Border Identities
-published in Spring 2018, Animated from People Dancing (Foundation for Community Dance).
This article was written to reflect on and share my research project in Belfast, Enniskillen, and the Irish border. I worked with local people on a dance project themed around borders and boundaries.
Citation: Akinleye, A. (2018). Border Identities, Animated.UK: Foundation for Community Dance. Edition Spring 2018, pp. 9–11
Excerpt: She stepped on to the edge of the mat to dance and closed her eyes… He lay in the snow and hugged the ground… She took a breath and seemed to fill the spaces between trees and distant houses…
Places of home (excerpt from my article)
The Cure Violence Foundation, initiated by Dr. Gary Slutkin in 1995, proposes that violence spreads or behaves like an infectious disease. Slutkin suggests the procedure for working with infectious diseases maps directly to strategies for curbing community violence(1). After experiencing fighting diseases such as tuberculosis in Somalia, Slutkin returned home to the USA to find similar clusters of death due to street violence. Slutkin’s theory for treating violence as an infectious disease draws on health strategies for reversing epidemics, summarised in three steps: interrupt transmission; prevent further spread; and shift norms (for long-term group immunity).
It does not escape my notice, as I sit reading and watching Slutkin’s work, that the people involved are primarily composed of Africans and African-Americans and are in communities I would call home. Slutkin’s model resonates with me. I feel dance-arts have a presence in the metaphor of violence as disease. Dance is not readily a part of the immediate trauma response of the first step (interrupt transmission) but can contribute to the steps ‘change individual behaviour’ and ‘change norms’. I theorise that within this medical-based metaphor dance-arts boost the ‘immune system’. They strengthen the individual’s ability to avoid infection and recover from the infection of violence. Therefore, dance-arts are important as a preventative measure. They would be a part of the ‘health’ of the environment; they counteract the degree to which an outbreak of the infectious violence affected a community.