KasheDance Case Stories from the Field: Mapping, Nurturing and Amplifying Stakeholder Relationships

The company KasheDance, led by Kevin Ormsby, is rooted in the Afro-Diasporic and Afro-contemporary genre of dance. He argues, however, that its operations have to be understood from the context of the stakeholder, regardless of background. KasheDance works under three distinct pillars, denoted as CRP (3), each interconnected to the ideas around being a stakeholder.

Understanding the intersectionality of all three is key to unlocking the full potential of community-engaged work. Kevin uses the terms mapping, nurturing, and amplifying to explain critical concepts with questions, answers, and practical examples.

FROM THE FIELD – KEVIN A. ORMSBY

KASHEDANCE OVERVIEW

When creating work, KasheDance first and foremost considers who can benefit, and through this process charts areas of required partnership nurturing, including potential pre-audience engagement via social media platforms, focus groups, roundtable Konversations (a new KasheDance series emerging out of COVID-19 adaptation) and other ways of mapping the research required. Making time for creative development and communities to potentially engage along the arc from creation to presentation is also part of the process.

When thinking about mapping a community to engage within the arts, we encourage you to attempt to link the creative to the socio-economic and socio-political realities of said community. For example, “Facing Home: Love and Redemption” is KasheDance’s most toured, presented and community-engaged work. Chris Walker and I, as Queer artists, recognised conversations that two separate groups were having with each other and decided to collaborate and create the project. It investigated the potential that the vocabulary of the styles of dancehall and urban popular movement has to engage in conversations around and rise above the stigmas of homosexuality and homophobia in Jamaica.

Over a three-year process (a reasonable duration for both robust community-engaged arts and production development), interviews, community discussions, feedback sessions, movement development workshops, performance workshops with audience talk-back sessions, conference presentations, publications and curated performances were undertaken. The creators sought to dig deep into the consciousness and value system which inform Caribbean identity and Bob Marley’s work, and explored movement vocabulary steeped in the cultural nuances of Caribbean dance. In working to notice, shape and replicate the nuances of tradition, practice and situations, we included the concept of synchronicity in the choreography of the production (Jung, 1960). We had to be responsive to the opportunities of noticing—of responding without stereotypically framing Caribbean practices. Traditions of masking and subversive texturing also reflect the realities of living as LGBTQ+ in the Caribbean and, in many cases, where Caribbean cultures migrate. Queer Caribbean bodies morph, as they are often forced into machinations to get through the day. These expressions provide a dance language palette suited to the creators’ curiosities about having contemporary physical conversations with the past, present and future of LGBTQ+ resilience and survival.

“Facing Home” is meant to impact, generate change and ignite the LGBTQ+ community, its supporters, and service workers wherever it’s performed and beyond. That now includes five countries, 14 performances, 5000 audience members, and countless community-engaged workshops. Currently the production is also being used to contextualise homophobia, diversity within LGBTQ+ communities, and also as a creative workshop program at many conferences including The Gay Men’s Sexual Health Alliance (n.d.). Wonderful opportunities can be sparked from thinking about the ways your community-engaged programming can benefit from deeply rooted activity mapping.

Nurturing

Through CRP1 and CRP2 (referenced above), how can we begin to nurture what engagement looks like?

• By empowering and working with facilitators, artists, and participants/learners in shaping programming.

Do you ask community participants/learners what they may also be interested in and how it may be included in your creative facilitation? Do you consider where and what their stories are?

• Incorporating their stories, perspectives, and realities in your facilitation creates “meaningful experiences” which are memorable because they are specific.

DANCING INTO POSSIBILITIES

As a community-engaged facilitator, adapting your program’s offering to meet the interests and creative capacity of the participants/learners is integral. You must respond quickly to the scenarios occurring in the spaces you facilitate. To explain this concept, I will offer an example and describe what I have incorporated into my programming since the experience. While being an “Artists in Education” with the Ontario Arts Council, I had the opportunity of delivering the program “Dancing into Possibilities” throughout the school system. The program’s spots were sometimes filled two years in advance. I concluded one installment of the program with a performing arts high school, the Etobicoke School of the Arts and then began work with drama students at Nelson Boylen Collegiate Institute in Toronto. I knew what the drama teacher wanted from the program, and we met to discuss class design and the creatively facilitated deliverables within the Ontario high school curriculum. We explored technique, movement and then looked at how it could support character development with the students. Through this experience, my entire practice changed: I learned to meet participants/learners where they are and draw on the Liz Lerman mantra: “Everyone should leave with a meaningful experience.”

Initially, I assumed all participants/learners would be open to the exercises and floor work involved in “Dancing into Possibilities.” I was entirely incorrect, and I learned two main lessons in not only cultural but also spiritual sensitivity. One, the culture of participating in the arts looks different to those who have experience and have participated in the arts before. Two, with Toronto being as diverse spiritually as it is culturally, I had to shift the delivery of the program to support the experience of Muslim students who could not participate in the same way due to religious observances. It was important that as the facilitator that I recognised challenges, strategised alternative possibilities and implemented options that would benefit the class while ensuring all participants/learners left with a meaningful experience. As a facilitator, I now shift my class as a rule based on who arrives in the space, having many options toward a shared collective desired outcome.

Amplifying

• Are there funders or those working for funding organisations living in communities of community-engaged practices? If there are, it’s recommended that you seek their participation where possible. Imagine how that participation could impact your organisation, so long as in your reporting you provide the reasons why funding was given.
• Have you considered the impact of facilitation that includes the perspectives of participants? As facilitators, our programming at times was created and executed without the request, input, or vision from the communities in which we worked. We delivered the programs and left, never following up with community partners, participants/learners and spaces in which programming occurred. Particularly due to realities of COVID-19, we’ve begun to think differently about how programs are improved and amplified when we consider community-engaged entry and exit practices with participants/learners. “Parachuting in” and then leaving is unhelpful—this is how artists may once have worked, but no more.

AMPLIFYING IN LONG-TERM CARE FACILITIES

Working in Edmonton with older adults in a long-term care facility underlined how integral it is to animate the lives of older adults and create unique, community-engaged experiences for underserved populations. What’s amplified in these experiences is programming that makes room for the spontaneous. On this occasion, a participant/learner who attended all sessions had her cognitive memory sparked by songs played by a facilitator during a community sharing. The songs and instrumentals unlocked aspects of her younger life of which caregivers were not aware. The participant also had a passion for and experience with singing. As facilitators we must respond in the moment, so we allowed her to sing outside of the “scripted” program format. As facilitators, we sought approval from participants and created space for the power of community-engaged arts to have meaning in the lives of the older adults who needed it most. Amplify all serendipities, and use them to affirm participants’ experiences. When working in community-engaged arts practices you must be nimble and open to the unexpected.

In the continuation of KasheDance’s amplifications, the production “Facing Home” continues to show the company many ways of inviting amplification of experiences for participants/learners. On its last tour in 2019 before COVID-19 hit, we performed in St. Catharine’s, presented by First Ontario Performing Arts Centre. A LGBTQ+-identified Jamaican student was a part of our workshop series and demonstrated acute interest in the work and its research. When told that every show has a talkback embedded, his interest heightened. As a facilitator, I recommend noticing, and where possible, amplifying those moments for the participants/learners. I did that, offering him an opportunity to be the moderator of the talkback.