Born in Indonesia and recently graduated from De Montfort University, Leicester, UK; Sasha founded her new emerging dance theatre company ‘Copa In Motion Dance theatre’, pledging to use it as a place to educate, inform and introduce her audience to the richness of the different cultures the world has to offer. Sasha fuses folklore, ritual, and traditional dance with contemporary dance techniques and storytelling in ways to which her audience can relate.
Dance as an Educational Tool to Bridge Cultural Diversity
Based on the Cambridge Dictionary, Cultural Diversity is the existence of a variety of cultural or ethnic groups within a society. At the moment with movements like Black Lives Matter and other recent public race-related incidents, the world (especially in the West) try to grasp matters of concern and fix them.
While this is a great step in the right direction, quite often the representation of the cultural diversity promotes the problems of particular races while overlooking that of others. There’s an Indonesian Proverb ‘Tak Kenal Maka Tak Sayang’ which literally means ‘If you don’t know then you won’t love’. The only way you ‘know’ is by learning, being exposed to things, and trying to understand.
In the UK, dance and diversity is something that everyone is still trying to discuss and navigate. Many artists, choreographers, creative directors and even dance educational institutions are still trying to find a common ground
on what Diversity In Dance means. The easiest shortcut seen from the outside is by filling the casting, auditions, selections, and other processes with artists from a minority background. At face value, this is a step in the right direction. However, after a while, this seems to just mask the bigger problem.
Yet, what the artists quite often don’t appear to see is that we have been given a variety of creative tools that we can use – as movement artists to communicate, educate and inform people about the existence of a variety of cultural or ethnic groups existing in our community.
I will be talking about a variety of creative tools within dance that can be used to educate, inform and communicate to our audience/society about cultural diversity without disengaging the entertainment part of it.