Community Study Halls
history
Community Study Halls (CSHs) are public conversations for dance workers to gather and connect about shared values specific to cultivating healthy, equitable, and ethical workplaces in the professional dance field. CSHs are designed to be places where dancers and people who hire dancers can speak frankly about the equitable hiring practices, working conditions they desire, and how to make them a reality. The conversations are facilitated to balance the serious issues and emotions that arise with humor, levity, and community building. Previous discussion topics include career sustainability, the emotional labor of grant writing, ownership and credit in collaborative processes, budgets that prioritize dancer pay, accountability practices, and resource sharing. Originally launched by Emily Hansel in 2023, the CSH series is about to embark on its next, new, improved iteration in 2025.
Summer series 2025
Thanks to a generous grant from the Zellerbach Family Foundation, Community Study Halls are back and better than ever! (For the sake of transparency, we invite you to check out our project budget, if you’re interested.) Just like in past years, each Community Study Hall will be FREE and open to the public. Here’s what’s new:
each event is led/facilitated by a different artist—see below for our super sweet lineup!
a delicious, catered meal is provided FOR FREE at each event.
all events are held at Steppin’ Out Dance Studio (697 S Van Ness, SF), which we chose for its ADA accessibility, close proximity to public transit, and lack of affiliation with large, powerful Bay Area dance institutions.
You’re welcome to come to one, several, or all events in this series! Please RSVP to each event you plan to attend so we know how much food to order.
All Bay Area dancers, choreographers, and other dance-workers are invited to come as you are and listen/share/learn/educate/observe as much or as little as you feel compelled. Our seven facilitators have been meeting and planning their events since April, and we are eager to welcome you into the thoughtful conversations that have been burgeoning. Listed below, in chronological order, are the six Community Study Halls on offer this June through September:
Dancing + our movements towards liberation
Facilitated by Audrey Johnson
Wednesday, June 11th, 6:00-8:00pm
Steppin’ Out Dance Studio (697 S Van Ness, SF)
As dancers and dancemakers in the Bay Area, how are our dance practices supporting us to navigate this current moment? A moment that includes a government growing quickly fascist, ongoing genocides, alarming and unethical deportations, increasing climate disaster ...etc.
Whether your dancing is protest, social praxis, healing, ritual, aesthetic expression, therapeutic, or something else, come join this intergenerational conversation where everyone is welcome to share wisdom and questions on topics such as:
How can we utilize dance to support our communities and ourselves in this moment, and then on the inevitable other side of it?
What histories, cultural practices, movements, rituals do we already have or could we turn to for inspiration in actualizing our dance practices as shifting culture and contributing to social change?
How can the ways that we conduct our work and creative processes reflect and embody the world we want (and need) to live in?
What is “contemporary” dance?
Facilitated by Erin Yen
Tuesday, June 24th, 6:00-8:00pm
Steppin’ Out Dance Studio (697 S Van Ness, SF)
Calling all contemporary dancers and dancemakers! Ever been stuck with the question, “what is ‘contemporary’ dance?” and not sure how to answer it? Let’s hash it out.
How do you define “contemporary” when referring to the field at large? Is it different when describing your own work?
When is it important for us to define our genres? Who are we defining them for? Is it helpful or harmful?
How do we define the artistic moment/movement that is currently unfolding? Should we move past using the word “contemporary?” What other language do you use?
Reimagining dance company culture
Facilitated by Jenna Marie
Thursday, July 24th, 6:00-8:00pm
Steppin’ Out Dance Studio (697 S Van Ness, SF)
In dance company cultures where burnout, injury, tokenization, unchecked leadership, and toxic hierarchies are the norm, how do we shift the culture toward more accountability, transparency, consent, and dancer autonomy?
Let’s talk about how to dismantle elitist and white supremacist traditions in company programming, training, and rehearsal culture. We’ll spend time
Acknowledging problems that dancers are currently experiencing,
Brainstorming new policies and working conditions that would lead to solutions,
AND strategizing around how to implement these changes / convince leadership to actually get onboard.
When is it worth putting ourselves in uncomfortable positions in order to push for progress in our workplaces? How do we assess risk level as individuals?
Many smaller companies are already able to model solutions—how do we get existing institutions of a larger scale to follow suit?
Riding the ebbs and flows of the creative process
Facilitated by Jocelyn Reyes
Wednesday, August 13th, 6:00-8:00pm
Steppin’ Out Dance Studio (697 S Van Ness, SF)
Come join this collective brainstorming session for dancers and choreographers! We’ll chat about:
Are there obstacles that prevent your ideal creative cadence (how often you make work) from occurring?
How do you sustain your creative practice when there isn’t consistent funding or you’re in between projects?
How transparent should a choreographer be with their dancers/collaborators if they experience insecurities, fear, or loneliness at different points in the life cycle of a creative process?
When a cast parts ways at the end of a project, do you have strategies for staying connected? How do you manage post-show blues?
Collective knowledge sharing
(aka gossiping our way to a better tomorrow)
Facilitated by Megan + Shannon Kurashige
Thursday, August 28th, 6:00-8:00pm
Steppin’ Out Dance Studio (697 S Van Ness, SF)
In our experience, there’s value in hearing dancers and dancemakers dish about their professional experiences. It informs how we assess our own experiences, needs, and desires so we can cultivate better artistic processes and infrastructures to support them.
Let’s gather and gossip for the sake of ensuring we all have respectable standards for our employers/employees/colleagues/selves. Some things we might touch on:
Wage transparency
Strategies for a dancer to respectfully ask for clarity about basic aspects of a job
Classifying dancers as independent contractors vs employees
How to build trust in a creative process
Ethics of auditions
Practical reasons/aspects of entity formation
Come as you are, enjoy a delicious dinner, meander with us through conversation that emerges.
Radical dreaming and reclaiming our attention power
Facilitated by gizeh muñiz
Monday, September 8th, 6:15-8:15pm
Steppin’ Out Dance Studio (697 S Van Ness, SF)
The whole ecosystem of artmaking is influenced by institutions and political systems around us—and this impacts the way we’re perceiving the world and making art. A lot of art that’s currently being made in the U.S. is created in a way that serves capitalist aesthetics, which dictate that we don't make people too uncomfortable, and make things that are easy to understand. In many ways, we’re operating as service workers for capitalism. Is this what we want?
Let’s question the prohibitive systems that surround us and consider how we contribute to them and how we might escape them. As artists, we have the ability to create unique worlds of performance, and we can harness that same energy to create new patterns in the world.
At this event we will daydream, activate our imaginations, search for antidotes for today’s shit, source from our sense of childhood/innocence, and bring forth inherent ways of thinking and perceiving outside of the repressive constructs that overpower our daily experiences.