Tricky Moves In Dance and Conversation

by Rita Fierro | Oct 18, 2019 | Communication, Dance, Facilitation

The challenges of our bodies often parallel that of our minds. An experience with dance that says more about life, conversations, and relationships. 

I am out of breath again…

I’ve been taking African dance classes for 10 years. I love the way the drums energize me. I feel the loud beats pulsing in my veins. My ankles twitch. They want to lift.  I’m enchanted with how dancers’ steps ahead of me match the beat and how their upper torsos follow one drum –ta-ta-ta-ta !– while their lower bodies follow the other –ta- ta!–.

I’ve gotten better over the years. I dance with passion, loving every moment of it. I still suck at it. My legs are often off beat. My posture is never low enough.  Polyrhythmics are still a struggle. African dance requires a repetition and consistency I’ve never had, immersed as I am in a full life.

Rita dancing an Ogun Orisha dance from the Yoruba tradition from West Africa.

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Dance is my stress valve. I haven’t perfected it, though I’d like to. I spend one hour trying to get a basic step. I do it wrong tens of times. I quickly get exhausted, so out of breath my tummy touches my ribcage at every inhale, my tender belly bulging rapidly at every exhale. I taste the salty sweat dropping from my forehead. I try harder and harder and harder at each repetition –ta-ta-ta-tA—–ta-tA– playing the beat in my head, my feet still off.

More and more out of breath each time.

My relationships can sometimes feel like that too, when I have to make hard choices about how to handle a conversation that is pissing me off, or try to make a relationship work that clearly isn’t, or decide to avoid a fight or a controversial topic. My blood starts to boil, my heart swells, and I artificially drop my tone of voice to say what I need to without sounding offensive. My tone is low, but not calm.

The person I’m talking with can sense my emotions, and is annoyed.

She says….

Then I say….

Then she says….

You know how that goes: “What I meant was….” “What I said was….” “What I thought was….” All these words don’t bring the human connection and reassurance we both long for. Voices rise, breaths shorten, feelings get more tender. I leave the conversation feeling dissatisfied, depleted. Angry even. I don’t feel heard. Neither does she.

Five minutes before dance class ends, I learn how to do the step right, and there it is. Slower than I thought. Easier than I thought. Simpler than I thought. I begin to realize that I had added a million moves in between that I didn’t need. By removing extra steps, the dance is more manageable, pleasant even. Fun. Yet, I spent most of the class doing it wrong and working myself silly.

I am getting healthy. I am beginning to shift. When my blood starts to boil in a conversation, I’m learning to listen harder. I’m learning how to stop and say: “What can I offer you right now?” “What do you need?” I’m learning to take a deep breath and let my skin absorb its sweat. I’m still uncomfortable, and I wish I could offer more. I learn to say just that. Just being honest about where I am in that very moment. Nothing else. And just like that, the issue dissipates. We both let go, knowing tomorrow it will even itself out. I just needed to be present to the other person. I just needed to be present to myself. The extra steps are removed.

And I’m no longer out of breath.

Photo by Light Brigading

I am raced white[1]. When I enrolled in African American Studies in Philadelphia in 2000, I had a personal quest. I had been forever changed by glancing at only three images in 100 Years of Lynching, a book too painful for me to actually read. I wanted to know: how could a white person stand by and watch a man burn to death, hanging from a tree, and have a picnic so close by, with his 5-year-old child? He must have smelled burning flesh. What was it about white people that made us capable of such brutality?

Over my many years of graduate studies, I didn’t get the answer. I only gained more details, more examples of injustice, violence, and death, more examples across time and space, throughout history, and throughout the world. I found it terribly depressing. Instead of being empowered, I felt increasingly hopeless.

It wasn’t until I attended a training from the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyondthat I discovered an important puzzle piece in response to my quest. The trainer pointed out to me that my sense of distance, my disconnect between the mind and the heart was my biggest obstacle to achieving effective, collective, antiracist organizing with other whites. I would not be able to connect  \as long as my brain overrode my heart, and I believed I was “different” from other white people.

Not surprisingly, once I saw this disconnect in myself, although overcoming my individualistic tendencies was not easy, I could organize purposeful action with other whites. I had been highly trained in academia to be an individual, to win and argument, see myself as different, and to stand out above the rest. I had to learn and practice how to operate as part of a collective and use my knowledge for collective action.

Public Domain photo. A picture of the mob preparing to lynch Jesse Washington from a tree in front of Waco city hall taken by Fred Gildersleeve on May 15, 1916.

Let me clarify that, when I say “race” I’m talking about a social construct. A fictional concept, that originated in European thought 300 years before genetics was even a science. It endured because it was convenient to European occupation of indigenous land and the upholding of capitalism, not because it had any scientific grounds. We have believed in this fiction for centuries, and it has shaped our perceptions of ourselves, people around us, and out institutions, separating people according to traits that are absolutely arbitrary, as modern genetics confirms.

When we look at social issues that prompt the accusation of racism, we often focus on the personal, failing to pay due attention to the collective. When I point fingers at “bad people” and distance myself from the bad behavior of others, I ignore the collective, unconscious dimensions of racism in which, even unwillingly, I participate.

The collective perceptions, are intertwined with my basic emotions, fed to me as a child like: love (when I remember my favorite cousin making racist remarks Christmas dinner), anger (when for instance, one gets angry with immigrants for taking one’s job instead of getting angry at who is responsible for the recession), and fear (when I am scared of who is different from me). These basic emotions didn’t just shape me. They shaped our institutions such as the political system, child welfare system, the criminal justice system. So racism is rooted firstly in collective perceptions, emotions, and institutions. When I point my finger at something someone else does, I fail to take responsibility of the ways in which I am not immune from what I am criticizing.

As a society in the USA, I feel we have never truly questioned the mechanisms, culture, and system of rewards and punishments that allowed us to uphold overtly racist structures for 335 years. Those collective mechanisms endure in the prison industrial complex, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the child adoption market.

In an article about Ferguson, MO, Brittany Cooper states:

That inability to see black people as human, as vulnerable, as children, as people worthy of protecting is an epistemology problem, a framework problem, a problem about how our experiences shape what we are and are not able to know. The limitations of our frameworks are helped along by willful ignorance and withholding of empathy.[2]

As a society, when in the 1950s the United States passed anti-discrimination legislation, we suddenly wanted to proclaim that we were no longer racists. But white people had been trained to withstand violence without emotion for centuries. Most of us did not truly see, question, let alone take steps to eradicate the training that was instilled in us to uphold a racist system.

In my years of alliance building among whites against racism, I’ve had to recognize that the challenging make-up that made me withhold empathy was not mine alone, it was collective. I learned working with other white anti-racists that we didn’t only lack empathy with people of color. We lacked empathy towards each other as well. The distance from our own feelings was the cause. Rationalizing emotions was an integral part of our training. It is this lack of empathy acculturated across centuries, that makes us still question the victim rather than be outraged in the face of injustice.

While it is easy for me to point fingers at the lack of empathy in the racism of the KKK, my journey has been to take responsibility for smaller, apparently innocuous, but also insidious aspects of that lack of empathy. Values of professionalism, objectivity, and cold politeness, all support controlling and repressing emotions in favor of a so-called reason. I am not immune.

Photo by Rachel Towne.

So when we talk about police brutality, let us be honest and talk about the collective training that all whites have received to not empathize with Black and brown people. It’s not that the police officers are evil, it’s that they, like the rest of society, tend to see Black people as a threat before they see them as living, breathing, struggling human beings. Further, blocking of empathy is professionalized, such that Black officers must also internalize and abide by it to gain recognition and standing among their peers.

If we as whites want to be real about ending police brutality, we must also get real about looking at ourselves and overcome the limitations that keep us from empathizing with people who are vulnerable to police brutality and individual and systemic racism. We must regain the humanity we have lost, damaged by how we were trained to uphold the system. It is not easy. We must take an honest look at ourselves first, and do so every, single, day.

When do I disconnect from the person asking for money on the street? The victim of violence? The drug dealer? The woman who lost her children? How do I lose my own humanity when I fail to see the humanity of a person that doesn’t look like me?

How do I stay open and allow myself to hear, really hear the stories of people whose lives are different from mine without questioning, doubting, or judging what they have experienced just because I haven’t?

Some practical things I try to do to overcome my racist training:

1. When I find it hard to empathize with someone, I ask their story. I tell myself to   not judge the story, but to simply listen.
2. I think of the times I felt unjustly treated, and sit with the feeling. I journal. What makes the feeling intense? I try to take the time to really feel my own pain and let it flow until there’s none left.
3. I purposefully established and nurture a community of people with whom I’m comfortable talking about undoing our racist training. We share readings, conversations, and food. Food always helps.

[1] I don’t see whiteness as part of my core identity, because in my self-identity being Italian American (my culture and lineage) plays a stronger role for me. However, as an Italian American, I benefit from white privilege, because Italians are raced white, meaning we viewed, profiled, and treated as white. As a person who benefits from white privilege, I hold myself accountable to the privilege I receive.

[2]“White America’s scary delusion: Why its sense of black humanity is so skewed” Retrieved from: Salon.com.

Performing Arts Alliance Article About My Work
Oct 18, 2013
Category: Performance  Group dynamics Art Art and Social Justice
Author: Rita Fierro, Ph.D.

I had the great pleasure of giving a workshop in summer 2013 on facilitating conversations about social justice at the Alternate ROOTS gathering of artists and social activists. Cristine Davis, General Manager of the Performing Arts Alliance, describes this work in their October newsletter:

When people come together to work on a common cause, each brings his or her own set of skills, knowledge, methods, and experience. They also bring strengths and weaknesses. All of these elements in combination can unintentionally create power dynamics that can create barriers when artists and advocates form alliances, join coalitions, and organize for their causes.

At ROOTS Week 2013, “Unpacking the Journey,” Alissa Schwartz, Ph.D. and Rita S. Fierro, Ph.D. presented a session on easing these dynamics.  ROOTS Week is the annual meeting of Alternate ROOTS which joined the Performing Arts Alliance earlier this year. The Week is created and led by artists for artists and cultural workers/supporters to learn, share, develop, encourage, and connect with each other in their commitment to social justice. In their session entitled “Facilitating Social Justice Conversations with Your Communities and Organizations,” Schwartz and Fierro demonstrated the participatory conversation methods of World Café and Circle Practice and provided additional resources on other conversational structures, including ProAction Café and Open Space. These methods gave participants tools to build unity in their community organizing, coalition meetings, and other forms of collective work.

Schwartz is the founder and principal of Solid Fire Consulting. Her background in theatre directing and participatory research aid her facilitation work in which she uses participatory conversational methods and embodiment/theatre work. Fierro is the principal of Fierro Consulting. Her work involves culturally-competent research and evaluation, and she uses mixed-methods designs to highlight the perspectives of different stakeholders, especially among vulnerable populations. The pair regularly works together and publishes a shared blog, Art.Intellect.Practice.

Schwartz and Fierro modified and renamed the World Café facilitation method the “Generations Café” for their purposes. The topic of conversation was how each generation of attendees had been experiencing ROOTS week and participation in Alternate ROOTS. Attendees rotated among small groups discussing the topic with a different guiding question in each round of conversation. A second activity further modified the World Café model and placed participants in pairs to share with each other how they perceived power dynamics in the group, such as who spoke first or last or who was listened to least or most. The exercise concluded in a Circle Practice with facilitators asking the entire group about the power dynamics they perceived, providing time for each to reflect on their observations. Fierro says that allowing participants to share their observations in pairs creates a safe opportunity for expression; in a full-group setting, all participants, aware of the dynamics, may not feel comfortable speaking and sharing.

The facilitation exercise produced a variety of results. By talking in pairs, participants had the opportunity to learn from a peer who may not have felt comfortable sharing his/her knowledge with the entire group.  By reporting out to the group, some became aware of power dynamics that they may not have perceived themselves. What resulted was a non-linear conversation—one with no explicit leader and/or director—where participants had the opportunity to contribute to the collective voice on a subject in which they were all stakeholders. Participants walked away with a broader perspective on their topic enhanced by “collective intelligence”—the combined knowledge and experience of everyone in the group. They also left better able to perceive the dynamics that can build up walls in coalition work.

Fierro was attracted to bringing this facilitation work to Alternate ROOTS because of the organization’s focus on arts and social justice. The mission of ROOTS—a regional service organization reaching 14 states in the southern United States—is to support the creation and presentation of original art, in all its forms, which is rooted in a particular community of place, tradition or spirit. It is committed to social and economic justice and the protection of the natural world and addresses these concerns through its programs and services. Fierro believes that artists have similar concerns and experiences as other grassroots advocates in the social justice arena: they face the challenge of having common conversations when there are different experiences around the table. In her work, Fierro has found that it can be hard for advocates to create common outcomes, yet facilitation techniques can empower coalition members to have conversations in the presence of those differences and beyond. This ultimately strengthens the collective.

Fierro and Schwartz’s session was one of many at ROOTS Week 2013 that empowered artists to be strong social justice advocates, equipped them to communicate with and organize community members, and encouraged collaboration across disciplines, experiences, and resources to achieve common goals. To learn more about Alternate ROOTS and ROOTS Week, visit www.alternateroots.org.