For Immediate Release
Media Contact: Patsy Collins, Communications Coordinator, Emory Dance Program
A Workshop presented by the Emory Dance Program
January 23, 2024 (Atlanta, GA) – On February 13, 2024 at 7:30pm, the Emory Dance Program
will present a Friends of Dance Workshop entitled, “Dancing Around Race – Cultivating Racial
Equity and Absolute Belonging” featuring Gerald Casel.
Gerald Casel (he/they/siya) is a dance artist, equity advocate, and antiracist educator. Utilizing
a decolonial approach and using tools from Dancing Around Race, a community engagement
social practice that challenges systemic racial inequity, Gerald Casel shares their ongoing
research on race and racism in dance. Through candid conversations along with some
movement provocations, participants will be asked to explore their relationships to power,
social position, and where and how they exist within systems and institutions of dance
education, performance, and production. They will also be asked to share something about
their dance training and experience (and teachers), reflecting on the ancestral legacies they
hold. Those who attend will also be encouraged to develop an embodied manifesto that aligns
ongoing, lasting actions with values of equity and absolute belonging.
As director of GERALDCASELDANCE, Casel's choreographic work complicates and provokes
questions surrounding colonialism, collective cultural amnesia, whiteness and privilege and the
tensions between the invisible/perceived/obvious structures of power. Casel is Professor and
Chair of the Department of Dance at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. They
have previously been a faculty member at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee, California State University Long Beach, and UC Santa Cruz where he also
served as the Provost of Porter College. A graduate of The Juilliard School with an MFA from
UW-Milwaukee, they received a New York Dance and Performance Award “Bessie” for
sustained achievement for dancing in the companies of Stephen Petronio, Michael Clark,
Stanley Love, Zvi Gotheiner, Sungsoo Ahn, and The Metropolitan Opera Ballet. He is the founder
of Dancing Around Race, an ongoing community engaged-participatory program that
interrogates systemic racial inequities. www.geraldcasel.com
WHEN: Tuesday, February 13 | 7:30pm
WHERE: Schwartz Center for Performing Arts, Dance Studio
PRICING: Free, No registration required
For more information about the Emory Dance Program and upcoming events, visit
