Sidra Bell

Bank Street School for Children '93

We learned how to look at history and literature and mathematics from every different kind of learning lens and I think it left an indelible imprint on my sense of humanity and my sense of being in community with people.

Sidra Bell, SFC ’93, has a BA in History from Yale University and an MFA in Choreography from Purchase College Conservatory of Dance. She is currently a master lecturer at the University of the Arts (Philadelphia), an adjunct professor at Ball State University in Indiana, was an artist-in-residence at Harvard University, and was an adjunct professor at Barnard College in New York City. Bell has been commissioned for many special projects nationally and internationally. This past summer, Bell became the first Black woman to create an original work for the New York City Ballet when she accepted an offer and choreographed “Within Wires,” a six-minute pixelation in a wave, for two female and two male dancers. A solo work, “Conductivity,” won second prize for a performance at the Internationales Solo-Tanz-Theatre Festival in Stuttgart, Germany in 2009 and was then toured in Greece and in select German cities. She was invited back to Stuttgart for the 2011 Solo-Tanz-Theatre Festival with a new solo, “Grief Point.,” where she received First Prize for Choreography, and her dancer, Moo Kim, received First Prize for Performance. “Grief Point.” toured Germany and Brazil in 2011/2012. Her critically acclaimed company and work has been seen throughout the United States and internationally at premier venues in Denmark, France, Austria, Germany, Canada, Aruba, Korea, and Greece. Sidra is a sought-after master teacher and has taught her unique approach to movement, improvisation, and technique at major institutions for dance and theater throughout Canada, Europe, and the United States.

Transcript

Transcript
My name is Sidra Bell and I graduated from Bank Street School for Children in 1993. Everything at Bank Street was about the individual and coming into the school and being very shy but very artistic and working with modes of learning that really helped me find my interiority. It was a very special experience; we were always given a lot of freedom to create, to find ways and inroads into the information base that we were being introduced to in our classrooms and just this emphasis on community building that everything was generated from a kind of circularity of thought. We learned how to look at history and literature and mathematics from every different kind of learning lens and I think left an indelible imprint on my sense of humanity and my sense of being in community with people. I think that there was an opportunity to really flesh out ways in which the world that we lived in was working and how we can contribute as citizens and it felt a lot like world building, which is something that I’m very emphatic about in my own teaching practice that there's a communal world building that's happening and so we got to figure out the world that was already in motion as children but also think about future forms and think about how we could make an impact and how we could be part of—it was always being part of something—we were not alone and I think that that's something again very special about the Bank Street ethos is that well it fostered our individualism wholly and allowed us to find our agency as young learners. We also had an opportunity to think about how we could put all those pieces together as a group and how that would filter out as we kept expanding our circle and our family, and I think I carry that with me. This idea of ritual was really important at Bank Street – we had these annual rebels performances and it was a tradition of its own kind and participating in that year after year and learning the folk dances and the songs – like, I remember singing a lot at Bank Street and working with sound and dance and, you know, creating set design, it was all really integrative and so the experiences feel like they sort of accumulated into this knowledge base but also the experience of working with these small classrooms, because we largely went through the school with the same peers and it was like we had built these traditional things together with the guidance of the faculty. I think Bank Street really taught us to believe. I think there was this sort of magical feeling in that building. It was like a playground to explore and just to keep that sense of play. A lot of my ways of operating in the world as an adult have been through modes of play both in dance but also in understanding and travel and I think that also was very much a part of my experience at Bank Street. It taught me to play and to be curious and just to hold on to that feeling that's the most important thing no matter how old you are that there's always something to be curious about or something to intake or ingest and to figure out that the learning just never stops, that it's a lifelong process.