Zahava

I have been dancing since the age of two.  My body has been a central part of my self knowledge, spiritual practice, and connection to rituals across cultures.  I have been blessed to study and perform with many dancers from the African and Caribbean Diasporas including Katherine Dunham, Urban Bush Women, Tania Isaac, Wanjiru Kamuyu, Oh!ni Sowa, Reginald Yates, David Pleasant, Ron Brown and Marie Basse Wiles in Senegal.  As a white woman invited into these dances I felt honored by the level of trust and openness that allowed me to enter, sometimes more invited than others.  They recognized a deeper part of my spirit and humanity than many of my white friends and family.  These experiences were the beginning of my sensitization to race and how normalized white culture had become.  They gave me another reference through which to re-evaluate my twenty years of ballet.  As my body started to unlearn ballet, I found it to be a metaphor for unlearning the normalization of white culture, reattaching origin, history, and meaning to movement.  

I also found an appreciation for the complexity of being the daughter of a man who met my mom by studying her people.  My very existence was the intersection of being an outsider studying a culture, and the insider being studied. Their whiteness was the only thing they had in common coming from different religions, class backgrounds, ancestral lineages, regions of the country and dialects.  This sensitized me to the falseness of the construction of whiteness, and also to the limitations of intellectual curiosity compared to shared experience and empathy.

My body became an expression of emotional, energetic, and spiritual information; a way to excavate memories; a doorway to empathize with others’ nervous systems and thus multiple realities; a doorway to consciously shift energy; and a vehicle for creating art to shift consciousness.  These five ways of using the body were distinctly different from running my body with my mind, which I now see as a metaphor for the master slave relationship that becomes internalized in our own BodyMindSoul relationship.  Re-Educating the BodyMindSoul FREE from Racism focuses on cultivating these five ways of living in the BodyMindSoul.

For nine years I sought out spaces to discuss and change white privilege.  I spent three years in the Re-Evaluation Counseling Community, trained with the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, the New Jersey Project, the White Privilege Conference, produced and created multimedia performances, facilitated audience Listening Projects, choreographed and became the spiritual doula for artists creating race conscious material.  It has been an honor to work with We Got Issues, the apprentice company of Actor’s Theatre of Louisville in community derived material, and individual artists doing community based work.

Practicing and teaching Sufi Dancemeditation, Anusara based yoga, meditation at Deepak Chopra’s Center, and Sensual Inner Expansion to integrate sexual and spiritual energy, have all continued to liberate my BodyMindSoul.  It has also become clear to me that this liberation requires the healing of racism, and sexism, and that Re-Educating the BodyMindSoul to trust and communicate truth opens doorways to multigenerational healing.  As a healer, teacher, artist, and privilege-conscious white woman, sharing this process, the creativity it liberates, and the authentic relationships it nourishes has been nothing less than a soul path.  In February of 2008 I founded White Folks Soul By Any Dance Necessary, an experimental dance company exploring the incompatibility of wholeness and the race construct for white people.  

 

Love,

Zahava