Tearing Down Barriers to Dance

Student Ana Montenegro in rehearsal

No matter how much one studies, prepares and trains, the complexity of the dance world in its pure exercise is always ready to surprise us.  Dance is an art that reflects the spontaneity and changing complexity of the real world that it represents.  Learning is fluid and dependent on formal dance education experiences and the nuances of the student´s cognitive process as she responds to formal and informal dance exposure.

As one prepares to become a dance teacher, one studies with hypothetical students in mind.  One fits specific profiles with dance education and theory matching profiles with a complex needs’ assessment, goals and objectives.  All fits in a beautiful, intricate puzzle formed from ages of tradition and modern practices.

Real life teaching, especially when one wanders away from the pre-professional dance training world, challenges all these pre-conceived concepts of dance theory and syllabi.  Students become as diverse as the real life from which they come from.  

Such has been my experience since I have taken upon a dance fitness group at Body Motion Dance Studio since last year.  Originally, the class was conceived as a dancer physical conditioning class that would accompany the students’ training in other technique classes.  Yet, the group evolved majestically before my eyes.   My class became filled by more mature students, university students and high school students both.  Curiously, one common denominator to all students was an absence of early dance training or the discontinuation of early dance training if they had had any.  Yet, my students nonetheless are young, healthy, beautiful and full of potential.  They are late to the challenge of dancer development, yet young enough that training can still deliver great results.  To my surprise my students´ aspirations were not to get fit through dance, but to become prepared enough to dance.  They dreamed of tutus and pointe shoes.  I in turn became deeply moved to see how childhood dreams endure in the adult beyond the aging and structure that maturity requires.  The class evolved to include technique and choreographic exploration.  Carefully going back and forth between traditional delivery of a class to return to focalized strengthening and flexibility to prevent injuries and build up the body in record time to face real life dancing choreographic challenges.

No teacher training has truthfully prepared me to become my students ´teacher, both my students and I are in intense training as we decipher how to fit the pieces of this puzzle.  Perhaps I should fast forward and reveal that my students have danced onstage with full ballerina costumes and they are working intensely in class and developing solid pointe work.  Thus, as a dance educator I seek to truly understand in depth the experential learning of this work.

Student Valeria Perez, after a few months of pointe work 

The most important part of this process for me has been letting go of any traditional roles of the authoritarian teacher-director.  I must listen to my students throughout the class and after class.  Their bodies respond to training in unique ways according to their own personal stories.  I must get simultaneous feedback and find myself creating a truly differentiated classroom in which my students will work through the exercise with different goals and with personal modifications each.  Injuries and immediate limitations cannot be ignored.  Instead of jamming their bodies into the challenging forms of classical ballet, I have chosen to slowly open, mould and work in micro improvements with great discipline and at times in painfully repetitive motions to encourage muscle memory and to ease the body beyond its current limitations into the demanding technique they wish to achieve.  I am fooling the mind and body to believe that ballet is easier than what it truthfully is, I work slowly so that the steps feel natural and, in their struggle, they do not lose the natural ballerina within them.  Allow me to explain, my students dance with the illusion of children, I seek to preserve that by moving at a speed that they do not lose the naturalness of movement that their intuition permits.  

The objectives of this dance classroom are established by the students, the level is established by me.  Due to the maturity of my students I can establish conversations about artistry and technique at an intellectual level truly unusual for beginner adults.  However, their cognitive grasp of technical theory allows them to jump ahead in their dance technique attainment at a speed that younger students would never achieve.  We have begun working with a flipped classroom model in which I share with them dance content prior to the class, and we are able to move ahead as they have been exposed to certain concepts before we begin to work in classroom.  Even after class the feedback continues especially individually, with continuous formative assessment and additional exercises for the student.

Beyond educational practices to reflect upon, socially I believe this artistic experiment is of great weight.  My students are extraordinarily high school students, some are high honours in their classes.  My university students are studying to become educators, psychologists, accountants, adminidistrators, odontologists, doctors and academic mathematicians.  It is still beyond me the huge academic weight on their shoulders and the importance of their time, time that they faithfully abandon in my dance classroom.  The extreme discipline and humbleness that the process of becoming an older dancer is extraordinary.  The transformative process in their lives has a deep impact on their human development.  As in later years they will become older, I feel great pride to know that these women will hold the world in their hands, I have been the humble witness to their great potential.

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