The 2025 SHAPE of Movement: health.moves.minds
2025 is the year that DA:NCE continues to initiate a focus on the traumatic outcomes for harmful children’s DA:NCE. Most adults are still unaware of this issue. Very unaware. With that focus in mind, I headed to Baltimore Maryland to attend and exhibit at the 2025 National SHAPE(Society of Health and Physical Educators) Conference. Why […]
A Bouquet of Dance Organizations to Love
This February we celebrated Valentine’s Day around a bouquet of dance organizations dedicated to protecting children. Their fragrance is a celebration of values. I’ll start by describing the bouquet with a flower from Dance Awareness: No Child Exploited. Our mission is to bring international awareness and education to stop the exploitation through hypersexualization of children […]
Gifts to Flavor Your Heart: CESE Summit and Dance for Life
Christmas is a season to share gifts that will flavor your heart. At Christmas, the flavors we usually think of belong to goodies like cookies, fudge, candy canes and hot chocolate. But today, I want to flavor your heart with 2 gifts of goodness that DA:NCE personally attended: the 2024 Coalition to End Sexual Exploitation(CESE) […]
‘Healthy DA:NCE Showcase’: New Ideas Become 2 Ideas
At DA:NCE, ‘New Ideas Become 2 Ideas’.First idea. Drum roll. About a year ago the DA:NCE staff began to think about putting together a Healthy DA:NCE Concert to expose the public to healthy dance through the portal of different age groups of children. After further consideration and discussion, we decided that a full concert was […]
NDEO is a GO
NDEO is a go! The 2024 NDEO Conference(Revitalize: Breathing New Life into Your Dance Programs and Teaching Methods) was a green light that never went red! DA:NCE attended the conference with a panel of dance experts that spoke on the hypersexualization of children in dance: Anne Green Gilbert, Lynn Monson, Marlita Hill and myself. DA:NCE […]
DA:NCE Moves With Tik-tok
by Madeline Gruenler One of the most popular platforms for dance in this social media age is TikTok, where people try dance challenge trends, post their practice or performance videos, and talk about life in the dance world. Though dance is by no means the only topic of TikTok videos, it is a strong […]
The DA:NCE Coalition Goes Live
When I took dance as a child, my parents dropped me off at dance class and then picked me up. During that time, I was not exposed to hypersexualized adult content in costumes, choreography and music. Back then, cultural norms assumed that the dance environment for children was safe. And initially, for the main part, […]
The Healthy DA:NCE Directory gets the Spotlight
via GIPHY Woo-hoo! It’s time to turn a spotlight on news that will spark cultural change. If you took dance classes as a child, If you have a child or grandchild who is in dance or will be soon, If you know a child exposed to hypersexualized dance through media, or, If you are simply […]
SHAPE: Dance is Good Medicine
As DA:NCE traveled to Ohio to exhibit for the 2024 National SHAPE(Society of Health and Physical Educators) Conference, I was reminded of researcher Gail Dines who has coined the phrase ‘pornified culture’ to describe what today’s children are exposed to. Children from birth to 18 are growing up in a hypersexualized, toxic adult […]
DA:NCE into Moving Conversations: NRB 2024
The DA:NCE Team arrived at the NRB Conference in Nashville Tennessee and we DA:NCED into movement conversations with a lot of people. I attended the event accompanied by my husband Richard along with DA:NCE Development Director Tony Wilcox and his wife Celeste. We had a wonderful mission: the protection of children from hypersexualization in adult […]