Dancing Around Race is a collaborative group of mid-career BIPOC choreographers working together to create projects and platforms to explore racial justice and equity in the interconnected fields of choreography, dance presentation, dance training, funding, curatorial practices, and dance criticism in San Francisco and beyond. Our work together is shaped by our collective experiences and study as BIPOC artists working within our communities for decades. Each of us have put in years of work to support BIPOC artists and audiences and have come together to amplify our efforts and create a mutually supportive network of resources. We utilize our gathered knowledge to advance the field to be more equitable and anti-racist, support our ability to create work that is valued and liberatory, organize mentorship and presentation opportunities for other BIPOC artists, and give our communities full opportunity to engage with work that honors their experiences and advances the cultural discourse.

We advance these goals through work with two primary audience groupings. First, we work with BIPOC artists and community members with whom we create spaces for dialogue, mentorship, education, and the development of work with a critical lens. These programs challenge us to understand how systems of white supremacy have been embedded in our training and aesthetic and imaginative frameworks, and to begin the process of creating work that can push past those limits to build a new artistic ecosystem. This includes creating platforms to present and dialogue about work by artists who have been working in these liberatory modes, but overlooked because of the lack of tools to understand those practices. Second, we work with presenters, funders, and critics, leveraging our collective cultural capital to make institutional shifts so that our artists and audiences have the resources to engage with a healthier artistic community as a whole.