dream acts

During the time I lived in south Texas, stuck up right against the U.S.-Mexico border, I often experienced a deep sense of isolation and listlessness. Claustrophobia is not the correct term to describe it, for there were miles and miles of scrub brush, mosquito-laden lakes, and scalded highway. Surely part of this feeling was due to the overwhelming task of being a brand new teacher. But even though I came to love that space, slashed however haphazardly between two countries, I can still conjure that melancholy today. As a friend who grew up in Brownsville mused, life on the border meant you had "the worst of both worlds."

El Paso and Ciudad Juarez are located over a day’s drive upriver, and thus not synonymous with my life along the Gulf of Mexico, but I know well what landscape dance teachers Gemtria St Clair and Zulema Galindo work within. It is, of course, a landscape eroded by the steady northbound current of drugs, a current which roils and cataracts along the banks of the Rio Grande.

I recently wrote a story about the partnership between Gemtria and Zulema: Gemtria runs a dance program in El Paso, and has worked with Zulema to start a similar program across the border. This hasn't been easy. Things are so bad in Juarez that some schools have started teaching their sixth graders what to do when they hear guns fired; visa renewals don't come easily, it appears, for dance teachers trying to support community education programs. But there are some very good reasons why Gemtria and Zulema (and the organizations they work for) have decided to keep at it, one being that, as they mentioned in their interviews, they teach students who may never have seen a live dance performance, heard a full orchestra, or had the chance to perform in a play.

Some might think that this represents the distinction between one's income and one's interest in the arts; a distinction in which the arts become synonymous with the elite, and is clearly false. A very vivid distinction, however, can be found between the schools of the elite and those where dance, or art, or theater, or music, are cut in the name of improving math and science test scores. We forget to wonder what might occur if our future mathematicians and engineers, or, more accurately, low-level workers do not have ongoing opportunities to witness and explore music, movement, and the power of creativity.

Which is what Gemtria and Zulema’s dance programs, based upon the National Dance Institute curriculum, allow students to do. They use dance to inspire students to excellence and make them more curious about learning—including math and science. Students can dance out fractions, explore tempo, describe movement with adverbs, and move like water molecules. More importantly, the classroom techniques ask students to self-assess, meet high expectations, and act together in community—all valuable skills back inside the classroom, not to mention within a national economy.