Tracey Dixon and Opus worked together to provide high quality string music education to middle school students in the community of Brownsville, Brooklyn. Brownsville is a Title 1 district in NYC where access to the arts is severely limited. By viewing music through a holistic and healing lens, learning instrumental music became a mode of therapy for students to process the heightened trauma experienced through the pandemic. Their commitment to the arts and their shared race and culture with the community, allowed students, teachers, staff, and ourselves a level of healing that was unprecedented. Being able to create sound, while creating new neural pathways through the mechanics of learning to play the violin, supported students as they left their worlds of online learning. Frequencies and vibrations of sound allowed a brand of curative and kinesthetic learning to manifest in the classrooms they worked in. Administrators experimented successfully with daytime arts programming, shifting the priorities toward a more humane existence for public school, an existence that brought light back into the eyes and hearts of the community.

OPUS Dance Theatre (ODT) promotes the full spectrum of the Pan-African experience through performance and educational programs. With a philosophy based on the belief that arts in education is valuable and must be maintained as an integral part of educational goals, ODT has, for more than 25 years, specialized in the development of general and multicultural visual and performing arts instructional curricula.