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Much of Western and normative dance is colonized as well as ripe with racism. All of this needs to be deconstructed & challenged. Learning histories, unlearning prejudices, celebrating non-Western dance styles, and combatting cultural appropriation and racism in dance spaces is vital. 

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Equity In Dance advocates for: 

- Dancers and dance educators learning & teaching histories and origins of what is now popular and Westernized dance. 

- Appreciating folk and cultural dance from across the globe. 

- Dance competitions having rules and regulations about cultural appropriation and racism. 

- Dance instructors to have a working knowledge of what cultural appropriation means and how it, alongside racism, is present in dance, specifically competition dance culture. 

- Dance studio owners, directors, and dance teachers to allow dancers to wear natural hair styles. Additionally, dance educators and studio directors need to learn diverse hairstyles that are accessible to dancers with non- Eurocentric hair textures. 

- Studio directors providing diverse resources on makeup brands, dance wear, and dance shoes that have wide ranges of skin tones to choose from. 

- Dance wear companies, dance studio directors, and dance instructors should allow students to wear tights, ballet shoes, and pointe shoes that match their natural skin tones- as opposed to the 'universal' pink, tan, and black colours provided. 

- For dance educators, studio directors, and competition & convention leaders to research racism in dance and be actively working on being anti-racist, as well as de-centering whiteness in dance. This means unlearning biases, listening to and uplifting the voices of People of Colour and learning from resources made by People of Colour. 

- Dance spaces to unlearn the "high and low" art dichotomy commonly found in dance & appreciate historically European dances and historically non-European dances equally. 

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See the "Land Acknowledgement" page on our menu to read about the land Equity In Dance works and dances on, in addition to a list of Indigenous organizations to learn from and donate to. 

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