Dignity Dialogues
Dignity Dialogues serves as an extension of the learning that happens both inside and outside of our school walls at Beaver Country Day School, allowing community members and outside experts to share their experiences, stories, and personhood.
By sharing the beauty and diversity of human experience, this podcast delves into the power of empathy, listening, patience, and openness as tools to honor and amplify the value of each member of our Beaver community and beyond.
Dignity Dialogues
Dancing Toward Dignity with Rodney Eric Lopez
What if the fastest way to rebuild trust in a room is to dance?
I sit down with educator and salsa maestro Rodney Eric Lopez to unpack how movement restores dignity, unlocks presence, and turns awkward groups into brave communities. He begins with a raw account of being publicly shunned by a religious community, then shares how a later church—built on crossing boundaries of race, class, gender, orientation, and age—helped him heal and see how discomfort can be a teacher.
From there, Rodney retraces his unexpected pivot from journalism and corporate PR to a life of social dance. We dive into inclusive facilitation for differently able-bodied participants, and we travel through culture with merengue, salsa, and Harlem swing—linking geography, history, and identity in a way that sticks far beyond the gym.
In the end, Rodney makes a compelling case to reunite mind and body in professional learning. He argues that schools should start the day with movement and arts so nervous systems are regulated before academics begin, boosting focus, teamwork, and well-being.
If you care about culture, belonging, and courageous teaching, this conversation will move you—literally and figuratively.
Enjoy the episode, then subscribe, rate, and share your favorite takeaway. Your review helps more educators and leaders find these stories.
All right. Good morning, Rodney Erida Lopez. You are official first guest on Digney Dialogues 2. It is a pleasure to have you. You were here at Beaver Country Day School last week and did a phenomenal, phenomenal performance education on Asperg Heritage Month. You got our kids in the upper school up and dancing. You led a workshop with middle school faculty. The feedback after was that's the best thing done in three years. Oh, wow. That's one. Shout out to you for realizing the vision. And shout out to Mike, my colleague, for really thinking about bringing you here to be. We both experienced you both at AZNE DI functions, also at the Posney BIPOC gathering last year at Fayweather Street. So it's it was a pleasure to experience you first, right, as a professional, and then bring that work here to our community for us all to enjoy and to share. So thank you for that. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. To get us started, tell our listeners about yourself, who you are, how do you defy as a person?
SPEAKER_01:It's identity questions are great because they there's so many ways you can go with them. And depending on the day and depending on what season of life you're in, you can activate a different aspect of your identity. I would say that the probably the most consistent way I identify myself is as a New Yorkan, a black Puerto Rican, a an Afro-Latino Puerto Rican from the Bronx. Those are the most sort of resonant identities that I have just because I highly identify with my with my ethnicity, with my Puerto Ricanness, with my New Yorker-ness, with my Bronx-ness. All of those things are important to me because those are the those are the aspects of my culture, upbringing, and heritage that have, I guess, poured into me the most. They're by no means the only ones. I'm a uh I'm a dad, I'm a husband, I am I'm a student, I'm a teacher, I'm an educator, I'm a dancer, I'm a lot of things. And so many times how I identify is dependent upon the context of the conversation. But I would say I'm a New York before I'm anything else. I love that.
SPEAKER_00:You said it depends upon the context, the situation. And in some contexts, people might identify you right before you have the opportunity to identify yourself, right? When you walk into trying to scan, understand, right? See how they might interact with you as a human being. And I love it because we're all about how do we maintain the dignity of a person through that. So let's let's shift to that piece. Talked about being from New York, a dancer, educator. To help us understand you and your personhood even further. Can you share a story in which you felt your dignity was stripped? Can you tell a story in which you felt your humanity maybe was no longer present, right? And that's more of a very complicated question because in theory, no one can ever really strip you of your dignity, but you can still really feel that way. And so, yeah, take us to a moment in time in which you felt like to happen.
SPEAKER_01:This dignity question is really important. And I want to be mindful of both the time and and the audience here. But the time that I felt in my life when my dignity was stripped was actually in a religious context. I was part of a religious community that for many years was actually a big part of my identity. And it was where I found the majority of my friends, my community, my social environment gathering. It was very much like many religious communities do, is they take up a lot of space in your life, in your mind, in your spirituality. And so for many years, this was a source of joy and connection for me. But I had a, I had an experience where that changed practically overnight. And I went through this. There are some religious communities that that practice, that do practices called shunning. Some people call it excommunication, right? Or what have you. There are these different, different ways that some religious communities separate themselves from or separate people from their community based on a perceived slight or a perceived wrong that was done. And so I experienced this as a young man in my early 20s. And it was probably one of the most harmful things that I've ever experienced because practically overnight I was ripped out of a community that had been a big part of my life for many years. And it was done in a very public way. So there was sort of this public shaming that took place within the community. And so people that I had known for years and was friends with, I saw them at the supermarket or at the grocery store or on the street, and they no longer talked to me. They no longer said hello to me. And so it's a long, complicated story, but but at the core of it, I don't know if in my life I've ever felt my dignity stripped more than that, because it was a moment where I just felt like all of a sudden I went from being a whole human being to someone who wasn't worthy of being spoken to. And that was a very, very difficult time. I eventually did the work I had to do to get over that and heal from that, but it was difficult. And it's hard when you are no longer seen by your community. It is a moment where you can absolutely feel like your dignity has been stripped.
SPEAKER_00:I'm wondering two things, and you kind of alluded to it already. What has been the lasting impact, right, on you, and maybe how has it shaped you to this day of how you might interact with people and communities that you enter? You do a lot of that right in professional practice. And then two, you you've mentioned this interesting conundrum, dichotomy, right? Of a religious space that I think many of us think we we think that religion is supposed to be a welcoming, inclusive form, right, in our in our world. And yet many of us can probably speak to a time in which religion was actually the probably most exclusive thing that we've had to deal with because of our identity. Why do you think that is? Why is religion kind of play that role with humans?
SPEAKER_01:It's a great question because I think anyone who has done an honest survey of the world's religions, right? Historically, the vast majority of them have values of mercy, tolerance, forgiveness, openness, welcoming, understanding, welcoming grace, welcoming the stranger, showing kindness and hospitality to the widow and the orphan, right? All of these things that I think until until it's always an until until a rule is broken. I think the flip side of many religious communities is that the other aspect of that is that they not all, not all, to be sure. And I want to make sure that I'm very clear about that. Not every religious community behaves this way, but many religious communities also take on the idea that their way is the right way, right? That their path is the right path, and that everyone else, everybody else are people that are meant to be tolerated as opposed to truly seen as brothers and sisters. And so if you happen to be part of a religious community that takes its own theology so seriously that it feels like it has the way and the truth, that anytime you deviate from their prescription of that, you are now out of step. That's right, you become other. And I think that many religious communities just fall into that into that paradigm of exclusivity, even though on the surface they may be espousing values of inclusivity and welcome. In practice, it's very hard to be part of a community and not take on an us versus them mentality.
SPEAKER_00:I want to do a little bit of a 180 on you. And think about conversely, we've discussed where you felt maybe your dignity was the most stripped, but conversely, where with whom do you feel the most dignified? Where do you feel that your your humanity is honored and amplified?
SPEAKER_01:Oh goodness, I feel that in a lot of spaces now. But but to be fair, many years later, and it took many years, but many years later, I was really fortunate and I say blessed to be part of a different faith community. This was this was much later in my life. I happened to find this amazing church in the Bronx where I was living before we moved to Rhode Island. But this was a fantastic, this was a fantastic church community. It was a startup church, and the pastor who had started this church actually named the value of the church was one of the named values of the church was that was the was the value of crossing boundaries. Like it was intentionally designed to cross boundaries of race, class, sexual orientation, gender, and age. Like that was named in the pillars of the church. And he did everything in his power to include in the leadership of the church, in the in the liturgy of the church, in the practices of the church, um, this very uncomfortable practice of crossing boundaries. And if you're crossing boundaries, it's supposed to be uncomfortable. If you're going to church and you're getting too comfortable, that's a signal. That's a signal. And I think we go to church for comfort sometimes, and there's a space for that to be comforted. But you're also in your faith community, I think it's a good sign if you're if it's a little bit disturbing, if it's a little bit uncomfortable. And that's where the growth happens. And that's where the growth happens. And there's a and there's a balance there, right? Because you don't want to go every weekend and get agitated, right? You're not you're not going to church and get angry every weekend. However, however, there is this balance. And I felt like a misfaith community that I was in for over 10 years until we moved, and then eventually the church went in a different direction. But it was in those years that I actually found completeness and healing from that earlier experience that I had as a younger man. And so the spiritual practices, the the guidance, the support I had from the community there was really transformational for me. And so I could say that it was in those years where I felt the most dignified. I felt the most seen. I felt the most healed because I was able to bring that story of kind of brokenness into that space and find that, you know what? No, not all faith communities are that way. There, there's a way to do faith community that's that's that's much more holistic. Amen.
SPEAKER_00:I want to transition this now to your career as a dance educator, but I know that's not your only career. So Walk is kind of the your journey of how you got to this place in your life coming into schools. I might even say to continue on the religious tip, maybe even a ministry of dance, right? Something you feel in your mind and your body and your spirit and your soul, right? When you have, at least for at Beaver, we are 360 kids in the upper school. What does that look like? What feeling, what energy is in the space when we all get up and gather in dance unit is in? But I want you to tell us, how did you even get here?
SPEAKER_01:Well, well, I'm gonna, yeah, I'm gonna tell that story, but I wanna, I wanna, I wanna just land for a moment on what you just said. I was resistant for a long time to looking at my work in dance as a ministry. I really was. I was very much for a long time, and again, it's because of these boxes that put in. For a long time, I was like, no, dance is like what I do for a living. It's uh I'm an art educator, it's my day job, it's I it lives in this box and like questions of calling and vocation and all that that lives somewhere else. Like that has to be, and so for a very long time, I put those two things in very separate boxes. And it wasn't until a few years ago that actually my brother told me he saw a video that I had posted of a of something I did in a school, very similar to what we did at Beaver last week. And he looked at that video and he's agnostic, right? He's he's he he identifies as a secular humanist. And he looked at that, then he called me and he says, Rodney, that's your ministry. What you're doing is your ministry. And I'm like, no, no, the secular humanist did not just tell me what my ministry is. And I think that that the reason I've I've come to be at peace with that as a descriptor is that with the exception of the content, right? With the exception of the content, right, I feel like what's happening in a space where hundreds of people are moving together, right, is there's a spirit that's moving you, and there's and there's a there's a connectedness that we're sharing. We're sharing connectedness, and the and there's music and there's movement, there's whatever. And so it's not a worship space, but it's a spirit-filled space. And you can say that spirit comes from wherever, but it comes from somewhere. So I don't, I don't want to overly, I don't want to overly spiritualize the thing, but there are through lines. There are definitely through lines there. So to answer the question, absolutely not, dance was not anywhere on my radar in the early part of my career. Like so many people who find their work, it it often shifts over time. My earliest, I guess, aspirations, I absolutely wanted to be the Puerto Rican Bryant Gumble. I wanted to be the Puerto Rican Phil Donahue. I was at a very young age, like a news nerd, kind of a talk show nerd. People would rush home from school and watch like He-Man and Transformers and G.I. Joe, and I did that too. But I would also rush home and watch Phil Donahue. Or like I'd get up every morning and watch the Today Show, and I was like, and I would look at Brian Gumble and I would be like, I like what he's doing. First of all, he's a man of color. So and seeing the way he presented himself and presented the news and all of that, I thought that was something I wanted to do. I thought I wanted to be a journalist. I always had an affinity for writing, for for speaking, for for putting things for for communicating in public ways. I just had a, I guess, a gift for that and a skill and a and a joy when I did that. And so at most opportunities in school, I just I wrote. I wrote for school newspapers, I wrote for the yearbook, I just did all those things and then majored in journalism and communication in college, thinking that that was the career I was going to pursue in college. I went to New York University and I wrote for the Washington Square News, I did WNYU radio, I did WNYU TV, I did all the things that someone who's preparing for a career in journalism is supposed to do in college. Except that my internships, my summer internships, for whatever reason, they were never in journalism. They were always public relations and marketing. Like for some reason, I just attracted those opportunities. And so since the skill sets were similar, in fact, my journalism friends would always make fun of me and say, Oh, you're going to the dark side because the journalists are doing like the the good work of like educating the people, and I'm doing the work of like being a shill for company. And so, but they paid better. So they paid better, right? So like my journalist friends were like making very low salaries, and meanwhile, I was making comparatively better better pay. And so all of my early internships were in either public relations, marketing, public affairs, those kinds of things. And so I got a job offer right out of college to do public affairs for a hospital. So my career started in healthcare. And I'm like, well, it's a great job, it's a great salary, you know. And so let me just start there. Like, why am I gonna go take some crap job in a news department when this organization is paying me a decent salary? So that was how I started. And and so that's what I did for the first, that was the first leg of my career, which was public relations. And so I started in the nonprofit space. Then I heard the siren song of corporate America and went to work for a big huge PR firm, PR marketing firm. Did that for a while, not very long, because I wound up not liking it, and then went to a boutique PR agency. Now, while all of this is happening, I met a young lady. I met a young lady who was a salsa dancer, and that's where the trouble started. And so she introduced me to Salsa. She was a professional Salsa dancer, she was a social worker by day, a salsa dancer by night. And we started hanging out, and she just started exposing me to this world, and that was it. It was a rap. Like started the rest of history, the rest of history, as they say. So for a few years, well, first it started as just a hobby. I it was fun, it was something to do at night. I was getting exposed to this new world of salsa. Secondly, it started to open the door to what it meant to be Puerto Rican because salsa is a very in New York, it's very much identified with the Puerto Rican community, although not exclusively so. Um, but salsa is a very Puerto Rican, New York-Puerto Rican art form. And so I found all kinds of cultural validation in that, and that exploration. And then I had the opportunity to teach as a volunteer, just helping people out. It wasn't even like an official thing. And the reactions I started getting in my teaching as a volunteer is what started to open the crack. And people were leaving the class way more joyful than they walked in. Now, at the time, I couldn't have articulated that. All I saw was people having a good time because they took my class. And I something told you in your spirit, you felt inside, like, hey, I'm doing something right. I'm doing something right. And the reason why I knew that, Delante, was because it came easy to me. The teaching of the dance came easy to me. I mean, yes, I had to eventually I worked and I studied and I did all the things, but like even in those early years, it it flowed very naturally to me. And I can look back and say, oh, well, it you it was the affinity you had for public communication. It just, you just, you just moved it to a different place. Um, and so all of that preaching I did as a young man, all of those talent shows and plays and theater and all of that stuff that that I had I had I had a talent for and a knack for, dance, teaching dance gave me a little mini stage in which to do that. And it wasn't until many years later that I, well, the through line is I'm an educator. That's what an educator does. An educator takes something that's hard and makes it easy and digestible for their students, whether they're children or whether they're adults. So there, I was nowhere near knowing that's what was happening. But back then, all I knew was that I had a knack for teaching dance, for making people feel good, for making people feel like they could do something they didn't think they could do with their bodies. And I just followed that instinct. And I eventually left my last PR job, thinking it was going to be a short break, like six months. And 30 years later, here I am talking to you. I never went back. And so I found this, I found this incredible new career as a dance as a dancer and as a dance educator. Um, that I never would have thought. If you would have asked me back in those early years that this is where your career's gonna go, it doesn't even make sense that I would go from corporate public relations to that. It doesn't compute.
SPEAKER_00:It doesn't have to make sense.
SPEAKER_01:It doesn't have to make sense. And so I and so I went, you know, and so I became a teaching artist, and then many other things after, which we can get to later. But yeah, that that that's the that's the story.
SPEAKER_00:Your journey. I want to bring it to your time here at Beaver and thinking about how you once said you can get a room full of strangers dancing and laughing together in minutes. And I think about our high schoolers, a little bit awkward, and as we kind of discovered, it's actually more so the adults who feel a bit more limited and shy and reserved because it's awkward touching your peers, it's awkward having to look eye to eye, it's awkward having to touch their hands and write and have that close, intimate proximity. How do you go about doing how do you go about breaking that ice in spaces, particularly with adults and kids, so we can start moving and dance together?
SPEAKER_01:So I teach children, young people, and adults in very much the same way. I use the same language, I use the same approach, I use the same tone. And that's important because I never want children or young people to think that I'm talking down to them. And I never want adults to forget that they can have fun as adult learners, also. It doesn't have to be that serious, and you don't have to take this one that seriously. Right? So it's a it's so I that's why my approach is very similar. I might tone it down a little bit for kids, but not by much. So a couple of things to your to the point you just made about adults. We receive messages as young people somewhere, maybe it's as a very young child, maybe it's at it's it's as an adolescent. Somewhere along the way, we get a message. Many of us get a message that I don't know how to dance, I can't dance, dancing's not my thing. I have two left feet, I have no rhythm, I didn't grow up with this, I'm very awkward, you know, all of those things. And the moment that it's like inception, it's like that thing gets in your brain, and then you think that's your idea. You think you came up with that on your own, as opposed to maybe, maybe that was planted in you and you just owned it as your own. Now, that's not to say that everybody has the same level of skill. Yes, some people are naturally more gifted at movement, more rhythmic, more coordinated, all of those things. There's some people who can sing and some people who are tone-deaf. That's just that's just the way it works. We're not all given the same level of talent and skill in something. However, that being said, uh, and I said this at at Beaver Country Day, dance is the most democratic of art forms because we all have access to it, because we all have a body. Doesn't mean we're all good at it, but that's not the point. The point is we all have access to it because it is an unmediated art form. I don't need anything in my hand to create the art form. It's just my body and a beat. I don't even need a I don't even need a full music. So I I gave you that preamble just to say that like my approach in coming into a room full of strangers is to even with my tone and my intentionality, not just with the words that I say, but the way I move through the space, I want people to know that they're safe, that they're gonna be okay. And and that this isn't about your performance. This isn't about you're not being graded, you're not no one, no one is evaluating you. We are doing this together. So the fact that I teach in circles is a big deal. Dance classes are often taught in lines so that you can see, like, and the best dancers in the front of the line and the weak dancers in the back of the line, so that you can write. And there's a that's that might be necessary in technique classes or in advance, right, where you need that kind of hierarchy, but that's not what I do. What I do is social dance, and I and I and with the exception of teaching line dances, I do everything in circles because the circle is the shape of community. So nobody stands out, nobody is picked apart. We're all going through this together. We are changing partners and you're dancing with other people in the circle. So you're never stuck with one person. So you're getting to experience this movement with different people. Two people together may not work out, but when you go to the next person, all of a sudden something clicks. And then that's where the confidence comes from. And so how I get a room full of strangers laughing and doing it is by using the language of play, using humor by, I talk about in one of my professional developments, this idea of willing to be the fool but not be treated like one. And so you learn as an educator, there's ways to use humor and self-deprecation that doesn't remove your own dignity as an instructor. That works with adults just as much as it works with kids. And the only difference with adults is that adults, we've learned coping mechanisms to deal with our awkwardness. Kids haven't always figured that out. And so a kid might lash out in an antisocial behavior because they don't have a coping mechanism. An adult will just say, I gotta check my phone. Oh, I got this thing with my hand, or I gotta go return a phone call, right? Because we have to do that as adults, but you have the exact same feeling that the 10-year-old has. So I can identify that, I recognize that. And so when I'm doing adult workshops, I always ask people like you and Mike and the people who are inviting me, help me create the container of safety that that allows me to just deal with the elephant in the room. And nine times out of ten, even more than that, people leave feeling better than they walked in.
SPEAKER_00:Let's speak to that container of safety. And I'm really proud and gracious. And I think some educators at other schools might be wondering in the community, right? You said that dance is a democratic art firm or the most, right? And so speaking about thinking about people who might be differently able bodied, how'd you go about creating a space which they also felt included, invited to participate in that dance workshop? That's a fantastic question.
SPEAKER_01:And I and I would be, I would be, it would be wrong of me to say that like every dance is equally accessible to every person in everybody. That's that that is not an accurate statement. I think there are certain movements and certain things that differently able-bodied folks may or may not be able to do successfully. And so it's my job to be able to create a space that says, okay, there might be some modifications we have to make, there might be some adaptations we have to make, there might be some moves that may not be accessible to you right now, but can we figure out a way to do something differently? And so I've got to, it's always helpful as an educator and as a facilitator if I know those things in advance, because it helps me to prepare, right? Educator ever wants to go into a situation that they're not prepared for. Just like you prepare a lesson plan, I have to prepare my events, I have to prepare my facilitations, I have to know who's in the room. And so if there's a differently able-bodied person that just kind of walks in and I wasn't prepared for it, I may not be as confident in the delivery of the experience. But if I know that in advance, then I can work to make my session as inclusive as possible. And so that might just mean speaking directly to, okay, when we do this move, here's your option. You can do this instead of this, or telling the community, hey, you might need to hold this person differently, or instead of two hands, you might need one hand because they need their other hand to operate their chair or to or to operate their crush or their walker or some other thing. And we're able to do that in dance because we have if if if you can't use, if you don't have the full use of your legs, for instance, can you use your Arms in a certain way? Can you use your shoulders in a certain way? Can you clap your hands? Can you do some other things that allow you to participate with the same level of enthusiasm? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. And I and I have to be honest when it doesn't work, and I have to sort of be transparent about that. But I I don't know that I've ever been, and I've been doing this a long time. I don't know that I've ever been in a situation, at least where anybody has admitted to me or has told me that they have ever felt excluded because they were different. They always found a way, and we found a way together to make people feel invited and welcome in the space.
SPEAKER_00:And I think it starts by you start off very high energy, right? And that enters, that creates a sense of, I think to your point, joy and safety in this space, right? And so you're able to, I'll even say use the word forgive, right? If there was maybe a misstep, the intentionality from the get-go that you were trying to create in that space. I want to shift this to these last two things, particularly thinking about leadership, teamwork, cultural competency, right? I think for our young people and for our adults too. What would you say that your approach, right, to this work, i.e. PD, or giving our students an ability to experiment with dance? How does this maybe serve differently a purpose that quote unquote traditional PD might miss? Right? Because this isn't your typical sit down, take notes, apply it in the classroom, right? And yet I might argue because you're using your body, it's a it's a it's a full body experience, you're going to, your brain's going to store information in a different way. But tell us, how do you think kind of differs from the traditional PD experience?
SPEAKER_01:I think the great, the great error, well, there's more than one, if I'm being honest. But for the context of this conversation, the great error of Western philosophy and education is that we divorced the mind from the body. We lifted up Descartes' statement, I think, therefore I am, and made that the golden standard. And so everything in Western philosophy and education said, feed the mind. The mind is superior to the body. The mind leads the body, the body is subservient to the mind. Thinking is what makes us human. Thinking is what separates the humans from the animals. All of this stuff that we just take as given from the moment we're children. And then to go back, and this is this this was not my intention, but here I am, to go back to some of those religious tropes that we've the bot everything that's wrong with us happens in the body. Right? The flesh. The flesh. And again, it's just it is it is really again, until you sit down and examine it, and I'm sure there are people in your community who have studied philosophy and who are philosophers, either amateur or professional, I think they would concur that there has been this privileging of mind over body. And I think that's just wrong. And I think that there are other cultures who have a more balanced and nuanced approach to this. The reason I started with that is because now we talk about how we show up in professional spaces. And yes, there's a whole list of technical and skills that we need to bring into the classroom, into the workspace, absolutely, that are mental skills, psychological skills, whatever you want to call them. But my goodness, all to the like the ignoring of the body. We live in a body. We experience the world through our senses and our nervous system. So much so that listen, I don't have to like the how effective are you at work when you have a toothache? How effective are you at work when you have a headache? How effective are you at work when your big toe is screaming at you because you stubbed it in the morning and the pain won't you?
SPEAKER_00:I fell off my bike.
SPEAKER_01:You fell off. It's like, how long, like how much met how much mental energy does it take for you to get through a work day when something in your body is off? If it gets too bad, you have to leave. You have to take a sick day, you have to leave early because your bot your nervous system can't handle it. So that's an extreme example, but there are less extreme examples. We're walking around all day with that thing, you the argument we had with our spouse or our kid or whatever, and that's sitting in here. Not it's not sitting here, it's sitting in here, and now we've got to go teach uh a room of 20 children how to do like an equation or how to do something else. All of that to say if we paid more attention to what's happening physically and gave our bodies a chance to metabolize it, we could show up more fully ourselves. So when I teach a social dance class or a social dance PD, I'm trying to check off sort of three boxes all at once. Number one, I'm giving the body a chance to move in a joyful way. So when I was I would say even release, you release some of that tension, that energy. Release that's absolutely. And so, and I'm not the only clearly there's lots of other people who do this. Some people use yoga, some people use something else. Like it's not dance, it's not the only modality. I just think that it requires very little. I don't need that, I don't need yoga blocks, I don't need it's just you. You just show up. You can dance where you are. You can dance where you are. So number one is I is is I I feel like the social dance class allows you, number one, to just move and move joyfully and move in commute right in community. Number two, because the my art form is partner dance, right? It's that kind of part, right? So I'm not doing ballet, I'm not doing tap, I'm not doing hip-hop dance. All of those have their own specialized skill sets. I what I do is bring people together, I make them look at each other, touch each other, make eye contact and move together. That is a very unique way of being in the world. Because now I have to deal with the person that's in front of me. Let me, that's really uncomfortable. That's super awkward. And yet, if I can hang in there, if I can hang for 20 seconds, if I can hang in there for a minute, right? If I can just hang in there and let that thing pass through me, that if I can let that pass through me, now I'm dealing with another human being. I'm not dealing with my narrative about it. And then thirdly, there's the cultural piece. So when I do these workshops, and let's say I start with a merengue, you would be surprised at how many adults in a room I ask, where does the merengue come from? And most people don't know. And that's okay, because you never learned it in school. And then I ask, oh, the Dominican Republic, what's the capital city of the Dominican Republic? How many adults don't know? What the capital city of how many educators don't know? What the capital city of the Dominican Republic, oh, it's Santo Domingo. Guess what? You just learned something today, right? And so there are these like sort of, and I'm not saying this to shame anybody. I'm just saying there are some basic things that learning a dance from the Dominican Republic, from Argentina, from Puerto Rico, from people don't always know that swing comes from Harlem. Like these things are just foundational things that are just as important as what you would learn in a social studies class. And so for years, when we would bring this work into schools, we would say, hey, listen, believe it or not, we're supporting your social studies curriculum. You may not believe it, but we are. They're gonna learn where Dominican Republic is on a map as a result of taking this class. So it's those kinds of things. So those are the three boxes I'm trying to check. And so I think that once you do that, to go to the leadership piece, what that looks like in a leadership context is okay, I can now, whatever the next task is. So it could be fill in the blank, it could be doing a leading a department meeting, it could be working on the budget, it can be figuring out what your admissions and enrollment team is gonna do. Like whatever the thing is in school that needs to be done, um, you can now go do that work from a more centered place.
SPEAKER_00:I would say even more present having experienced it myself, right? I'm more present. I've I've that thing that was worrying me. I told you this morning my bike style work. Yeah. Right. But I've moved some and that's now moved to the back of my mind, right? So I can do the task and I can be more fully present, right? For this podcast recording.
SPEAKER_01:My dream is, and I sent a proposal in to one educational authority and it it never got it never got responded to, which I understand educators have a lot on their plate. Uh, but sort of my dream would be to do a pilot where at a school where we inverted the school day. And to get a school to do this would require a huge leap of faith, not to mention support from the parent community. But what have we told ourselves about the best way kids learn? Well, one of the things is well, what we know is kids learn best after they've had a chance to move and play. That's why we we we schedule around recesses and we let kids go outside, whatever. And frankly, independent schools have many independent schools have privilege around this because you've got campuses, you've got lush green fields where kids can go and walk around in nature. Where I grew up, that wasn't the case. You had the the black top yard, right? No green in it, and a basketball hoop with no net. Okay. And weeds, and maybe some weeds, and that's and that's the reality for a lot of urban kids, right? But that's a that's a conversation for another day. The point is, is that we understand that kids learn best after they've had a chance to move, but then we also say, well, the mornings is when our brains are most active. So let's let's pack the mornings with academic content. And then we'll let them do their arts and their other in the afternoon, kind of after lunch. And there's a logic there that makes sense, but what if we just inverted that a little bit? What if we spent the first hour of the day only in somatics and in movement and in arts or whatever, right? What if the first hour of the day were just dedicated to the body and you didn't open a book at all? And then kids go and what and they then they have a moment of transition to regulate, and then they go into the classroom and open their first book. My imagination tells me that you'd have a much more successful school day if you did that.
SPEAKER_00:And something that I want to amplify, and I think for for me that you have illuminated and concretized, right, and maybe even reminded in this conversation is how, to your point, how Western values guide much of what we do. And until we're able to bring that back into the conscious, right, we're going to keep we're going to continue making subconsciously, unconsciously decisions, right, that uphold that. And so what does it look like to take a step back, right? And to be present and say, more philosophically, what what decisions, what philosophy, what factors are governing how we create space for our students and for adults in our schools? That's lovely.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And I think when we look at so we we talk about there's been this movement, right, over the last few years of like even longer, to be honest. Like, let's introduce yoga in the schools, right? And then school, and there's data that says, well, kids that kids that participate in yoga during the day or meditation or mindfulness practices, we see a dramatic drop in suspensions and all, and like that's beautiful. Like we need, we need more of that. And where does this stuff come from? Right? Where does it it it doesn't, it doesn't, this is not a United States practice. This is not a European practice. We're we're importing, right? And the generous version, the generous interpretation says we're appreciating, the less generous interpretation says we're appropriating. Okay, whatever. That's a that's an important comment. But whatever it is, we are borrowing these practices from from Eastern, from African, from other cultures. We are westernizing them and putting them into our Western boxes, and we're taking the things that we like, the things that serve us, divorcing them from the larger philosophical context in which they come. So the communities from which a practice like, and I'm and I'm by no means a yoga expert. So if I'm speaking out of turn, someone will correct me short, but the container out of which a practice like yoga comes, right, doesn't come from we fit this in 30 minutes a day. It's a way of life, it's a guiding principle for humanity. And so these are the things that I think to your point, when we step back, those are some things I think that are worth meditating on.
SPEAKER_00:And I've mentioned it before, especially here at Beaver, I find that I said it actually last week. Time is elusive and time has become a commodity. And so if we're not able to give time to things that we most value, right, we can't do it well in our spaces. And so, how do we begin to prioritize, right, those things that will bring us in the long term, better wholeness, better wellness, and better health and just better being, I would say. Agreed. I want to end this off here. And we started this conversation actually in my office last week. I'm kind of curious about any other featured products you have coming down the pike that you're working on that might give a little insight into what's coming down. Oh, I appreciate the Rodney Road.
SPEAKER_01:I appreciate you giving me the space to plug because absolutely there is a project that I'm working on that I am so excited about. Oh my God. I feel like I don't want to overstate it, and yet maybe that's the only way to do it. I really feel like this project that I'm working on is not the, but a culmination of what I've been doing over the last 20 to 25 years. And it's a book that I'm writing, but the it's not, it has, it didn't start with a book. It started with a choreography that I did, that I was a part of. I didn't choreograph it, my friend choreographed it. It started with a choreography that I was a performer in, then it became a workshop that I've started giving. And now it's turned into a book because I feel like that those workshops weren't adequate, wasn't an adequate venue for me to explore the issue. And so the book is called I Don't Speak Spanish, but I understand everything when I'm dancing. And it's an exploration of the intersection of language, acquisition, identity, and dance and arts. Obviously, my life story is the lens through which I'm looking at it, but I'm working hard to bring in many other voices to be in dialogue with, experts in linguistics, in education, in dance, so that it's not just my story, it's not just a memoir. And basically, in a nutshell, I want to address, I want this book to be a space of conversation, discussion, and hopefully healing around language shame of a Puerto Rican who was born and raised in the Bronx to parents who were born and raised in Puerto Rico, whose parents, my parents made the choice for me to speak English only. That's a decision many families make for very complicated reasons. Often because they were the victims of language shame and discrimination as a result of coming from somewhere else. Exactly. And so they don't want their children to deal with the same issues. And yet that choice comes with cost and consequences. Because then on the other side, when you are raised not speaking the language of your home country, then by people in that community, you're treated as less than. And so there's a damned if you do, damned if you don't miss. And in Spanish, we call it ni de aquí, ni de allá. I'm not from here and I'm not from there. And so, and so that was my experience. Ni de aquí. What do you got there?
SPEAKER_00:So I used to teach AP Spanish at my old school, and it is a graphic novel. It's funny, people don't know I speak Spanish, but I do. I'm an I Spanish speaker. I love a story about that. But the book is called Gente, Gente de Agi. It's a story about a Andalucina. And so she is she's born Anna Lucia in Espana, but her parents are from China. And so, because of her phenotype, because how she presents right to people, they would say you would never think that she is quote unquote Espanola, but it's like, no, I am born and raised here, right? And so, how does it mean to, to your point, not be enough from here, but not be from there? She went to China, she wouldn't try to eat enough, right? She's living in this interesting space of who am I in this greater context.
SPEAKER_01:Can you send me a link to that? I want to get back to it. I got you. Okay, thank you. But so so what I'm gonna be doing is essentially telling my version of that story, but then the sort of what what what my wrinkle is is not only examining my experience with language shame and language transmission and acquisition, uh, I'm at a point in my life where I get to examine that now, both as a child and as a parent. And so I get to see how this is what are the generational impacts of that. And also how dance, particularly salsa dance, gave me this other vehicle, like I said earlier, to explore and really celebrate what it means to be Puerto Rican and New York Puerto Rican, and that my Puerto Ricanness isn't only caught up in my ability to speak Spanish, that there is that Spanish is only one manifestation of culture, and that there are many others, and we would do well to embrace them and to celebrate them and to lift them up and to not shame each other over it, because so much of the shame comes from the people in our own community, not the dominant culture. The dominant culture does its own work on you, but it it is the people in your own family, in your own community that can actually cause the most intense shame around your language proficiency or lack thereof. And so I want this to be a little, I want this book to be a little bit, a little bit balm, a little bit healing, but just like we talked about church earlier, I also want it to be a little bit agitating. I want it to be a little bit uncomfortable for people. It's a conversation starter, it's a conversation starter, and so so I'm I'm halfway through the drafting of it right now, and so my fingers are crossed for a March release uh publication. Let me know.
SPEAKER_00:I will invite you back because that's at least a whole other PD.
SPEAKER_01:It's a whole other thing. It's a whole other thing. It's a whole other thing.
SPEAKER_00:And it and it speaks to, I think, what I mentioned to you here, right? My name's Delante Iguatu. Clearly, my last name is not American. And so I had that similar feeling of being half Nigerian, my father's Egbo, right? But my father was basically socialized in the UK. And so I never had the opportunity to learn Igbo. And so when I'm around Nigerian people, I feel culturally Nigerian. I can dance to the movement, but can I speak my father's native tongue? No. And then I feel right. It's like you, who's this outsider coming into the space, right? And I'm like, no, no, no, I'm just Nigerian. And I get it. I wasn't, I didn't grow up in that cultural context, but how do we still honor and invite others into spaces, even if we don't feel like they have the same level of cultural proficiency to your point? And to your point, actually, language is just one level or one tool or one manifestation of that cultural proficiency in a community.
SPEAKER_01:So I'm curious, does does your father speak Ebo? He does. He does like fluently? He does, yeah. He does. So I'm just since I have you, I might I might as well use this as an opportunity for research. So what was, to the extent that you've either talked about it with him or he's mentioned something or whatever, like what is his narrative or his explanation for not passing that on to you?
SPEAKER_00:Uh we haven't really explored it. And that's in all fairness, to in all transparency. If I had an educated guests or or inference, I might say he spent a lot of his education in the UK. And so therefore, right, like the call, the code of relationship that the UK has with Nigeria, right? It's actually interesting. People asking, like, what do you speak in Nigeria? I'm like English. It was colonized by the British.
unknown:Right.
SPEAKER_00:Also speak speak English in Nigeria. And because of that, right, there is kind of this tension of, I don't want to say forsaking, right? Like, I or I think it's convenient, actually, right? It's I I think it's convenient when we're able, or some people sometimes, sometimes people are able to maybe claim like the royalty, right? I come from a royal family or tribe in Nigeria. And yet, right, I was sent off to the UK for to a boarding school for a better, more ritsier, flashy, posh education. So I think it's that interesting tension. I don't want to piss anybody off or make any assumptions here. That's kind of my own observation from afar. But to that end, when I would talk to like my grandmother on the phone, she would try to teach me some words, but I can only learn but so much. And I also think not growing up in that space as a child, I grew up in Washington, DC. I was not something opposite to Spanish. I went to a bilingual school, right? So I learned the language through immersion. I didn't have that same experience with my Ebo, Igbo tongue. And so it's something I think about not often, but when I'm particularly in African spaces, it definitely comes up. I think I look probably more Nigerian as an adult than I did when I was younger. So there's an assumption that someone makes when they see me. And then it's like there's an ouch, there's an internal ouch when someone's like, oh, but you want to speak the language? I'm like, got me.
SPEAKER_01:That's that's exactly that's exactly it. That's exactly it's the assumption and followed by the explanation, the expected explanation. And there's I quote this woman from a book, it's a fantastic book. I don't know if I told you about it, it's called American Negra, and it's by Natasha Alford. And she's her father's African American, her mother's Puerto Rican, and a big part of her experience is this idea of mom, why didn't you give me the language? And so she explores that very beautifully. But this one quote that I pulled, she talks about it's the explanation. It isn't enough that it's like you just don't know the language. It's somebody expects you to know it. You say that you don't speak it, and then they're like, but why? So now you've got to defend your existence, and then you gotta talk about your mother, and you gotta talk about your talk about like I just did with you. You gotta go through the explanation.
SPEAKER_00:You're unearthing some wounds, maybe certain people.
SPEAKER_01:And it's exhausting, and it's it and it hurts, and it and it brings up all these other things. And I think that's the point of the book. The point of the book is to spark these conversations and to say, hey, look, very little of this dynamic, honestly, very little of it has to do with you, and very little of it has to do even with your parents. There are systems that have been set up aid before any of us got here. That part that created an assimilationist project that was designed to move everybody a certain way. And the social scientists have or you could set your watch by it, you can just like you can set the sun by it that says by the third generation, home languages are lost. They're lost. You could set your clock by it, and that is that is what has been set in motion by our various institutional agencies, and so it's it's hard, it's hard, but it feels personal. That's the thing. It feels personal, it feels like a personal flaw, and you're made to feel like it's a personal flaw, and yet there are so many other contextual things that are happening. So, to answer your question, that's what's coming down the pike, and I'm very excited about it. This is rich.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, man. I appreciate it. This is great. I love this conversation. You would not think that this would all would be sparked for from a dance workshop, but I love that it this this demonstrates the depth, the compassion, the understanding, and the awareness of the tool of dance and what it can bring to our communities. So if you're even thinking about looking at Rodney, where can they find you?
SPEAKER_01:You can find me. My website is just my name, so that I made it easy for everybody to find. Rodney RodneyEric Lopez.com. That's my website. And you can also shoot me an email, info at rodneericlopez.com.
SPEAKER_00:Well, thank you, Rodney. I hope many more communities will continue to be blessed by your work, by your wisdom, by your expertise. And thank you. That's a wrap. Thank you, my friend. Thank you for inviting me.