Dr. Samantha Stinson, school engagement manager at Walton Arts Center, recently traveled to the Partners in Education Conference at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and led an educational workshop with some NWA dancers.
During the conference, Stinson and three local dancers presented a workshop called Dancing Through Black American History. The workshop was based on a piece that the dancers helped create and perform in 2023 called Reclaiming Our Roots.
This unique project began in 2022 with a contract between Walton Arts Center and CONTRA TIEMPO, a Los Angeles-based activist dance theater company. With the help of NWA Movement Hub, Walton Arts Center sent four professional performers to FUTURO spring workshop, hosted by CONTRA TIEMPO in Los Angeles. This group of Arkansas performers then morphed into the Rooted Movement Collective, the first to participate in Walton Art Center’s Performing Arts Exchange. During Black History Month, Rooted Movement Collective brought their Reclaiming Our Roots tour to 600 local middle and high school students.
Walton Arts Center has been providing free arts integrative curriculum in schools since it was founded in 1992. The Kennedy Center’s Partners in Education Program helps arts organizations throughout the nation develop or expand educational partnerships with their local school systems to provide professional learning in the arts for teachers.
Stinson also did congressional visits while in DC, meeting with the chief of staff for Senators Tom Cotton and John Boozeman as well as the legislative assistant to Representative Steve Womack.
The visits are an annual opportunity to brief the legislators on Walton Arts Center’s education initiatives, to share results and data with them and to ask for their support where it is needed.