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.

Backstage

Areas of Learning an Academic Reflection of My Dance Journey

Areas of Learning Brainstorming

As I further my studies through the Masters In Arts of Dance Pedagogy and Technique from Middlesex University, I must focus on my Professional Practice.  I work through mind maps and outlines that organizes my experience and this helps me visualize my Dance journey with clarity: from child student, to pre-professional training, to dancer, to teacher apprentice, to mature teacher and a member of my dance community.

I taught a class last night at Body Motion Dance School and I worked with my students through pointe work, and I saw myself in those beautiful students with their powerful legs seeking to defy gravity and their passionate eyes seeking a moment of freedom and beauty.  They grow and learn, and in their process I learn with them.  As they inquire further I find myself obligated to reorganize my knowledge so that it is deliverable and attainable so that it marks them beyond training, and becomes their own learning.  So that this new knowledge becomes cognitive attainment and they can embody their own dance learning.  As I teach them, I learn. I redefine what I know from years of sweat and study, I understand once again in a deeper place than before and for a brief moment my students experiential learning and my own match and meet in time and space.  

The road travelled has been long with many stops and great intellectual and physical complexity.  The greatest gift from this Masters Degree has been the tasks and ideas we are given to help us walk through our living dance biographies.  We are given books, handbooks, participate in meetings, and are given many ideas.  Reading, I came across a blog post from Dr. Adesola Akinleye from 2012. She suggested an exercise to help us identify our Areas of Learning through mapping an imaginary neighborhood in which our Dance Practice and experience is located.  This blog post of my own is my visualization of that imaginary neighborhood. I have started that exploration and have found that my Areas of Learning are defined by the dance role I was dominantely living at that moment: the dancer, the teacher, the choreographer and community outreach leader.  Here is where I discover the Areas of Learning that have governed my Dance practice, here is where I start.  I seek to understand my experiential learning, as our class handbook for prior learning states: “Practice is Knowledge”.  Let us discover that knowledge that has been stored in years of memories. Looking at Bloom´s Taxonomy Theory, the application of knowledge is already at a level higher than understanding.  Therefore, experential learning requires a higher cognitive acquirement than what we possibly understand prior to an organized reflective process.

Pointe Work Technique

As we continue to work on strengthening pointe work and proper technique.  I have found this video for my students that I wish to have view and study.  The details of pointe work are complex, but these corrections will only make us better dancers.

My Dance Journey

Mind Map : My Dance Journey

My dance story begins when I was very young.  My mother told me that as a child living in England my father took me to my first dance class and returned embarrassed claiming that I had truly misbehaved in class.  My mother still laughs at this anecdote.  She says that apparently when all the children were dutifuly following class, I explored the open space and danced freely claiming that what my teacher and classmates were doing was not dancing.  I suppose that I believed that my bouncing about was true dancing.  Now looking back on my dance journey and mapping my professional and formative experience, I find that this anecdote is the starting point of my story.  Here, many years later, I still dance to understand, explore and discover what dance is.   In the privacy of intimate moments I still find that dance is an exploration and delicate balance between structure and freedom.

Today I am many miles away from my starting point, I am living and working in Costa Rica.  My dance students are extraordinary young ladies.  Reflecting on my dance formation, it was rigorous and traditional.  I received classes from a number of international dance institutions and culminated dancing in a young professionally tracked programme of the Washington School of Ballet in Washington DC.  I took ballet class every day with a combination of courses that included intensive pointe work, contemporary dance, repetoire work, etc.  My students have not received such a formation, but rather some started dance relatively late and they combined their dance studies so that ballet is not the dominant genre in their formation.  Some of my students take Jazz, Hip Hop, Contemporary Dance, Tap, Musical Theatre, etc.  I see my students twice a week, some of them three times a week.  However, despite the great differences in my dance formation that of my students, our differences end there.  My dance students are as passionate as I was as a dance student.  They do want to dance as beautifully as possible.  They have the possibility to dance onstage twice a year.  Each performance of theirs is filled with effort and passion.

We work under extreme pressure to maximize their time during training.   Classwork is based on extensive conditioning and floor work exercises.  Barre work includes heavy pointe preparation and strengthening work.  On Saturdays we work on choreography and movement exploration.  The concept is to have my students dance in original works that I choreograph for them to award them the possibility to participate in the creative choreographic process and to create a piece that suits their technical and artistic capabilities.

I celebrate my students' successes every class.  As they are mature students, their understanding of dance technique and theory is more acute than that of younger students.  It allows for in depth discussion and analysis prior to physical execution.  These discussions are perhaps the most rewarding part of the didactic process with my students.

I have discovered that the sharing of my own anecdotal experience from both my professional life and pre-professional dance training is of great value to my students.  We compare and contrast the differences in classroom work approach between the Cuban, Russian, British, and American approaches as I experienced them and as we analyze in class.  We celebrate too the great similarities and appreciation for the aesthetic as we reflect on the universality of beauty despite the many different approaches.

It is this experential learning that has proved to be the greatest challenge and reward in my latest professional work.  Challenging because I had to tear down the traditional dance methodology that I had been trained in and trained to teach, and replace with more time effective methods and personalized practices.  Rewarding because the dance training itself has a great personal, artistic and physical impact in my students, and a transformative process in my own professional practice as a teacher. 

Connectivism and the Democratization of Dance Education

I moved to Costa Rica in the year 2000 ready to dance, teach and learn.  I am the daughter of Costa Ricans raised abroad and with an international dance formation.  I was excited to bring my dance experience and enthusiasm to my parents’ lovely country.  However, Costa Rica is a tiny country in the middle of the American continent.  Back then it was easy to become isolated of the international dance discourse.  Receiving magazines and books was costly and slow.  With the arrival of connectivism to the world of Dance academics, to our delight, dance professionals around the world have been included in the conversation in real time.  Connectivism, for those spread far from the cosmopolitan cities in the world, has proven to provide a true democratization of the information and a gigantic privilege granting access and inclusion.

However, we should not idealize this availability of information and believe that it leads to a true democratization of education.  Students need to be academically and technologically literate to be able to participate in such rich and international exchange.  The importance of brick and mortar schools are still important (except for the few students that may have the capacity of being auto-didactic).  In dance, there is no substitution for dance studio life and theatre experimentation.  Yet, the student´s experience is not limited to the teacher faculty of the dance studio but rather extends to the rest of the online world.  Access and the possibility of connectivism is the first step of connectivism democratization of dance education.