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Veronica Vasquez’s new book, “My Emotions Dance Journal,” began as a writing exercise to help her cope with the death of her father, Juan Vasquez. It has now become a tool she uses to integrate social-emotional learning into the dance programs she holds through JMM Dance Co at local schools, including San Juan, Rancho Santana, and Ladd Lane.
“His death was like a big light bulb for me,” Vasquez said. “It made me realize how much my dad’s teachings played a big part in the way I teach classes, in the questions that I ask kids, and how I really bring healing into the classroom.”
The book is an eight-week exploration of movement exercises, accompanied by daily recaps of activities and emotional states. Vasquez said the core of the book’s inspiration came from her father’s work as a mental health social worker.
Dance seemed an unlikely path for Vasquez, who spent much of her youth dealing with severe asthma and allergies, an underlying developmental condition and attention deficit disorder. Finding it very hard to express herself, she was motivated by videos of pop stars performing.
“I’d see them dancing and singing,” she said. “I just wanted to act like that. I started asking my mom if she could take me to dance classes. I got fixated on movement because it was so healing for me and helped with my own low self-esteem.”
By the age of 17, Vasquez had learned jazz, ballet, tap, hip-hop, and liturgical dance. At 18, she was accepted as the only freshman to be a member of a college modern dance company.
“I think that really played a part in me learning more about these different layers of dance,” she said, “which were deeper than what I was used to in competitions.”
After graduation, Vasquez opened a studio, Veronica’s Art of Dance, closing it five years later when she realized that the standard approach she had been taught was not what she wanted and not what her students needed.
“The people who kept coming to me were not what you traditionally see in a studio,” she said. “I wanted to connect dance for a healing purpose rather than for a skill set. I wanted to learn more about what I was doing with dance that made it so unique.”
Driven by a desire to use dance for healing, Vasquez founded JMM Dance Company in 2018. The acronym, which stands for “Juan’s Mindset Method,” is a nod to her father, who she said profoundly influenced her approach to teaching.
Starting with a program for children with special needs during the COVID-19 pandemic, Vasquez noticed her online classes were attracting other students who were deeply affected mentally by the pandemic. It led to a rethinking of her approach to teaching dance, incorporating social-emotional learning.
“It’s the learning of emotions,” she said, “and specifically how you engage your emotions with others in a social environment. It’s how you bring empathy to yourself first of all, then to the people around you.”
Following the death of her father a year and a half ago, Vasquez incorporated JMM as a nonprofit and expanded her reach to four-week sessions, mini-camps and five-week summer programs held in local schools and communities.
Jivan Dhaliwal, Aromas-San Juan Unified School District’s director of curriculum and instruction, said that she welcomed Vasquez’s programs as part of the district’s summer programs.
“Veronica is just so in tune with students and their needs,” Dhaliwal said. “She has these fantastic ideas, and then she executes them. I think it helps, particularly our special education students, to incorporate their feelings and their emotions into movement.”
Erica Morton enrolled her 11-year-old son, Jacob, in one of the summer camps after seeing a post about it in a special needs Facebook group. To her, it sounded like a fun and inclusive activity that catered to one of his favorite things: Jacob loves to dance.
“Veronica taught them how to do different steps and routines,” Morton said, “but she added STEM activities that he really likes. She also taught them breathing exercises, which we’ve managed to integrate at home to help him when he gets upset.”
Vasquez sees the “My Emotions Dance Journal” as an essential part of her work with children. Each of the eight-week sections begins with an affirmation such as, “Every step I take helps me grow,” and continues with motion exercises and a series of questions that probe into how the body might respond to different emotions, like joy or anger.
The goal, Vasquez said, is to help children express themselves in ways they did not know how to do previously.
“When you connect your mind with whatever is going on in your body,” she said, “you are releasing your stresses and anxieties. I want to really tap into that and be able to share this with kids who may be struggling”
Contact Veronica Vasquez at info@jmmdanceco.org, through Instagram or the JMM Dance Co. website. “My Emotions Dance Journal” is available at Hill’s Book Store or through Amazon.
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