My initial dance instructor, Louise Mc Clashie (deceased), was the individual who taught me the art of dance and meticulously sewed all our costumes by hand whenever the sewing machine malfunctioned. She was a cultural carer, a remarkable woman who united all the young dance talents within the community into a cultural group known as the Embacadere Travelers, aimed at showcasing the rich folk-dance heritage of Trinidad and Tobago. Photo Credit Edison Boodoosingh
By Kieron Dwayne Sargeant
Affiliation – Skidmore College
In the Caribbean, care is not an abstract ideal; it is a way of being, a continual improvisation against the backdrop of instability. Whether in the shifting sands of rising shorelines or in the cracked foundations of neglected school buildings, care in the Caribbean is always embedded in precarity. And in the realm of dance education, it is no different. For generations, Caribbean dance educators—especially those who teach traditional and folkloric forms—have operated as caretakers of cultural memory, quietly sustaining practices that resist erasure even as the ground beneath them shifts, both literally and metaphorically.
To teach dance in the Caribbean is not merely to pass on steps; it is to transmit a legacy. Each movement sequence is a container of history, a carrier of survival strategies, a keeper of cosmologies. The dance educator becomes more than an instructor: they are an archivist, a guardian, a griot in motion. In their teaching, they safeguard not only choreography but a sensibility, a worldview, an embodied way of knowing that connects generations across ruptures of colonialism, migration, and environmental degradation.
Yet their work takes place within profound structural precarity. In many parts of the region, state funding for the arts is minimal or nonexistent. School curricula prioritize imported models of “artistic excellence” over indigenous and African diasporic forms. Global tourism economies extract Caribbean culture for commercial entertainment while offering little reinvestment into the communities that sustain it. Against this backdrop, dance educators—particularly elder teachers embedded in local communities—continue to hold space for traditional dance practices, often unpaid or underpaid, working from personal homes, church halls, and community centers. Their labor is an act of profound care: for the dances themselves, for the communities who dance them, and for the future generations who must inherit them.
This care is not only pedagogical; it is affective, emotional, and spiritual. To teach a child a dance step is also to teach them to stand inside a lineage. To rehearse a drum rhythm with young people is to reconnect them to ancestral pulse. Every moment of instruction becomes an offering of continuity in a world that demands forgetting. And for many educators, this care work extends far beyond the classroom. They become surrogate parents, mentors, social workers, cultural interpreters, bearers of stories, and healers within their communities. Their role as educators cannot be disentangled from their role as cultural carers.
And yet, who cares for them?
This is a central tension I have observed across the Caribbean: while dance educators serve as cultural infrastructure, their own needs are often marginalized or overlooked. The very structures they uphold—heritage, identity, continuity—are fragile, threatened by both historical neglect and contemporary crises. Climate change compounds these pressures. Rising sea levels displace coastal communities; hurricanes damage dance studios and community centers; unpredictable weather patterns disrupt annual festivals that serve as critical sites of cultural transmission. In the wake of each storm, it is often the elders who quietly reopen their spaces, gather the children again, and begin the slow work of rebuilding—not only physical spaces, but emotional landscapes.
Their care is a quiet form of resistance. It is a refusal to let cultural erasure be the inevitable outcome of crisis. It is a commitment to holding onto practices even when resources dwindle. This labor, however, comes at a cost. Many elder dance educators carry the exhaustion of decades of unpaid cultural work. Some grapple with health challenges from aging bodies that have borne the physical demands of dancing and teaching without adequate medical care or institutional support. Others face emotional burnout from being pillars in communities with few other supports.
Still, they persist. They teach the dances even when the costumes must be sewn by hand from donated fabric. They drum the rhythms even when the drums are patched together with fishing line. They choreograph performances even when the stage is the cracked asphalt of a schoolyard. Their work exemplifies care not as a passive sentiment but as an active, ongoing, creative praxis—one that insists on cultural survival in the midst of multiple precarities.
In this sense, Caribbean dance educators embody a form of care that is both restorative and prophetic. It is restorative in that it holds the community together, offering continuity and belonging through embodied practice. It is prophetic because it invests in futures that have not yet arrived: futures where the dance lives on, where the drum continues to call, where the movements of the ancestors are not lost under rising tides or shifting economies.
Yet even as they extend this care to others, the care extended back to them is insufficient. Institutional support remains uneven. Funding mechanisms rarely prioritize elder community educators without formal institutional affiliations. Curricula increasingly marginalize traditional dance in favor of globalized aesthetics. The extraction of Caribbean culture through tourism and international arts circuits leaves little for reinvestment into the grassroots pedagogical labor that sustains these forms at the community level.
In the face of these challenges, it becomes urgent to reframe how we understand dance educators in the Caribbean. They are not simply teachers; they are carers of movement legacies, stewards of embodied archives, protectors of ancestral knowledge systems. Their work cannot be evaluated solely by the number of students taught or performances staged. It must be recognized as a practice of care for cultural ecosystems: an effort to maintain balance, continuity, and meaning across intergenerational time.
Care, in this context, means repairing the worn soles of dance shoes so another rehearsal can happen. It means sharing food after practice because a student arrived hungry. It means translating ancient movements into contemporary bodies so they remain legible across generations. It means making a way out of no way.
In a time of climate crisis, when precarity becomes the common condition, the work of Caribbean dance educators stands as a vital model of relational care. They show us that care is not only interpersonal but cultural, ecological, and ancestral. They remind us that to care for a community requires caring for its rhythms, its steps, its embodied memory. They remind us that to teach a dance is to teach a way of being that refuses disappearance.
This essay is an invitation to center Caribbean dance educators as key figures in the region’s care matrix. Their labor sustains more than choreography—it sustains identity, dignity, continuity, and collective possibility. If we are to speak of care in precarity, we must include the stories of those whose care work has preserved our dances through centuries of instability.
Because to teach the dance is to preserve the people. And to preserve the people is to protect the possibility of the Caribbean itself.