Today I went to a number of
panels. I went to one about teaching dance in higher education. One paper was
about teaching ballet from a feminist paradigm. We talked about how as a
teacher you negotiate how the expected way to teach a technique might contradict
your own principles. The question set by Gretchen Alterowitz was about teaching
ballet without adhering to the power structures often associated with ballet,
such as the teacher being the only voice in the room, assumptions about what
beauty is and genderise movements. In order to teach in formed by a pedagogy
that involves notions raised by feminist writers she draws on democratising
techniques such as having students self assess, work in pairs, collaborate in
meaning making, comment in class and link their experience in the ballet room
with outside experiences. I thought about how rigours I am with my principles
of teaching on BAPP and MAPP and how I do not fight half as hard to adhere to
those principles in my practical teaching. I am planning to re-think many of my
technique classes to see where I tacitly accept the rhetoric of the dance studio
at the expense of my moral / ethical beliefs.
Another discussion was about
assessment (particularly in choreography classes). Most of the room agreed that
it was not so much the choreographic aesthetic that was assessed but the
students transformative journey within the learning experience. This is how we
assess BAPP and MAPP too. It is about the student articulating the learning
they gain through the process of the course. I talked about how we had
introduced the Professional Artefact at Middlesex in order to allow students to
create a comment on their learning process within their own terms (and the
terms of their profession).
I then went to a workshop
run by a MFA student I had when I was guest teaching in USA last summer. She
shared her whole process and really constructed a whole approach to
contemporary dance informed by her ethnographic experiences of being
Korean born, having trained in “traditional’
dance and western forms of ballet and contemporary (Graham). It was really interesting and inspiring.
After lunch I went to a
roundtable talk about Jazz dance. What Jazz is? How it is taught again we had
some deep conversations about the ontology of dance itself. The panel talked
about how Jazz ‘takes you there’ and
you can’t be afraid to go. You are one with the music feeling the beat in your
body. Jazz is also its history linked to roots in Africa and yet at the same
time defined by it experimentation with the ‘here and now’. I thought about how
one teaches a style of dance (any style) where that is what it is to you a ‘style’. And you know that for someone
else it is away of life – away to connect with the world. Do you say sorry I am
not passionate enough about that to be a good teacher in it or do you turn to
the codified version of it (and teach it as a process of accomplishing steps)?
The conference has really
encouraged me to feel we are not alone at Middlesex in an insistence in deep
reflective practices and links to ‘other subjects’ as part of the process of
being a dancer. Particularly for me not to compromise my interests because
things I am most passionate about (interested in) give me an energy to explore with
rigour and brings deeper meaning to the work. Funny because its what I am
constantly telling Module two and three students!!!!!
I am going to the
performance tonight – looking forward to that.
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