How a Charlotte dancer created an international dance school during the pandemic

It all started in Kim Jones’ Charlotte kitchen. The UNC Charlotte associate professor of dance posted #KitchenDanceChallenge, a video of herself dancing while holding a cup of coffee.

“I was looking for something fun to do during lockdown,” Jones said, explaining how she came to lead an international online dance school during the coronavirus pandemic. “I have a lot of friends in Europe, and they were under severe lockdown and starting to get depressed.”

Jones is founder/artistic director of Movement Migration, a Charlotte-based collective of professional dancers schooled in ballet and modern dance. All of her master classes, residencies and performances had been canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

She knows that dancers can’t sit still. A Movement Migration board member suggested that Jones lead summer classes online.

The reaction to Jones’ #KitchenDanceChallenge was immediate — and came from all corners of the world.“People started sharing their own kitchen dance videos, and then it moved to a pillow challenge, where people were dancing with pillows and comforters. It was so silly and so wonderful,” Jones said.

‘A BIT TERRIFYING’

“I had no experience creating a school on an online platform,” Jones said. “It was a bit terrifying. So I hired people I knew and trusted.” People like Nya Bowman, a dancer and teacher at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance.

Jones embraced the challenge of learning a new platform. “I was super excited I could problem-solve this,” she said. “There was so much that could’ve gone wrong.”

She promoted her classes on Facebook, Instagram and by word of mouth.

Jones tapped 27 instructors from across the globe to lead classes. They came from prominent dance companies such as Paul Taylor, José Limón and Martha Graham. Students, too, came from all over the world: 25 states and 14 countries, including Brazil, Luxembourg, India, Romania and Trinidad and Tobago.

More than a quarter of students came from North Carolina and 21% from New York City.

‘DANCE IS LIKE POETRY’

Bowman was on Zoom a call with famed playwright Ifa Bayeza this spring and mentioned that she was teaching online dance classes for Jones, a former Martha Graham colleague.

Bayeza (Bye-AH-zah) had just finished directing a New York revival of “a photograph: lovers in motion,” a play by her late sister, Ntozake Shange, who also wrote “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf.”

After talking to Bowman, who had been a cast member in “a photograph: lovers in motion,” Bayeza enrolled in Jones’ beginning Martha Graham technique class. “Graham is to dance what Picasso is to art,” the playwright said.

Bayeza, who was locked down at home in Maryland, was hooked. She enrolled in other classes — Luigi-style dance, yoga, meditation.

Years prior, Bayeza had taken dance lessons. “I love movement,” she said. “I’m a kinetic person.” But she’s a writer first, and she discovered that some of the dance instruction sounded almost like poetry.

GLOBAL CLASSES

Jones capped her online classes at 18 students. “It was a global class, yet still intimate,” Bayeza said. “It was smaller than an in-person class might be. Even though it was online, students got personal attention.”

Students could sign up for a single class that met for five consecutive days, but they could also take as many classes as they wanted. “I wanted to be sure (classes were) interactive, that teachers could see their students,” Jones said.Since most everyone was out of work at the time, some students spent half their days in online dance class.

One student, a full-time lawyer in Colombia, took four classes a day for eight weeks, Jones said.

The classes were as wide-ranging as the geography of teachers and students — body percussion, Afro-Brazilian, Cuban modern, hip-hop, Turkish contemporary ballet, Pilates, Paul Taylor style, and filmmaking.

Wait, what? Filmmaking? “We’re living on Zoom now,” Jones said. “Students need to understand how to film themselves dancing.”

MOVING INTO THE FALL

Jones is back at UNCC full-time and teaching online classes — a skill she honed during the quarantine. The success of her summer intensives led her to embark on fall “Warrior Weekends.” (“We’re all warriors living through chaos,” she said.)

The online Weekend Warrior classes, taught over the first two weekends in October, were rigorous. But at the same time, appropriate for all levels, Jones said.

And students of all ages and experience levels, from all corners of the world, did more than learn about movement. Bayeza, for instance, “discovered that Graham and Luigi, while clear dance masters, were also poets.”

“The verbal articulation was beautiful,” Bayeza said.. “A teacher might say, ‘Open your chest, and let it meet the horizon,’ which sounds very different from ‘Put your shoulders back.’ ”