Should University Dance Majors only Focus on Western Dance? When you grow up seeing fabulous dance all over the world, you start to wonder… by Daniela Sider Growing up, I had the world at my fingertips – and I didn’t even know it. I thought the fact that I had lived on three continents before the age of six was cool, but pretty normal; six-year-old me thought most people lived like that. Soon enough, I started to realize that wasn’t quite the case. I began to notice how unique people thought it was that I had lived in Argentina, Morocco, and Spain in the course just over of half a decade. I also began to realize how many cultural colors my own parents represented (and still do), as Americans who left their hearts in Argentina when they moved to Spain, and do NGO work in North Africa and the Middle East. This cultural fusion of a childhood is what shaped my way of thinking and motivated me to connect with the world cross-culturally. It’s from this perspective of cultural diversity that I view and attempt to embody dance. I started dancing when I was thirteen, considered a late start, but I had done rhythmic gymnastics, which has a lot of similarities. And I had always been surrounded by dance in all the places where I lived. Tango was born on the streets of Buenos Aires; in Morocco, dancing is synonymous with celebration, and Southern Spain is the motherland of Danza Espanola (which includes Flamenco). These diverse dance forms I grew up around inspired me to pursue dance professionally and interpret movement as a means of cultural expression. Coming to University of California, Irvine turned out to be another cultural experience for me. When first I arrived in America, “fresh off the boat,” as they say, I knew hardly anything about modern or jazz. Thankfully, ballet was familiar, but modern and jazz? I had to Youtube “jazz dance” before the placement audition, because I did not know how I was supposed to improvise within the jazz genre – whatever that was. In my training in southern Spain, anything that was not ballet, was just “not ballet.” If it was named modern or jazz, I had no clue what the difference was between the two. So UCI taught me these American, cultural movement expressions – and it has been a ride! However, after having been here for a few years, I can’t help but notice the Western- centrism of the UCI Dance Department and eventually, I wanted more. At first, the “monoculturalism” of this place did not bother me because everything was completely new to me, and I felt culturally immersed in a foreign land. But after my second year, I had overcome the biggest obstacles of cultural adaptation and found myself wanting so much more than just Western dances. To be clear, I am so grateful to have grown as much as I have in my Western techniques here at UCI, for this has been the core of my training. Nevertheless, I can’t ignore the disappointment I feel at the lack of global dance perspective here, especially considering how increasingly globalized our world is. I think dance should be spearheading globalization and bringing people of diverse cultural backgrounds together through dance, not creating a dichotomized rivalry between Eastern and Western dance forms. Unfortunately, however, the latter is more often the case. As Nyama McCarthy-Brown discusses in “Decolonizing Dance Curriculum in Higher Education: One Credit at a Time,” limiting and defining dance as a purely Western tradition is a form of imperialism. This is something most American dance programs actually do, which causes the dance community as a whole to perpetuate a Western-dominant dance view. To be more specific, if Western dance forms are treated as intricate, complicated and beautiful, so should non-Western dance forms (McCarthy-Brown, 126). If there is not equality between the two at the university level, then higher education is promoting colonial thinking – in the dance community and consequentially beyond, which is ironic, since the art of dance should and has the power to promote non-violent