International Journal of Education & the Arts

Citation: Ebanks, N-A. (2022). Screen past flesh goin’ on to bone: Musings on Jamaican tertiary dance education beyond the time of COVID19. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 23(SI 1.7). Retrieved from http://doi.org/10.26209/ijea23si1.7

Q: “What time is it?”
A: “Skin, past flesh, goin’ on to bone.”

As descendants of stolen Black bodies in the ‘New World’, many dancing Jamaicans have become living anachronisms, unconsciously embodying retentions of life-renewing cultural movement practices past spirit and bone, into flesh and skin. Jamaican tertiary dance education has long been predicated on this baseline understanding of spirit, skin, flesh and bone as felt things. Although dance educators had grappled with ‘dis’embodied millennial audacity before COVID-19, we trusted that corporeal ancestral alchemy would remain, and thought we would always have safe touch in our pedagogy toolkits when words were not enough. This article discusses selected experiences of tertiary dance education at the Edna Manley College of the Visual Arts during the COVID-19 pandemic and questions the ability of ancestral somatic legacies to transcend this ‘no-touch’, physically distant pandemic moment. Additionally, it highlights key ways in which teaching dance virtually has provided rich embodiment experiences, crossing from screen to bone with technology and imagination, and provides recommendations for dance educators to re-create learning spaces for students which re-connect them with spirit, skin, flesh and bone.