From the April issue of Dance magazine:
“If you look at American TV as much of the rest of the world does, you would think we all went around wrestling and wearing bikinis,” quipped Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last year. Dance diplomacy introduces a new script in places where the American presence is limited to action films and TV sitcoms. Dance fulfills the State Department’s intention to more broadly communicate American ideals without the barrier of language. For CityDance, that meant giving budding ballerinas the confidence to exert their bodies and stretch their minds with modern dance in Belarus. In Bahrain, it meant opening children’s eyes to the concept that multiple movement interpretations can all be right. In Algeria, it meant being the first Americans that a group of North African hip hop dancers ever met. “In the case of countries where information is tightly controlled, freedom of expression is most often found in art,” says CityDance Artistic Director Paul Gordon Emerson.
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