Interview with Los Angeles Teaching Artist: Dorian Cohen 

Explain your role at Creative Netwerk

I am a teaching artist for Creative Netwerk. I am one of the original LA teachers here, and I've done a lot of work to help CN establish the chapter out here because I have a lot of schools I'm connected with as I used to be a school teacher. In general, my role is just another version of a  master teacher - whether it's hip hop, stepping, Chicago footwork, 90s grooves, whatever the case may be - I see myself as a seed planter. I love this work because it’s my personal passion: having teachers that look like the very students they're teaching and teaching the culture that they were born into.

You were the first Teaching Artist hired in LA for Creative Netwerk and had a big role in setting up the local partnerships that were foundational for our work there. What was that like for you?

Coming from being a teacher in the LA schools, I've always stayed right on the outskirts of that old life, still teaching at these schools, but teaching dance instead of general ed or general curriculum. Getting CN setup here was just honestly, really great, because it felt full circle. I didn't have a passion anymore for teaching curriculum that wasn't always rooted and connectable and relatable. It was much easier to carry out this dance curriculum and have the school networks get something that I believe in and that I'm passionate about, which is dance, and how universal that language is and how important of a skillset it is. That's one of my favorite things about Creative Netwerk, is not making ballet and Eurocentric forms of dance the only things that are considered ‘fundamental’, because there're so many fundamental building blocks of dance. That is what drives me every time I'm thinking about Creative Netwerk.

Tell me about your experiences as a dancer versus as a teacher. How does your work with CN fit in with those puzzle pieces and identities?

It was almost like a perfect fit to work with Creative Netwerk. I was already teaching dance in schools in LA, but a lot of my schools didn't have the funding for what would be a livable wage out here in Los Angeles for me to teach, but it's my passion. That happens for a lot of schools, with Black and Latino students, there's not a lot of resources or funding. So it's really great that Creative Netwerk came in, and although I already taught dance there, I'm able to tap into that Netwerk and continue to teach dance, because now there's the funding that we never get to see for these communities. It allowed me to keep teaching and to bring in the type of caliber teachers that I feel that these students deserve, and I hope, get that kind of top tier energy. So I'm really grateful that Creative Netwerk came around honestly at the time that it did. I'm also getting a lot of exposure to schools and communities in LA that I never knew about. I’ve lived here for 12 years now, and I only know certain areas. So with the expansion of partnership programs in LA like After School Allstars, which I helped create a Netwerk link with, I've now seen schools and communities that I didn't even know were around, and just a whole new pocket of kids. 

Can you share about your experience with ICEF and choreographing for their production of Mean Girls?

Yes, oh my. This school has my heart. ICEF was my first school that, you know, chose me as a young, 21 year old teacher. So they do these productions that my former colleague and friend, Judd Fish, manages. We've done everything! Mean Girls, Cats, Annie, Chicago, Willy Wonka, plays that I dreamt of doing at that age. I kind of like being a dance mom, living vicariously through how talented these kids are. We're really pushing these students with the choreography. They're doing West African when Cady’s character is in Africa, and then when Cady gets to the states, we're doing 90s grooves and hip hop. I had them doing a little bit of locking. I'm always so impressed with their abilities, because I don't think I've ever done productions of that level when I was a kid, and I think they have some great instructors and great staff, really pouring into them. And I really, really want them to take it far. Some of my students have gone on to NYU in the arts program, traveled, and gone to arts and opera camps. Sometimes I took some of these kids to Millennium on my own dime. This support from Creative Netwerk has been so important because it’s enabled more investment into these kids.

What was something you learned from that experience?

My light bulb moment, as the years have gone on and definitely with the Mean Girls production, was on the theme of growth and trust. The kids have now been choreographing for themselves, and we've had former students come back to choreograph. When these kids come back, I will always see if I can help them with this piece or that. Just watching them fly out of the little cocoon and develop into young adults and fall more in love with whatever their craft is, it really just makes me fall more in love with my work again. You’re seeing somebody at the beginning stages of this creative journey, whereas I'm in the stage where I could get jaded if I let certain jobs or communities and people wear me down. So every time I get close to that creative process working in a production like this, I remember that I have to trust each student’s growth.

What is something you’re most proud of, when you look back at your work with Creative Netwerk so far?

Connections. I don't want to get too emotional, but you know, we've all been through traumatic things. It helps me so much that I get to connect all my worlds. Because my goal eventually, in my own life, is to probably do some form of dance therapy. That's my self actualized version. And so Creative Netwerk has actually made me see through all the schools that we worked with, through all the communities, watching people find the joy of movement and the therapy that comes from connecting with people and connecting through dance. It's always going to be my first love.

What do you hope Creative Netwerk students or teachers will learn from you?

Joy is coming to mind. Joy and freedom are two things that, the rest of the world doesn't even have access to sometimes. There's just this freedom and this joy in knowing that life is so exquisite, so short, so this joy that we can have when we're moving around and this freedom we can have in this communication that we're not as different from each other as we think. I feel that social activism does tie into dance a lot, so I do hope that my students use dance as a tool to save their own lives, but also maybe even save others. 

What do you see for the future of Creative Netwerk in LA?

There's such potential for Creative Netwerk in LA, because a lot of people are here and there's a lot of need. I see huge programming endeavors. I fantasize about getting those kids from the community to connect more with that commercial world. Some of these kids have never been a day in their life traveling out of their neighborhood in LA. So I’d love to see more discovery based learning where the commercial world meets the community world. I think the commercial world steals and takes from the community, so who better than to be the representatives of commercial jobs than the people themselves, versus, someone who had all this money to bring themselves to LA from somewhere else.