Rachel Isaacs-Falbel, a senior Dance and Anthropology special major, describes herself as \u201cvery much a planner.\u201d \u00a0Her ultimate career goal has been consistent since high school; she wants to be executive director of a dance company someday.<\/p>\n
Isaacs-Falbel has a long relationship with dance. \u00a0When she was a young kid, ballet was offered as a consolation after her mom refused previous requests for figure skating or gymnastics lessons. \u00a0It ended up sticking, in large part because she loved being onstage, describing herself as \u201ca huge ham, and a huge drama queen.\u201d It wasn\u2019t until junior year of high school that she began to really enjoy ballet not only as an avenue through which to perform but also as a technique itself. \u00a0Her appreciation of regular ballet classes deepened as she embraced the practice \u201cas a learning process within [herself],\u201d and not just to achieve an external goal.<\/p>\n
And then, she says, \u201cwhen I came to Swarthmore and became part of the dance department, that\u2019s when it all really hit me.\u201d \u00a0Even more so than in high school, studying ballet and other dance forms proved to be a continuous challenge and avenue for personal growth, as teachers and other students here pushed her to be technically better than she ever thought she could be. \u00a0\u201cIf someone had told me arriving at this school that I would have the control and technique that I have now,\u201d says Isaacs-Falbel, \u201cI would have been like, \u2018you are lying, and I can\u2019t do that.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
But although she was taking technique classes and had \u201calways sort of thought about majoring in dance,\u201d she didn\u2019t seriously consider it as an academic focus until enrolling in The Arts and Social Change with now-retired Professor Sharon E. Friedler. \u00a0Having previously thought that studying movement theoretically would be boring, Isaacs-Falbel found that in fact the class \u201cwas amazing, and it changed my life.\u201d She continued with Dance and Diaspora, taught by Professor Pallabi Chakravorty, which \u201ctouched on the interest I\u2019ve always had in other cultures and learning about the world and the way that people interact. \u00a0I saw that I could do that through studying dance.\u201d After a heart-to-heart with professor and mentor Olivia Sabee in her sophomore year, she decided to combine her interests via a special major in Dance and Anthropology.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s proven to be a fruitful choice. \u00a0Since then, Isaacs-Falbel has studied dance technique and theory abroad in Nice, France, interned at Boston Ballet School, and is currently at work on her thesis, which focuses on diversity initiatives in pre-professional ballet programs. \u00a0Ballet companies are overwhelmingly white, and, she explains, \u201cone of the main things that [they] say when they\u2019re asked about this lack of representation is that they just can\u2019t find good dancers. So it\u2019s important to look at what the schools are doing.\u201d \u00a0Although she hasn\u2019t finished her research, Isaacs-Falbel suspects that those schools\u2019 efforts aren\u2019t as sincere as they could be and is exploring in part the \u201cidea of diversity as a commodity\u201d and \u201cthe way the term has sort of lost all of its civil rights meanings and has been rearticulated to just mean \u2018there\u2019s some black people there,\u2019 not that any structural change has been made.\u201d<\/p>\n
While she jokes that someday such a critical analysis will automatically disqualify her \u201cfrom all the jobs I\u2019ve ever wanted,\u201d she plans to stay immersed in academia for a few more years at least, with the hope of going directly to graduate school for dance studies in France. \u00a0There, she\u2019ll continue on the trajectory launched by Swarthmore\u2019s program, using dance as a lens through which to investigate both herself and the broader world.<\/p>\n
Rachel Isaacs-Falbel, a senior Dance and Anthropology special major, describes herself as \u201cvery much a planner.\u201d \u00a0Her ultimate career goal has been consistent since high school; she wants to be executive director of a dance company someday. Isaacs-Falbel has a long relationship with dance. \u00a0When she was a young kid, ballet was offered as a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":7528,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7527"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7527"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7529,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7527\/revisions\/7529"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}