Sherrie Barr
Faculty
East Lansing, Michigan

I am fascinated about autobiography and dance. I am fascinated about how different ways, not autobiography, but here's my name, here's when I was born and all that, but how autobiography can become shared. And so through that it is a cultural autobiography and through that a community.

When people tell me their story, their oral narrative, and then I watch them move, somehow it’s together. It is not like one plus one equals two. It is like one plus one equals three. And because the intonation of my voice or how I hold my body says something about how I am feeling about my words. So if I can capture those attributes in terms of the energy expression in terms of how I am using the space in terms of my body or the force or the rhythm of how I move in terms of tempo, I think that gives me a new sense of the person or a unique sense.

There is a lot that is in our body. Our history is in our body. We carry our history in our body. And there is a lot that can be said in our body—again, saying it not in terms of putting dictionary words to it. So when I start moving and just trying to take a signature of the things that I do, that's a kind of writing with my body.

[music playing]

It was an adventure for the elders. You know, it was really just an adventure. I really believe they learned to trust their bodies. I think that the elders they thought that dance was social dancing and that was that and that they couldn't dance. And so they really learned to trust their body—that their bodies could speak.

I think dance has a lot of different functions, and dance has a healing function. We can think about dance as a therapeutic function where people move expressively and they work out an emotional sense.

That is what I try to do with my students in a lot of different courses to get them to understand and the breath and depth of dance as a body of knowledge.

I love what I do. And I think the fact if I can expand my students’ sense of what dance is in terms of the larger world because this is part of dance, and to get them to think more broadly and to bring that richness to the community of MSU and to the larger community, and for the elders to make them feel that they are still contributing—that was really special to me.

People can do. You know people can dig down deep and that there is this spirit of doing something. There's the belief in humanity. There's the belief in giving back and that giving back one also receives.
Like if I feel that I gave a lot to the community, but I know that they gave a lot to me.

And it is something that really, you know, it's not something that is going to necessarily go in a research paper, but just as a human being I believe that I really grew. And that's part of the Spartan will, you know, how people just want to make a difference. And I have always felt that way—that as a teacher, as an educator, I just simply want to make a difference.