How can we create inclusive spaces, where everyone feels safe to move and express themselves? How can diversity be nurtured and encouraged in dance intervention?
During this experiential workshop, Farah Fancy will discuss these questions, and many more, to shift the movement narrative and to include underrepresented populations.
The workshop will be divided in two parts, taking place on two different days: the first workshop will offer participants tips and tools to limit the impact of implicit biases and reduce oppression of marginalized communities. Visceral and embodied exercises and practices will help reveal the individual values of participants. Then each participant will create a roadmap for self-reflection, re-evaluation and action to help their community become visible and harmonious, without hindering others. The goal will be to model diversity and inclusion in practice and to allow for authenticity to surface, stripping expectations that do not belong to the individual and moving in ways that are culturally ethical.
The second workshop will take the form of an interactive discussion, where both words and movement will be used to acknowledge gaps, blind spots and biases that may prevent connection or do justice to the underrepresented populations the participants work with. The group will be encouraged to bring forward the obstacles they face in their embodied teaching, movement methodologies and dance techniques and, through their collective knowledge, they will be identifying promising practices and suggestions that can apply to working with a diversity of populations. As a Kwaja/Pathan spiritual keeper and warrior, Farah will also offer alternative solutions from the lens of a global indigenous perspective.
Participants wishing to join should come willing to become comfortable with being uncomfortable; enter with radical openness; transparently offer their concerns and challenges; be free of judging themselves or others.
The framework of the two workshops will consider empathy, resilience, and active whole-bodied listening with the goal of leveraging social capital to increase cultural vitality.
This event is presented by the National Centre for Dance Therapy and supported by the RBC Foundation. It is dedicated to all the dance professionals, artists, educators and practitioners who offer dance interventions to marginalized communities.
We are only accepting a small number of participants. Please reserve your spot below and, if you cannot make it, let us know in advance, so we can free your space for someone on the waiting list.
As an international public speaker and consultant, Farah shifts mindsets and strips away bias to increase resilience, inclusion, and justice. Her holistic approach fuses the arts, therapeutic techniques, and ethnography to reduce harm while improving self-worth, productivity and purpose with relevance and harmony. She commits to building a diverse community of leaders who are proud to be fearless and flawsome without limiting beliefs, self-doubt, or shame.
For 25 years, she has been using creativity to reveal and resolve barriers to equity and to foster economic, professional, and personal development, while improving belonging and sparking innovation. Her successes include facilitating programs for over 100,000 people, producing and creating over 30 performances, implementing 6 community projects for social change, co-founding the Dance Movement Therapy Association in Canada and Le Groupe Herencias. Farah focuses on identity, respect, vitality, and empathy to decolonize behaviours so we can dare to be audaciously visible and aligned beings.
