Shall We Dance? Art History alum designs new dance degree - and a partnership with Joffrey Ballet

Jennifer Hasso is an unlikely champion of dance.

Although she loves dancing and took classes as both a child and an adult, she preferred gymnastics and cheerleading in her teen years. Rather than a dance degree, she holds a Master’s in Art History from UWM.

Nevertheless, she’s become the architect of both the City Colleges of Chicago’s new associate’s degree in dance and its partnership with the Joffrey Ballet. Since the program began in the fall of 2018, City Colleges has become one of just three schools in Illinois, and the only one in Chicago, to offer an associate’s degree in dance.

“The responses have been really great. Last semester, we started the program at 65 percent capacity,” Hasso said. “Particularly within the dance community, people have been so warm and welcoming. We are providing more equitable dance education.”

Hasso is an adjunct instructor who teaches fine arts and humanities classes at Harold Washington College, part of the City Colleges of Chicago. It is the largest community college system in Illinois and serves more than 80,000 students per year.

Jennifer Rose Hasso is the architect of City Colleges of Chicago’s new associate’s degree in dance, and its new partnership with the Joffrey Ballet. Hasso is a 2012 UWM Art History graduate. (Photo courtesy of Jennifer Hasso.)

Most of those students don’t look like the typical classical dancer. That’s why, in 2015, Hasso invited a representative from the Joffrey Ballet to come and speak to her classes.

“Ballet has a history of being very homogenous in terms of class and race,” Hasso said. “The Joffrey Ballet … (is) very diverse. Their focus is more on the ability of the dancer rather than what they look like.”

After the representative spoke to the students, she had a question for Hasso as well: Did the college offer any studio courses for dance?

“(The Humanities and Music department at Harold Washington) is very strong in visual art, in music, in philosophy, in cinema studies,” Hasso said. “Why didn’t we have dance? Well, we just didn’t have the space.”

But the Joffrey did – several studios, in fact, that occasionally went unused and would be perfect for City College students. A partnership was born.

Hasso set to work designing a dance curriculum that would eventually turn into a path for an associate’s degree. In addition to designing classes, Hasso also had to collaborate with four-year institutions to determine how her students’ credits would transfer after they graduated. She’s even developed a partnership with Columbia

College to offer a “2+2” program where students can take their two years of dance at Harold Washington and complete their last two years to earn a BA or BFA at the four-year school.

Students began their first classes this past fall. The college offers introductory courses in ballet, hip-hop, modern, jazz, and world dance. The latter will be a rotating class featuring styles like West African dance, Middle Eastern, Latin dance, and more.

Harold Washington is also looking into building its own studio on campus to support budding dance majors.

It’s important to Hasso that she provides new opportunities for community college students, since she’s a product of community colleges herself. She took classes at a couple of two-year institutions in Michigan and fell in love with her art history and anthropology courses.

Hasso completed her Bachelor’s degree at DePaul University and chose UWM for graduate school based on its proximity to Chicago and its strength in African and Caribbean art education. She was a commuter student with a very long commute; Hasso attended classes at UWM while still living and working in Chicago. She graduated in 2012.

In addition to teaching at Harold Washington, she also lectures at Triton College and bartends on the weekends.

Because she holds an arts degree, Hasso is familiar with a question many of her dance students will face: How do you expect to earn a living?

“You have to be a bit more diligent to figure out what you can do with any sort of art degree,” she acknowledged, but, “I think there are a lot of very diverse career opportunities, especially in a large city.”

Several of her students want to become professional dancers, dance instructors, or physical therapists, for instance.

Whatever they decide to do, Hasso will be supporting them every (dance) step of the way.

By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science