WCCHS, Dance-a-Rama, and collaboration

So, meanwhile (*if you're jumping into this post without reading the one immediately before, you should know that it's really a continuation of what would have been too long a post — you might want to go back one)... I had decided back in the fall that while I was teaching part time and (theoretically anyhow) not as prohibitively busy, I should get back into doing some choreography. So I had talked to the folks in the Terrain performance collective about presenting a piece in Dance-a-Rama, their annual celebration for Bay Area Dance Week. At that time, I thought it would probably end up being just a short solo, given my current resources for available dancers — but I did know exactly what I wanted to create a piece about:

… Way back in the mid-'80s, while researching a piece using whale songs, I read a poem called "For A Coming Extinction" by W. S. Merwin, and it has haunted me ever since… (here's just a taste, the last stanza: "When you will not see again / The whale calves trying the light / Consider what you will find in the black garden / And its courts / The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas / The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless / And foreordaining as stars / Our sacrifices / Join your word to theirs / Tell him / That it is we who are important") I felt that now, when we are facing environmental catastrophe (and while I was teaching part time), it was definitely time to finally respond to it in dance.

So — I would have been okay with just doing a little solo, but I started getting ideas that really needed a group…  and by the time I had worked with the WCCHS students for a while, I could see that they might be up for a serious choreography project. So I put it to them one day — said it was totally optional, but I would like to see if anyone might be interested in working on a (semi) professional dance piece with me — and the four seniors were completely enthusiastic! I did warn them that this would be a blend of my ideas with some of their movement, that I would mostly be asking them to collaborate with me the way a choreographer collaborates with her dancers — and since they were up for it, we agreed to get started the next week (I did ask the rest of the class to work on it with us, at least at the beginning, so that they could have the collaboration experience also).

My big structural idea was to keep the beginning a solo, danced to the poem, but to have the group enter during that last stanza — and to have the group section based on  an accumulation in reverse: the group would repeat a ground bass phrase over and over as each dancer solos; then one by one, each dancer would freeze, hold her shape, and slowly melt to the ground; and as she melts, the group would subtract her movement from the ground bass, until the last dancer would be performing just one movement over and over again… to somehow symbolize in movement the loss of diversity, the "dark and gathering sameness" (to borrow a phrase from Terry Glavin) of extinction...

So I asked each dancer to create a solo symbolizing in movement any animal she chose, and to pick one movement from it for the ground bass. We did a lesson on abstracting animal movements, taking off from a lesson in Mary Joyce's book (I had done a very simple version with kindergartners earlier in the year, so it was really interesting to expand the lesson and see what accomplished high school students could do with it). They chose a good range of different animals: crab, flamingo, lion, and bear. The movements they abstracted came out beautifully, as all were so different from each other — tiny, quick hand gestures for the crab; large, flowing movements for the flamingo; strong low-level movement for the lion... The hard part was setting the de-accumulation — we found it was really hard to remember to do each shorter version of the phrase (even though we could see each dancer melting away!)... We did need a few rehearsals outside of class time, but not too many.

Performance time was at the end of April. It was lovely for me, as Dance-a-Rama takes place at the Eighth Street studio complex, where I have studied Hawkins technique for years (no, decades) with Ruth Botchan — so it was quite wonderful to be able to bring students to perform in that setting, with various dance friends watching. We started out at 10:00 to be there in time for the morning run through; then we went for lunch, so we were able to sit down and just talk about stuff other than dance — their college plans for this year, favorite food, whatever… Our performance was at 2:00 (second out of four shows) — they performed beautifully, and since we were the first piece, they got to come out to the audience and watch the rest (and when I went back to the dressing room afterward to pick up their costumes, I found they were all folded — I have never known teenagers to fold their costumes without being nagged!)

The dancers weren't able to stay for the audience reception at the end of festivities, hours later (finals coming up soon, and all those conscientious seniors had plenty of schoolwork after a full day of dancing), so I was the one to hear all the excellent feedback. When we got to our next class, we were moving right along into work with the rest of the class — so my only regret on this one is that we didn't really have a time to debrief and talk about how it felt for them, to dance for the community… But it was certainly a memorable experience for me — having students mature enough and open enough to collaborate with on a piece so close to my heart is an amazing gift; and, much like the group who created "All Arms Open…" four years before, this is one group of students I am not likely to ever forget.

West County Community High School

Well, now that it's over it's (past) time to write about my experience at WCCHS. This was a little tiny (just over 100 students) charter high school in Richmond, serving a low-income community as well as a lot of kids who had trouble making it in big comprehensive high schools. I was only there for one semester — just long enough to meet some remarkable students who were able to do some beautiful work.

I got the position there — just one dance class, three afternoons a week, with nine lovely students (most first-year but I believe some of the seniors had taken the class in a previous year) — through my colleague Jochelle, who recommended me to the administration when she moved on to a full time job. At the time (last January), I was feeling so overwhelmed with learning to teach visual art (even half-time) that I was almost reluctant to take on anything new, limited though it might be — but my husband convinced me that I should, and I am now very grateful that I did.

Since Jochelle had been doing a lot of creative movement with them through the fall semester, they were already well warmed up for me when I came in the spring. I knew this class would be different the very first day, when I tried a short exploration — in my experience, typical teenage first-year students would stare at me as if I was crazy if I asked them to do anything improvisational ("I can't dance, you haven't taught me any steps yet!"). So as I often do, I started with an exploration based on concrete images (move or dance as if you've just found a $100 bill… as if you've just broken up with your boyfriend/girlfriend… moving against a strong wind… through sticky mud… across a high narrow bridge with no handrail…), then moved into a basic freeze dance focused on all the elements, just to see where they were — and they all dove in with the teen-dancer equivalent of wild abandon! … some varying degrees of engagement, of course, but all nine were dancing (no big attempts at strolling and chatting), and some were discovering a remarkable range of movement.

As we went along through the weeks, the class as a whole was wide open to whatever I wanted to try with them. Usually teens are so self-conscious ("ohmigod, I might do something dumb and someone might be looking at me!"), but many of these students (especially those seniors) kept on experimenting with their movement and further expanding their range… I could only guess that the support they received from the small school environment enabled them to feel comfortable working around each other. Some of these kids were so mature and open that I was able to collaborate with them as I rarely had with any students… but that's a pretty long story, so it will be in the next post (soon!).

So now, WCCHS is no more — the charter was up for renewal in June and the district denied it (because of low test scores would be a good guess). After being up in the air all summer as the school appealed to the county school board, the decision came down just a couple of weeks ago — no charter renewal, school closing down… I have so often heard of for-profit charters picking and choosing their students, or kicking out the ones who have trouble because they don't "fit with the program." This one little nonprofit actively pulled in students who were having trouble elsewhere (and probably tested badly because of it), nurtured them and helped them to find their way... and then got shut down. (sigh)… I suppose that's life in education in this day and age...

interesting art teacher blog

This is not really dance or dance ed, but... In my (now) regular job (the art prep position I took when my dance program closed, to avoid going back to teaching middle school PE), I have just become what is referred to as an "art on a cart" teacher. Last year I had walked into an ideal situation for a newbie art teacher: the retiring art teacher was still frequently at school and available for advice, and I inherited a fabulously well-stocked and well-organized art room — pretty much the equivalent of the "dance teacher heaven " dance studio I had at EOSA. Well, fast-forward to this year, when the district closed five schools, one of them very close to mine, and my school had to add both a kindergarten and a third grade — and naturally that lovely art room was the only space left available for that new third grade. So I just spent two days in the week before staff development clearing all of those well-organized art materials out of the art room and trying to organize them in my new home base, a corner of the copy room…

In the course of that, I realized that almost all of the art teacher blogs that I have so come to depend on for lesson and project ideas are written by teachers with their own art rooms — and that I would need to find some written by art-on-a-cart teachers who know how to simplify, and might have lessons that I can realistically deal with from my copy-room base. So I googled "art on a cart" + blog to see what I might find...

… So anyway, this is a long way of explaining why I added a link to a blog that isn't strictly about dance education — one of the blogs I found is called Art Teachers Hate Glitter, and the reason I am writing about it here is that so much of what she writes about is stuff that we dance teachers can so relate to! She writes about how hard it is finding a job as arts programs get cut, the foibles of her K - 6th grade students, and especially fighting the perception that art teachers are not "real" teachers...

One post called "Crafts are for summer camp. I teach art" is about that misunderstanding and lack of respect: "Art, what I teach, what I went to school for six years to become highly qualified to teach, is about teaching kids how to create, how to paint, how to draw, how to look at the things around them, solve problems through experimentation, investigation and problem solving..." One thing that struck me was how much her description of teaching art also describes my emphases in teaching dance (problem solving, experimentation aka exploration…); but the other, of course, was how often I hear similar sentiments about dance — how many times have I heard a school justify its lack of a dance program because they have a "dance team"? (do they actually not understand the difference?)

Anyway — I know it's not as if anyone out there has oodles of extra time to spare… but if you want to find a kindred spirit in a different art form (who happens to be hilarious to boot), I highly recommend this one!

Spatial thinking

Last spring my principal sent around, with her weekly message to teachers, an article from the journal American Educator called "Picture This: Increasing Math and Science Learning by Improving Spatial Thinking." It says that there are three main kinds of thinking (not learning styles): verbal, mathematical, and spatial. Spatial thinking is apparently very important to learning in the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and math, for those not up on education jargon); yet while we focus intensely in schools on verbal and math skills, there has not been nearly the same focus on spatial thinking skills.

The article defines spatial thinking as concerning "the locations of objects, their shapes, their relations to each other, and the paths they take as they move," and describes some aspects of spatial thinking as being able to mentally rotate objects in space (two- or three-dimensional spatial visualization). Among their recommendations for improving spatial thinking in young children are to teach spatial words such as around, through, over, under, up, down, high, low, out, in, line up, etc., and to "encourage young children to gesture."

I of course emailed back immediately "Hmmm… sounds exactly like what we do all the time in dance education!" Of course, our work in the element of Space is all about spatial thinking  — dance teachers teach entire lessons or units on concepts such as around and through, high and low, toward and away… We don't simply teach and use the words, we guide our students to explore as many variations on those concepts as they can discover through movement.

And those words and concepts pervade all of our teaching, no matter what dance element (or technique) we focus on… When we direct students, in the "freeze dance" to "find a shape with one arm high and one arm low… expand it… shrink it… make it spin… keep one part the same and travel around the room with it…" what are we doing if not prodding students to think spatially — and on a fairly sophisticated level? In technique classes, we quite naturally focus on nuances of space (size, direction, etc.) when correcting movements to a particular style. We constantly reinforce the ability to mentally rotate as we practice shapes and movements in different facings… and as far as encouraging children to gesture, what is dance if not gesture writ large (not to mention specific lessons on gesture abstraction)?

There is so much more that could be said about this… Perhaps just one more argument we can muster for the importance of dance education. There's a website devoted to spatial thinking which may be interesting to explore, so I'll add it to my arts ed advocacy links.

the importance of dance education

I was recently asked in an interview to explain why I believe dance education is important (talk about a big question for an interview…!). I've had some ideas on that written down for myself for a long time —  one of my last assignments from my student teaching seminar (15 years ago) was to write about my educational philosophy and why I feel the subject I teach is important — so I was able to pull out some of those points I've had in my mind for so long:

...that dance is the most basic and elemental or art forms, since in dance, the instrument is oneself — not a piano or violin, nor paint and canvas, nor even a smaller part of oneself such as the voice, but one’s own moving body… and students expressing themselves through movement are challenged to think in ways they may not have previously attempted, to form their thoughts and feelings into physical reality…
… that dance is one of the most universal and elemental of art forms — all cultures dance in some way, whether for ritual, celebration, social, recreation, or expressive reasons. Although dance leaves few physical traces and we cannot say for certain when it became part of human culture, it is likely to be among the oldest of art forms as well: there are cave painting depicting communal dances…

(Of course, I continued, one can also make arguments for the importance of all of the arts — I recently re-read The Grapes of Wrath, after many decades, and was struck by the power of fiction to convey the truth of a situation with so much more immediacy than any work of history I have ever read.)

But since I first wrote down those earlier thoughts, I found out a lot about the value of dance and the arts to those underserved students I taught at EOSA… I know there were a number of students who had trouble in their regular "desk" classes, and may not have stayed in school had they not had arts classes to come to every day (and as we were often told in staff meetings, in East Oakland the difference between staying in school and dropping out can be a life and death matter). But I remember especially one student in particular, who came into school wild and angry as a ninth-grader, but because of dance and track stuck with it and became one of EOSA's most diligent and accomplished students by her senior year. She was one of the group who created "All Arms Open" (below), and was asked to speak at an Alameda County "Art IS Education" event being held at EOSA… This is a part of what she said: "I come from a community where there are a lot of killings, the community right outside of this school, and I have lost six of my loved ones to gun violence… and because of that, I am sometimes deprived of my right to happiness… However, when I walk into the dance studio here at EOSA my feelings of being deprived of my right to happiness no longer exist. I feel like when I go into the dance studio at EOSA I am home— they are my family, we learn to care about each other... And things that I wouldn't be able to say in words, I know that I can express how I feel, and my ideas, through dance."

I can't add anything better than that…

What do we mean by "technique"…?

A few weeks ago I spent two days at Luna's Advanced Summer Institute with a half-dozen other dance teachers and three mentors. We had a lot of excellent discussions, among them one that comes up often — the roles of creativity vs. technique in dance programs. What was so interesting to me about this conversation was how differently we may think about things that I had pretty much taken for granted — in this instance, what we mean when we say "technique."

We started by quick-writing our own definitions of creativity and technique. I focused on the technique side (since "creativity" seemed daunting to take on in a short quick-write). I came to the question from a lifetime of modern dance training, taking classes in Hawkins technique, Weidman technique, Limón technique, Cunningham technique, Horton technique… So my experience with "technique" as a dance term was very much as a particular way of doing things — those "stylistic nuances" in the content standards, that differentiate one way of moving from another… So I wrote in my quick-write "technique = the correct (and safe) way to perform any particular style."

When we got to the discussion, Patricia, one of our mentors, suggested a very different definition from mine — that technique is the skill set that enables you to perform in whatever style you choose. We talked about the definition a lot, and came to the conclusion that this also implies learning the analytic skills that enable you to understand and internalize those differences — so that technique is all that gives a dancer the ability to know and show the differences between Cecchetti and Vaganova, or Weidman and Hawkins, or a Hawai'ian hula and a Tahitian 'aparima… the skills (both physical and analytical) that allow you to perform an attitude effacée or a Graham contraction or a fa'atere, and to get those nuances just right.

This was sort of a revelation for me, that there could be such a different way of thinking about technique. What it brought to mind for me was an idea that we had talked about in years past, that students who learn dance in a creative dance class, through the elements of space, time, and force/energy, are learning technique — that technique could be nothing other than a careful application of line, shape, size/range, weight, movement quality, flow, rhythm, accent, etc. I haven’t got it all worked out, of course, but it’s an interesting idea to think about...

On the other hand, I know I will continue to teach particular dance styles (whether it be Hawkins, Cecchetti, Dunham, kahiko hula, Bulgarian, or whatever), and probably call it “technique” (old habits die hard) — but perhaps at least with a different perspective on why I’m using that term. Good food for further thought, at any rate.

the relative scarcity of dance programs

Well, I'm a bit reluctant to take on an issue that sounds like complaining, but it has been on my mind a lot lately (especially after having spent much time over the past year looking for schools in my area which might need an experienced dance teacher)...

I am old enough to have grown up in the "golden age" of education in California (the 60s and 70s, pre-Prop 13), but in those days even my large (2400 students) high school had virtually nothing in the way of a dance program -- we had a one-semester PE elective, taught by a PE teacher obviously never trained in dance of any kind, who left us alone to group ourselves and make up dances for the whole semester.

In those days there were no state Frameworks or Content Standards specifying arts as core subjects or mandating access to education in all four major arts disciplines (dance, drama, music, visual art), as we have now -- yet it is discouraging to see, in many ways, how little has changed. I know, in these times of high-stakes testing and focus on ELA and math scores, that all the arts are struggling for space in the curriculum; yet when the subject of arts in schools comes up in general public discourse or in the local papers, it is so often framed as "art and music" classes. And while there are, of course, many schools both large and small with excellent dance programs (very many I could name right in my area), there are equally many with huge, thriving programs in three arts disciplines, and no dance at all. As just an example, in one local (fairly well-off, suburban) school district encompassing three comprehensive high schools, there are no high school dance programs at all, although each school boasts at least 30 courses in the other three disciplines. And should one of those schools actually wish to start a dance program, it would find at least one large obstacle: the district list of approved courses, including 51 classes in Fine Arts, recognizes no dance courses at all! (except as a unit within Core PE or a one-semester PE elective -- exactly what I had all those decades ago...)

So... why is this? I suppose that part of the difficulty is the lack of a dance credential in California — it is much harder to be taken seriously as a subject with no teachers credentialed specifically for that subject. There is also that PE thing — once thought of as a physical activity within PE, it is hard to get out of that mold (I remember one principal telling me that "we don't have a dance program because none of our PE teachers knows how to teach dance")… although the PE connection is also one of our advantages, as students are often able to take dance courses for Performing Arts, PE, or elective credit — definitely a saving grace when most districts require only one year of arts credit. I also realize the logistical barriers to starting a dance program: while we do not have the ongoing materials budgets that, for instance, visual art programs require (as I have certainly found out this year), there is that big issue of space -- we dancers do tend to be a little (rightfully) picky about safe surfaces and adequate space, so dedicating a room can be a big up-front investment. BUT there are those content standards mandating access to four arts disciplines — and it still feels as if we are so often left out of the conversation...

One of my teachers in college, Chitresh Das, used to say that "I am not a dance teacher, but a dance preacher" — meaning, as I recall, that he feels his mission in life is to continually remind the world of the importance of dance. At times I have felt that that is how I ended up myself — a "dance preacher"  trying to convince the education world of the importance of dance in schools.

All Arms Open...

All right, here's a story (although I know a few of you out there may have heard this one before, in some form or another)… This is from about four years ago, but it's a good introduction, I think, to where I've been teaching and what my priorities have been: for a long time, one of my big goals as a teacher had been to move young choreographers past simply fitting their favorite steps to their favorite songs, and somehow teach them that dance can be about creating and communicating meaning — and this is a story about how I started to find a way to do that...

A little background: I was teaching at East Oakland School of the Arts, a small high school in a part of Oakland often sensationalized in the local media as “East Oakland’s killing zone,” where kids walk around in t-shirts saying “RIP, gone but not forgotten” and miss school for way too many funerals of their peers. It was the fourth year of the school and the dance program, so some of the seniors in my Dance Production class had been with me since they were freshmen. I had set the focus of the class that year on dance as a way to respond to history or social issues.

In the Fall, we were asked to put together a dance/ritual for EOSA's Dia de los Muertos celebration. We started off by having each dancer make a very short (one- or two-movement) motif that somehow reminded them of someone close to them who had passed. We combined those movements into a group phrase, which was repeated over and over as a ground bass background for solos: each dancer came on stage and joined the group phrase, and then each dancer soloed around and through the group. The repetition gave the final dance a meditative, ritualistic feeling, which was perfect for the celebration.

While we were working on this piece, we got a call from the Dance IS folks. The Dance IS festival was a local multigenerational event, combining high school, college, and professional dance groups on the same stage — very cool, and very empowering for my high school dancers. We had been in the festival for the past two years, and had applied that year with a proposal that would have used a storyline to combine a lot of different dance forms. The word from the panel was that this year’s proposal sounded... well, a lot like our last two festival dances. They wanted us to concentrate more on one dance style, and especially wanted to see more evidence of the EOSA dancers' growth as choreographers and artists.

So I came to the class and told them that, essentially, the panel was really looking to see them use dance as a medium to express something bigger and more meaningful than "we like to dance and here are the kinds of dance we like to do." I reminded them that their focus that year was on dance as a way to respond to history, and that it might be good to think about some specific Oakland history or issue to express (to fit with the theme "local") — and asked them to think about it overnight.

When I asked for any ideas the next day, bubbly, enthusiastic Y___ said, so quietly we could barely hear her, “I think we should do a dance about the killings in Oakland... and we should use the Day of the Dead piece as one part of it.” Nobody said a word... I had to take a really deep breath, and said that this would be very serious and very hard — and that I thought the group was ready to take it on. I asked if there were any objections, and K___ spoke up and said “I want to make a dance that makes people leave the theater crying...”

We brainstormed a little on music and structure — settled on some instrumental beats, and a slow beginning feeding into the Dia de los Muertos part, the rest to be determined — and wrote up a new proposal, which was accepted by the panel a week after the Dia de los Muertos ritual.

So then came the hard part — actually choreographing a piece that would do justice to their experiences. I had pretty much no idea how to go about guiding them through this process, without telling them how to do the choreography or doing it for them... so, when in doubt, I had them pull out their dance journals: “how has this issue affected you personally?”  “how would you choreograph the dance if you were doing it alone?” “what visual images do you see...?” The stories that came pouring out into their journals were amazing, and scary — and I knew we couldn't possibly do this piece without including their words. I asked them if we could add their voices to the opening slow section, had them each choose one or two sentences from their writings and mixed them over the music — and it became the entrance, as each dancer entered to his or her own words.

Then I needed some explorations to move the dance along. I started with some work with different energies, then with the five emotions that had mostly come up in their journals (anger, sadness, fear, confusion, and tranquility). Then my mentor suggested something about proximity — moving toward and away with different variations (rush... creep... as if you're scared... concerned... shocked... afraid to be seen... afraid to look but just can’t stop yourself... as if this happens every day and you don’t care anymore...), and they did it so beautifully we incorporated it into the dance and it became a central image, as one dancer fell in the center and others either rushed to her or walked unseeingly over her.

All through the process, the kids were on edge — sometimes having emotional outbursts, sometimes just wanting to give up — which I assumed was because of the extreme emotions of what they were working on. They got through it, and created a stunning piece — titled "All Arms Open, All Eyes Closed, All Hearts Speak," hence the title to this post — without doubt fulfilling K___'s wish to make the audience cry (some audience members who didn't know the dancers did confirm that for us). Being able to take the often tragic reality of their lives and turn it into art was incredibly empowering for these dancers... and I suspected that once they had found they could make something truly meaningful in dance, there would be no going back.

Welcome!

Welcome to my new blog, and… where to start? Maybe just a little more about me and where I'm coming from than appears in that little blurb over on the side…

I've been teaching dance for -- well, decades (plural, not to put too fine a point on it). I started out in city rec departments, teaching ballet to kids and folk dance to adults, and spent a long time teaching technique in a little neighborhood studio; but for the last fifteen years I've been in public education, most of that in secondary schools. Just this past year, after losing my dance program to budget cuts and school consolidation, I have been teaching visual art (and some creative dance when I can) in elementary school.

I am passionate about a lot of issues around dance education, and I hope to talk about some of them here; I also have a lot of stories to tell from my years of teaching, and I hope to tell some of them as well. I can't promise any rhyme or reason in how I choose what issues to write about or what stories to tell (especially since most of my best dance teaching stories are from the past) -- this is a work in progress and an experiment, so I hope you will bear with me and get something out of it, and I would love to read your comments and perhaps start some conversations somewhere along the way... Thanks for reading