Dance diplomacy, Iowa City, Iowa, September 7, 2017

- [Karen Chappell] I want to acknowledge our university and community supporters, the University of Iowa's International Programs, and the University of Iowa's Honors Program, and the Stanley UI Foundation Support Organization for their financial support. And I also want to thank today for our special financial sponsors Janice Weiner and Karen and Wally Chappell. So now, it is my pleasure to introduce Janice Weiner who will introduce our speaker. - [Janice Weiner] Thanks, Karen. It is my pleasure to introduce my friend Jonathan Hollander. Jonathan is one of this country's outstanding choreographers. A man committed to international cultural exchange and social activism through dance. As Karen mentioned, Jonathan is the Founder, President, and Artistic Director of Battery Dance and of Dancing to Connect. In 1982, he created the Downtown Dance Festival, New York City's longest running dance festival. Jonathan and his organization are very active in New York City's public schools with the objectives of reaching at risk youth and fostering a love of dance. Jonathan's work has taken him to very diverse locations such as Japan, France, Mongolia, Russia, the Philippines, Poland, Paraguay, you can continue naming them, Iraq, and India. And he has a special condition with India where he was an AFS exchange student years ago. His work has been supported by the US State Department, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Ford Foundation. Jonathan founded Battery Dance and Dancing to Connect to bridge divides, unite communities, empower youth, combat bullying and xenophobia. I first met Jonathan eight years ago in Germany where he and his dancer teachers were conducting one of the Dancing to Connect programs. I was amazed at the depth of the relationships they built with high schoolers in just one week of intensive workshops. There, I really learned that dance is truly a language that transcends spoken language. And when I watched those young people perform after their week of working with these dancers, I was, what's the technical term? I was blown away. Jonathan will speak to us today on how dance can ease conflicts, breed trust, and represent the very best of American values abroad. Thank you so much for coming. Jonathan. - [Jonathan Hollander] Thank you, Karen, and thank you, Janice. I want to return the favor for all the compliments that Janice just gave me. When I sat in a theater in Germany and we had an audience of mixed German families and Turkish immigrant families who had come to celebrate the achievements of their children in this workshop that we had run, Janice came up to the mic as Consul General of the United States, and she first welcomed the audience in German, and then she welcomed the audience in Turkish. And there was a sigh. You could hear an inhalation of the audience that they were amazed that an American could speak such perfect German and such perfect Turkish. And I thought to myself if all our diplomats were so well schooled as Janice, we would really be in very good shape around the world, better shape. So to step back a bit, we have images here that are just random shots from the different programs we've run in New York and around the world. It's 70 countries and counting at this point. And of course, being a dancer, and being a choreographer, and having the opportunity to also be a citizen of the world and a cultural ambassador, what could be better? It's been an incredible opportunity for me and I've never felt limited by my choice of career. Dance, as you know, is a very hard task to master. To be a dancer, to be a professional dancer, you have to spend hours in the studio. And each time you go to class, and you never stop taking class, you re-approach the same task over and over again and try to perfect something that is imperfectable. But to be able to come out of the studio and to be able to reach audiences in the context of a public dance festival in New York where thousands of people come out every night to see performances. And then to go around the world to places like Myanmar or the Congo where dance, the universal language that Janice mentioned, can transcend tensions, and political problems, and issues, and bring people together. This has been a wonderful thing for me and it's constantly re-inspiring. I'm 66 years old, and yet I feel like I'm always kind of at a new project, I'm at the beginning of my career all over again because there's no repetition involved. Every audience is different. Every group of students is different. But one thing that's consistent throughout is that young people have so much capacity, more than they even know. And the programs that we run reveal to young people how powerful they can be and how creative they can be. We have a four minute video that sort of chronicles the different aspects, and layers, and levels of Battery Dance. So I'd ask that we can just take a pause and bring that up. - [Female Speaker] Dancing can be really powerful. It can be really joyous or really emotional. I think that there are some things that transcend words. - [Vin Cipolla] The Battery Dance company is a creative powerhouse. I mean, for a small organization, it punches way above its weight. The caliber of the choreography and its presentation, the sensational quality of those dancers, those magnificent dancers. This is a company that travels throughout the world that teaches, that interacts with communities. You can't help if you're an artist if you're a true artist to not bring all that back into your work so that it emanates from you. - [Jonathan Hollander] Battery Dance Company is a unique institution. One could think that we're spread too thin because we run a festival for the public, we're in New York City public schools, we're in 60 countries around the world, we're creating and performing new work every year, but we see that as a fabric. It all speaks to the impact that you can have as a dancer on your community and your community can be as small as a small part of the city like Tribeca, or the entire world. Battery Dance Company found a home here on Broadway in Tribeca before it was branded Tribeca. There's no cultural vacuum in lower Manhattan and so many people work there and pass through there every day. So we've turned our own outdoor performance season into a festival. 32 years later, we have presented hundreds of dance companies from all kinds of genres. It gives us so much excitement and a feeling of contribution to our community to see thousands of people every summer come out and watch these performances. - [Rosemarie Bray] Since we can't offer dance as part of our curriculum, Jonathan comes in twice a year and does his Dancing to Connect program. It teaches them the importance of time, and accountability, and hard work, and focus, and team work. Not even to mention the physical benefits. - [Jonathan Hollander] We've had the privilege to travel to many countries where Americans have not always been welcome. What we've found is that art brings people together and transcends any difference in terms of politics or conflict, that we can all meet on level ground when it comes to the arts. - [Robin Cantrell] It is dance, but more often, you're spreading this idea to young people that they have the capacity to be creative. - [Annalysa Cole] I learned to spell my name with dancing. I never thought I would do that. Or like have a secret within dancing. - [Mira Cook] Students end up with a piece of choreography that they created together. And then they're performing in a big theater. So most people are sort of flabbergasted that they were able to accomplish that. - [Jonathan Hollander] As dancers without a political agenda, we can get inside issues, inside people's minds and hearts through giving them a voice on stage. Something happens that is very powerful. - [Jonathan Hollander] I thought I would focus on a couple different regions around the world where we've had programs, and I was going to start with Iraq. In 2012, we had an opportunity to bring the Dancing to Connect program to Kirkuk. And then Kirkuk turned out to be too dangerous. There were car bombs. So it moved to Erbil in the Kurdish autonomous region in the North of Iraq. We had Sunni, and Shia, Christian, and Kurdish, and Arab students in mixed groups. We had young men and young women in mixed groups. And the results over the 20 hours of the workshop were similar to anywhere else that we would have done it. Just to step back for a minute, the Dancing to Connect workshops, usually four or five hours a day. As opposed to the usual model of an arts education program in dance where there's a master teacher who stands in front of the room and everybody imitates their movement, in 20 hours, you're not going to teach somebody how to dance. You're not actually going to make a huge difference in their technique, but you can open up the doors to creativity. So we actually do not demonstrate movement in our workshops. All of the movement that comes together, crystallizes in a piece of choreography, is created by the students themselves. And many of the students have not had any formalized dance training before. So it's an opening of the door. It's a welcoming into the art form that we love and we're passionate about. So over the 20 hours of workshop, students come together. They learn how to work together. They learn about teamwork. They learn how to listen, and accept, and negotiate with each other in order to make decisions about the flow of the choreography, and so forth. And at the end, as was mentioned, they perform on a large stage. So we did the program in Erbil and word went out around the country, around Iraq, about Battery Dance, and about who we were, our website, social media. And I guess it was about nine months later, a year later, I heard from a dancer, a self-identified dancer in Baghdad who started to write to me on Facebook. And very quickly, I understood this was somebody very passionate about dance, but in Baghdad, very, very difficult circumstances in order to practice dance. And I thought to myself how could we help this young person? We weren't going to go to Baghdad. We actually tried, but were unable to get the US Embassy to support us because of security issues. Where would we run workshops in Baghdad? We would have to do them in the green zone, perhaps even in the compound of the US Embassy. How would we get the participants through those gates every day? It would have been really, really difficult to achieve, plus very expensive. So I had to think creatively and I came up with the idea of connecting him, this dancer, who was kind of a street dancer, break dancer, hip hop style, with one of our dancers who though he's been classically trained, also has a kind of urban dance background. And I thought we'll try using Skype to connect these two. And we set up lessons every week where Sean would be in my dance studio and Adel would be in the living room of his home where he had a signal and could connect. Of course, from time to time, the technology got in the way. The picture was pixelated. How could you actually see each other well enough to have a give and take communication? But my idea was, at first, I told him when you go into whatever space you are to practice, just take a camera and film yourself and then send us that film. And then my dancer Sean can critique you. We can get a sounding board and some back and forth. Well, there was a delay. And I kept saying just film anything. Don't put a lot of attention to this. But there was like day after day, I was waiting for something to come back. He said, "Don't worry, don't worry. "I'm getting it. It's going to happen." One day I was in the Museum of Natural History with one of my daughters who was on a class trip or a visit to a museum. And I was sitting in the lobby, and there was WiFi. I had my laptop, I was working, and something came through from Iraq. And it was a three minute film. There was a beginning, a middle, and an end. He was dancing, and somebody. It was called, I think, painter and dancer or something like that. Somebody that you couldn't see too well had an easel and was making a painting, and Adel was dancing. And first of all, his dancing was superb. It was really compelling. And at the end of this short film, the camera zoomed over to the easel where the artist had been working, and the painting was finished, and it was a portrait of me. And of course, you can just imagine how I felt. I mean, at this point, I had had very little contact with him. I hadn't made any life changing gestures, but he was so moved that I was willing to chat with him and be in touch with him that he paid this tribute to me. So of course, I was hooked at that point. You know, how do you walk away from that? So 12,000 Facebook messages back and forth ensued. I wouldn't know that number except that I looked back after July 3rd in 2016 when he was killed in the bombing in Baghdad to look over the history of our relationship. In the meantime, between those two events, we had been invited by the US Embassy in Amman, Jordan, and two festivals in Amman, Jordan, to perform and teach there, which of course, was a hop, skip, and a jump by plane, although a world away from Baghdad. So we applied to a foundation in the Netherlands, the Prince Claus Fund, which gave us a travel grant to bring Adel from Baghdad to Amman. Of course then, Janice would understand and many of you who have dealt with immigration and VISAs would understand that getting a young man, 22, from Baghdad to Amman was not an easy feat. And I consider myself a VISA expert. I've had to be with all of these programs that we've done. So I began the standard channel. I contacted the Royal Jordanian Embassy in Washington and said, you know, can you help me facilitate? Here's the story. They were very touched. I happened to find a young officer there who was really, really into this and really understood how important it was, but she couldn't do it. She couldn't figure out, because she's in Washington, the you know, ministry in Amman, Jordan, would be dealing with America and Jordan. How to get somebody from Iraq? That was outside of her influence. But that wasn't a problem according to Adel. He said, you know, I'm just going to go to the travel agency, buy the ticket, and they'll give me a VISA. And I'm like I don't think so. How does a travel agency get a government issued VISA into your passport? Well, the bottom line is he was right. There was a piece of paper, and it said something on it, and I had sent this to the Royal Jordanian. I said take a picture of this and send it to me. I'm going to test it with the Royal Jordanian. They were like no, no, no. It hasn't gone through the ministry. He'll never get in. Well, he got in. So the day came when we flew, Sean, who had been training him on Skype, Mira, one of our dancers who'd also had some interaction on Skype, and I, arrived in Amman, Jordan, at the airport, and there he was. And you can just imagine the emotion that we all felt. It was just incredible that this could happen. 10 days of training and he appeared on stage at the opening of the Amman Jazz Festival before a full house. He brought the house down. And then he danced side by side with Mira and Sean, dancers who'd been through, you know, dancing since children with all the standard training. And he having, in essence, 10 days in a dance studio. I was sitting in the front row, you know, hoping he could get through it. Not only did he get through it, there wasn't one step that he missed. So I mean, these are the kinds of experiences that we have had that just prove to us, and refresh us, and re-inspire us, as to what people can do when they really want to. Whether that's a student in a New York City public school. And by the way, we always work with schools that are dealing with at risk students. They're called over the counter kids 'cause they didn't get into any of the 12 high schools that they chose. They're sort of put into a high school. So there are metal detectors, et cetera. And then in those situations, we find capacity that just makes us feel like we're doing something important in the world. I also wanted to tell you a little bit about the aftermath of that death. Okay, July 3rd, this happened. We were completely heartbroken. But then we came together as a dance company, our board of directors, and said like what next? Like, how do we memorialize this life? What do we do with this? And by the way, if you Google Adel Euro, A-D-E-L Euro, you will see articles, BBC, NPR, the German national television, Australian television, et cetera. He became the poster child. He became the human story, the human face behind a bombing that was the worst bombing that's happened in Baghdad. So but what is Battery Dance Company going to do about that? So we decided to start a campaign, the Adel Euro Campaign for Dancers Seeking Refuge. And we have a dancer with us right now from Iraq who is the first recipient of that fellowship. And we brought him with us to Fort Wayne, Indiana. We had a residency there in Fort Wayne a few months ago. And if I could tell you what it was like to see an Iraqi teaching hip hop to third graders in a public elementary school in Fort Wayne, Indiana. You know, the kids didn't see anything different or unusual about it. It was the principal and the teachers that were sitting there agog that this could be happening. So Hussien actually knew Adel. So he is a direct connection to Adel Euro. Adel Euro's family is now in, his three brothers and his mother are all in Belgium seeking asylum there. We have been to visit them. And you know, this is a connection that is not going to end ever. We are fused together as one big family, which is how I feel about India. Karen mentioned or Janice mentioned that I was an AFS student. I was 16 years old and I lived with a family in Bombay. I went from Chevy Chase, Maryland, to Bombay. Quite a change. And in 1968, if you wanted to call home. I mean, there was no calling home. What you could do would be write an aerogram which would take 10 days to arrive. And by the time you got your answer, whatever problem you were complaining about was over. Coriander or some kind of stomach ailment. So I lived with a remarkable family in Bombay. My Indian father was the Managing Director of the ICICI, which is the first Indian bank which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. And my Indian mother was a Founder of the Indian National Theater. So I was plunged into this incredible, incredible family and incredible circle of contacts so that I was sitting in the living room of the Jhaveri sisters, the Manipuri dancers, and they were explaining to me the Krishna Radha stories as they rehearsed and danced. And other situations like this. I actually met Indira Gandhi. At that time, she entertained the AFS students in India on her lawn. We sat at her feet and had a conversation. I was a very callow, self assured, young 16 year old. And when I heard that AFS was going to end the program in India. India was going to end the AFS program because American students were polluting the minds of young Indians. The person who was carrying that message forth was named Morarji Desai who was the assistant to Indira Gandhi. A high ranked official. He came to Washington and was at the Indian Embassy and he met with me, and I tried to convince him to change his mind. I didn't succeed. But you know, the resonance, the opportunity for a teenager to be taken seriously to speak with important people, that was something that was a remarkable experience for me. And then 23 years later after becoming a dancer and choreographer with my own dance company, I went back to India as a Fulbright lecturer and had the opportunity to work in universities, and colleges, and performing arts center. And I brought my entire dance company on my Fulbright grant, which gives you a clue as to my personality that I'll max out every credit card in order to do a program. But that was an incredible experience of coming back to some of the people I had met as a teenager, coming back as an artist and having the opportunity to perform, and to teach, and to travel through India with my dance company. That set in motion something that's continued up 'til today. I'm a Founder of the Indo-American Arts Council in New York City. We present Indian dance at our festival every summer. I'm working right now. We are the cover story on SPAN, which is the American Embassy's bi-monthly magazine that goes to a quarter of a million people in India this month, talking about the work that we've done. I guess, you know, as artists, we work in a very spontaneous way. We work organically. One project leads to the next and there's never sort of a master plan. Like, when I started Battery Dance Company, all I knew was that I wanted to be a dancer. I wanted to be a choreographer. And that was really kind of the fundamental thing. To have a dance company, you have to have space, so I found a loft in lower Manhattan, a building that nobody else wanted because all these towers were going up around it. But there was this like five story building with wooden floors, and that's what I wanted. That was in 1976, which was an important year for America, as you know. And Lower Manhattan was the venue where all the tall ships came from around the world to celebrate our bicentennial, the OpSail, which was a project of my father in law's. So there I am, sailors from all over the world coming through the streets of lower Manhattan. The tall ships with flags from all over the world, including, at the time. I mean, consider what 1976, the Cold War was still up and running and yet he managed to get ships from Poland and the Soviet Union to celebrate the American bicentennial. That spirit of one world, and of citizens of the world, and that people would come together around the water, around sailing, and why not around dance. So that was kind of a fundamental idea, but how I would achieve it was never something I knew until one step led to another. I wanted to tell you, sort of transplant us now to the Congo where we've actually did two different programs. We arrived in the Congo after having been in Kenya, in Nairobi. In Nairobi, we were working with college students who were already using dance to message ideas to people in villages about public health and so forth. So it was like a very, very high, you know, already educated, already engaged kind of group that we were working with. We went to the Congo and our first meeting with the 100 participants that were going to be working with us was scary because the faces of the Congolese young people who were going to work with us were so challenging. You could see from their body language and their facial expressions that they were not warm, fuzzy, welcoming. They were challenging. Who are you, and why are you here, and what do you want from us? In a few days of workshops, this mood, this affect completely changed. We saw some of the best, most incredible dancing that we have seen anywhere. But the thing that kind of was the eye opener for me, we didn't really know where these young people were coming from. What was their home life? What was their environment? Until the very end, after the program. I think we must have arrived at night so we really didn't see the scenery along the road between the airport and where we were staying. On the way back, it was daylight, and there were walls, but there were little chinks in between these sections of wall and you could see the worst slums, the most incredible, terrible situation you could imagine. And to think that our students showed up every day for their dance workshops with clean clothes, somehow groomed, and on time was unfathomable once you saw where they were coming from. Again, what gave them the motivation to be there? What gave them the creativity, the ability, to band together, to accept us after initially really wondering who we were and what we wanted from them. Once we proved ourselves in terms of our friendliness and our humility, then the sky was the limit. And I think that that's been sort of a theme carrying through. How am I doing for time? Okay. Paraguay. The US Ambassador to Paraguay, Leslie Bassett, who I think Janice knows, was an extraordinary woman. And she decided that how could she use dance, how could she deploy her public affairs department to use dance to address a national issue. It was the 25th anniversary of the ADA, the Americans with Disability Act. And she decided that Paraguay, although it had a fast growing economy, on a national basis, its awareness and support of people with disabilities really needed an infusion of new ideas. So she charged her public affairs officer to discuss with us could our Dancing to Connect program be in some way modulated to involve people with disabilities. We'd done some work like that in Hong Kong. I think that was the first. But it wasn't a field that we really had explored very fully. So we really had to go back to the drawing board and think carefully. We worked with the embassy. Five groups were composed of students with a particular disability, whether it was hearing, or visual, or wheelchair bound, emotional, cognitive disabilities. Each one, with a group of students from dance schools. So we were bridging two very, very severe divides. One was economic because the students who were in dance schools were from very wealthy families that could afford to send their kids to a dance school. The students with disabilities were pretty much coming from outside Asuncion. They were from, you know, economically deprived communities. We found out that there was a large number of blind students in Paraguay because some kind of mistake was made in hospitals at a certain point and drops that were put in children's eyes were making them blind. So there was a group with blind students and then visually able, you know, normally sighted students. And I'll never forget Leslie came to each one of the workshops and this was not a pro forma meeting by an ambassador for a photo op. She went. She got down, sat on the floor. Spoke perfect Spanish. And was asking the students to tell her what it had been like to be in these workshops. And I was there. I remember specifically or particularly the one with the visually impaired students. And one of the students who was a sighted student who was holding the hand of her blind counterpart started to talk about the experience, and she began to cry. The blind girl began to cry. Leslie began to cry. I mean, I had to leave the room because I'm a loud crier. It was just so moving. But then the embassy did something really interesting because a week before we arrived, we'd done all this work. You know, think about bringing a dance company to another country. You have to do all the work with the theater. You know, what's the lighting capacity? How are we going to translate what we do to their needs, and so forth. They changed the theater a week before we arrived. Why? Because the embassy had said to the local municipality you don't have ramps. You don't have, you know, wheelchair accessible bathrooms. Like six months earlier. And they had said that they would retrofit the auditorium. They didn't do it. So we had students who were in wheelchairs, but we also had audience members who were in wheelchairs and so the embassy said not going to happen. So they moved it to another auditorium where they could go it. They brought in a tent and lavatories to be outside the auditorium, and a ramp so that students could get in and out with their wheelchairs. It was just extraordinary. So the house was full. The house was full of people of every possible economic and physical condition. In fact, it was so overloaded that they had to put video monitors in the lobby to accommodate 150 or 200 people who couldn't fit into the auditorium. And for us, it was a learning experience. It was new. And we learned that these students could do incredible things. I mean, it was just unbelievable truly to see blind students launching themselves into the air in leaps and jumps knowing that their sighted counterparts would be there to catch them. It was just amazing. So there is a case where the embassy decided on a mission goal and shaped the artistic program to meet that goal. And I think Karen was asking me what is the state of the budget for the state department. Going forward, we're all concerned about that. The good news is I heard that the Education and Cultural Affairs Bureau, which deals with the Fulbright and exchanges as well as cultural programs has a bigger budget for fiscal year 2018 than it did in '17, which is remarkable. We don't know what the future will be beyond that. But I think these programs are very, very important, and accomplish something that speaker programs. I'm a speaker, so. But speaker programs can't do, you know. I can describe to you but I cannot reveal to you what you would see if you went into a theater and experienced this for yourself, or if your children experienced it, or if the students experienced it. Seeing Palestinian and Israeli young people who sit on the side in the first two days at lunch time, separate, you know, like that. And then by the third day, you can't separate them anymore because they have become friends. They have become colleagues. They understand their common humanity. And seeing an Israeli mother in tears after the performance to say I never, ever thought that my daughter could dance with a Palestinian. So seeing these things happen, they revive our interest in our own careers and the hard work that we put in in order to do this, but they also show us what the arts can accomplish. So thank you. - [Karen Chappell] What is your dance background and how are students in the country selected or found? - [Jonathan Hollander] My dance background includes folk dance, classical ballet, and modern dance. I was a scholarship student with Merce Cunningham. I danced with Twyla Tharp. I studied at the Joffrey Ballet. Just names that you might be familiar with. I started dance late. I was a pianist. I was a pianist from age five to 18. I never really thought I was going to be a professional classical musician. I couldn't sit at the piano bench long enough to really give it its due, but I couldn't leave music because I loved music so much and I needed music in my life. So it wasn't until I really started getting into dance that I realized that dance is my music. So that's really that story. How are the students in the country selected and found? That's a very good question. It leads me to just mention the fact that when our programs are successful, it's because our local partners have done a really good job. Our local partners on the ground are the ones that select the students. Our sort of guiding principle is the only criterion is that the person volunteers. We don't like it when a teacher says I think this will be good for my class to do this and then the kids are resisting. We want the kids to want to be there and they have to sign a contract to say that they will be there for every hour of every workshop because the creative process is happening day by day and if they miss a day, they've missed something very pivotal in the process. So that's the main criterion. - [Karen Chappell] Okay, these two questions kind of go together. How do you begin your workshops using other people's movements, especially since you do not demonstrate? And how did you manage warming up the students? I assume it was not a formal class as in the US. - [Jonathan Hollander] Those are also very good questions. We have evolved a kind of a curriculum or I would say a portfolio of ideas that our teachers, our teaching artists who are all professional dancers, have at the ready because every group that they encounter is different. So they can't come in with a cookie cutter approach. They have to really be flexible. But we do warm up. That's the one part that is sort of led in a typical fashion of certain things that are not. We're not giving plies and tendus. We're giving more like sit ups, and push ups, and things like that. Just general body calisthenics to get the kids ready. There was some other part of that question, I think. Oh, it had to do with the student created movement. How did you manage warming up the students? How do you begin your work? Okay, so there's certain, I would call them prompts that the teaching artists use like write your name in space. All kinds of different sort of abstractions that get the kids thinking and moving. Like one would be sometimes we use paper and crayons or markers and you're supposed to make a doodle and then create that doodle in space with your body. I mean, just like little challenges, little prompts that get kids moving and out of their heads. And from that, you know, some kids will do some extraordinary things. And then go from doing individually created movements to okay, let's pair up. Teach what you just created to someone else. Well, for one thing, these kids don't have muscle memory where they remember what they did. So that's something that they have to come back, you know, start over again. Okay, I have to memorize this. I don't remember what I just did. So there are all kinds of cognitive learning that goes into this process. It's really remarkable at how many different sort of skills are developed on the spot. - [Karen Chappell] Can you tell us anything about follow up on the part of the host country to any of these programs, if there was any? Like Congo, Israel, Palestine, or Paraguay. And I guess I would add, are there statistics that the state department puts together so that we know what effect programs like yours have? - [Jonathan Hollander] These are really, really good questions. We had to kind of evolve our own thoughts about this particular issue. At first, someone in Germany said to me. Germany has been a place where this Dancing to Connect has gone to as many as 20 cities. It started with one, and it's just proliferated. And a friend of mine in Germany who runs a foundation there said Jonathan, you know you're not going to be coming to Germany forever. What are you going to do about the sustainability and the, you know, follow on of this program? And at first, I was really resistant 'cause I thought I was hand picking my teaching artists. They had certain qualities. They had certain abilities. How could I just randomly accept German freelance dancers, you know, that I didn't know or hadn't in any way vetted? But I realized that was wrong, that we need to have teaching artists from the country that we're working in as partners, as shadows, and eventually, taking over the program. I'll give you an example of how that's worked so well in Greece. We ran a program in Greece. We worked with the US Embassy and the Onassis Cultural Foundation there. And the Director of Arts Education at the Onassis was really, really, a talented, smart woman and she picked five freelancers from the community of dancers in Athens. They had a session with me and then they were split up and put one on one with each one of our teaching artists. So right from the beginning, they were in the mix. Five years later, they have now completely taken over the program. Those five have trained five more, and five more. The program has gone from Athens. It's always in Athens every year, but it's also included another city each year. So that's the best kind of model of the sustainability. Now, the other question was how do you show the impact and I was very lucky six years ago when Emad Salem, my colleague who's now the Vice President and COO of Battery Dance came to me from the SIPA program at Columbia, the School of International and Public Affairs. He came fully loaded with statistical experience, how to evaluate programs. And so we are one of the few arts organizations that for six years, has been having entrance and exit questionnaires to track the difference, the change in attitudes and all kinds of experience that has happened over the course of the time. And one of the most compelling pieces of information that came out of that was of course, the Palestinian and Israeli mixed groups. Like, what was the inclination towards war as the solution of a problem. Questions like that, we saw statistically significant changes in student's attitudes about the other. - [Karen Chappell] This will be the last question and kind of a fun one. Your stories are wonderful. Are you making notes for a memoir? - [Jonathan Hollander] I would really love to, but I'm so involved in the day to day of running the programs that my choice has been not to take time out to write. I'm writing all the time. I'm collecting stories all the time. But at this point in my life, I want to make the most of being in the trenches. That's really where I want to be. Later on, perhaps I will, I will write a book. But right now, it's really about the programs themselves and the book that's being written every day. - [Karen Chappell] Thank you, Jonathan. A wonderful program. I also want to thank our sponsors, the University of Iowa's International Programs, the University of Iowa's Honors Program, and the Stanley UI Foundation Support Organization for their generous support. And also to thank today's special financial sponsors, Janice Weiner and Karen and Wally Chappell. We also want to thank City Channel Four for making our programs available to viewing audiences. So now, Jonathan, as a token of our appreciation, I want to present you with the coveted Iowa City Formulations Council mug. - [Jonathan Hollander] Wow, thank you. - [Karen Chappell] Thank you. So thank you all for coming. We're adjourned. - [Scott Koepke] My name is Scott Koepke and I run a garden education service called Soil Mates through New Pioneer Coop. And so this is our second annual children's garden pet mall day for Arts Fest where the kids help me plant a variety of vegetables and flowers. Today is just bed preparation, which I started early. Seeding, transplanting. I'll get some mulch in too later on, which will just be some leaves. It'll just be some mulch. And then the final thing today is we'll put up this white fencing. If things germinate properly, you should be able to come back in a few days or a week and start to see some little sprouts. It's always a magical thing to put this in and wait, like I say. And then give it the proper balance of sun, soil, air, water. And then see that one day when you come down the pet mall and everything is starting to wake up. I teach gardening to kids in the public schools and we do a lot of composting too. But this is a life skill class too. These kids are learning about a lot of lessons that nature's teaching us about balance, and respect, and nurturance, and patience. I like to let them know that they should let some stuff go to seed so we can save the seed for next year. It's just a great natural classroom. Flowers, of course, need to be incorporated into all the vegetable mix just to attract pollinators and beneficial insects. Before the ochre pod produces a pod, it gives you a little flower as most of these plants do before they are pollinated. This plant is so incredible. Not only the root structure on it, but before it produces the pod, it gives us this little pale yellow delicate flower that only opens up in the morning for just a couple hours and then closes. And it only is with us for a few days before it falls off and starts producing that. To me, it's the color of summer. 'Cause I'll come over here and look at this in the morning and then bees will just kind of fly in and just hang out there, and pollinate, and then move around. And then we harvest them once a week during the season for Table to Table. So it gets taken to the Farmers Market on Wednesdays. I just have to thank the city again for letting me to this and I just have to thank the community for being so respectful of the space. I'd just encourage everybody to come on down throughout the summer, watch it progress through June, July, August, September. Things start dying down around September. But this was still giving us stuff into October. And then we'll put another cover crop down and do it all over again, and grow food right here in downtown Iowa City. Now, in the third year of this, this soil has really been built up significantly. It's just so bio-diverse. And all I'm doing is composting and cover cropping. And that's it. I'll leave some of the root crop. I'm going to get rid of all the stuff that you've seen I pulled. There's tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, eggplant. We're getting all these peppers came off today, actually. And they're still actually in pretty decent shape. I'm going to leave these. Kale is so hearty. You know, kale will go 'til, like I say, snow is going to be on this before you know it and it's still going to be fine. Now, this dill has come back both years. It just starts re-seeding. What's really cool is there's a lot of seed in here that's going to be annual, you know, self seeding annuals. Like I wanted to save the seeds. These are so cool. Kids love this when you open up these pods, you get these little. Look at how beautiful those seeds are in there. - [Male Speaker] Oh wow, that's beautiful. - [Scott Koepke]And when you let the ochre pods dry. See if we can. You can hear like a little shaker, so you can paint 'em and use little musical ochre instruments. But if I let these germinate. Like I bet you anything, if we come back in the Spring, there's going to be ochre growing right there. There are some other good examples of seeds that I always let go, dry, out. All these beans. Now, I had lots of beans. Look at these beautiful black beans that I'm letting just kind of go to seed here. And we'll see how much of this comes back in the Spring. Look at all these seeds that were dropped out of one squash plant. And I can't remember what variety this was, but look at all those. Those are totally viable for next year. And in fact, again, I will keep these here and we'll have squash growing right here next year. I actually didn't even plant these cherry tomatoes this year. Those were ones that were from last year that just germinated. Over winter, came right back. Okay, here we go. There we go. Yeah baby! Sweet potatoes. Well, you're right. They do kind of look yammy, don't they? - [Male Speaker] It's already starting to grow again. - [Scott Koepke] Yeah! Yeah, check it out! This is the treasure dig I love. I can't believe I have worms in here because for raised beds like this, that's tougher for worms to overwinter in situations like this. Check it out, an old melon. It's decomposing, but I mean, you know, this is not an ideal spot to put melon but I do anyway just to show people what's possible. Here's a new, some of these seeds haven't been eaten yet by the birds. It's so cool watching them hang upside down. What's really cool is that in the summer, the best highlight for people to look at visually is the natural trellis that occurs when, for instance, this is an old cucumber vine here and what happens is these cucumbers will grow and hang off of the sunflowers. It's just such perfect compatibility. And the three sisters I did last year had that with the corn. I can't do corn down here anymore 'cause the wind just knocks it down. But corn in the middle, the Native American design, you know, the pole beans climbing the corn and then the squash at the base. And all three of those plants compliment one another nutritionally. The root systems are exchanging biochemical information that compliment one another's, you know, nutrient needs. It's just ancient wisdom. But I mean, these are just so strong. I mean, again, look at that beautiful, beautiful root system on this thing. That smells so good. Just so good. You know, the city lets me hook up water. I have a water hook up right there. And because these beds are raised, that's the one thing that's a little drawback is when you dangle a root system unnaturally this high above this ground, it dries out so fast. And these roots, they want to dive deep for subsoil hydration and nutrients and they can't do that when they're raised. So that means I have to come in here and water this, you know, quite a bit more than I would if this was just connected to the ground. Hi, pretty. I'm going to keep you. - [Male Speaker] It's actually a pretty big plant. - [Scott Koepke] Well, and what happens is too, these also produce seeds. You can see the seeds in there right there, those beautiful black bases of those seeds. These also have, I've noticed that the marigolds have come back on their own too. At the very end, what I'm going to do, take the old hand plow. Oh, a worm. Cool, thank you. What I'm going to do is just kind of scratch and I just drag this through really shallowly to scuff up the surface. No need to go real deep. It's just as simple as taking a handful of this rye grass. Throw it down. I know it sounds crazy, but believe it or not, even though it's cold, this stuff will still germinate. I'll just lightly do this too so this stuff will just all germinate in the next week or so and start to grow a little blanket of rye grass. But then eventually, you know, soon, it's going to get real, real cold consistently. But what's happening now, we're in that cusp of time where the weather is, you know, cold at night, but now in the day, it's still getting up. Like tomorrow, I think it's supposed to be 60. So that's where these seeds are still going to open up and germinate. But then when it gets consistently night and day below 32, or 30, that's when everything's going to die back and go dormant until Spring. And then in late March typically, early April, it will start to wake up and this seed will then re-germinate and this grass will start to grow again. And like I told you before, I'll let it get about this tall before I come in and whack it back. But it's just such a great way to condition the nutrients for next Spring. This is community building for me. This brings people together and heals communities. You nurture yourself and you nurture your community when you nurture plants. That's my bottom line. - [Narrator] You're watching City Channel Four. 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