Dance Connections Newsletter

A dance community should be a place people want to come back to.

 

It should feel welcoming. It should feel expansive. It should be a place where new dancers can walk through the door without having to understand years of history, rivalries, personalities, and tension just to figure out where they belong.

 

And the people already inside it should be helping it grow.

 

Businesses, teachers, organizers, venues, DJs, and dancers all benefit when more people fall in love with dancing. Another teacher succeeding does not take something away from me. Another organization having a great event does not diminish someone else’s. Collaboration does not weaken a community. It strengthens it.

 

There is room for more than one teacher.

There is room for more than one organization.

There is room for more than one event, one style, one approach, and one personality.

 

We do not have to diminish someone else in order to prove our own value.

 

But too often, instead of growing the community, we divide it.

 

We create camps. We protect territory. We undermine other teachers. We make people feel as though supporting one person means choosing against another. Personal conflicts spill into public spaces, and before long people who had nothing to do with the original disagreement are being asked, implicitly or explicitly, to choose a side.

 

And then there is the gossip.

 

There is a difference between warning someone about genuinely harmful behavior and using someone else’s private life as social currency. There is a difference between accountability and humiliation. There is a difference between telling your own story and telling someone else’s.

 

When it comes to gossip, I have one simple question for the person telling it:

Is this your story to tell?

If it isn’t, I don’t need to know.

 

I’ve been the subject of gossip plenty of times in my life, including in the dance world. I’ve had people I considered friends poison the watering hole. I may never know exactly what was said, but I felt the shift. I felt the distance. I felt the way a room can change around you when a story has traveled ahead of you.

 

That experience stays with you.

 

It’s part of why I care so much about what kind of community we create.

 

The dance community has saved me during some of the darkest times in my life. It has given me friendship, connection, joy, and a place to belong. I want that for other people too.

 

So I would rather see us collaborate than compete, welcome rather than divide, and make the community bigger instead of smaller.

 

Dance community, I wish we could do better.

 

I think we can.