In summer 2022, the Department of Dance held an intensive summer dance for the second time. During this summer we expanded the initial program and added a week to the intensive to make it an even more immersive two-week dance experience. The intensive was initiated by Ohio State Dance Professor Dr. Nyama-McCarthy Brown, at the request of local Columbus City School dance teachers who voiced a need for their students to connect to Ohio State Dance. In June 2021, the department hosted a one-week non-residential Summer Dance Intensive for high school students. The intensive included classes in movement practice, repertory and choreography, with additional sessions about dance in college. Intensive students took one contemporary and one African movement practice class, one choreography class, and one repertory class each day. They discovered many ways to continue dancing in college, connected with current college dance students, toured the campus and learned about its many resources and prepared a sharing and showing about the intensive on Friday. All classes were taught by current Department of Dance faculty, with several Ohio State Dance majors serving as student leaders.
With the expansion of the intensive, week two of the program included morning technique classes and then a focused repertory experience for the Archiving Black Performance Summer Program, under the leadership of Ohio State Dance Professors Crystal Michelle Perkins and Dr. Valarie Williams. The Archiving Black Performance Summer Program is part of the collaborative project Archiving Black Performance: Memory, Embodiment, and Stages of Being, which establishes a vision for the transmission of identity and race through the embodiment of dance repertory acquisition of internationally acclaimed black women dance performers. The project team aims to elevate, via performance, oral history, archival research, summer workshops, digital preservation and communication methods, and publication, historic dances of black women performers as represented through black lives and black bodies. The focus is on solo, duet, and small group works staged, performed, or choreographed by/for black women early in the creation process.
The Summer Dance Intensive is an essential and important part of our ongoing recruitment process in the interest of building a robust incoming class that reflects of our ideals of diversity, equity, inclusion and justice. “With a focus on diversifying the Department of Dance in a way that resembles the demographics of Columbus, Ohio; we seek to offer dance to young people in the Columbus area, who are already engaged in dance programming, but may not see it as a viable path for post-secondary education,” says Dr. McCarthy-Brown. “In addition, we want to position Ohio State as a post-secondary opportunity that is accessible to members of the local community.” The intensive was a great success. In 2021, we had 33 applicants, 28 students attended; in 2022, we had 25 applicants, and 22 attended. All students who demonstrated a need for financial aid received financial support, thanks to the support of our generous sponsors.
The 2022 Summer Dance Intensive was co-sponsored by The Ohio State University Department of Dance, The Office of Diversity and Inclusion, Office of Community Outreach and Engagement, Pinchuk Community Engagement Award and College Arts Engagement Fund.
The 2022 Archiving Black Performance Summer Program was supported by the Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme (GAHDT), the Seed Fund for Racial Justice Grant from the Office of Diversity and Inclusion and from the Mellon-funded Humanities Without Walls.
The 2021 Summer Dance Intensive was sponsored in part by The Ohio State University: Department of Dance, Office of Diversity and Inclusion, Undergraduate Admissions, Office of Outreach and Engagement, Department of Athletics and Global Arts + Humanities.
Photos by Clancee Synco
