Dancer turned social advocate, Kai Hazelwood is no stranger to standing out amongst the crowd. As a black, queer, and now disabled individual, she has had to navigate life with many obstacles. Yet, instead of letting them weigh her down, she has transformed them into a source of fuel, using her experiences to foster community and cultivate healing. Her defiant nature is what ultimately led her down a path of advocacy for the oppressed, now serving as a healer, teacher, and leader for black, queer, and disabled communities.
As the founder of the art collective Good Trouble Makers and co-founder of Practice Progress, Hazelwood might come across as a natural-born healer, but her story is much more complex. After surviving tumultuous mental health struggles and debilitating physical illness, her experiences have taught her the true depth of healing.
Now Hazelwood is sharing those practices on a grand scale through community and soon with Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, specifically aimed at Black, queer, and disabled individuals. Hazelwood shared with BAUCE, how confronting her trauma ultimately led her toward a career in healing.
Born a Dancer
Hazelwood began her path in dancing soon after she learned how to walk. She began exploring the art of dance at age 4 and started dancing professionally at 6. However, her initial feelings toward the art form when dancing professionally were stubbornness rather than admiration. As the only black child in her first dance school, she felt comparison more than inspiration.
“They tell you on the first day to look to your right and look to your left, and that out of everyone you see in the room, only two or three of you will ever amount to anything as dancers,” Hazelwood reflects. “My personality has always been that when you tell me ‘no’, I’m gonna turn it into a ‘yes’. So I stayed for a long time to prove them wrong.”
Years later, when she began training at the Dance Theater of Harlem, she found a home that made her feel included and uplifted amongst other young black performers. “It was my first experience wearing tights and shoes that matched my actual skin tone instead of pink tights,” Hazelwood tells BAUCE. The dancer cites the dance theater and her instructor Mr. Tyrone Brooks as being the reason she fell in love with dance.“[Brooks] would get in my face every day about dancing like I was a ‘petite white girl’. And I’m almost six feet tall, he was like, ‘This is not who you are’,” said Hazelwood.
On Facing Mental and Physical Struggles
Hazelwood went on to have a flourishing dancing career, curating and directing many transdisciplinary arts projects in Los Angeles. But in 2018, her life took a dramatic turn as she embarked on a life-changing process that reshaped how she connected with her body. That year, Hazelwood developed severe PTSD after recovering memories of childhood sexual abuse. “I went through this wild process of having been someone whose way of making sense of the world was through my body, to someone who felt unsafe in my own body,” Hazelwood shared with BAUCE. “It was really terrifying.”
This devastating mental and emotional toll began to snowball into a disease that took over her entire body. In a short span, she was diagnosed with a chronic stomach infection that went unnoticed for years and brought on intense pain. Treatment for the infection led to further health complications, leaving Hazelwood bedridden and chemically imbalanced. Eventually, she was diagnosed with a connective tissue disorder, which required her to use crutches. “I went from an athlete who would dance all day—eight hours a day—still go home plenty of energy and keep going to thinking about if I’ve got the energy for a 10-minute walk,” Hazelwood expressed. “I had to become a different person to survive, and that’s really what this healing work has become for me, is to figure out how to survive one of, if not the hardest period of my entire life.”
Unable to use the coping mechanisms she developed in the past as a body-based artist forced her to find new pathways to healing. Aside from isolation, her pet snake, and a wonderful team of black women medical professionals, a big part of healing spiritually, mentally, and emotionally was finding community.
The Importance of Community and Disability Justice
Hazelwood has always been an advocate for community, especially in marginalized groups such as queer, Black, and BIPOC. However, her experience in 2018 with a significant physical ailment led her to embrace a new community, the disabled. “I was fortunate that I knew already had in my community some incredible disabled people who were able to help me navigate this transition and figure out what it meant to use mobility aids and limit my work time, and just figure out what it meant to accept and embrace being disabled.” Submerging herself deeper into the disabled community led her to realize there is not much that separates its members from the rest of society. When asked about how society can make more inclusive efforts for the disabled, she expressed how it is a necessity for everyone.
“We do not make it out of this life without going through some element of disability. How do we make a better world for all of us? Because all of us are going to fucking need it.” Hazelwood also made a point to raise awareness of how racial injustice and disability can intertwine. “There are higher rates of disabled folks in black communities because of things like environmental racism, because of the trauma that we go through, because of the stress that racism puts on our bodies,” Hazelwood explains.
Body-Based Learning and Practice Progress
As a dancer, Hazelwood has used her body as an instrument of creative expression for nearly her whole life. Forming this close relationship with her body allowed her to see its connection to healing. This insight inspired her to launch Good Trouble Makers in 2018, a collaborative arts project shaped by community-driven values and shared creative visions. In 2019, the coalition began developing a project aimed at addressing racial systemic issues that were showing up in the dance world. This intentional project eventually evolved into Practice Progress.
Together with her business partner, Sarah Ashkin, Hazelwood launched Practice Progress, an organization dedicated to anti-racist education that tackles the effects of white supremacy through a body-based approach. “Racism affects us on the level of the body, so we have to respond to it and heal it and attend to it at the level of the body,” Hazelwood explains. Unlike traditional dance, which relies on choreographed, rehearsed movements, this approach focuses on connecting with the body’s natural responses to soothe the nervous system and promote somatic healing.“When I think about body-based learning, I think of it as reclaiming, repairing the wound with our own intuition, knowing, and expertise.”
The organization works in affinity groups, with Hazelwood leading BIPOC groups and Ashkin leading white groups to meet the specific needs of each demographic. “We talk about community, we rest, we take care of each other, we resource each other, and the white group works with Sarah on closing the information and knowledge gap and empathy gap that white people have when it comes to race and racism.”
Launching an EDMR Practice
Hazelwood’s next mission is to launch an Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy tailored specifically for Black, queer, and disabled individuals. EMDR is a psychotherapy technique that involves moving your eyes a specific way while processing traumatic memories to help individuals heal from traumatic experiences.
“Trauma can pull us back to those intense moments and disrupt the flow of time for us, and EMDR is about essentially healing that relationship to time so that those traumatic memories can actually live in the past and stop intruding on the present moment.” Hazelwood further explains. After facing her struggles finding practitioners she could identify with, she felt a strong need to launch a practice that directly serves these communities and offers a better understanding of their unique traumas and experiences. “To not be able to work with someone who had any competency or understanding around all of those things made me have to do a lot more of the work myself,” Hazelwood expressed.
“As someone who has the lived experience of being a black person, a woman, a queer person, and with a lived and very traumatic experience of understanding my own disability, I’m particularly positioned to be able to support people going through those things. ”In addition to EMDR therapy, Hazelwood is launching several other projects including a book project Shedding: A Playbook, set to be published in the next couple of years.
As for her own journey, Hazelwood is still healing and believes the healing process is a lifelong venture. “I think in change work, we can be focused on the systemic so intensely that we forget that the systemic, the community-wide, is made up of individuals. And I feel like if we move all the way back and turn inwards and care for ourselves and surround ourselves with people who are caring for themselves…then we can, in fact, change the world.”
Stay updated on Hazelwood’s latest projects at goodtroublemakers.com or by following her journey on her Instagram @kaihazelwood. Visit practiceprogress.org for more insights on their body-based approach to addressing white supremacy.
