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"One way of really empowering others is to give them the opportunity to have space to talk, to show up and to be visible"
 

Bence Gáspár

Bence Gáspár is an Open Floor teacher.  He serves on Open Floor International’s diversity, equity and inclusion circle and the OFI Board of Directors. He holds a PhD in evolutionary biology. Bence is queer and is of Jewish and Roma ancestry. He is originally  from Hungary and now lives in Berlin, Germany.

Q.: Most of our readers would agree that the values of diversity, equity and inclusion are important. I wonder if we could get a little more practical about what that means and how that impacts the way I teach.

Bence: We live in a system that is unfair, and that's the mildest way I can put it. Within the  social systems we live in, there are undeniable injustices happening in many dimensions.

For example, even though I would like to say I'm not a racist person, I acknowledge that I live in a racist society, and I was conditioned through this society. And this applies to ALL the dimensions, where some inequality might show up. The way that I look at this, is that there are differences between people. There are differences in education, age, housing status, and employment. There are differences in ethnic background and sexual identity… and the list could go on and on.

Now these differences will have a hierarchy, and that's where privilege and power come in. Some of these hierarchies have long histories, and some more recent and some more arbitrary that are also context dependent. In some contexts youth can be a privilege, and in others it can be marginalization or disempowerment. In some situations, someone who is older has more power, and in other situations this means less power. And I think most of these dimensions work in a similar way.

Many of us would like to do our work as teachers because we would like to support others, to share the healing, the development, and all the goodness that we have received from our teachers. Along the way we have to do our own work, of looking at where do I have those mental habits of being exclusive, of not including all the differences that are there? Most of the time, they are unconscious. Do we know enough of all of these issues? I grew up in Hungary, and until I moved to Germany, I knew personally less than five people of colour or of African descent. So the question is, what do I really know about people who have a very different experience than mine? 

Q.: It seems to me that trying to overcome inequality by offering to help those that are marginalized can be quite counterproductive. What does it mean to offer empowerment in a movement class without falling into that trap?

Bence: Before we offer inclusive language with instructions on the dance floor, there needs to be an attitude of humility and empathy. And this comes through listening, through tuning in, and through giving space. Not by appearing to know better or trying to solve problems, but by allowing the space for anyone to have their own process and healing.

There are layers of social structures that we are embedded in. And everyone, whether you are a teacher or a student, whether you have more money than I or less, in some dimension you will experience marginalization or disempowerment. So in all of our multiple dimensions as human beings, everyone will have an experience where they were marginalized. And some of us are in these places rarely compared to others. So for example, if my skin color was darker, the exclusion would likely happen to me all the time. There might be bigger thresholds for me to access some places in the city.

We are always embedded in social reality and we can never step out of it, because that's how our brains are wired. We're always comparing and we are always trying to find our place. So if I am acknowledging this kind of truth of human existence, then I know that in some dimensions, I have more power than the other person. And I can give space. One way of really empowering others is to give them the opportunity to have space to talk, to show up, and to be visible.

When we recognize that we have an attitude of “poor you” as a movement teacher, I recommend a good supervision session on that condescending part of us. It is our responsibility to cultivate our own resources and come to our teaching from a resourced place so we feel safe enough to give space to our participants. 

Q.: In some ways, having time, money and access to movement meditation is a privilege in and of itself. How do we reach out to communities that do not have easy access to our classes?

Bence: We can bring this work to places and communities, where people are less privileged, through connections that are already there in our social networks. It is a question of being aware of what are the pertinent dimensions of social inequality and injustice in my immediate context. For example, when I moved to Berlin, I started teaching at the Stretch Festival which is for queer men and people on the non-binary spectrum. I wanted to bring Open Floor to this community because I belong to it and therefore I have access to it. I think maybe that's the easiest way to start being inclusive, bringing this work to a place where we feel at home. Because there, we don't have to start learning from scratch about how someone else’s experience is.

Contact Bence:
connect@bencegaspar.com,
bencegaspar.com