Movement
On a Friday morning in May, I went to the Crossroads Hotel for a networking event called Creative Mornings because the guest speaker, a choreographer at the Kansas City Ballet, was giving a talk on the topic of “Movement”. Experiences that center dance pull me in, swift and strong as gravity, because at the core I am always thinking about how movement shapes my life and my interactions with others. I learned dance techniques from classical ballet schools as a child, and I still very much identify as a “dancer”. So I was already buzzing from the moment I entered the hotel’s seminar room, with an extra boost from the free dark roast. I found a seat in the 3rd row back, next to the aisle. I had a perfect view of our speaker, who held a graceful presence at the front of the room.
He began his talk by inviting the audience to create something together - a rhythm using hands and feet - to demonstrate that movement is something that is done by linking together many different elements. Half the room was instructed to create rhythms with claps, and the other half to use stomps.
The result was a bit harmonic and a bit chaotic and utterly unique. It had never happened before, and it will never happen again. It gave me another buzz because whenever I realize that I have created something absolutely precious with other people, I feel lucky to be here.
Our speaker continued by sharing some of his own story and journey as a dancer and choreographer, then invited the audience to ask questions for the remainder of the morning. The question that came to mind for me was this: “What is the relationship between personal expressions of movement, such as dance, and social movements?” He responded (at about 27 minutes into his talk): “Unchoreographed social movement can become synchronized.”
Now I’m buzzing like a bee.
Unchoreographed social movement can become synchronized.
My partner and I started going our community garden during the pandemic. Every Sunday at 10am, people gather to plant, harvest, weed, clean, and beautify the garden. The first time we went, I was expecting a leader with a clipboard to give us our assignments. Instead, I found about 15 people, standing in loose clusters, waiting.
Then, a shift. I don’t recall anyone counting us in with a 5, 6, 7, 8. No one was handing out assignments, but out of nowhere people started doing things. A few people peeled off to pull weeds. Two women opened the tool shed and began distributing rakes and shovels. One guy started picking up detritus in the chicken pen. Suddenly we were a moving flock, contained yet dispersed throughout the garden, completely unchoreographed, yet moving together in the direction of our intent to steward the land, grow food, build community.
This is self-organizing, and it is the lifeblood of any social movement. When one cluster of friends decides the greenhouse needs to be painted and another group realizes the tree grove is overgrown, and then takes responsibility to make it better, it leads to a vibrant, living thing brimming with possibilities. I would guess that dozens of people have come through the garden since the first time I went, some of them coming only once and others staying for longer seasons, and there is always something to contribute. I’m not much of a gardener myself, but when I come to the garden, I find a way to add value: I bring snacks, I run errands, I play with the children. Once I pointed out that the stage had a hole in the floor, and someone said “we should repair it”. We raised money for materials and volunteers rebuilt the thing and within a few months we had a stage that lets us host performances, programs, and political forums in a public space that is accessible to all. With self-organizing, people can integrate their wisdom, identities, lived experiences, and ideas into the space, making it a rich and diverse ecosystem filled with emergent opportunities, urging us towards interdependence and cooperation.
Since my first garden Steward Sunday, the garden has adopted some more predictable structures, such as board meetings and designated harvest days. Even though there is more predictability, it is no less a living, evolving system. As my friend Kristin Johnstad recently expressed: “semi-autonomous people operating in unpredictable ways form new patterns.” These days, most work days at the garden are focused on the work of gardening - but if a semi-autonomous pattern-breaker brings coffee and bagels to a Steward Sunday, most likely the garden work will pause and the social work will begin.
A public panel on environmental stewardship and climate change action at Manheim Garden and Conservatory in Kansas City, October 2022
Here I am facilitating a racial equity learning series in New Jersey, November 2023
I started seeing myself as a movement facilitator around 2013, when my colleague, mentor, and friend Alice asked me to step into a leadership development and training role. Alice had hired me for my first community organizing job and she had a keen eye for my talents. Her loving agitation pushed me to embrace them, even when I didn’t feel qualified or capable. I started teaching basic training modules to community leaders that I already knew, or teaching others how to teach those concepts. After about a year, I felt empowered to design my own trainings, workshops, and learning programs. The first one that I did was called “Faith, Race and Power” and it went marvelously awry because I didn’t have the analysis about any of those meaty topics that I have now. And yet, I was allowed to try, and fail, and learn from all of it. I now understand how liberating it is to be given permission to try, fail, and learn in social movements. I now understand how formative that experience was in helping me grow my analysis of movements and the functions I can serve as a facilitator.
The Dancer.
The Choreographer.
The Curious Observer.
These are the ways that I describe my particular approaches to movement facilitation.
The Dancer is caught up in the movement with people whose interests and desires are aligned with mine. I am just as earnest and curious as everyone else about what will happen and how it will unfold, surrendering to the embodied state. The Dancer experiments, trying and failing and trying again, forming individual steps into a string of steps, a pattern that will stick. Brittanica defines dance as the movement of the body in a rhythmic way, usually to music and within a given space, to express an idea or emotion, release energy, or simply take delight in the movement itself. The Dancer is moving in a dance that has not been choreographed yet, but knowing that there is a story to tell or a lesson to uncover.
The Choreographer shows up to create and teach, coaching others so that the movement can come to life as intended. The Choreographer must be adaptable because there’s nothing predictable about a bunch of semi-autonomous people that you’re trying to get synchronized. I have buried many a perfectly timed, meticulously planned agenda under my laptop mid-meeting because what the group needed was not in my handouts but emerging right in front of my eyes.
The Curious Observer is the spectator, standing “on the balcony” and watching what is happening in the movement. From this place, I get to be deeply curious and sharply critical. The Curious Observer notices patterns that might be difficult to spot from the dance floor and offers feedback in service to learning, evolution, and greater fidelity to the intent of the movement.
Of course, all of these expressions of movement facilitation intersect dynamically and frequently. In March 2022, I started moving with other moms in my community who had publicly shared their rage after yet another school shooting that hit particularly close to home for me.
On March 27, six people were murdered and many more were forever traumatized by a mass shooter at the Covenant School in Nashville. Hundreds of miles away, I am on the phone with my brother who lives in Nashville, who I had called to confirm that my niece and nephew were not at that school and were still safe, and he tells me that he knows one of the victims. I am covered in grief and rage.
In response, I joined this group of other mad moms. We called ourselves Moms Rage and decided to organize a dance (what else could it be?) as a fundraiser for Moms Demand Action and a public action against the inaction of elected officials who have all of the power and none of the will to prevent mass shootings.
The first Moms Rage event was in June 2023. The Dancer, The Choreographer, and the Curious Observer all showed up. The Choreographer created run-of-show documents and managed volunteer tasks. The Dancer shook rage out of her body on the dance floor and turned it into a powerful elation. The Curious Observer was watching and responding: we need more pens on the table for people to write postcards to their elected representatives, the trash is overflowing and needs to go out, it’s time to turn the music down and the lights up.
Me and Kristin Johnstad at the second Moms Rage dance in Kansas City, October 2023
I was in Minneapolis last summer and decided at the last minute to sign up for an African dance workshop in St. Paul. I’m the kind of dancer who loves it all and wants to learn it all. Rarely do I feel intimidated by the opportunity to learn a new style, but this was different. It was a challenge. I eagerly absorbed the teacher’s instruction as we moved through traditional and social dances from Congo, Ghana, and other places on the continent, yet somehow I kept tripping over myself and getting lost in the technique. My hips moved like a Tetris game - mechanical and jolty. I couldn’t get my body to vibrate with the beats like some of the other dancers in the room, and quickly became self-conscious about it.
It was almost like my kinesthetic memory was still trapped in a classical ballet school of my youth, trying to achieve a perfectly straight back and lifted arms and validation - but this dance was asking something different from me.
At one point, the instructor made us face a partner and, without moving our bodies, express with our faces whatever we heard in the music. My partner understood the assignment. From the first beat to the last, I watched her face change shape. Imagine each slice of the feelings wheel has a facial expression associated with it; that’s what I was watching. It was alarming and intriguing and captured my attention. At first, I just tried to mirror her expressions and not to think about how ridiculous I looked. Then I kind of got over how I looked, and it was during this exercise that I was able to finally arrive in the present moment.
I realized something kind of critical: This dance doesn’t need me to be perfect. It doesn’t even need me to feel confident and assured. It just needs me to be present.
A pause in the garden, May 2022
This might be the hardest part of movements - staying present with what is. The speaker at Creative Mornings spoke to this too, noting that as dancers evolve in their practice, they move with more and more intention and a greater sense of awareness about the constraints and openings that are available to them. For me as a dancer, being present looks like a recognition that this body is aging, my joints need lots of love, and I must stretch for at least half the amount of time that I spend exercising or else my muscles will scream nasty things at me for days. In the context of social movements, staying present might look like responding to the capacity limits of movement leaders, or the need to revise the approach because the current one is failing, or the imperative for a mediation process to heal a broken relationship within the community.
Consistent presence can be challenging when there are so many things pulling at our awareness. These days, it feels like my whole psyche is at dance training camp, and rehearsal starts at 5:00 AM. It’s also the most liberating journey I could ever hope for, and to do it with others is a gift.
Human systems (whether a dance troupe, garden volunteers, a family, a neighborhood, or an organization) tend to move together over time in a synchronized direction, even though they are made up of autonomous units. I believe that this is the ultimate power of movement: that patterns created at the smallest scale influence patterns at larger and larger scales.
It’s how hundreds of starlings paint prayers in the sky when just one or two of them shift direction.
It’s how the public lynching of George Floyd swelled into a global protest era that we see replicated today in marches calling for Palestine’s children to be free.
It’s how babies learn what the faces and voice tones of their caregivers mean, what happy looks like, what angry sounds like - and that becomes part of the blueprint of social-emotional relationships when baby grows up.
It’s how the curious first tug of a weed from the ground starts a garden and feeds a community.
