Alvin Ailey, The Sound of Music, and Frozen: our COVID 19 curriculum
by Sachi Feris
The Covid Spring felt liberating as a parent compared to this Fall. Covid Spring, while hard, even under the best of possible conditions, felt temporary. Covid Fall feels permanent and indefinite. And anything but liberating. Instead, it feels like the structure of school but over Zoom, and in practice, I am a personal assistant running like a chicken with its head cut off, trying to meet tech, academic, and emotional needs of my eight-year-old and five-year-old, while totally ignoring my three-year-old. It feels awful.
So, the other day, while rolling around on the rug with my three-year-old, I mentioned that it had been a long time since we’d watched Alvin Ailey’s Revelations. Ailey was a core part of our Covid Spring’s soundtrack—the media we listened to on a loop, and watched multiple times/made various connections to—along with The Sound of Music and Frozen (1 and 2).
My three-year-old then demanded that I “put Revelations on the television.”
I have taken my eight-year-old to see Revelations three times and my five-year-old once. They were mesmerized, having seen clips of almost the whole dance and very often danced around the living room to the full score. My three-year-old became obsessed with various sections of Revelations during the Covid Spring. He regularly requested “the one with hands,” referencing the mechanic arms that click down like the arms of a clock in the iconic pose of I’ve Been Buked, replicating with his own hand movements. He danced along to Wade in the Water, urgently seeking his own blue clothes to mimic the blue “water” that streaks the stage and disappears in an instant. And once it’s time for Sinnerman, all three of my children run all over the living room and on top of furniture like those three Black men, inspired by their wave of precision and fierceness.
During Passover 2020, fully immersed in Ailey’s Revelations, we made various connections while rehearsing our version of the Passover story for our seder, sending my youngest down the river in a basket to be raised by the princess, my eight-year-old, with my five-year-old standing up with a crown as “big Moses” to say “STOP ICE” and “Don’t put kids in jail!” to our present-day pharaoh.
First, in the river, my three-year-old suggested we start singing Wade in the Water. The water connection was obvious enough to him—and my older children knew that Alvin Ailey had listened to many of the songs he used in the dance at church—and here we were celebrating a different holiday.
Then came the part when the Jews had to make their matzah quietly and escape before Pharaoh changed his mind again and decided to keep the Jews enslaved. My three-year-old had moved on to dancing (and singing) Sinnerman. My oldest protested, but, I argued, there was a connection here, too. “Those three Black men in the dance could represent escaping from our more recent history of enslavement in the US.”
The first mention I made to my oldest child (essentially when she was a baby) of slavery was from the Passover story—which made the US chapter of enslavement a somewhat obvious connection. I am reminded of a chant that my mentor Mari Haas (an inspiration for teachers of world languages) taught me to recall the language learning standards: Communication, culture, connection, comparison, community. Through telling the story of my own ancestors, I can connect to stories of others.
I had been cautious about introducing the Holocaust to my children. I’ve blogged before about how my dad spoke to me about anti-semitism as a child in a way that did not create a space for learning. During Covid, I decided to introduce my two oldest children to another love of mine, The Sound of Music—and made a connection to the book The Cats of Krasinski Square, about a young Jewish girl who “passes” as Polish and helps fellow Jews in the ghetto. I told my children that The Sound of Music, like the book, had a connection to our family and, specifically, to my paternal grandmother. She immigrated to Cuba prior to World War II and left her family behind in Poland (all of whom would later perish in the Holocaust).
“Malka,” my daughter told me. She knows my grandmother’s name as it is part of her Hebrew name.
A few days after watching the movie (in several parts), my daughter reflected on the Von Trapp family and the many Jews who escaped from WWII Europe, sharing, “It’s kind of the same as people with brown skin escaping from enslavement in the United States.”
“Yes and no,” I told her. “On one hand, people who were Jewish were treated very unfairly and even hurt just because they were Jewish. Although there are some people today who still think those unfair things about Jewish people, here in Brooklyn, I don’t have to worry about my safety when I walk down the street. But someone who is Black still gets treated unfairly just because of their skin color.”
Then we started talking about the police and the awareness she would need to have when she was a bit older and was travelling home from school by herself with a friend of color.
“Like what could happen?” she wanted to know.
I told her about a group of boys from a nearby middle school—I’d heard sirens from inside my apartment and went out to the stoop to bear witness, to make sure the police saw me watching. “They were a group of Black boys and they probably wouldn’t have been stopped if they had been White,” I told her.
“What did you do?” she wanted to know. “Why were you watching?”
“In that moment, there wasn’t much more I could do.” I explained that her youngest brother was inside our apartment napping, so I couldn’t have left him alone to get closer to the police/boys, but that I’d wanted them both to see me, to know I was watching.
We started to talk about what she might do as a White person if the police stopped her and her friends but were interrupted by sibling rivalry between my youngest two and paused the conversation, saying we would have a long time to talk about it before she started walking home from school by herself.
Despite ongoing and explicit conversation about the police, guns, and prisons, these themes creep into my two youngest children’s play. When this happened two days after the death of Walter Wallace Jr. in Philadelphia at the hands of the police, I showed my three-year-old and five-year-old a beautiful painting of Walter Wallace (@micahbazant ) that I had seen on social media.
“This man’s name was Walter Wallace and he was a dad and a son and a friend. And the other day, the police came to his house and ended up hurting him with guns and he died. And that’s why guns (and jails) aren’t a game in our family.”
My five-year-old and I have had much more explicit conversations about racial profiling and the police—and in fact, just days before this, he had called me over while listening to a read-aloud picture book, “Even Superheroes Have Bad Days” to tell me there was a “parte feo” (an ugly part) that read “dragging hundreds to jail while police dance and sing.” He was absolutely right about that being “an ugly part” of the book—so even as he returns to “ugly” play, I know he’s also listening.
A question my eight-year-old has often asked is, “Why did the police do that?” (regarding killing people who are black and brown).
To answer this question, I brought it back to our third Covid soundtrack, Frozen which I have blogged about before here:
“You know how we’ve talked about how Disney could have chosen to make a story about any two sisters, but made a choice to make Elsa as pale-skinned (and stereotypically “feminine”) as possible? Even your youngest brother has looked at Elsa and said, ‘Mamma, why Elsa got blue eyes? I want blue eyes like Elsa?’ (Note: I quickly googled Idina Menzel and showed him what the “real” Elsa looked like!)
When Disney makes a choice to make another movie about a White princess, and because Frozen became so successful and kids love Elsa so much, Disney is sending a message to kids that looking like Elsa is the ‘best’ way to look. When kids (and adults) see images like this over and over and over, it makes us all think that is true, just a little bit, even if we don’t want to think that. It’s called a bias—and the police, who are people, have biases, too.
If all people, including police officers, are showed images of people like Elsa all the time, and ‘learn’ that Elsa is beautiful, is good, is ‘the best’—they are also ‘learning’ that anyone who doesn’t look like Elsa is not beautiful or ‘bad.’ Which isn’t true, of course, but these are the messages our brains are getting.
It’s really hard to understand why a police officer, whose job is supposed to be to help people, would do something bad…but it’s like all these messages in their brains react in one split second and they end up hurting or even killing someone.”
Mari Haas, my mentor, also taught me about thematic curriculum mapping—which I think was the “gift” of my Covid Spring. Following my children’s leads as we wove in and out of stories of Passover and Ailey’s Revelations, and the Holocaust, and police violence against Black bodies, and Frozen…
…I was able to make connections for different ages and interests, through art, through song, through dance, through critical thinking, through research, and through conversation.
Sometimes I need to remind myself to turn off the Zoom, and turn on whatever is singing to my family…and use their interests to tell stories, to draw comparisons, to build understanding, and to raise children who want to be in community with all those seeking a more just world.
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