Christine Cali, co-director of the dance program,has performed, choreographed, and taught dance for more than 20 years, using it as a tool for education, activism, and expression.
Formerly a high school athlete, Cali’s unexpected journey toward dance after an injury led her to find an intense passion for movement and creativity.
Cali came from humble blue-collar beginnings, and as a first-generation college student, she struggled with understanding higher education systems. At Niagara County Community College, she looked into numerous career paths from accounting to surgical technology, but then realized she was an embodied learner with some neurodivergent needs. Cali proved the importance of dance in higher education by realizing that movement-based practices were important to her intellectual progress.
“Movement-based practices were essential for my intellectual development,” she said. “But something magical happened for me while I was attending NCCC, and is a real example of the importance of dance in higher education., I was introduced to modern dance and simultaneously discovered that you could major in dance in college!”
After learning that she could major in dance in college, it changed the trajectory of her life. Cali transferred to Ohio University and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in dance, then choreographed, taught and performed from San Francisco and New York to Italy and South Korea. When she returned to San Francisco, she was hired as SSU tenure-track faculty in 2015 and promoted to full professor this past June.
The courses Theatre in Action and Global Perspectives in Dance are among the many things that she finds most rewarding. Students have the opportunity to engage in various embodied history and lineage-rooted dance experiences. She said seeing students discover new possibilities in their bodies, share their embodied knowledge, and develop an understanding is an inspiring thing to witness. “These are my proudest moments–the quiet ones, when you are seeing the potential being realized, the discovery becoming palpable, the curiosities flowing, and vulnerability and confidence to share it with the world.”
Along with the incredible faculty and students who built the Theatre Arts and Dance Program, Cali said she would like to highlight the support of Evert B. Person, a former publisher for the Press Democrat and whose father was the founder. Person has notoriously contributed to theatre arts, dance and music in Sonoma County and SSU.
To emphasize the value of performing arts at SSU, Evert B. Person Theatre was built specifically at the campus entrance. This relationship is one of many that the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance created that shows the importance of fine arts. “We hope administration has thought critically on this history of support for the performing arts, and understands that its absence will indeed be devastating for the campus and its lifelong partnerships,” Cali said.
With the elimination of the Theatre Arts and Dance Program, Cali said that it’s a deep loss for every theatre arts and Dance major at SSU.
“The BODY is being eliminated. The body is the site of deep research, the dancing body is cultural, about craft and skill-building, is a practice toward liberation, is deeply rooted in scholarship, transformation, and innovation,” said Cali, “The body is political. The body is intersectional. The body is intellectual.”
Cali, who was promoted last June, said it’s difficult to be laid off in the same year. “Our community has been affected in a major way,” she said. “There is a ripple effect that resounds beyond this moment, and impacts our alumni, our emeritus and past faculty, our donors, and our future students who would continue to fuel the arts and education work sector in Sonoma County and the SF Bay at large.” The closure of these programs is career and life-altering.
She said all the slated programs for closure are paramount to a liberal arts education, especially during a time when liberties are challenged and critical thinking is most vital. “Our pedagogy is rooted in history, diaspora, critical thinking, creativity, anti-oppressive, experiential, cultural, identity-based, liberatory practices, these are paramount to our work,” said Cali. “We are not on the periphery or an extracurricular, we are the embodied center, the soul, the heart, the rhythm, the breath, the wisdom, the vibration, the life.”
