An award-winning performer, choreographer, artistic director, and educator, amara tabor-smith taught at University of California, Berkeley, for more than a decade and, since 2017, has been an artist in residence at Stanford University, designing both courses and productions. “Everything is connected,” says tabor-smith about balancing priorities as a teacher and an artist. Expanding on the common model of dance in higher education that focuses on training dancers to be performers, tabor-smith asks how teaching dance can foster future leaders, politicians, and changemakers.
For me, teaching is a collaboration. I love when I get questions that I don’t know how to answer and that make me study and research more deeply. I love being around young minds: I love their thinking, their struggle, their messiness, their tenderness, their vulnerability.
I also learn so much from students. As the age gap between me and students has gotten wider, students keep me relevant. I’m not trying to push an agenda that I learned 30 years ago, 40 years ago, unless that information is still relevant to them and supports who they are as dancer/movers and creatives.
At Stanford, I’m an artist in residence. I teach four courses a year and I co-lead an arts fellowship program for undergraduates through the Institute for Diversity in the Arts . In the summer I lead a five-week artist residency in collaboration with Instituto Sacatar in Bahia, Brazil, for graduate students. I also mentor and advise students. The idea behind this position is that artists in residence make work while at Stanford: I set a main-stage production every few years.
The work that I am creating now is interested in Afro-now-ism. A recent piece I created at Stanford was Revival: Millennial reMembering in the Afro NOW. It was in honor of the 50th anniversary of the founding of Committee on Black Performing Arts, and looking at how the past, present, and future are all part of the circle.
Another aspect of my position is serving as artistic director of the Committee on Black Performing Arts. CBPA was part of the Black student activism of the 1960s. They created an entity that produced and continues to produce dance and theater shows. They also produced a journal called Black Arts Quarterly. That is something I’m hoping to revitalize this year as an annual journal.
The biggest challenge is being very intentional about my creative time, meaning projects that are outside of Stanford, and being a full-time caregiver for my 96-year-old mother. It has helped me to be even better about how I organize my time. I appreciate that challenge. The artist in residence is a three- to five-year appointment, and I just was reappointed for five years. There’s an opportunity to teach students to understand the importance of the arts in their lives.
I teach a course at Stanford called “Conjure Art 101,” which is about ritual, spirituality, and Black feminist magic. The course is part movement and part lecture. I created courses called “Moving the Message: Reading and Embodying the Works of bell hooks” and “Moving the Message: Reading and Embodying the Works of Audre Lorde.” We consider the body as crucial to digesting information, which disrupts the idea in the academy that, historically, has said, “I think, therefore I am.” Lorde says, “I feel, therefore I can be free.”
These courses are about how we are valuing the information that the body holds and activating the body as the repository for our understanding. My greatest hope is that people are teaching in ways that are liberatory and contributing to social transformation, recalibration and collective well-being: We have the power to raise future leaders, politicians, teachers, funders, university presidents, and, of course, transformative artists.