Find Your Center Wellness Arts

  By Kate Feinberg Robins, PhD In my blog post  Addressing Race in Ballet and Capoeira , I discussed Find Your Center’s commitment to bringing race and social justice explicitly into our dance and capoeira classrooms. Here I share my experience doing this with my Children's Ballet class for 7-10 year-olds in early June. This is part of an ongoing effort to decolonize our curricula and educate our students in social justice as well as dance and martial arts.  ​​ TIPS FOR ADDRESSING RACE & SOCIAL EQUITY WITH GRADE SCHOOL CHILDREN ​ Make it relevant.  Find the underlying emotions and experiences that children can relate to. Invite children to talk about their experiences, but don't insist if they don't want to. Draw on school knowledge.  Ask some open-ended questions about what the kids have learned in school, and build on that knowledge in your conversation.  Use what children tell you, not what you assume.  If a child shares their family histor...

By Kate Feinberg Robins, PhD In my recent blog post  Addressing Race in Ballet and Capoeira , I discussed Find Your Center’s commitment to bringing race and social justice explicitly into our dance and capoeira classrooms. Here I share my experience doing this with my 2-4 year-old Bilingual Creative Movement class in early June. This is part of an ongoing effort to decolonize our curricula and educate our students in social justice as well as dance and martial arts.  Tips for Addressing Race & Diversity with Young Children Make it relevant.  Find the underlying emotions and experiences that young children can relate to.  Use nonverbal communication.  Have kids participate through moving, clapping, and body language.  Don't put anyone on the spot.  You may have some children & families who are more likely to have personal experiences with racism than others. Don't make assumptions about their experie...

By Kate Feinberg Robins, PhD Not Enough Racial equity within ballet and capoeira has always been an important part of our mission at Find Your Center. It is implicit in everything we do. The events of the past few weeks have led us to realize that we need to make this work more explicit:  ​ It is not enough to welcome students of color into our classrooms. We also need to talk with  all  of our students about  why most American ballet schools are so overwhelmingly white .   It is not enough to teach a martial art with African origins. We also need to teach our students how those origins have been  obscured and appropriated by white institutions .   It is not enough to  be  a Black- and woman-owned business. We also need to show our students  Black dancers and capoeira masters who they can look up to . ​ It is not enough for me to use my skills as a cultural anthropolog...

By Kate Feinberg Robins My rediscovery of ballet after retiring from a pre-professional performance career at age 18 has been gradual, to say the least. During my last couple years of high school, I was dancing lead roles with the Cuyahoga Valley Youth Ballet and preparing to audition for professional companies, or to continue my training at professional schools if I wasn’t yet good enough to be hired. At 5’ 1”, good enough to be hired meant good enough to be a soloist. No one would hire a dancer my height for the corps. I auditioned for American Ballet Theatre’s Studio Company, and unsurprisingly, didn’t make it. I made the second cut at Julliard, but didn’t quite get in. I finished high school prepared to enter Butler University’s ballet program on a merit scholarship. There I would stay, perfecting my skills until I could finally get paid to do what I loved—or so I thought. But during that summer between high school and college, I discovered that I no longer loved it enough to g...