October 01, 2024

Dance professional puts military experience on stage

Tango Alpha Lima
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Dance professional puts military experience on stage
Dance professional puts military experience on stage

Marine veteran Román Baca shares how he founded Exit 12 Dance Company to give veterans a storytelling platform through dance, theater and movement on this episode of the Tango Alpha Lima podcast. 

Classically trained ballet dancer Román Baca traded his dance shoes for combat boots in 2001 when he joined the U.S. Marines to defend the defenseless and change the perception of what male dancers are.

While serving as a machine-gunner and fire-team leader in Fallujah, Iraq, Baca shared with a battle buddy that he was a professional dancer and the two started thinking of ways to put war experience on stage back home. But upon returning home, his vision got away with civilian life. Then aggression, depression crept in from the trauma of war. That’s when Baca was challenged with a life-changing question.

“If you could do anything in the world, what would you do? … I would start a dance company,” Baca shared on this episode of The American Legion Tango Alpha Lima podcast.

From there, Exit12 Dance Company was born to help veterans process military trauma through the arts.

“It is a vehicle to bring members of the military community in to creatively engage through movement and theater with their experiences, their military experiences, their human experiences, and to put them on stage so other people can learn, other people can see the different sides of what it means to serve in the military and the plethora of people that dawn the uniform,” said Baca, co-founder and artistic director of Exit 12 Dance Company.

Through Exit 12, Baca has choreographed dance works that explore the military veteran experience and the impact of war on civilians and families. He also leads workshops and lectures that help veterans recover through sharing their story, where he shares an example.

An Army veteran of the Vietnam War joined Exit 12 to begin healing from the traumatic experience of a rocket attack. “Everett recalls that he was petrified, he could not move a muscle, he was frozen in fear,” Baca said of Everett’s experience during the attack. That single moment contributed to guilt and shame, and he turned to drugs and alcohol to move past it.

Part of Exit 12 is journey mapping where a veteran tells his or her story and participants walk through it with them.

“He decided that he was going to recreate the scariest moment of his life. He knew that all of the other participants were doing similar things and struggling with similar experiences and that knowledge, and that community gave him the strength to go through it until his heart was still,” Baca said. “After that he went back to his therapist and for the first time in his life his therapist downgraded him from high suicide risk to low. That’s what the arts can do. That is how the arts can impact people in a very large and transformative way.”

Baca is currently overseas working with veterans in the arts but Exit 12 has upcoming events to share the experiences of veterans through storytelling, dance and movement. Listen to see if Exit 12 is coming to a city near you, how you or your American Legion post can get involved with the dance program, and then take the same name game exercise as the podcast hosts did with Baca.

Also, co-hosts Stacy Pearsall, Adam Marr and Joe Worley discuss:

-          Breakdancing to keep the dance topic going. Should it be an Olympic sport after the debate from the summer Olympics in Paris? And what are people talking about that will be the Olympic sport be in four years in the United States? Either way, Pearsall wants podcast listeners to send in their best ragan moves.

-          The military ship that had a secret, unauthorized network installed for use exclusively by a few people. Their punishment? Maybe make their browsing history public think the podcast hosts. 

-          A homeless teenager gets his wish of serving in the Marines thanks to a Legionnaire who helped him get his GED in a matter of weeks. 

Check out this week’s episode, which is among more than 265 Tango Alpha Lima podcasts available in both audio and video formats here. You can also download episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google Play or other major podcast-hosting sites. The video version is available at the Legion’s YouTube channel.

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