| Coming to a Place of Eldership by Kierra D. Foster-Ba
by Kierra D. Foster-Ba, November 2024
Fellow teachers:
I had been asked to share about my maturation as a teacher. For me (and I expect for many others), part of aging, growing in experience, has been the unraveling. In my early life, I was much more fixed, much more likely to believe there was one superior way rather than seeing the rightness and value in multiple approaches. My dad is a jazz musician, and he is a purist. In fact, what is being called "Smooth Jazz" and includes artists like Sade, would not be considered Jazz by him. I inherited this binary way of thinking. I applied it to life and certainly in my approach to facilitating the 5Rhythms. I really wanted people to experience the 5Rhythms, not a blend or hybrid, but the 5Rhythms. In one of my practice classes I taught a group of belly dancers. I was in a troupe at that time. I was in despair during the class because to me, it looked like all they did was belly dance despite my clear instructions to follow the map. After the class, several students declared they had never felt more free. They explained that they felt more relaxed and more energized at the same time. That was the very beginning of the unraveling. But it would be a bit of time before I would let go and trust the bodies in the room to find ways to embody the rhythms that made sense to them. This does not mean I no longer push students to surprise themselves with unpredictable, unpracticed movement, or that I have stopped using metaphors to elicit body shapes that adhere to the map. Rather it means that I recognize that staccato looks very different on someone who never purposely moves their hips and that their imperceptible movements are just as valid as someone's with effortlessly moving hips. Some of the unraveling has been suspending judgement. Some of it has been letting my ego and need for control to expire. I like the idea of an expiration date… Poof! This need and idea that it will be my fault if things don't go well fades, just evaporates. My role is to support. I am the backup, not the leader. The bodies in the rooms are each individual leaders. All of my offerings are an invitation not a command, not even a suggestion. In liberation, Kierra D. Foster-Ba
Kierra Foster-Ba is a 5Rhythms® and Femme! teacher based in New York. Kierra is passionate about authentic movement as a path to human liberation. She studied the 5Rhythms® with Gabrielle Roth, the founder, for 15+ years and appears in Gabrielle's Power Wave video and in the documentary "Dances of Ecstasy". She has also danced with PURE (Public Urban Ritual Experiment) an international organization of artists devoted to using belly dance to promote peace and end suffering. Kierra is also a school administrator in the NYC Department of Education. She has been serving the students of New York City since 1989 and has been offering 5Rhythms® classes in New York City since 2008. Kierra offers workshops throughout the world including Europe, Latin America, and Asia. |
