Althea Miller, a black student of Walker’s from Los Angeles, is amazed by the culture she and her diverse classmates have connected with through Walker’s class. “I just know that … [Buchanan] has very much just an appreciation for it, and I see that with a lot of people in the class. Black, white, there’s a certain appreciation that is just floating in the air, a certain amazement … as we watch [Walker] perform,” Miller says.

A community of understanding

The thing about cultural dance, Westhofen says, is its inclusivity. “It’s not the kind of dancing where you have to have a partner. You’re part of a line or part of a circle,” she says. Seim distinctly remembers this circle while dancing with Westhofen as a child. In both Westhofen’s group and Cole’s, the adult dancers include the children, no matter their skill level, to create a sense of community where stories and traditions can be passed along to new generations.

“I very distinctly remember being so small that [we’d] be in a circle, and the adults would be holding my hand, and I would just get tugged and pulled every which way because my feet weren’t quick enough to keep up with the steps of the adults,” Seim says.

The dance circle and line are concepts that span across cultures. The Folk Dancers of the Fox Valley form circles and lines for Bulgarian, Russian, Czechoslovakian and Romanian dances. In African dance, the circle can unite audiences and performers to facilitate learning through experience. “It’s not audience here and performer there, but audience can become performer, and performer can become audience,” Walker says.

The drumbeats drifting from the UW-Green Bay Union Alumni Room have just that effect. As the Nia African/African American Dance Group sway their bodies to the drumbeats, college student Travis Meyer pokes his head in from studying.

“What is this? It sounds really cool,” he says. “You can join us,” Cole says, motioning him in as the drummers continue. “Sweet!” Meyer says, already bumbling through the step touches. But his clumsiness doesn’t matter — Cole can see the joy on his face.

That same booming African drumbeat reverberated in Buchanan’s mind as she sat watching the movie “Sankofa” with the African Student Association during Africa Week on campus. It reminded her so much of her dance class. The next day in class, as the drummers started thumping the stretched leather, a rush of emotion spread through her.

“All I could think of was the women and mothers and people on these plantations that just had these awful lives, and what they were going through, and what dancing and music … meant to them in this awful, godforsaken experience,” Buchanan says. “The rest of that class, I just had this energy I’d never had before.”

That is precisely Walker’s goal. “I always speak of diversity not in being able to see these different cultural groups represented in the space, but how much different cultural groups understand each other, which is really what diversity is about,” he says. “Having the numbers and seeing the faces is not enough. It’s how much we learn and understand about each other.”

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