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.