Bantaba World Dance & Music

In 1997 I had been teaching Religion and Dancing courses at the University of Colorado for a few years. One of these coursed had become a two-semester sequence that met in lecture hall two days a week and studio on Friday afternoons. For over a decade it filled quickly at the ninety-student limit. The course covered some thirty dance forms representing cultures around the world. The two lecture presentations each week placed these dances in their cultural and historical context and explored the relation between dancing and cultural identity with emphasis on the close connection of dancing with religion. The studio sessions each week were held in a huge gymnasium-sized studio. Over time I had made connections with dancers and musicians who were adept at the various dancings and musics we were studying. Most were from the relevant culture. These expert dancers and musicians, often accompanied by others in their community, taught their dancing to my students. I asked them to offer an experience that would give these students a memorable introduction to the culture and religion through their experience actually dancing the dances of the culture to the live performance of music.

During the 1990s the US government was friendly to foreign artistic and cultural visitors, and I was able to sponsor cultural exchange visas for artist from other countries that I learned would like to spend an extended visit to the USA. From the mid-1990s until 9-11-2001, a date after which most cultural exchange visas were impossible, I sponsored more than two dozen artists from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. All of them taught studios contributing to my “Religion and Dancing” course.

Recognizing that most of these artists were struggling to conduct classes for the community in borrowed spaces—garages and living rooms—I was inspired to found, with my daughter Jenny who had earned a degree in ethnomusicology, a community dance and music studio to provide space and administrative advantages for these artists to teach and as the home for building their performance groups. We envisioned Bantaba as an international community building connections and appreciation among diverse cultures through the sharing of arts. The studio was successful in establishing a broad multi-ethnic, multi-racial community of artists serving the Boulder-Denver community. It enriched the diversity in the community. It was, however, a financial disaster for me personally. Further the City of Boulder took action to put us out of business; they succeeded. Bantaba existed from 1997 through 2007. The legacy persists in the lives of a generation of young people—I call them Bantaba babies, although most of them are now young adults—that came about through these artists becoming a permanent part of the community. Many still perform and teach classes not only in Colorado, but throughout the USA. Others inspired by them have achieved advanced degrees focused on the studies of the musics and dancings of these cultures.