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 […]
DA:NCE Connects with KOSA
Did you watch the U.S. Congressional Hearings in Washington on January 31, 2024 concerning the lack of safety mechanisms on social media platforms for children? CEOs of Meta (notably Mark Zuckerberg), TikTok, Snapchat, Discord, X and others were called on to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the exposure of inappropriate adult material to […]
DA:NCE Newsletter – January 2024
DA:NCE Newsletter – January 2024 What if our collective voices could flip the switch for a dance teacher who hadn’t truly thought about how the sexy dance moves she was teaching her young students would impact them? What if our stories reached a parent who hadn’t dared to speak out for his or her own […]
Add Your Voice to ‘My DA:NCE Why’
If you’re reading this article, you already know that there’s been a radical change from healthy educational dance to harmful hypersexualized children’s dance in adult costumes, choreography and music. Sociologist Dr. Gail Dines calls it ‘a pornified culture.’ Researcher Phillip Adams calls it ‘Corporate Paedophilia.’ Cultural transformation has come through exposure to on-going internet, media […]
2023: ‘A Very Good Year’ for DA:NCE
At DA:NCE, 2023 was a very good year. That line was made famous in a song sung by Frank Sinatra. It resonates with me. Now let’s look at how the song repeated ‘It Was A Very Good Year’ in the lyrics and personalize it. 2023 was a very good year for DA:NCE because you supported […]
‘She Loves to Move’ and move and move
It’s time for healthy dance to get the spotlight with ‘She Loves to Move.’ It’s been a very special yearlong celebration…and we’ve found out what we already knew: a child really does love to move and move and move. The profound lyrics of the song demonstrate this: “She loves to move. Poetry in motion, […]
DA:NCE Newsletter – September 2023
DA:NCE Newsletter – September 2023 Announcing our $5,000 She Loves to Move Winner! Months of hard work, dedication and celebration of healthy, age-appropriate children’s dance have led us to this moment: the announcement of our $5,000 She Loves to Move Call for Choreography Winner! Throughout 2023, thousands of individuals were touched by the DA:NCE Awareness […]
She Loves to Move Call for Choreography Reflection
By: Marlita Hill, Lead Adjudicator for DA:NCE’s $5,000 Call for Choreography With an aim to publicize DA:NCE Awareness’s mission and celebrate the healthy, age-appropriate dance happening throughout our communities, DA:NCE launched its inaugural choreography competition, ‘She Loves to Move.’ The ‘She Loves to Move’ Call for Choreography began with an October 2022 invitation sent out […]
‘My DA:NCE Why’: Reflections on Innocence
“A child’s innocence is the one gift, that once stolen, can never be replaced.” ―Jaeda DeWalt Innocence: Ignorance, freedom from cunning; lack of worldly experience DA:NCE just released a new resource called ‘My DA:NCE Why’. In that video, along with others, I recorded a brief statement about why I founded DA:NCE: “There’s been a cultural […]