DDP Talks To Heather Myers (Manager of Education and Engagement)
Ballet BC
Ballet BC’s outreach work includes various collaborations with non-profit organizations in the Greater Vancouver area. These partners include Ageless Dancers, Union Gospel Mission, and Big Sisters, among others. Which community members do you reach through these partnerships and how do you choose the companies with whom you collaborate?
Ballet BC’s outreach and education work aims to facilitate first-hand movement-based creativity; to build a wider audience for viewing and experiencing dance; and to cultivate a meaningful connection between the company’s repertoire and the lives of participants. While our Moving Schools programming brings an ever-evolving workshop curriculum, in-school Annex performances, and other fully subsidized initiatives to K-12 students, our Moving Communities programming is more specifically responsive to the needs of the groups that we work with. At all times, we seek to collaborate with a variety of organizations that support underserved or marginalized groups, though partnerships are sometimes also determined by people resources and scheduling.
For example, what served Big Sisters during the 2023/24 season, was offering complimentary performance tickets to volunteers and their matches throughout the season, and facilitating a workshop for these adults and youth to attend together.
In the case of Union Gospel Mission, we offered bi-weekly after-school classes to grade 4-7 students, where the work was adapted to meet participant needs on a given day.
Ageless Dancers is a free Vancouver Park Board-administered program for seniors where Ballet BC’s Education department leads weekly classes as an Artist-in-Residence.
We also work with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s School of Music’s Youth Empowerment Program, where we lead occasional movement-based workshops to enrich the ongoing program that VSO provides for at-risk youth, in collaboration with local organizations.
How do you determine the need for the specific offerings for these partnerships? How do you track the effectiveness of these programs and how have they specifically had a positive impact in the community?
It is vital that our Moving Communities work employs sensitivity, adaptation, and is widely accessible. We use a variety of tools to create safe and fun experiences for participants of all ages. Somatic movement can be a useful tool for focusing on the experience of movement rather than the performative or technical aspect of dance – but it is not always used. We may also engage in creative movement, play, aspects of company repertoire, drawing, writing, improvisation tasks, and/or good old-fashioned ballet, depending on the partners we are working with.
Somatics is a broad and widely applicable field and an approach that can be supportive of whole-person engagement, mind-body connection, and experiential learning to different degrees. Where possible and appropriate, we combine a somatic lens with an expressive arts approach, along with conventional dance instruction. So rather than only teaching a dance class or asking participants to imitate steps, we may also ask participants to notice, describe, or draw how a movement feels; ask older students to consider how a piece’s theme relates to their own life through a series of specific prompts; or introduce somatic/body awareness and exploratory improvisation as a tool for self-regulation and wellness.
The majority of this approach shows up in our Moving Schools programming, in some seniors’ classes, and in our adult Creative Immersion class series. In all of these cases, our goal is to empower a more creative, personally relevant engagement with both watching dance and dancing, and to encourage dialogue around company work in general. The need for this approach has been determined through first-hand experience in classrooms where a diverse range of interests demand multiple entry points to the idea of dance, and through engagement with new audiences who seek tools for relating to contemporary dance performances. We have also heard from teachers how a lack of funding in public schools means less money for arts programming, education, and guests, and how tools for self-regulation, creative thinking, and physical literacy support students in the context of BC public school curriculum.
People's Summit, Photo by Midia Ninja