Welcome to the 2021 Dance Education in Practice special issue on virtual dance education.
March 2020 saw a dramatic pivot for most dance programs to online delivery of classes and choreographic experiences in response to widespread stay-at-home orders due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This experience required educators to be inventive in navigating ways to meet the challenges of virtual dance education. Many of these strategies will be with us well past the pandemic and could become part of the landscape of our field for the foreseeable future. The articles in this issue illustrate a variety of ways in which educators and students responded to these taxing circumstances and highlight some commonalities in our experiences. As you read through this issue, you will encounter the sense of loss that many felt as long-awaited performance gatherings shifted to online experiences, and you will hear about confusion as many were forced to embrace unfamiliar technologies to complete projects and courses. However, you will also find a thread of resilience and creativity as dance educators found ways to continue the values of their teaching to support embodiment, understand of the role of dance in culture and community, and find choreographic voice without moving together in the same physical space. The articles also convey the profound sense of connection that emerged from the virtual dance world, whether that was a connection with another dance company across the country, with other dancers around the world, or with dance history or dance in popular culture.
There was an overwhelming response to the call for papers, and many of the excellent papers submitted for this issue will see publication in future issues of Dance Education in Practice and in a forthcoming online article collection. The articles included in this issue were selected to demonstrate as wide a spectrum of experiences as possible: private sector, community, postsecondary, and K–12 public education. A wide variety of solutions are also covered in this issue: the use of social media platforms, emailing choreographic inspirations, video conferencing, livestreaming, and editing software. The ways in which the authors in this issue write about their experiences are as varied as their solutions. The issue includes a formal research study, personal reflections, and instructions on re-creating pedagogical practices.
“Socially Distant Powwows,” by Robin Prichard, examines the positive impacts that a shift to the virtual can have for a community as she details the extended access that socially distant powwows offer to the Native American community and beyond. Also focusing on the positive aspects of virtual collaboration, Jessie Levey and Anna Mansbridge describe their private-sector collaboration, which allowed two dance studio youth companies to engage in a cross-country choreographic project based on Remy Charlip’s Air Mail Dances, in “‘Common Ground’: East Coast Meets West Coast on Zoom.” The creative approaches to working with youth continue as we move to Helen Buck-Pavlick’s clever middle school assignments using TikTok and Flipgrid to activate a unit on folk and social dance in “Engaging Virtual Dance Students Using Social Media Dances and Technology.” A continued focus on student experience is illuminated by Zihao (Michael) Li’s article “Virtual Learning During COVID-19: Perspectives from Dance Students,” which details a research study the author conducted on more than 100 postsecondary students in Hong Kong and across the globe who experienced the shift to online course delivery. The issue concludes with a student perspective in postsecondary education in “Creating Art and Cultivating Intimacy During a Global Pandemic,” as Maggie Waller reflects on how she reinvented her senior dance project, an examination of women and apology, from a live performance, into the virtual space. I hope you will be as encouraged and inspired as I have been by the thoughtful and creative solutions demonstrated by the authors of these articles.
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Drexel University
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