Conflict Resolution Within the Context of Dance: Resource Guide (updated March 2025)

Conflict Resolution Within the Context of Dance: Resource Guide

By Jill Randall

Throughout the past 4 years, professionally and personally, I have wanted to learn more about conflict resolution. This also relates to the ideas of mediation, transformative justice, and repair. 

What does this look like within an arts organization? A dance company? A project-based dance process? And of course - let’s also consider it personally, in close community, and within our global community.

I also want to acknowledge the idea of exploring conflict resolution within bigger conversations and intersectionality with power, race, gender, and compassion. Let’s have this dialogue and reflection within the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements. 

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Let’s consider the steps, discussions, and documents we can have and make, to offer clarity and care, which might prevent some conflicts. 

During the past few years, I have been honored to work with dancer Emily Hansel to publish four of her pieces about dancer care and contracts on this site. Please check them out here:

• Relearning Agency: A Dancer’s Call for Collective Action
• Cultivating Healthy, Equitable Workplaces for Dancers
• Empowering Dancers through Contracts
• Contingency plans that support dancers’ mental and physical health

In addition, colleague Cookie Harrist’s zine Liberate the Dancer is important within this dialogue. I really appreciate the list of questions to consider as you begin a new dance process/project. 

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With very few dance-specific or arts-specific resources, I have explored a variety of resources during the past few years in the hopes of making connections and applications.

I have participated in a few webinars with Zen teacher and mediator Diane Musho Hamilton - about navigating conflict and about compassionate conversations. (See links below.) I just participated in her 3-day mediation training in February 2025. In Winter 2024, I had the honor to work with dancer/conflict studies teacher Dana Caspersen over the course of a few months.

As adrienne maree brown noted in a 2011 article, “in most organizations i work with these days, it’s my first order of business – how do we make decisions, and how do we handle conflict?”. brown gets right to the heart of it.

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I hope that the resources below can help spark your own journey and learning around conflict resolution. My best wish is that every arts org’s employee manual — and every dance company’s LOA/contract — includes language about conflict. Even at the college level, my wish is that student groups and dance companies are building language around dancer care and navigating conflict. What happens when there is a disagreement, tension, misunderstanding, or microaggression? How can we process, reflect, be in dialogue, heal, and repair? If you have resources to share, please add them here as a comment below. Thank you.

Let’s take the time to create meaningful and thorough documents - staff manuals, artist letters of agreement, and MOUs. Let’s make conflict resolution and community care key components in every working situation as dancers, choreographers, and directors.

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Articles

• “Conflict resolution 101” - adrienne maree brown (adrienne’s website)
• “A Responsive Approach to Conflict" - Luna N.H. (Luna’s website)
• “What’s Your Conflict Superpower?” - Compasspoint
• “Calming Your Brain During Conflict” - Diane Musho Hamilton (Harvard Business Review)
• “This Mediator - And Former Forsythe Dancer - Uses Dance to Address Conflict" - Rachel F. Elson (Dance Magazine)
• "Dana Caspersen: Choreographic thinking to understand and navigate conflict" - Tamara Searle (Dance Informa)
• "A William Forsythe Dancer Moves from Toe-Tapping to Hand Shaking” - Roslyn Sulcas (New York Times)
• "Getting Unstuck: Conflict Resolution Strategies That Work" - Robert Feirsen, Seth Weitzman (Edutopia)
• "Navigating Conflict in Movement Organizations" -AORTA

Books

• Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation - adrienne maree brown
• Everything is Workable: A Zen Approach to Conflict Resolution - Diane Musho Hamilton
• Changing the Conversation: The 17 Principles of Conflict Resolution - Dana Caspersen and Joost Elffers
• Conflict Is an Opportunity - Dana Caspersen
• The Mindful Guide to Conflict Resolution - Rosalie Pulman
• Decolonizing Non-Violent Communication, third edition - meenadchi
• The Guide to Reflective Practice in Conflict Resolution, second edition - Michael Lang
• Conflict Resilience: Negotiating Disagreement Without Giving Up or Giving In - Robert C. Bordone and Joe Salinas, M.D.
• In addition, I wanted to give a shoutout for Andrea Olsen’s latest book, Moving Between Worlds: A Guide to Embodied Living and Communicating. It beautifully explores somatics, dance, communication, and perception (all key ideas related to conflict resolution too).

Workbooks

• Creating Conflict Infrastructure - Luna N.H.
• Turning Towards Each Other: A Conflict Workbook - Jovida Ross and Weyam Ghadbian

5 Minute Meditation

• Happiness Break: A Meditation For Connecting In Polarized Times, With Scott Shigeoka

Podcasts

• adrienne maree brown - On Being with Krista Tippett
• Pleasure Activist adrienne maree brown On Conflict, Canceling, and Community - Undistracted podcast with Brittany Packett Cunningham
• "A Dancer's Guide to Conflict Resolution" - Words That Move Me Podcast with Dana Wilson

Apps

• Diane Musho Hamilton has a 5-part series on the Waking Up app called "Resolving Conflict."

Websites and Upcoming Workshop Opportunities (many are online)

• Diane Musho Hamilton
• Dana Caspersen
• Community Boards (San Francisco)
• Compasspoint
• Bay Area Nonviolent Communication
• Aorta Collective
• UC Davis Continuing and Professional Education
  

Affordable Conflict Mediation (in-person or online)

• While Bay Area based SEEDS recently closed, they created a comprehensive list of colleagues and orgs to recommend

Embodied Conflict Resolution Certificate

• The Embody Lab (25 hours, online)

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