(Image Credit: Ronelle Roode-Brothers)

By Sydney Chisholm

BLACK HISTORY MONTH

‘My parents had this dream’: Move from apartheid-era South Africa to Kamloops helped unlock a career in dance

Feb 15, 2023 | 4:16 PM

KAMLOOPS – February is Black History Month and in celebration of the observance, CFJC Today’s Sydney Chisholm sat down with former Kamloops resident Ronelle Roode-Brothers, an accomplished dancer and musician with South African roots.

Ronelle’s family moved to Kamloops from Cape Town when she was a young girl, during the apartheid era.

Immigrating to Canada made pursuing a career in dance a possibility for the young woman labelled Cape-coloured at birth. Fifty-six years later, she’s working to enrich the Kamloops arts community.

The dance studio was always a safe place for Ronelle, despite feeling out of place as a person of colour living in Kamloops in the 1970s.

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“The atmosphere of being there led me to believe — even though in my everyday life, I sort of felt out of place because I felt ethnically different,” Ronelle said. “The dance studio presented an atmosphere that it didn’t exist. It didn’t matter.”

She started dancing at the age of four. Since then, she has excelled in many aspects of arts, including music, dance and writing.

Maureen Duggan, owner of the Dance Gallery and Ronelle’s former dance teacher, said Ronelle had both the natural talent and drive to improve.

“When she left, she just continued to educate herself, in all different genres. She was pretty amazing – she still is,” Duggan said.

But her success in the arts may have never happened if her parents hadn’t made the move to Kamloops in 1966.

Ronelle was featured in an ad for Judy Hunter’s School of Dance, which she said would never have happened if she was back in South Africa.

“Do you really think that a child of colour in the 1960s or ’70s would be representing anything to do with the arts in a newspaper? Probably not,” she said. “I look back at it now as an older person and I realized that my parents had this dream.”

Because they pursued their dream, Ronelle says she was able to pursue her passion.

During her career as an author, dancer and musician, she’s won numerous awards and even opened for Kool and the Gang in Tokyo in 1989, before turning her attention to helping others.

“I wanted to provide the same safe space,” Ronelle said, explaining why she was so drawn to teaching.

As a dance educator, she works to empower students of all ages, creating programs that focus on inclusion.

Now living in Alberta, Ronelle says Kamloops still has a special place in her heart, making it the perfect launching ground for her new dance program – Arts2Empower.

Her Arts2Empower program will be coming to the Kamloops Dance Gallery this summer and, according to Ronelle, she has been in discussions with the Kamloops-Thompson School District about bringing her programs into schools.