Dance Science and Training Alternatives

My highly intelligent and analytical student Ana Laura Montenegro, Eduarte Photography

As a dance educator rediscovering dance technique and movement through the embodied experience of my students, I have found myself becoming a dance scientist and observer.  As I reflect on my own personal experience as a dancer, I discover that although important to my dance culture, the traditional dance classroom was not what transformed me into a ballerina.

What did transform me into a ballerina?  A deep and reflective process of dance movement as it manifested through the unique embodiment of my own physical limitations and potential.  Dance work occurred first as a mental, cognitive map after hours in the dance studio.  Visualisation and the tying in of information: music, technique, sensation, motor memory and artistic interpretation all falling into a clear manifestation of sensation and sequence.

As a society we have had the "Rocky training method" sold to us by myth and movies.  The idea that if we repeat a movement endlessly to muscular fatigue and on the verge of injury the body will discover dance in a moment of breakthrough and inspiration.  My professional experience has proved exactly the contrary.  The excessive repetition of movement leads to injury.  The excessive practise of an imperfect movement leads to the solidification of incorrect learning.  Dancers are better served by few repetitions that are correct in their execution.  The reinforcement of mistakes is the biggest error we can make in dance education.  

Yet we endlessly allow students to accumulate hours of incorrect work in the barre and centre, thinking that with a correction or one hundred of them the student will emerge triumphant.  Yet we know from science that doing the same thing over and over will not result in variation.  

My work with dance students today seeks to work with targeted artistic and physical analysis.  Mental maps and cognitive understanding of dance take priority over brute force.  Strength is built upon through building of muscle memory and strength from micro movements and exercises that build up from the floor to the barre and finally to the centre and to autonomy.  Patience, discipline and consistency is key.  Speaking and verbal analysis are extremely important.  Dancers need to be heard and movement needs to be discussed.  

Dancers need time for reflection, development and discussion.  The dance teacher needs to be an observer and diligent scientist, understanding the unique cognitive and physical pathways that each student embarks upon.  The teacher is the guide in that exploration, the map creator and the motivator.  It is the dancer´s learning that matters most.  The teacher must humbly fade in the background and allow the learning process to take protagonism.  The most important thing to look for is not what the dance is, nor the dancer before the teacher- but the direction, the process that the dance and the cognitive development of the student is taking them to.

It is about allowing the process to become enriched and allow the classroom to be informed beyond the historic barre and allow relevant teaching alternatives to play in the correct moment.  It is about personalising dance education and allowing rupture from routine to permit true self-discovery and exploration.  Such moments are almost imperceptible to the student at times.  The student becomes.  As such, the transformative process process to the dancer may be as lost to them as it is to the butterfly.

A correct dance process will create a false illusion of comfort and familiarity.  The micro-improvements of the student will lead to an extraordinary process through which they will discover themselves at the end of the educational cycle dancing choreography they never believed they could achieve at the start of the cycle.  In the end the student will find herself onstage in tutu and en pointe, dancing the role of her dreams.  There will be no climatic Hollywood musical number accompanying the moment, and as soon as she will step down from the stage she will become even more critical of herself than she had been the day before.  This is the becoming of the ballerina.

On Dance Science