DanceMode Culture Bearers Project
At DanceMode, we believe that Blues and Jazz dance cannot be separated from the people, communities, music, history, and lived experiences that created and continue to shape these traditions.
Our events intentionally bring together culture bearers and trained movement, dance, and cultural educators. We value both lived cultural knowledge and thoughtful, informed pedagogy and believe they play different but complementary roles in how these traditions are shared.
Culture bearers may include musicians, dancers, elders, historians, club owners, organizers, educators, and community members who carry lived, historical, musical, social, or movement knowledge connected to a cultural tradition.
Within Blues and Jazz, we recognize the particular importance of Black American culture bearers whose communities created, developed, and sustained these traditions.
We also believe there is no single Black narrative or experience. Black American culture is not monolithic. Experiences differ across regions, generations, communities, musical traditions, families, and individual lives.
We want our students and communities to encounter multiple voices and perspectives rather than expecting any one artist or educator to represent an entire culture.
For this reason, DanceMode aims to continually broaden and diversify the culture bearers represented within our music and educational programming.
The Culture Bearers Fund
Bringing culture bearers to our European events involves significant costs: travel, housing, meals, artist and teaching fees, and local transportation. Those costs can unintentionally determine whose voices our communities have access to.
The DanceMode Culture Bearers Fund helps us bring artists, educators, musicians, dancers, and other culture bearers into our events to perform, teach, share their knowledge, and participate meaningfully in our communities.
Our goal is not simply to bring one featured guest to one event. We want to create a sustainable resource that allows us to include a broader and more diverse range of voices over time.
We don't want culture bearers to be treated as symbolic guests. We want them to be paid, supported, listened to, and meaningfully integrated into our events and communities.
Why Additional Fundraising Matters
There is another piece of the Culture Bearers Project that may be useful to communicate over time.
DanceMode is committed to keeping our events as financially accessible as we reasonably can while also paying artists fairly and bringing a diverse range of musicians, teachers, and culture bearers into our communities.
We also intentionally produce smaller, boutique events. Rather than continually increasing attendance to cover rising costs, we value events where people can connect more deeply with teachers, musicians, other dancers, and one another.
This smaller scale can also be particularly supportive for neurodivergent dancers and others who may find very large, crowded, highly stimulating dance events overwhelming or inaccessible. Creating events with a more human scale, opportunities for connection, and room for different ways of participating is an important part of what we value. Those choices create a financial challenge.
International travel, housing, live music, fair artist pay, and quality education are expensive. If all of those costs are passed directly into registration fees, our events become inaccessible to many of the people we want to welcome. If we simply increase attendance to cover them, we risk losing some of the qualities that make DanceMode events distinctive.
Fundraising, donations, and sponsorship allow us to find another way.
They help us support culture bearers and artists fairly while keeping participant costs more accessible and preserving the smaller, community-centered events we believe in.
Our Approach to Teaching Blues -
DanceMode Blues Statement
Blues dance is a Black American cultural tradition rooted in the music, communities, and lived experiences of Black Americans.
At DanceMode, we strive to honor these roots through music, movement, education, and community. We value live music, cultural context, improvisation, individual expression, and the social nature of Blues dance.
Our classes and events draw inspiration from a wide range of Blues, Jazz, and African Diaspora traditions while recognizing the unique history and cultural significance of Blues as a Black American art form.
We believe that learning directly from musicians, culture bearers, elders, and community members helps deepen our understanding of the dance, the music, and ourselves.
We welcome dancers of all backgrounds and experience levels and are committed to creating a respectful, inclusive, and supportive learning environment.
