Q: How have you seen other professors supporting their students during this time?
I mean it's been really interesting. I am in touch with the University of Michigan, there's a group of women who all teach in dance departments. We have sort of a research working group and we've been meeting every week to talk about our work. I've actually been really intrigued that a lot of them are talking about students doing really great work at this moment and think feeling like some of it has to do, maybe counter intuitively, with the fact that I have a little bit less access to professors. So, you all are high achievers and you want to do well. It's a pretty frequent conversation, we wonder, “What's the right way to do it?” and they would give more guidance, which isn't a bad instinct. I would never wish this circumstance on anyone but I'm curious about how it might have just set people off on the path they want to take and fate having to figure things out in a different community than they might have. I'm intrigued about that and I'm even intrigued about thinking about it if we're teaching online in the fall. We're going to treat it as an opportunity to work differently.
Clare Croft is a dance historian and theorist, as well as a dramaturg and curator. She is the author of Dancers as Diplomats: American Choreography in Cultural Exchange (Oxford, 2015), a study of the U.S. State Department’s sponsorship of international dance tours as a form of cultural diplomacy. She is also the editor of the book and website Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings (Oxford, 2017), a collection of essays by scholars and artists. In connection to this volume, Croft also curates the EXPLODE: queer dance project, which began in Ann Arbor (2012-15), toured to New York (2015), and will tour nationally in 2019.