Building the dance community virtually during COVID-19

With the advent of the global pandemic wrought by COVID-19, much of the world’s citizenry was forced to immediately pivot to new ways of doing business. This included shifting instructional delivery systems around the globe to online platforms. In the US and elsewhere, the dance education community displayed remarkable resiliency and perhaps more importantly – an amazing affinity for communal problem solving. As the nation’s leading, nonprofit, membership organization dedicated to advancing dance education centered in the arts, the National Dance Education Organization (NDEO), “Identifies and acts in constructive and strategic ways to positively shape public, social and education policy about and for dance in education…” Accordingly, NDEO played a major role as a convener of dance educators throughout the US to problem solve how to provide equitable access to quality opportunities for learning in dance, delivered in a responsibly socially distanced manner as dictated by the latest science. This article highlights salient aspects of the shared journey of the dance education community during the pandemic. What is chronicled here is a demonstration of ways in which dance education is better due to collective impact of a cross-section of the nations’ dance educators, acting as stewards of the art of dance.