Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.
An adage often meant to disparage teachers, this saying often indicates some sort of lack: of talent, of drive, of luck, even. But for developmental psychologist, musician, and teaching artist Yorel Lashley, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
“It’s a completely different skill set,” he says of teaching others a craft. “When you’re performing, you’re trying to get yourself to do something right. You only have to really understand the inner workings and the psychology of one person.
“But when you start working with a group of students, you have to first understand how to cultivate and build a space where everybody can live comfortably, where everybody can be clear on what the expectations and the promises are that we’ve made to each other,” he continued. “Everybody’s ability to do that is going to be completely different.”
Lashley is the founder of Drum Power, a drum and dance experience that teaches young people socio-emotional skills through African cultural traditions. The organization has served over 4,000 young people across Brooklyn, New York and Madison, Wisconsin since 2001.
Like many people who’ve found their artistic calling, Lashley had aspirations of becoming a professional musician. After reconnecting with drumming and studying under a master teacher at the Kankouran West African Dance Company in Washington D.C., Lashley moved to New York to pursue Afro-Cuban percussion professionally.
And while he found success as the director of a 12-piece band there, something was missing. “When I left and went to New York to just focus on music and my own artistic career stuff, I started to miss students,” he says.
The students tugging at Lashley’s heartstrings were the ones he met during work study as UW-Madison undergraduate student at the Wilmar Neighborhood Center and the South Madison Neighborhood Center (now known as the Boys and Girls Club).
“Drum Power was born because I was trying to think, ‘Well, how can I take this journey that I’m on as an individual musician and also make it something that can support young people?,’” he says. And while the program started out in New York City, when Lashley moved back to Madison to be closer to family, he brought Drum Power with him, creating a new opportunity for young people in the city to learn life skills through music.
Centered around the three tenets of discipline, community, and leadership, Drum Power equips students with skills that they can use in all aspects of their lives, along with the power to name the tools for what they are.
Thanks to his background in psychology, Lashley is keenly aware of the importance of metacognition in young people’s ability to see themselves as agents in their own lives.
“You can’t apply a skill or knowledge in a situation unless you know what it is and how to use it,” he explained. “It’s a way to actually reinforce the knowledge that they bring, rather than act as if I’m giving them something that they know nothing about.”
Thanks to his preexisting relationships in the city, Drum Power had a near-instant student base when Lashley brought it to Madison.
“I had a few friends who were teachers in Madison that I knew from college who knew about my work in New York City and invited me to their schools,” Lashley explained. “I also connected with a group of MMSD teachers who had formed a professional learning community around culturally responsive teaching who studied drumming with me for their own community-building and continued learning.”
To make Drum Power more accessible, the financial costs of running the advanced performing groups fall on the venues that host them, rather than the parents of drummers. For the Drum Power Arts Camp, there is a registration fee just like other summer camps, but scholarships are offered to students in need.
And for Lashley himself, while “betting on [himself] to preserve his freedom” has always been a worthy gamble, he admits that having an established teaching practice has granted him financial stability.
“I developed Drum Power to be based on semester to school year-long contracts to create stability so that I wasn’t hustling new work endlessly and facing financial hardship in between contracts,” he explained.
“Some years have been better than others but it has worked for me,” he continued. “I also have nurtured relationships and tried to execute good practices like being dependable, communicating with clients, not canceling or missing commitments, and being clear about financial agreements.”
But beyond any one business skill—which range from everyday tasks of scheduling and the bigger picture work of budgeting—Lashley emphasizes that the success of a teacher depends on their ability to set goals for the community they’re fostering.
“Clarity on what your goals are is probably the guiding light that determines all else,” he said.
“A program that has the goal of providing an inclusive program that helps children build toward self-sufficiency will look different from a program that seeks to stop at fun arts experiences and explorations,” he continued. “If you don’t have a vision for how you hope everybody will be in community, then they’re not going to be in community, because there isn’t a clear goal that you’re then building toward.”
Teacher’s Corner: Advice from Teaching Artists
YOREL LASHLEY: Have a vision. “If you don’t have a vision for how you hope everybody will be in community, then they’re not going to be in community, because there isn’t a clear goal that you’re then building toward.”
NATALIA ARMACANQUI: Marketing matters! “No matter how good your product or your services are, if people don’t know about it, if the word’s not out there, it’s not going to matter.”
SAVANNAH STARLIN: Take every chance you’re given. “Any chance you get, just take it. Don’t be afraid to take risks and make opportunities for yourself.”
While being able to impart art forms to a new generation of creative learners is a gift, there is no denying that its practicality is alluring to many. After working for years as a globe-trotting freelance dancer, Natalia Armacanqui decided to return to Madison and open her own dance studio, Kallpa House of Spirit Dances, which offers Bollywood, belly dancing, kathak, meditation classes, and more.
Upon moving back to the United States, Armacanqui took a break from dancing professionally and found fulfillment in the nonprofit world championing gender and disability justice. But her love for dancing remained, and she was finally in a position where she could build a student base and teaching practice.
“In order to teach, you have to be in one place for a long time for the students to grow,” she said. So she quit her job, and decided to pursue teaching full-time. “That’s when I really decided, ‘Okay, I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna do full teaching and on a consistent basis.’”
Prior to this, Armacanqui had spent a decade in India studying the classical north Indian dance form kathak, which she grew serious about after graduating from college at UW-Madison. It was in India that she got her first exposure to teaching, and subsequently pursued a life of dance.
In those years, while being a freelancer gave her the freedom to travel anywhere she needed to for a performance, it offered little in terms of financial stability. “Living as a freelance artist is not easy,” she said. “Depending on which country I was in and who was employing me, or who the director or producer was, sometimes I would get paid equitably, and sometimes not.”
Growing up in an Andean Peruvian household, Armacanqui doesn’t remember a time when she wasn’t dancing. As a child, she was surrounded by dance in her home, with her living room as an epicenter for cultural exchange and traditional celebration.
At Kallpa House, Armacanqui strives to cultivate this same sense of home, safety, and creativity for her students. “I want Kallpa House to be a safe space for folks of color, for queer folks of color, for trans folks, for LGBTQ+ folks, and to bring folks together to help us see the oneness and meet each other through music and through dance.”
Marrying her passions for social justice and movement, she sees dance as a powerful and revolutionary art form — one that has been oppressed by governments and institutions throughout history.
“It’s about bodily freedom, right?” she said. “The government’s always trying to police our bodies in different ways. And dance is saying, ‘Nobody can police my body. I can do what I want with my body.’”
So much invisible work comes with building a space as welcoming and healing as Kallpa House — namely, the unsung administrative work of running your own business. When the studio was first starting out, Armacanqui recalls leaning on her teaching artist friends for advice about how to market her classes.
“No matter how good your product or your services are, if people don’t know about it, if the word’s not out there, it’s not going to matter,” she explained. “But more than the numbers, it’s the feedback that matters most to me. If I see that they’re smiling, and they feel confident, and their eyes are bright.”
In addition to running Kallpa House, Armacanqui also teaches at studios around the city and holds a lectureship within UW-Madison’s Dance Department. Having lived lives of both performance and teaching, Armacanqui advises other artists that finding a balance between both is ideal — both financially and for your art.
“If one can, it’s most practical to do both, because teaching business brings in the regular salary, but then the performances [supplement that],” she said. “Performances also keep you on your game. When you’re performing, you have to be in good shape artistry wise.”
Beyond practicality, Armacanqui’s biggest piece of advice for others thinking about bringing education into their art practice is about openness and a willingness to share it with others.
“The process of creating art is a very vulnerable and intimate process,” she said. “If you’re gonna make a living off of it, and if you’re gonna teach it, I recommend being generous with it, [and saying], ‘Here, I made it. I made it with my heart.’”
Sometimes, it takes living a life of artistry to realize that you want to bestow it upon others. In other cases, it takes the right person to see that seed of talent within you and encourage you to share it with the rest of the world.
When The Bubbler at Madison Public Library’s Program Administrator Carlee Latimer reached out to Savannah Starlin asking if she wanted to get involved with them, Starlin had only been posting her drawings on Instagram as a hobby.
The Bubbler at Madison Public Library is a hub that connects artists to the community and the community to artists through free, hands-on making, exhibitions, and community-wide events.
“It’s a really niche environment working within a public library, and so we definitely look for people who are not only open but really excited about working with the public, working with the community, and in some cases, setting their ego aside and letting the community lead,” Latimer said.
The mastermind behind the Bubbler connection was Starlin’s father, who was the one to reach out to Latimer. “That’s not super rare,” Latimer explained. “Oftentimes there are close friends or people who [know artists who] are like, ‘Oh, I know The Bubbler and I know this person. They should know each other.’”
This type of support has been a mainstay in Starlin’s life. When she started drawing at the age of five, her family pushed her to keep pursuing the craft.
But even through years of encouragement, Starlin had never considered pursuing it as a career. “Art has always been my main interest but in high school, I wasn’t really thinking like, ‘I want to be an artist as I grow up,’” she explained. “I think I was mostly focused on the money aspect. People used to tell me that artists didn’t make money at all and that it wasn’t a real career.”
Instead, Starlin thought about pursuing a career in mental health counseling, and spent some time in college pursuing a liberal arts degree. In 2020, she had her daughter, and the COVID-19 lockdown gave her the opportunity to reconnect with her art. A friend of hers who knew she had a knack for drawing bought her paints, which kickstarted Starlin’s experimentation with the medium.
“I didn’t think it was that good, but once I started posting on my art page and being able to show my art, it kind of made me think that I have a talent that I want to pursue,” she explained.
Soon after, she became involved with The Bubbler at Madison Public Library, diving straight into its “Our Town Everywhere: A Self-Portrait of Madison” project. “She just brought a whole different take and perspective to that project, which was really appreciated,” Latimer said.
Through this project, Starlin proved herself as “somebody who’s willing and able to do something that already exists, that maybe isn’t their initial idea, but can bring their own style or their own facilitation method to it,” Latimer explained.
This initial collaboration led to a plethora of opportunities for Starlin to begin teaching art around Madison, including as a mentee to two other teaching artists who were working with youth at the Dane County Juvenile Detention Center to paint a mural in their building.
“The whole process of doing the mural and having that opportunity was really life changing for us,” Starlin said. The youth she worked with chose to paint the phrase, “It’s a lifetime, not a light time,” on the mural, from which Starlin takes great inspiration. “It’s nice to have meaning behind a painting, [and the] motivation to get it done.”
Since her first few projects with The Bubbler at Madison Public Library, Starlin has also started working as an art instructor at Wine and Design, a painting studio in town. This past summer, she was also a Bubbler artist-in-residence, where she held weekly classes for children and their parents at Madison Public Library’s Hawthorne branch, where Librarian Jessi Havens was her main support.
“I was super excited to come up with ten different projects for the kids to do and for families to come in and do,” Starlin said. “I just thought of projects I always wanted to do as a kid.”
These different experiences ignited a passion for mentorship in Starlin, and have shown her that she can make a living doing what she loves. “I found love in teaching art, [especially] with kids,” she said. “I think the most rewarding [part] is when people feel comfortable asking me for help.”
Starlin’s “interesting and rich path” with The Bubbler at Madison Public Library shows how crucial its programming is to artists who haven’t yet tapped into their potential as educators, but have the passion and drive to share their talents with the larger community.
“There are a lot of holes within the arts ecosystem of Madison,” Latimer said. “It’s incredible what we do with the small amount of resources we have. There’s an endless amount of people and creativity and talent, but unfortunately, less opportunities [and] less funding.”
“[The Bubbler at Madison Public Library] is modeling what we hope other organizations and agencies are able to do in supporting artists, paying artists, being incredibly flexible and understanding that if you’re working with somebody who is a facilitating artist, a teaching artist, they’re juggling a lot,” Latimer continued.
And for young artists like Starlin, it was her own circle and the larger Madison community that worked together to bring her to the place she is today.
“Any chance you get, just take it,” Starlin advised others who are considering adding teaching to their art practice. “Don’t be afraid to take risks and make opportunities for yourself. Posting my art and showing people my art opened a big door for me. I think [The Bubbler at Madison Public Library] changed my life for the better.”
