April 28, 2026

Transcript:

When we think about health, we usually think about hospitals, doctors' offices, diagnoses, and medical charts. But health also lives in places closer to home. In community, in memory, and in the body itself. Because the body is more than biology. It's a record of the lives we've lived, the cultures we inherit, the joys we carry, and sometimes the harm we endure.

From Drexel University's Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design, this is Iterations, a podcast about creativity, design, and the ideas that emerge when disciplines collide. I am Laurel Hostak Jones. This season, we're starting from a question: what if creativity isn't just expression, but infrastructure for health? In this episode, how dance can become a form of research, healing and storytelling, and what happens when we treat lived experience as expertise.

Val: I never intended to be a dancer. I had experience after experience, after experience of the universe sharing with me that this is such an integral part of, of my experience

Laurel: For dancer, researcher, and educator. Valerie Ifill, a relationship with movement started long before she ever took to the stage. It began at home.

Val: My very first memory is: listening to Motown records with my father in our living room, standing on his feet as we swayed back and forth, and the joy and connection that came in that interaction. And now as a researcher, I'm understanding that, “oh wait, that's kind of a passing of culture and tradition.”

Laurel: Today, Val is an artist, community-based researcher, and assistant professor of dance at Drexel University, but the way she thinks about dance is shaped by many identities.

Val: Something that is important to my lens is that I am a Trinidadian American woman who is also an American Midwestern. A raised person, there's something deliciously joyful in the spaciousness that that offers me. The Midwestern part of me kind of craves ease and space. And the Caribbean part of me is excited by this concept of “liming” or just chilling, spending time being with people. And I think that those identities bring me to my work. I'm a community engaged educator and researcher using dance as a modality for storytelling, and personal and interpersonal connections.

Laurel: In Val's research, the body holds something powerful. Memory, history, culture.

Val: I do very much think of the body as being a space of archive. It holds memory in a lot of different ways. History, the rhythms that live in my body very much inform who I am and how I go through the world. The way that each of us store who we are, whether we're cognizant of it or not, is through our bodies.

Laurel: That archive contains joyful experiences, family traditions, music, community gatherings. But it also contains something else.

Val: You know, trauma can be a part stored in your body. It absolutely is stored in your body. So that part of your story is also archived, and that really informs a lot of the choices that we make, I think, in everything that we do.

Laurel: Which raises an important question: if trauma lives in the body, can't the healing start there?

Val first recognized the transformative power of movement when she was a teenager.

Val: I remember being in the car and feeling grumpy, like in my body. I felt heavy. And then taking a 60 minute dance class at that time, and then stepping out and feeling notably different.

I felt lighter. I felt joyful. I felt connected to myself. I felt a close connection. Even of banter in the car with my friend, who I would carpool with, was different. And that was when I first noticed the transformative benefits of dance and movement.

Laurel: Later in college, even when she wasn't majoring in dance, she made sure to keep it in her life.

Val: Before I registered for any other class, I registered for my dance class. I knew that I could not have a college experience without having this space to breathe, to explore, to move my body. I knew that it made a difference in my mental health, even if I couldn't articulate it at that time.

Laurel: Eventually, that understanding evolved into a larger question:

What happens when movement becomes a collective practice? A place where communities can process shared experiences. One of Val's projects exploring that idea is called “Movement of Mothers.” It brings mothers together to share their stories and translate those stories into movement.

Val: And it's for mothers who feel like their stories have been either omitted from the dominant narrative or misrepresented to gather together and share. Because you know what? Our reality, what's expressed in the media, is oftentimes not true to what the lived experience is.

Laurel: The inspiration for the project came from Val's own experiences navigating the healthcare system during childbirth. Experiences that left lasting impressions.

Val: I was experiencing pain at a procedure. They're trying to do some kind of intervention without the pain medication that I needed, and I was expressing pain and one person after another after another were like, “oh, let me give it a try.” “Let me give it a try.”

And with each try… it was just more and more painful until I was like, “no more, no more students… at what moment are you going to acknowledge the pain that I'm experiencing and treat my body with respect?”

Laurel: Experiences like these are not rare, especially for Black women navigating maternal healthcare systems.

So Val conceived a space in which experiences like this could be collectively transformed. For the benefit of the individual and the community.

Val: How can we use dance and movement, right? Because the harm is rooted and informed by the body. So why wouldn't the intervention happen through the body

Laurel: In “Movement of mothers,”  participants begin with conversation. They hold story circles, connect over shared experiences, then those stories become something physical.

Val: At the different workshops that I had, we always have community agreements. We always decide collectively where our boundaries are and what our goals are, and then we move as a unit from that space.

Centering the body and using movement allows us to explore in different ways. Oftentimes our experiences or our stories are just taken out of context. And you see this in media often, and so there's a space where we can just talk openly, you know, in our small workshop, lab spaces, our story circles, and we can talk about anything.

And then we can create movement. But then putting it into our bodies: there's a claiming that happens… or a reclaiming. And then deciding how we want to share it out. Do we want it to be a literal movement story? Do we want it to have text with it? Do we want it to be abstract?

So those people in the circle, we hold that space sacred and the relationships and the trust sacred, yet we can still show up, tell our stories publicly. It's a multi-layered approach that is all thoughtful and wrapped in care.

Laurel: That philosophy extends into another project Val co-created called “Black Girls Steaming Through Dance.” The program brings together girls between seven and 13 years old to explore science, technology, engineering, arts and math, or steam through movement.

Val: I believe we're in our seventh year right now. It is a collaboration between faculty members at Drexel who identify as the “few or only’s” in their disciplines. We're all black women. I am in dance. Raja Schaar is in product design. Michelle Rodgers is in computing and informatics. And Ayana Allen-Handy is in urban education. We want to make sure that we don't remain the few’s, the only’s.

Laurel: In the program, students design wearable tech and then integrate it into choreography.

Val: They design costumes using wearable technology. Then they code the costumes to interact with choreography that they created. We have an open lab space that is beautifully chaotic, we have tables and computers and drawing pads, and then half of the space is open. Thry explore, we take them through our curriculum where they become proficient in all of these areas. And then they use their imaginations. And let me tell you, kid imaginations just blow us out of the water.

So we're constantly learning through them. It's very much an intergenerational space by nature, because we're working with so many different disciplines. I'll be sitting there, with conductive tape wrapped all around me, and then a student will come up to me and be like, “oh, Miss Val, let me show you.” And then I get to experience them as teacher, which reinforces their knowledge (but really it's just helping me out too in the process!).

Laurel: Movement becomes a tool for understanding complex ideas like energy circuits.

Val: We use movement also as methodology. If Michelle is teaching them something about coding, and how energy might go from one point to another… We’re about to put our costumes together, and if they don't put their conductive tape on, if there's a break, the energy will stop. And we want them to understand that concept. So we have them get up and hold hands and say, “let's send movement from this side to another. Oh, wait. You notice how it stopped when there was a break in the chain, and let's see if we could do that again. But how can we reconnect and how can we make that a more, a more solid connection so then we can pass the energy from point A to point B?”

Laurel: The goal isn't just teaching STEAM literacies, it's building confidence, creating community, and reinforcing self-concept. It's encouraging younger generations to explore STEAM identities and find themselves in STEAM spaces they've been historically excluded from.

Val: It's a beautiful counter space where we can just all breathe and be. It’s buzzing and alive and generative and there’s laughter, and there's something really magical about those spaces

Laurel: At the heart of Val's work is a deceptively simple idea: pay attention to your body.

And since this is a podcast rooted in higher education, I'm gonna let Val give you a homework assignment. But don't worry, it's easy to get started and it's impossible to do it wrong.

Val: I wanna start by saying notice… “how do I feel in my body?”

Am I grounded? And what makes me feel grounded? Am I noticing what's happening around me? Am I noticing other people make their way around me.

And that could be a stopping point.

But if you want to take it to another place, can you create a two-minute dance in a way that feels so delicious in your own body?

Nobody's watching. You're in your own space. Maybe you start a timer. You have a clear beginning where you start with both feet grounded, taking a deep breath, and you hear the music, and you let that inspire you without judgment.

So an invitation for personal practice first. And as that feels more comfortable… maybe you have a dance party with somebody else. Inviting others to be in their bodies freely in a way that feels amazing. Just notice how that makes you feel connected to yourself. Notice how that makes you feel connected to the other people around you.

So I think that's it. Notice and dance!

Laurel: Movement is one of the oldest forms of communication we have. Long before written language, long before scientific journals, people danced their histories, their grief, their joy, their survival. Valerie Ifill's work reminds us that those traditions are alive and well, that the body remembers, and that sometimes the path toward healing doesn't start in a doctor's office. It starts with a breath, two feet on the floor, and the courage to move.

Iterations is created and produced by me, Laurel Hostak Jones.

In partnership with Drexel University's, Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design. Our supervising producer is Brandon Johnson. Production support is generously provided by the Drexel Department of Cinema & Television. Special thanks to Michelle Chu. Bill McNulty, Karen Kelly and Joe Marini.