Bringing Dance to School

I recently chatted with Renee Pena, former dancer/dance student, current dance teacher, and recurrent CTFD client.  Renee is maybe the first dancer-activist I’ve spoken with this semester.  She started dance at a community center in Queens when she was 5, trained in ballet and modern through high school, and was accepted on a dance scholarship to Bard College in upstate New York.  In her senior year, in the week before performing her senior project– an end-of-major requirement in the performance arts at Bard– Renee tore a ligament in her right shoulder during rehearsal.  She went through with the performance.  And that, she said, was the infamous “it.”  She was 21 at the time of her injury; she’s now 24.

Renee’s story is an interesting one not because it typifies The Sad Dancer Plot, but rather because pursuing dance wasn’t easy for her, and because she’s now dedicated to making it easier for city kids and teens of similar backgrounds.  Dance lessons are expensive.  Insurance is expensive.  Physical therapy without insurance is even more expensive.  (“Money!” said Renee on Wednesday, putting up her hands, like, okay, I give; “everything’s so much money.”)  Travel is both expensive and inconvenient.  She was born out in Queens and she wasn’t of money– that made dance something of a luxury.  This is something she hopes to change.

Renee is now a teaching professional with City Lights Youth Theatre, an extracurricular program which brings dance and theater performance into city schools.  She is working with CTFD counselor Lauren Gordon on a plan to develop a non-profit dedicated to bringing dance into schools.  The idea is to offer no-cost extracurricular dance to schools with lacking arts programs.  ”Everyone deserves dance,” she said; “if you can move and move well, then you should be dancing.”  She hopes to eventually open her own community center in Queens, where she grew up. 

I was thinking about this program in relation to NYC’s relatively-recent Empowerment initiative in public schools (which, about a year back, granted principals full budgetary discretion over their individual schools).  I know there was some worry about Empowerment resulting in less funding for the arts, as principals might opt to shift funds toward maths and sciences– fields heavily tested under No Child Left Behind legislation.  And I know from attempting to report on the initiative and its aftermath that principals and Department of Education administrators were (and might still be) remarkably tight-lipped about how Empowerment affected their budgets.  So it seems to me that outreach programs like the one Renee proposes are important for just-in-case in NYC; just in case schools keep cutting arts, just in case Empowerment only proves to empower quantifiable skills.  And dance is underplayed in public school, anyway– which is why the very existence of the dance-themed Ballet Tech elementary-through-high school seems such a feat.