As many dancers have heard, Mills College in Oakland, California is considering eliminating the dance major. A petition has been shared widely online over the past two weeks. Over the next few weeks, I will gladly post on the blog more information and various dancers' perspectives.

Today I am reposting something Bay Area choreographer Katie Faulkner wrote on Thursday:

Here is the letter I wrote to the president of Mills College regarding her recent announcement about the possible phasing out of the dance major. If you would like to send your thoughts, letters can be sent to: academicfeedback@mills.edu.

October 28, 2015

Dear President DeCoudreaux,
I am writing to express my deep concern over the recent announcement regarding the Mills College Dance Major and its eventual phasing out over the next five years. As a graduate of Mills in 2002 with an MFA in Dance Performance & Choreography and an adjunct professor of dance at UC Berkeley and the University of San Francisco, I feel that I must express my belief that the removal of the Dance Major from the Mills curriculum would be a grave mistake.

Modern/Contemporary Dance, the aesthetic and political lineage of which Mills has played a historic role, is an artistic practice and form of scholarship born of and advanced by women. Dance, as it as taught at Mills, an approach which I believe to be at the cutting edge of 21st Century educational thought, concerns itself with a woman’s ability to know her body’s power, strength, intelligence and expressivity and integrating these forms of knowledge with critically engaged practices of reading, writing, thinking, making and collaborating. It is, at its very core, a form that demands a rigorous integration of the self. For women to reach the fullness of their potential as embodied, critically engaged adults now is not the time to capitulate to regressive (patriarchal) educational models that remove the body as a serious area of study. Now is not the time to eradicate fields of scholarship and practice that only exist because women have pioneered them. To remove the Dance Major at Mills communicates in no uncertain terms that women’s bodies and their potentials for radical expression and powerful political subversion (as the genesis of modern dance was a form of powerful political subversion) is an illegitimate form of knowledge and research.

Apropos of the need for integrated adults in our 21st Century world, it is noteworthy that Mills College deems itself a liberal arts institution, a designation earned by honoring and educating the whole person. Chipping away at the arts, as Mills has slowly been doing for the entire time I have been a part of its community, signals to me a gradual shift in the focus from the humanist origins of a liberal arts education toward a vocational model geared to the market. I am aware of the pressure on schools and colleges to orient their compass toward the “career-oriented” curriculum; that schools are being rated, not for the return on investment in the well-rounded growth of the individual, but on the money students can expect to make in their chosen fields. I believe that anyone who cares deeply about education would identify this as a serious problem. I also believe it is evidence of generations of people (policy-makers, educators, administrators, anxious parents, and on and on) who were not on the receiving end of serious arts training. Whether this is due to lack of access, funding, or cultural/familial support, a culture without access to education or experience in the arts will not prize the arts. Every college or university that steers its curriculum away from the rigorous integration of artistic study contributes to an epidemic of cultural and artistic starvation and illiteracy that we all know we can’t afford. We need more people with sophisticated artistic literacy and creative tools, not less. We need more people who have trained their bodies and minds (as dancers have) to listen, attend, and empathically connect to themselves and others, not less. We need more people with cultivated access to their imaginations, not less.

The Mills Dance Program is a radically inclusive environment that honors the diversity of the human form, and the creative and intellectual potential of all of its students, not just an elite few. It is the embodiment of everything Mills claims its mission to be. That the college finds the Dance Program somehow lacking and the major somehow dispensable, despite decades of historic, creative output, and all while simultaneously eroding its funding and resources is a logic I can’t comprehend. That this is coming from a women’s college is especially disturbing.

Please do not punish the Dance program and its exemplary students and faculty for the school’s lack of dedicated investment and support. The Dance Program is central to the school’s history and should be protected and elevated as a critical part of its future. My time as a graduate dance student at Mills changed my life and the Dance Majors were critical to every facet of my experience. Having built a robust career in the years since, I can assure you there is a rich and meaningful life that awaits its graduates.

Sincerely,
Katie Faulkner

MFA Dance Performance & Choreography; Mills College ‘02
Adjunct Professor, Dance; University of San Francisco
Lecturer, Dance; University of California, Berkeley
Artistic Director, little seismic dance company
Certified Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analyst

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