I did not go to an Ivy League university as an undergraduate. I went to McGill, known by some (present company excluded) as the “Canadian Harvard,” and paid about 1250$ per semester for tuition. Residents of Québec pay the lowest tuition fees in North America and students are currently on strike (various departments across most campuses have stopped going to class) and have taken to the streets in order to secure the accessibility of post-secondary education. Last week, on March 22nd, 200 000 people marched in downtown Montreal in what was, by some accounts, the province’s most successful protest ever.

I mention this because had I not grown up in a city that boasts universities that are at once some of the best in Canada and the most affordable, I might not have ended up at Yale. So my question is, where else will Cunningham’s legacy travel? Where else could I have experienced the quest for the ever-elusive-lower-back-curve and the many permutations of twist and curve, not to mention Roaratorio, Pond Way and the other choreography we have learned? What are the mechanisms that make transmission possible and how are they facilitated? Is the experience of a modern dance tradition contingent on certain kinds of privilege? How do we make modern dance more accessible across lines of class and race? How could modern dance in turn be transformed by a broader engagement with lovers of dance?

I remember, I was only a few years younger than many of my YDT colleagues when I had my first modern class, with Linda Marchand, who has remained my teacher back home (and who encouraged me to audition when I told her about this project). I remember doing improvisation to Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five,” learning modern dance technique – the spiral, the contraction, the high lift, suspension, triplets – and discovering a quality of movement, a rhythm, a dynamic that finally seemed capable of taking me outside of myself, to I place I had been longing to go.

I don’t believe in fate, but I found out about YDT through such a random series of events (most important was being in a seminar on Caribbean intellectuals with the wonderful Emily Coates) that I am almost convinced that this was meant to be. Emily told me she needed translators for a troupe of francophone dancers who were coming to dance and teach a workshop at Yale, and I shyly told her that I also danced. She told me about the upcoming audition, but I was so terrorized I tried to forget about it and never brought it up to her again, until I saw the infamous cover of Yale Daily News on Thursday December 1st 2011, at 9:26am, on my way to Spanish class.

So that is how I came to this unique opportunity, through a series of very fortunate events (and social democrat government policies). I could not have willed this if I would have tried. And I never would have expected having such an experience at Yale (none of us could have really, since YDT is so young), but now that I have been here for almost two years, I know that opportunities like this define Yale (forget lux and veritas).

Is modern dance a commodity whose value is contingent on its limited accessibility (like an Ivy League education) and specifically on limited admission for working class families and people of color?  What small or large measures can we take to break down some of the barriers we have erected? How does YDT challenge some structures of inequality in dance? Does the presence of “dance at Yale” legitimize and institutionalize this artistic form in a needed way? Is the choice of Payne Whitney as a location in New Haven for our performance a step in the right direction? Where do you think Merce Cunningham’s legacy will/can go after this?