truth that the joy and freedom of dance are accessible inside all of us, no matter our race, gender, age, ability, living situation, or criminal history.
We can honor this truth as artists, and as teachers, in private and in public. May we all find ways to continue to nourish the heart of our own humanity through all of our professional practices. Whether under a spotlight or a fluorescent bulb, may we strive to engage each other through embodied creative practices that are both generous and personal; expressive, therapeutic, and essential.
Catherine Cabeen (www.catherinecabeen.com) is a dancer, choreographer, certified yoga instructor, and Assistant Professor of Dance at Manhattan Marymount College.
Related Readings on race, mass incarceration, and the use of somatic practices in the healing of trauma:
Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2012.
Coates, Ta-Nehishi. Between the World and Me. Melbourne: Text Publishing Company, 2015.
Defrantz, Thomas and Anita Gonzalez (eds). Black Performance Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
Dixon Gottschild, Brenda. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996.
Dixon Gottschild, Brenda. The Black Dancing Body: a Geography from Coon to Cool. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2003.
Eberhardt, Jennifer. Biased. New York: Viking, 2019.
Kyodo Williams, Angel. Rod Owens, and Jasime Syedullah. Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation. Berkley: North Atlantic Books, 2016.
Van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Penguin Random House, 2014.
Welsh-Asante, Kariamu (ed). African Dance: An Artistic, Historical, Philosophical Inquiry. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1994.
Levine, Peter. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. Berkley: North Atlantic Books, 1997.
