Nothing as Dear as Life

 Distance learning or no distance learning, I was determined my Dance Production class would create a dance together this fall, as they did last year…

When we came back to school, I first told them their semester would have two main focal points: the first was “screendance,” or dance-for-video (for obvious reasons – there was not a chance that we would be able to perform in person this semester) – I mentioned that dance-for-screen is truly how our art form is evolving these days, all over the world, and our task is to show that we can still do meaningful work even if we can’t get on a stage…

… And the second, of course, was dance responding to meaningful issues – I quoted Nina Simone that “an artist’s duty is to reflect the times” and said that dance can be a part of changing the world, whether we dance for resistance or uplift. I told them that we usually create a dance together on some issue, and that last year we went through a long process of consensus-building to get to an issue everyone agreed on – but that this year, it seemed imperative that we needed to respond to the #BLM movement.... and they all were completely on board with that (not a surprise, actually, knowing these students and how focused they can be on social justice issues).

So from there, my role was mainly to help them organize their ideas – I got them into breakout rooms to talk about ideas for the general shape of the dance, out of which came the general consensus that it should start with solos (some said “like our chain dance from last year) then grow through small groups to end with the whole class dancing together in unity, as well as the idea of using quotes by civil rights activists to lead off each section.

I then took lots of suggestions for music and title ideas, and narrowed them down through multiple polls. We narrowed down the music choices for solos (or duets, for those who wanted to work in a pair) to three, and each dancer or pair of dancers chose their music and which name they would honor. I asked who was up for choreographing the small-group sections, and six dancers stepped up, serendipitously all seniors.

For the ending section with everyone, I asked the four seniors who were veterans of last year's class to choreograph (that was one of my only real inputs in the process). My role from there was setting the small groups (three of them, two choreographers each) and facilitating the rehearsals. The small groups naturally happened in breakout rooms, with many of the choreographers sending their dancers videos to practice with outside of class; for the full-class rehearsals,  facilitating on Zoom meant a lot of watching everyone and checking to see if they all understood which foot and hand the choreographer was using, since some screens come out reversed and things can be really confusing! And of course, once rehearsals were done, I spent a lot of time nagging kids to get their videos to me for editing (they all had three to turn in: one solo or duet, one small-group section, and one for the final, full-class coda), and editing them all together (this was by far the most complex video-editing project I had ever done!).

The piece came out to over ten minutes long, and was beautiful in the variety and passion of their dancing… My one and only choreographic input was the very end – after the choreographer of the very last section ended the whole dance with a long slow movement, reaching toward the camera, I thought it would be nice to bring in the photos of those they honored, one by one… I proposed that to the class, they liked the idea so we went with it – otherwise, as usual, the dance was entirely theirs, I functioned only as facilitator and video editor.

I was incredibly proud of what they did – the dance was powerful, and reminded me more of my class at EOSA, who created their dance on youth killings in Oakland all those years ago, than any other class I have taught since…  and I hope that this experience creating such a serious and socially relevant dance (even virtually) may stand us in good stead for next year’s class and beyond. 

more choreography projects on Zoom

 We only had time for four choreography projects for the Jazz 1 (Beginning dance) class, owing to the 4x3 schedule and having to condense the entire year’s curriculum into one semester. For the third project I wanted to give them a version of the project that is usually our fall semester final – contrasts in tempo, level, and size/range. I usually introduce this one with a quote from Doris Humphrey about staying away from “the deadly middle.” In this situation, I figured that three elements in one project was really too much for Zoom, so I concentrated on the two that we hadn’t already covered (tempo and size/range). Unfortunately, even the two different elements made life too complicated for our distance learning world, as this was our least successful project – only a few groups truly showed what I would consider real contrasts or opposites in both tempo and  size… perhaps showing real size contrasts is just too much for small spaces! So this is the only project I plan to change for my 4th-period Jazz 1 class, which meets during the spring semester – I think I will revert to the simple tempo variations project which is usually the lead-up to the contrasts final when we are in person.

Difficult third project notwithstanding, I was not about to let go of our usual year-end final: narrative form. This one is important to me, as it really helps set the students up for the idea that creating dances is not just about creating interesting steps, but is also a form of communication… I set this one up the usual way, with a video observation of a few short narrative dances or excerpts: a large chunk of Paul Taylor’s Snow White, the final crypt scene from Romeo and Juliet (I have the ABT version, with Natalia Makarova), and the “Rosa Parks” section of Gordon Parks’ Martin. Then I just set them in groups (in this case, in breakout rooms) with the instructions that they are to use movement only to tell a story – whether a famous story that we all know (like Snow White or Romeo and Juliet), something from history (like Rosa Parks), something from their own lives, or something they make up. I remind them that a real story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and something has to actually happen – but beyond that they are free to create whatever story they would like.

Of course, the added difficulty this year is that it is so much harder to tell a story when none of the dancers are in the same place… But some of the groups came up with very creative solutions to the problem of narrative on Zoom! One duet used a bear costume
and multiple virtual screens to dance Goldilocks and the three bears. Another pair created a story about a girl drowning in the ocean and getting saved, and managed to throw the life-preserver (actually a big round pillow that they both had in their houses) from one screen to the next. And a quartet used extensive (and well-planned) video editing to tell the story of Cinderella – my favorite part was how they took advantage of two of the dancers having similar staircases in their houses, so that Cinderella could lose her shoe in one scene and the prince could find a shoe on (what appeared to be) the same staircase in the next scene! There was much creativity all around, and I was so happy that they finished the semester this way!

distance learning choreography projects (1)

 Okay, about those choreography projects… Last spring, in emergency distance learning mode, I gave in and figured out assignments that each student could create and post individually – for the Jazz 1 students, I reverted to the Cinquain project (which I had originally planned to be the 4th-quarter lead-up project before the narrative final), in which they create their own simple poem in cinquain form, then create a dance to it; for Jazz 2, I made up a dancing with objects assignment, for students to find one thing in their houses to create a dance around (I have Wendy Jones from Lowell High School in SF to thank for the idea for that one).

But when this year started, with no prospects of going back to in-person in the dance room anytime soon, I was determined that this year’s students would not miss out on the concepts and curriculum I have refined over all of these years! So, somehow, we needed to be able to complete our choreography projects remotely. Due to breakout rooms, it mostly worked – the trick was finding the projects that were at least not too confusing to do over Zoom!

Jazz 1 began with our usual axial and locomotor movement / directions and facings project. I explained to the class, as I always do, that beginning choreographers tend to do a lot of movement in one place, facing the audience, so this project is designed to break them of that habit right away. The three main elements of the assignment were: 1. have a good beginning and ending; 2. do at least as much traveling movement as movement in one place; and 3. do at least as much movement facing sideways or backwards as facing your audience/camera. (I usually also require traveling movement in multiple directions, but this time I figured that getting any amount of real locomotor movement would be as much as I could hope for in their small spaces.) I made the assignment sheet that I usually hand out physically to each group into a PDF file, posted on their Google Classroom page so that they could keep referring to it, and I also reminded them of those three main points every time I saw them! They worked on their projects in groups in breakout rooms, and I recorded them in their breakout rooms as well. Instead of watching each others’ projects performed in real time in the dance room, students were asked to choose four of their classmates’ recordings to watch and respond to. All things considered, it worked out as well as I could have hoped for.

The second choreography project was a challenge – again, I did not want to completely give up on my usual Shapes and Levels project! I think it is the one project I have carried through all of my years of teaching, having gotten it from my master teachers during my student teaching year… I love it for the second project because after letting them use whatever music and steps they like for the first project (to get them hooked on the idea of creating together), I then hit them with a project that does not depend on “steps” and uses only amorphous background music – and it often seems to turn their thinking in a new direction and jolt them into new ideas of what choreography can be. The usual form is to create a dance of at least six group still shapes, three symmetrical and three asymmetrical, incorporating low and high levels, and using movements only for transitions.

Of course, the immediate problem here is that we can’t create anything like the group still shapes we would have in the dance room – I had to think differently about shapes myself! So I looked up some dance performances created through Zoom, and took some screen shots of interesting shapes to share with the students. I did still require symmetry and asymmetry for the assignment (I found plenty of examples in the screenshots), and asked for at least some changes in level; but I also asked them to think about using things we couldn’t ordinarily do in person – such as proximity to the camera, or reaching body parts across screens – to make their shapes interesting.  Some of the groups did some excellent work for their second-ever choreography project!

“Othering” — beginning to form the dance

For our collaborative dance, we had managed to come to a consensus on a theme — “othering.” So, now to begin the dance! Again, I started by having the dancers write: since art is most powerful when it has an element of the personal, write about how othering affects your life or those around you, or what aspect holds the most meaning for you… (Of course, with the caveat to share only as much as they felt absolutely comfortable sharing.) I am always astounded at how my students can open up their hearts on the page — and this group showed me again how thoughtful they can be.  I read stories of racism and stereotyping of Blacks, Asians, Latinos, and Muslims, of sexism and homophobia… But beyond the personal stories, students grew analytical:some mused on othering as the root of all bullying, or on how oppressed peoples internalize their oppression; one wrote that othering connects all violence, and about how it “has become normalized; it’s become natural to see the white man degrading the black man… to hear about the raping of women… to push around the kid who doesn’t have enough money… then say ‘it’s human nature.’”

I also asked for ideas of how they would portray this issue in dance, and for their opinion of my role as teacher (i.e., should I choreograph a section, or just help to organize their ideas?). There emerged a general consensus on the basic shape of the dance — nearly everyone mentioned beginning in small  “us vs. them” groups, then ending hopefully, in unity and empowerment. One dancer proposed that to show empowerment, all would freeze and “one person could be dancing to show how a movement only needs one person to start,” then the others join — a powerful image!

As to my role as their teacher, it seemed at first that these budding choreographers didn’t fully trust their own skills, as nearly everyone said they would like me to choreograph at least part of the dance, and they could “add our own touches.” But then…

I came to them with a general shape of the dance, based on all they had written and discussed: beginning with one group representing he “majority” culture, then various smaller groups entering and being somehow dominated or swallowed up by the majority, and finally the lone dancer stepping forward to rebel and start the unity phrase for others to join… And that is when these lovely students took the dance and ran with it, as one dancer spoke up: “I think we should start with the smaller “othered” groups before the dominant group comes in to take them all over…” There was general consensus on that being the better idea, and just like that the class took ownership of their dance!

Next we got into small groups for the first section. I divided them mostly by movement style, making sure that the “dominant” group (I resisted the term “majority,” since straight white males are in no way an actual majority) was made up of dancers who had said they would be okay with that. Their first prompt for group work was simply to come up with some distinctive movement for their own small group phrase — and this is where the dancers began to truly make it their own. Although I hadn’t specified any focus for the various small groups, each group came up with its own population to focus on, and with it an idea for their group’s denouement… One group focused on homophobia and gay rights, and decided that they would fight back when the dominant group tried to swallow them up. Another group chose racism, specifically directed at Blacks and Asians, and determined to create their movement with ribbons which the dominant group would snatch away as if to erase their cultures. And the last group chose to portray immigrants, and imagined that the dominant group would scatter them to the corners of the stage, symbolizing family separation — and that separation would be the “last straw” which would inspire one dancer to step forward in solidarity. They got to work in their groups, and fairly quickly created some movement for the first section — the collaboration was on its way!

Full-class collaboration – finding a theme and a consensus

Now that I have a real Dance Production class again, I decided that instead of teaching them a dance for their one full-class performance piece, I would set them on a collaborative project…  and one connected to something meaningful. The last time I tried something like this was with my last few DP classes at EOSA (including the class who created a powerful piece about youth killings in Oakland). After taking a workshop on theme-based projects at last year’s NDEO conference, and reading a couple of new articles about social justice projects, I was anxious to revive the idea – and I knew that this group of dancers, who are relatively inexperienced in dance but amazingly focused and serious about their choreography, would be ready to take it on.

So, as I have done in the past, I started with student writing. This time, we began very simply, with the dancers just listing some social justice issues they might be interested in creating dances about (some chose to write in more depth about actual choreography ideas, but most did just list some issues, as that was all I had asked). The issues they raised ran the gamut, from environmental destruction to domestic violence to racism and police brutality to xenophobia… So then came the hard job of deciding what issue we could all focus on. I told them I wasn’t going to just have them vote, that I didn’t want to go with majority rule because majority rule often leaves a minority unsatisfied (and after all, majority rule was just fine with chattel slavery in this country for two-and-a-half centuries) – instead, we needed to somehow come to consensus.

I started by having them get into small groups to talk about what commonalities they could find among all those social issues. The small groups then shared out to the whole class — some of what they talked about included “nearly everything connects with violence”… “many of these issues involve a hierarchy”… “absolute power connects a lot”… I posted their thoughts that I had written down onto Google Classroom (I hate how Google is taking over the world, but I have to admit GC has become a convenient tool), and asked them to think overnight about how we might tie all their issues together. The next day, after another brief discussion of what I had heard them say the day before, I mentioned the concept of “othering” — “us vs. them” — and asked if they thought it might actually be the common denominator to all their issues (I didn’t want to impose any ideas on them too quickly, but on the other hand we did have to find consensus at some point!). All agreed… We had found our idea!

new dilemma - student choreography and inappropriate movement

I guess this has turned into an occasional blog — since I'm not exactly a prolific writer, I'll most likely continue writing whenever issues raise their heads (instead of daily/weekly/monthly...). So — I came upon a situation this past semester that was a new dilemma for me, after all these years, and I am still wondering how I could have handled it better, and how I can tweak my class projects in order to head off anything similar in the future...

In the past, at EOSA, I had given my Dance Production students very specific assignments for their final choreography projects for the spring concert (one year it was dance in the style of a dance ancestor, another was dance as a response to history or social issues, another was dance responding to words or text, etc.). This year, for my first Dance Production class at my new school, I reverted to the more open-ended system of my student-teaching mentor — each semester we had an "idea day" in which students presented their dance ideas to the class; then dancers signed up for dances they most wanted to perform, choreographers gave me lists of their needs for dancers, and I set casting accordingly.

This worked beautifully in the fall concert, with 11 choreographers presenting interesting pieces in widely varied styles. In the spring, we again had some intriguing ideas presented; but I also noticed a lot of choreographers talking more about the popular music they wanted to dance to than the dance itself. Of more concern were various references to "hardcore popping" or "burlesque-style" dance, as well as some of songs that were fairly offensive (in which bouncing, jiggling, and showing off your booty is the entire point) — the tone of the day felt to me as if some choreographers were competing for dancers by using popular and sexualized songs and movement. So I reconnoitered, told the choreographers to come back in a week with a written proposal including what they intended to communicate to the audience, and tried it again. The second idea day went better — most choreographers came back with complete proposals, with more well-thought-out movement ideas and nothing overtly unacceptable at least.

As we moved into rehearsals and in-progress showings, I could see there were still a couple of dances (or parts of dances) that made me uncomfortable as a director. The first was pretty simple: in a group dance about love, the very first movement looked to me like stereotypical "stripper dance" — dancers squatting on their heels opened their knees sharply in unison before slithering to standing level (a movement which undoubtedly appears in countless music videos, but in context seemed very suggestive). I talked to the choreographer about what she intended to convey to her audience, how the opening movement sets the tone for the whole dance, and that at least parts of her audience were likely to see her beginning as an allusion to striptease. She agreed that it might not be the most appropriate opening, and changed it so that each dancer (still in unison) sharply made his or her own dramatic, low-level shape — which turned out to be a much more interesting opening in any case.

The second instance was more difficult. This choreographer had originally proposed one of those "shake your body" songs; for her second proposal she changed to "Flawless" by Beyoncé. Ironically — given that the song includes a talk by the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the importance of feminism, specifically deploring girls in our culture competing for the attention of men — her dance seemed to be permeated with subtly (or sometimes overtly) sexualized movement. After the first showings I asked her to tone down some parts of the dance, which she did (though reluctantly); but it remained problematic for me —not blatantly inappropriate enough to take it out of the concert, but still not what I wanted to showcase in my dance program.

The heart of my dilemma is that this choreographer's intention was to create a dance about "empowering women to love their own bodies" (as her dancers agreed). I think these young women genuinely believe they are conveying women's empowerment by performing movement that looks to me very reminiscent of striptease. I know this style of movement is very much a part of pop culture through music videos, and that burlesque and even pole-dancing are now popular recreational dance classes; yet I also know, in a historical context, how much this is still a product of a male-dominated culture in which women are objectified as sex objects. What I have been asking myself is: how do I expand my students' focus (or raise their consciousness, as we used to say) to understand how these movements they are drawn to are objectifying, decidedly un-empowering, and borderline offensive for some of us, without coming off sounding like an anti-sex prude? I worry that I am simply being too sensitive — but I do not want my (nearly all female) students learning to demean and objectify women, however inadvertently.

This, again, is a new problem for me — at my previous school, every student in my (small) Dance Production classes presented their choreography finals on stage, and somehow I never had to deal with movement I considered inappropriate.... So I wonder — has the culture changed that much? Is it something in the culture of this particular school? And how do I adjust my class to prevent the problem in the future — going back to specific assignments? Requiring instrumental music only? (both of which I am definitely toying with.) Or perhaps some readings in classic feminist literature...? Or do I just frankly talk to the new class about how sexualized movement objectifies women? I hope that these are just growing pains of a new program and that we will get over it as our culture of dance develops, but I do feel a need to address it proactively as the new school year starts.

new rubrics (part 2)

The second new rubric I needed to create last fall was for the Dance Production class: since we were working with a new (for me) class structure, I needed a new rubric to assess the final choreography projects. In my previous DP classes at EOSA, there had always been a final choreography assignment with specific guidelines; but this year's open-ended structure, with choreographers signing up to create whatever they envisioned, demanded a new assessment structure as well.

So I went back to the beginning — I started by looking at the peer critique form from my student teaching mentor (Marcia Singman at Berkeley High), which asked students to look for variety in dance elements, use of stage space, entrances and exits, and the like. Choreography feedback guidelines from Mills College were also helpful, stressing dance elements as well, but also originality, willingness to take risks, clarity of ideas, and attention to detail — all things which I value and want to see in my students' choreography. I looked a little farther afield and found a a few choreography rubrics online, which gave me ideas for some specific things to include in various categories... then to put it together!

I began with a couple of categories that are standard in my rubrics for group choreography projects in class: "Dance structure" and "Creativity and Variety." In ordinary choreography projects, I use "Dance structure" to stress the point that all dances have a beginning, middle, and end (as well as well-planned sequences and transitions), and that the beginning and end are vitally important as the first and last thing the audience sees — so students know they lose points for just standing in neutral waiting for the beat, or dropping the last movement or shape and walking away. For the Dance Production projects, it was a given that no choreographer was going to put a piece on stage without some kind of beginning and ending, so I added language to indicate whether the beginning and ending were clear but uninspiring, strong, or dynamic; and that the dance has a clear flow and sense of purpose. Then since "creativity" could fit into this rubric in may forms, I converted the general "Creativity and variety" category into the more specific "Variety and contrast" — use of variety in the dance elements of space, time, energy, and relationships. Harking back to Ms. Singman's work, I also inserted a category for "Use of stage space" (including entrances and exits). Those three categories took care of the purely "craft of choreography" aspects of the rubric.

Of course, creating a rubric is still an exercise in setting — or simply recognizing — priorities and values. My goal for years has been to move students beyond setting their favorite steps to their favorite songs, and toward expressing and communicating meaning, so much of the remainder of the rubric is concerned with how student choreographers are (or are not) finding original ideas and bringing meaning to their works. For this I turned back to the Mills College guidelines. I made one category focusing on originality — this is where I brought in movement invention versus movement clichés as well as willingness to take risks. For the category most specifically focused on communicating meaning I chose the title "Artistic intention," which allowed me to bring in not only what the dance is intended to communicate (whether ideas, emotions, a narrative, or simply a mood), but also whether the dance demonstrates the choreographer's artistic growth — which I realized, as I worked on this, is also one of my high priorities.

Those categories added up to 90 points, so I completed the rubric with a 10-point category for "Attention to details." This gave me the chance to bring in the dancers' performance of the piece in a relatively small way. In our ordinary in-class group choreography projects, preparation and performance quality are graded as a part of the project — since the group works together as a whole, the dancers' preparation, confidence, and attention to details of technique do generally reflect how hard the group worked on the assignment. In this case, I was focused on assessing the choreography itself, not the dancers' performances; but I did feel that attention to detail among the dancers (precision of movements and shapes, floor patterns, and relati onships) shows something about how the choreographer worked with the group, so I found that it was appropriate to include.

That rounded out my rubric — here it is, I would welcome any feedback!

Motif and development

Although none of my students have fully experienced all the elements of dance yet — last year we primarily focused on Space, with one Time unit (tempos) — I still wanted to jump my Dance Production class ahead into some work with forming before they take on creating full dance for the fall showcase. So for their first composition project, I tried them on motif and development. I had thought of giving them a strict theme-and-variations form, but decided against it because this is a pretty creative group and I wanted to give them the freedom to mix up their movements a bit (I do plan to give the Dance 2 class the strict theme-and-variations project later in the year, to set them up for further work if they continue on to Dance Production next year). They completed their projects with somewhat mixed results, but for the most part at least successfully enough to know that they did grasp the concept.

For lead up lessons, we began with each dancer creating a personal phrase using an accumulation process of seven elements, then editing them down to five (the seven elements were: 1. make a fabulous twisted shape; 2. look somewhere in the room and travel to it; 3. reach out, fold in; 4. your "signature movement"; 5. a turn; 6. a jump or spring; and 7. a variation on your fabulous twisted shape). The next day in the week was a short day, so we used it to play the Adverb game with an already-learned phrase from their lyrical dance. The next day we reviewed the personal phrases created the first day, then manipulated them with various choreographic devices (tempo, size, level, repetition, range, embellishments, retrograde...).

The project was: create a dance motif of eight distinct movements, then expand it into a dance three times as long using any of the devices we worked on — and you must show your motif in its original form, in unison, somewhere in the dance. I also required instrumental music, so as not to distract them from the movement variations and development. As mentioned, the projects were somewhat mixed, but overall pretty well – some came out beautifully, while even those that were a bit less successful in the extent of their motif development at least showed enough movement variation that I believe they did at least understand the concept well enough to use it in the future.

One trio began with quick, intricate arm gestures on a standing level, then ended on a seated level with their arm gestures huge and in super slow-motion. They chose to perform in silence rather than spend time choosing music (I loved that, it is so rare!) – if that happens again, I hope to have time in the showings to try the dance with a selection of different musical choices. Another trio essentially performed a strict theme and variations: they began with their motif phrase in unison, then each dancer performed it in turn with each solo growing progressively slower and bringing in each dancer’s personal movement style. One duet used repetition and canon form to develop their motif; a quartet began with their motif in call-and-response form, then ended the dance by repeating it in unison; and another quartet began with a walking pattern moving from a line into a diagonal, then ended by retrograding the walking pattern from the diagonal back to the line.

In general, I might have liked to see a bit more development of each motif, but for the first project of the year they did fairly well. I will be interested to see how this class progresses!

choreography final — narrative form

For many years I have used narrative form as the choreography final for my beginning students. I have found that this works well as a culminating project for the beginners — they have gotten some dance elements under their belts, and it's a simple and accessible way to start them down the road to thinking of dance as a way to communicate something (besides "these are my favorite moves to my favorite music").

I start by showing a few short examples of narrative dance from my library: usually one humorous (Paul Taylor's Snow White), one dramatic (the final scene of Romeo and Juliet); and one created by a pair of former students in turf dance/ hip hop style. Then the assignment is to create a dance that tells a story using only movement (no narration!) — whether an already-known story (like Snow White or Romeo and Juliet), a story from real life, or a story made up for the project. Since it is the final, I also require a few simple elements we have worked on: both locomotor and axial movement, movements and shapes on various levels, and movements in contrasting tempos. The only requirement for music is that it be instrumental, to avoid the temptation to mimic the words of a song.

I'm always interested to see what kinds of stories students choose for their projects. I usually see quite a few dances depicting well-known stories — often stories from movies, and especially Disney movies (these sophisticated adolescents can be charmingly eager to look back to their childhoods). I don't know whether this is because of the examples I show, or because known stories are easier for groups to agree on... but at any rate, this year was no exception: we saw dances portraying Pocahontas, Alice in Wonderland, the Titanic, the Little Mermaid, and three versions of Cinderella (one in each class). It was fascinating to see the diverse ways all these stories were treated: while one Cinderella group used mostly pedestrian movement and mime, another set the story into a more formal dance structure, with an opening unison section and characters freezing into still shapes while inactive (in lieu of going offstage). The Pocahontas group opened with a tableau of three dancers on their knees using a canoe-paddling gesture while the other three circled them with stylized wave gestures; the Titanic group used partner dancing as if showing a ballroom, before two connected dancers depicted the prow of the ship and then all dancers sank to the floor. I was especially taken with the Alice in Wonderland group, which used simple, stylized movement and symmetrical patterns to turn the story into a nearly-abstract (though still narrative) dance — opening with four dancers in a square, gesturing to the center with straight arms while the center dancer spiraled down to the floor ("down the rabbit hole").

Of course, not all narratives were from known stories — many groups or soloists made up stories, often using real-life issues such as bullying, cliques, and even human trafficking; and some performed stories from their own lives and experiences. Of these, some were quite dramatic and emotional: one story depicted how the choreographer's friends helped pull her out of depression in a difficult time; another depicted a family member returning after a long absence then committing suicide. I was impressed and encouraged by the seriousness with which all the dancers treated this project.

class dance project

Wow — things have gotten very busy and I haven't posted in over a month! I guess I have a bit of catching up to do...

Since completing our brief Polynesian unit with a bit of Tahitian, I gave the classes a short choreography project to create a phrase for a class dance. This is an assignment I had only given a couple of times before, and which I was a little hesitant about, as it doesn't reinforce any specific dance elements — but it does give the students a chance to create the phrases they've wanted to create since the beginning of the year (and, as I have to admit, perhaps help to get them hooked on the idea of taking Dance again next year). The idea is very simple: create a short dance phrase (24 - 32 musical beats) that you would like to teach to your classmates, which we will then combine into a class dance. The only real requirement was that the movements be the students' own creation (no direct-from-video choreography please!).

A few interesting things came up in this one for me... One was that, as I watched groups working on their steps, I noticed an awful lot of dependence on song lyrics for movement ideas — things like the ubiquitous gesture for “call me” (thumb and pinkie stretched from ear to jaw), what I think of as “Mickey Mouse-ing” the song (of course,  could have headed this off by requiring instrumental music again, but part of the impetus for this project was to let the kids work with the music and movements they’ve wanted to work on all along). One of my thoughts on this was that we had just recently learned Hawai’ian dance, in which the gestures explicitly illustrate the words of the song, and I wondered how their movements might have differed had we done this at another time; but I think in some respects this way of thinking about songs and gestures is so natural for them it may not have made a difference.

Ironically (given how hesitant I was about the assignment to begin with), this turned out to be one of our more successful choreography projects. Everyone participated, and all groups successfully taught their phrases to the class — some with their own spokesperson, some using me to transmit their steps using “loud teacher talk”... Students were eager to learn from each other, and although they did tend to be more talkative and less focused when their peers were teaching than they usually are with me, they were invariably supportive and enthusiastic about their classmates’ work — and picked it up very quickly, to boot. With a good mix of styles, tempos and energies, each class now has one more dance to add to their repertoire for the end of the year.

Before leaving for spring break, I assigned a journal reflection on the project — How did you feel about teaching your movement to the class? Did the knowledge that you would be teaching your steps change your creative process? What was hardest for you in this? How did you feel about learning movement from your classmates? Which group surprised you, and why or how? The responses were overwhelmingly positive — many students said they thought they would be too scared to teach, but they gained confidence and pride as they saw their peers learning their movement... I had originally thought of this as a project just for the first year of the program (essentially to give each class that one more repertoire piece for the end-of-the-year concert); but after seeing what  a confidence-builder it became, I think I may need to bring it back in future years — perhaps with just a few tweaks to get them over that song-lyric rut!

reflections on the tempos project

I got behind on my writing as I spent a good chunk of last weekend and quite a few evenings ensconsed with my video camera and choreography rubrics, grading the tempo variations projects... But after viewing twenty-one projects (many times each), I think I can at least say I am encouraged with the results of some adjustments in the way I've been teaching it over the years.

When I first started assigning this project, way back in my student-teaching days, it was very cut-and-dried: create a 16-count movement phrase and perform the same phrase in three tempos: medium, half-time, and double-time. From this, I think students learned what half-time and double-time were — but not really very much about varying tempo for choreographic effect. In the intervening years, I had tried broadening the project by simply requiring three distinct tempos, but students often wound up with movements only marginally slower or faster (sometimes they would even ask if they could mix three songs, in slightly different tempos, so that they could stay "on the beat"). This time I did allow them to use three tempos any way they liked, but stressed very strongly how extremely different they should be ("think s-u-p-e-r slow-mo"... "think hyperspeed!").

I also expanded just a bit on the lead-up creative work this year — for many years in the past, I would give one creative-work lesson on tempo/speed, then follow up the next day by trying already-learned dance phrases in double-time and half-time; but this time I used two days for creative work on speed. And, of course, the third major change was restricting them to instrumental music.

It's hard to say which of these adjustments made the difference (probably a combination of all three), but this was the first time that I saw almost all groups using tempo variations, clearly and purposefully, the way they should be used: to make choreography more interesting and engaging. Nearly all groups clearly showed three very distinct tempos, and nearly all mixed them in some unique ways. Even groups who haven't yet gained the skill or confidence for full-out, polished performances created some lovely little studies... One group juxtaposed a slow body roll with a fast, accented arm movement in a repeated pattern; another repeated their opening movements at the end of their dance in slow-motion, creating unity and variety long before I taught the concepts; still another began their dance with slow, curling hand movements, reflected those movements with undulating torsos, then kept repeating hand and torso movements in increasingly fast tempos until they ended with fast shoulder isolations.

So... while it would be tempting to think that I simply taught the project so well this year that my students really got it for the first time, my suspicion is that what actually made the most difference was the instrumental music. I'm remembering back to when we first did the ancestors project at EOSA, and how being required to work in a new style jolted those dancers out of their hip-hop-and-Cumbia comfort zones and into an entirely new level of choreography — and I think perhaps in much the same way, having that crutch of their favorite songs taken away gave these students the freedom to think about their movement in a new way. In that case, I may have just found a good progression of projects to start my Beginning Dance classes: starting off with directions and facings, an easily accessible project danced to their requested songs, letting them begin the year in their comfort zone so as not to scare them off; then the Symmetrical and Asymmetrical Shapes project, danced to amorphous music to break them out of their comfort zones; then the tempos project, requiring instrumentals to help them continue growing and risking new ideas... We'll see how it goes from here!

tempo variations

The dance classes opened spring semester with a short creative work unit on tempo variations. I wanted to work fairly quickly on this one because we only had 3-½ weeks between the beginning of the semester and our February break (officially called "Presidents' week," unofficially "ski week"), in which to cover one creative-work unit and one world dance unit — so I asked the students to make slightly smaller groups for their choreography project in order to get it done more quickly (big groups do tend to get a bit unwieldy).

We began, of course, with a couple of lessons on tempo. The first day, I gave them a fairly extended exploration, trying various actions (tiptoe, glide, slither, twist, skip, gallop, swing, sway...) in different tempos (slower... slower... s-u-p-e-r slow-mo... faster... faster... hyperspeed!) as well as acceleration and deceleration. We tried a single movement in one count and stretched it out to 2, 4, and 8 counts; then reversed the process by making a short phrase in 8 counts then speeding it up to fit into 4 and 2 counts. We danced across the room in 8 counts, then 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2... (both of these are venerable exercises from Anne Green Gilbert's Creative Dance for All Ages, if I'm not mistaken). We had to leave out the composition piece that day because it was a very short school day.

The second day we warmed up with the "whimsical minute" — a wonderful little exercise from Blom and Chaplin's The Intimate Act of Choreography in how we perceive time: the dancers free dance very slowly, to slow music, until they think one minute has passed, then freeze; they then do the same but dancing quickly to fast music. It is always interesting to see the range of perceived minutes — there is always close to a half-minute difference between the first dancer to freeze and the last, and the times are always much shorter the second time around, with the fast movement. We then explored variations of traveling, turning, jumping, sliding, swinging, and shaking; after plenty of exploration for lots of ideas, dancers were asked to create a short phrase with just four of those actions. After they created their phrases, we tried them with the same tempo variations we had explored the previous day, then the final composition piece was to revise the phrase using one or more of the tempo variations.

The group choreography project was very simple: create a short dance (30 seconds to a minute) that uses three very distinct tempos. I specified that their medium tempo should be what they think of as "on the beat," their fast should be at least doubletime ("think hyperspeed") and their slow should be at least halftime ("think super slow-mo"). They could mix their tempos however they wished, as long as there was enough of each to register for the viewer. My last big requirement was that we would work to instrumental music — I would play them songs from my pop beats playlist, so they could use tunes they were familiar with (in the karaoke versions), but I stressed that I didn't want the words to distract them from their movement.

We are only halfway done with the showings (about half showed Thursday and Friday,  the rest will show tomorrow). So far they are mostly doing well — I'm seeing some lovely solutions to mixing tempos, turning into interesting accents. One pair that stood out for me began a fast connected turn, suddenly slowed down to complete the turn in slow motion, then sped up to repeat it quickly while letting go of the connection — very effective. My one slight disappointment so far was with one group of excellent performers who begged and pleaded to be able to perform their dance to their actual song with words (which they of course had on their phones), so I caved in and let them... The dance was obviously well-rehearsed and performed with great energy, using a variety of tempos — but it was an object lesson in song lyrics distracting from movement creativity, as so many of the movements were just mimicking the lyrics (if not taken straight from the music video) — what I would call "Mickey Mouse-ing" the movement. If nothing else, it gives me a chance to remind students in the future exactly why I will keep them working to instrumentals for a while!

Shapes and levels

Now that Hallowe'en and Thriller are over, we're back to creative work and choreography. This time we're taking up shapes and levels, which is a project that I've been using since I first started teaching, which I actually got from Susan Brown, one of my master teachers when I was student teaching. I'm not sure how it gels with creative dance teaching theory, since it focuses on two different dance elements — but I do like the way it gets beginning choreographers out of the "cute steps to favorite songs" rut right off the bat.

Over the years, I have done some refining of my creative work lessons leading up to the project. We began the week with a lesson on Level, starting with a basic freeze dance, focusing on shapes in various levels and shape copying ("make a high twisted shape… change it by changing one arm… one knee… look at E___'s shape and copy it… make your shape turn, make your shape jump, make your shape travel… Drop your shape and make a low, wide shape…"). We then took up the Erosion Game partner activity — one partner takes a high shape, the other partner molds him/her into a lower shape then copies it to be molded in turn… After four or five changes from high level to low level, the composition is all the shapes performed in unison, eroding to the ground. Simple but effective (and students always enjoy working with partners).

The second day, we worked on shapes and shape transitions. After a very brief recap freeze dance, we built on the previous day's work with shape copying for some Shape Tag — half the class freezes in a still shape while the other half dances around and through them, "tagging" a still dancer by copying her shape — with lots of giggles from the dancers as they found shapes to copy; then we worked on transitioning into and out of shapes. This is important to get dancers out of just dropping a shape and taking up the next one — so we did a lot of explorations with specific transitions: "melt out of your shape, glide to a new spot, and wiggle back into it… explode out of shape #1, gallop to a new spot and then stretch into shape #2…"

The third day we worked specifically with symmetry (and asymmetry) — we started by looking at some photos of symmetrical shapes in dance, then tried some of the "Man-on-a-stick" improv from Blom and Chaplin's book The Intimate Act of Choreography (what would we ever do without Blom and Chaplin?). Then we worked in pairs with some mirroring and trying a few symmetrical and asymmetrical shapes; and then each pair joined with one or two others to try a few group shapes.

After the three days of exploration, the group project began on Thursday: Create a dance that includes at least six group still shapes (at least three symmetrical and three asymmetrical) plus transitions between shapes, using a variety of levels. I always caution the students that we will be practicing these to amorphous instrumentals without a strong beat, as the starting point for the dance should be the shapes and not steps to music. I usually get a fair amount of whining about that part, but this time only a couple of groups asked about being able to use particular music (I just told them "let's get your dance set first, then think about it"), and for the most part all groups have dived in and gotten off to a good start. We hope to be finished the end of this coming week (though not sure, since it's only a three-day week) — I'm anxious to see how their dances come out!

Directions & facings project

The composition project I gave just before winter break was pretty simple: create a dance using any steps, movements, and dance styles you like (school-appropriate, of course!), a long as you include movement that travels in at least three different directions and that faces at least three different walls or corners. We started out with a couple of days of explorations — first just reviewing axial and locomotor movement, then working with various traveling directions and axial facings. I included a lot of actions they could play with in various ways, and by the end of the second day many students were getting into the spirit pretty well.

Then they began working in groups on the composition, and I ran into a new problem: most of the 7th graders (those that were participating and working on the project, at any rate) wanted to dance to a song called "Payaso de Rodeo," which I soon discovered is the music for a simple line dance well-known in the local Mexican-American community, much the way the electric slide was well-known to mostly everyone a couple of decades ago. The dance itself does nominally fulfill the basic requirements of the project, as it travels (minimally) in four directions and faces four walls — the complete dance is: slide/chassé to the right, then left, then back, then front, then one-quarter turn to the next wall and repeat... over and over and over...

I had a very hard time getting across to them just why this wasn't okay for their project, especially since some students who hadn't been participating before actually started to join in ("but we're dancing, what do you want?"). I had to sit them down and explain that this was a creative work / composition project, that I was expecting them to create something, and that just getting up and running through a dance that I could see random people doing in innumerable YouTube videos was not creating! I used the analogy that if their English teacher asked them to create a short story based on their own experiences, using certain elements, it would not fulfill the assignment to just write down a story that everyone already knows, like Snow White or the Three Little Pigs. A few of them tried to tell me that their English teacher would be okay with that (I told them I was pretty skeptical, and that I would certainly check with their English teacher!)… They did finally get the point, chose new music, and created a dance of their own (pretty basic, but their using their own ideas at least).

This did, of course, give me an idea that what these kids really want to do in my class is something they already know how to do — which is a little weird to think about in a learning situation, but could be related to making them feel successful, or at least in their comfort zone… something to ponder for the future, at any rate.

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.

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.