Community Dance Project and the Jones/Zane Educational Partnership

In 2021, The Max H. Gluck Foundation gave LMU Dance a grant to fund Community Dance Project (CDP), a co-curricular program that teaches LMU students to teach dance in under-resourced K-12 schools in the Los Angeles area. CDP assembled a twelve-person creative team to develop a middle school study guide after Bill T. Jones’s acclaimed evening-length work, Deep Blue Sea. The team included three LMU dance faculty, two dance majors, three middle school dance teachers from the Los Angeles Unified School District, a leading dance educator from New York City’s renown Dance Education Laboratory (DEL) and three performers from the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company. The team worked remotely over three months to write the first-ever interactive, embodied movement study guide for this epic work of Bill T. Jones’s that explores feelings of alienation and the search for “we.”