by Joan Cramer
She has performed and traveled the world with some of the finest modern dance companies in the U.S., won the coveted Bessie Award in 2013 for outstanding dance performance and a Lifetime Achievement Award for National and Community Service in 2016 from President Barack Obama. But to her young dance students, both in West Baltimore and at Peabody, Associate Professor of Dance Diedre Dawkins is simply “Mama Diedre.”
“She is all about the students,” says danah bella, chair and founder of the Peabody Conservatory Dance Department. “She can be very strict. But when she gives you feedback, she never makes you feel small. You know she is doing it for you and doing it out of love. So students respond to her in a wonderful way.”
Dawkins was bella’s first hire, joining her as an adjunct professor at the program’s 2018 inception, and joined the faculty full time the following year. “Now we have four full-time faculty in the department, but for those first two years it was just Diedre and me,” bella says. “And I can’t think of a better person to have had by my side, helping to create this program.”
They met when bella, brand new to Baltimore, took an Afro-fusion modern dance class Dawkins was teaching for the arts advocacy nonprofit Dance Baltimore. “We started talking after class and it was as if we’d known one another forever,” bella says.
She has performed and traveled the world with some of the finest modern dance companies in the U.S., won the coveted Bessie Award in 2013 for outstanding dance performance and a Lifetime Achievement Award for National and Community Service in 2016 from President Barack Obama. But to her young dance students, both in West Baltimore and at Peabody, Associate Professor of Dance Diedre Dawkins is simply “Mama Diedre.”
“She is all about the students,” says danah bella, chair and founder of the Peabody Conservatory Dance Department. “She can be very strict. But when she gives you feedback, she never makes you feel small. You know she is doing it for you and doing it out of love. So students respond to her in a wonderful way.”
Dawkins was bella’s first hire, joining her as an adjunct professor at the program’s 2018 inception, and joined the faculty full time the following year. “Now we have four full-time faculty in the department, but for those first two years it was just Diedre and me,” bella says. “And I can’t think of a better person to have had by my side, helping to create this program.”
They met when bella, brand new to Baltimore, took an Afro-fusion modern dance class Dawkins was teaching for the arts advocacy nonprofit Dance Baltimore. “We started talking after class and it was as if we’d known one another forever,” bella says.
The two shared a philosophy of dance, of expanding the scholarship in a rigorous, disciplined way beyond traditional Western classical dance forms. They also shared a passion for dance as a catalyst for community. In 2016 Dawkins was named “teacher of the year” at ConneXions, a community-based arts program in West Baltimore where she has been teaching for more than a decade.
She also runs AileyCamp Baltimore, a free six-week summer program for children ages 11 to 14, which, thanks to Dawkins, has been hosted for the last two years by Peabody Preparatory. She joined AileyCamp Baltimore as its modern dance instructor at its inception nearly a decade ago and was named director three years ago.
She mentors middle-school girls through a program she founded called Dance is Healing. And she has helped create dance curricula for Baltimore City Public Schools.
Dawkins, who earned her MFA in choreography and performance at the University of Maryland and BFA in Dance and Performance at New York University, says her dual roles at Peabody and in the West Baltimore community “feed each other.” “I have my Peabody students teach at ConneXions in their senior year so they can get a taste of what it’s like to teach in an underserved community. And my ConneXions students are able to walk into a conservatory and see what that is like—like, ‘Wow, you can really do this, you can come dance every day and get a degree and dance some more.’ For me, this is balance. I couldn’t do one without the other.”
In fact, Dawkins’ ConneXions students performed on a formal stage for the first time ever at bella’s 2018 inaugural Peabody Dance! Festival, bringing West African dance and drumming for the first time ever to Peabody’s Miriam A. Friedberg Concert Hall. “We had seventh graders performing alongside professional dancers and it was amazing,” bella says.
Dawkins grew up dancing in Brooklyn, New York, in the 1970s and 1980s, a time and place of such rich and lush creativity and activism that, looking back, she says she still can’t believe her good fortune. She was a pioneer, without even realizing it at the time, in the fusion of modern and African-influenced dance forms. “I tell my students I was running back and forth from pointe classes at New York University to West African dance classes down the block,” she says. “That’s when I really got the bug.”
“Diedre was there when everyone was trying to figure out how to teach and talk about [African-influenced dance forms], how to create a methodology around them,” bella says.
Dawkins studied with Katherine Dunham and Alvin Ailey, worked as a dancer and choreographer with Ronald K. Brown (Evidence Dance Company), Bill T. Jones, Bebe Miller, her lifelong mentor Kevin Iega Jeff (Deeply Rooted Dance Theater), Jawole Zollar (Urban Bush Women), and Amaniyea Payne (Muntu Dance Theater). She has brought Jeff and Brown to Peabody to teach as resident guest artists. And over the spring and summer she helped Brown prepare a new generation of dancers to perform “Walking Out the Dark,” the piece for which she won the Bessie.
“I’ve had incredible opportunities, settled in at the feet of so many elders, just listening, taking notes, and now it’s time to pull all of those notes out and use them, pass their wisdom on to my students and to our audiences,” Dawkins says. “Dance is life. We are the world’s storytellers, the griots, the jalis, the historians. We carry the knowledge in our bodies and we speak it in our movement. We are the keepers of the flame.”
