decorating the dance room

Happy Solstice and happy new year (and whatever else you celebrate)!

My gift to myself has been to gradually decorate the dance room — for decades I have been collecting photos, mostly cut out of magazines, waiting for the chance to use them to adorn a dance studio. Many had been on the walls at EOSA, but came down when that program dissolved... Now I finally have walls to decorate again!

It is a bit of a laborious process — since the buildings are brand-new, we are not allowed to use tape, staples, nails, or anything else except blue painters' tape, so I have to cut out multiple little circles of painters' tape for the back of each picture. I have been using Tuesday afternoons, when the break-dance club is meeting in the room, to decorate. It's going slowly, and I've made just a dent in that blank-walls feeling, but it is a start...

Last week I finished the "dance ancestors" wall (the most important, of course!). My selection is skewed toward the photos that have appeared in my dance magazines over the years, so I'm a bit chagrined, as a longtime Hawkins dancer and a recent devotee of Duncan dance, that I have so relatively few pictures of Isadora Duncan and Erick Hawkins (I had to find a picture of Erick online, as the only ones in my collection were of Erick and Martha together) — not to mention only one small photo of Alvin Ailey. But it is good to have a representative sample of some of our ancestors, at any rate.

I also made a good start on a world dance wall, although it can certainly grow (I may need to do more searching for images, as the photos from dance magazines heavily favor ballet and modern dance)...

And, when we were working on the symmetrical and asymmetrical shapes project, I made it a priority to get my "shapes" posters up on the wall, along with an elements of dance poster...

I have so many more photos and so many more walls to decorate — but it feels good to have this much done!

pre-winter break creative work

This past week we worked on a few different (though related) concepts. We started out on Monday with the map activity — a tried-and-true lesson I learned at a workshop many years ago and have been using successfully ever since. This time we began the same as usual — draw a beginning and ending point; connect them with a pathway including straight lines, curved lines, and a zig zag; try various locomotor movements on your pathway — but when we came to adding the stopping places for still shapes and axial movements, I introduced the LOD (Language of Dance) symbols for turn, spring, and still shape. It worked well, and we had just enough time to show the resulting solos in three groups each class.

On Tuesday, we focused more on the LOD notation. I started them off with a freeze dance emphasizing traveling, turning, and a lot of variations on opening / closing, expanding / contracting, folding in / reaching out, etc. to give them a handle on what is meant by extension and flexion. I then explained to them about various forms of notation and LOD in particular, gave them the symbols for traveling, flexion, and extension to add to the three we had learned the day before (I had all 6 symbols taped to the mirror), and showed on the whiteboard how to arrange the symbols into a timeline. On backs of the maps from the day before (to save paper), students created a timeline using at least one of each of the six symbols, then took a few minutes to turn their notation into movement. They showed their solos to one partner, who followed along with the notation, and then discussed what they noticed.

Wednesday and Thursday, because of exit exam diagnostic testing (always with the testing!), we were missing all of the sophomores — about half the population of all of my dance classes — so I wanted to do a two-day project just for the juniors and seniors (and the few freshmen I have this year). I wanted to try something that we might get to next year in higher-level classes (which the seniors would miss out on), and I also wanted to do something with pairs; so I looked through my notes and found an accumulate-a-duet lesson, which I was able to adapt for my beginners... Here's how it went:

On Wednesday, we warmed up with a brief freeze dance, again using reaching, folding, turning, traveling, jumping, and still shapes. We then began a sequence of seven elements — we tried each element in multiple ways before adding it to the sequence, repeating the entire sequence with each addition. The seven elements were:
1. make a fabulous shape
2. look somewhere in the room and travel to it
3. reach out, then fold in
4. do a signature movement (your favorite move, the one you would do forever if you could only do one!)
5. a turn
6. a spring or jump (any air movement)
7. a variation of your fabulous shape
After practicing the sequence until it was settled, we then did some editing: remove any two of your seven elements, but keep the other five in the same order ("when you write an essay, you do a rough draft first then edit out all the fluff — dances need to be edited, too!"). This being  a short Wednesday, we didn't have much time for showing — the homework was to remember the edited five-element phrase for the next day.

On Thursday, we started with a very brief recap, for students to remember their phrases (and for any who were absent to catch up). Then they got into pairs, and the assignment was to combine their two five-element phrases  into one duet phrase no longer than the originals (or not much longer — I did give them the leeway to have from five to seven elements). I asked them to practice their phrases until they were really "in their bodies," because we would be fooling around with them further. We showed the duets two or three at a time, then I asked the pairs to separate (go across the room from your partner so you're not tempted to worry about shat s/he's doing").

With the partners on their own, I gave them a few choreographic devices to manipulate the phrases: size ("do it tiny... do it humongous"); tempo ("do it as fast as you can safely... start slow-motion and speed up to hyperspeed"); level ("as best you can, do it sitting down... on your tiptoes or jumping"); with different energies ("do it as if you've gone to the moon and you only weigh 20 pounds... now as if you weigh 600 pounds"); retrograde ("do it in reverse order"); and embellishment ("do it with fancy arms..."). I gave them a couple of minutes to revise their phrase using the devices they had just tried, then they showed them to their partners and discussed what surprised them in their different choices.

In general, the students did pretty well with all of the lessons. My fifth-period class in particular did some beautifully uninhibited work on Wednesday (when there were just the few juniors and seniors in class) — when we tried on a few fabulous shapes, many of them did low-level shapes without being asked (something I don't see much with beginning classes), and then continued the pattern with the traveling, crawling, rolling and spiderwalking across the floor. All in all, it felt good to be able to get a few days of creative work into them before winter break, and I hope we will be able to continue some of these concepts as we go along.

End-of-semester dilemma

Planning the end of this semester turned out to be a bit of a dilemma for me. Coming from Oakland, I was used to having two weeks after winter break before finals — ample time for a few improv lessons and a final choreography project. Most of my years at EOSA, my fall semester final was a dance mapping and notation project: after leading in with the map activity then practice describing steps and movements, groups would notate their own choreography using dance vocabulary, musical beats, and pattern maps.

After attending a wonderful workshop on the Language of Dance (LOD) this fall, I got excited about trying the project in a whole new way. In the workshop, we learned a few basic LOD symbols (shape, travel, turn, spring, flexion, extension, stillness) and how to use them in a timeline; we then created solos by arranging the symbols as a starting point. It was an engaging new way of working for me, so I planned to try turning that notation part of my usual assignment upside-down — instead of first choreographing steps and then notating them with descriptions, my students would arrange the LOD symbols to build their dances, and only then fill out the movement physically. I was anxious to try out the project in a whole new way...

Unfortunately, my new district starts and finishes the school year (and fall semester) one week earlier, leaving only one week after winter break to prepare for finals. It just felt too weird to me to have a two-week vacation in the middle of a creative work / choreography project; to top it off, I would also be missing all of my sophomores (about half the students in all my dance classes) for testing during two days of this week, making it even harder to feel that we had time to do a notation and mapping project justice. So I somewhat reluctantly decided to switch gears entirely and have a performance final instead, letting students choose one or two of the dance styles we have studied this semester (basic jazz, the Thriller jazz dance, and Lindy hop / Big Apple) to perform in class — which they could easily review in the one week after break. In the meantime, we could still work on some of the mapping and LOD concepts this week.

What feels uncomfortable for me in this is that I’ve only gotten my classes through two choreography projects this semester. There are a number of reasons for that — for one, we started the school year two weeks late, then took an extra two weeks out of the curriculum to work on the Thriller dance (which was entirely worth it, both for making the program visible and for student buy-in); we also took longer on both creative work units than I have in the past, for the sake of allowing enough time to not rush the choreography — but in that “technique vs. creative work” dichotomy, the creative work seemed to be falling behind.

On the other hand, what came out of the dilemma was perhaps a new way of thinking about teaching creative dance and improvisation for me. In the past, the bulk of my creative dance lessons have been connected to a few elements, as lead-ins to group choreography projects; but this week, we were able to do four days of creative work for its own sake, not tied to a project, and that actually felt very freeing. We did dance mapping and a brief introduction to the LOD symbols and timeline (which I hope to return to in small ways throughout the year), as well as a two-day duets project for the small classes while the sophomores were out testing (more about all those lessons in the next post). I now think that this is a direction that I can and should explore further — while I surely will continue to  teach creative work units, with specific lessons leading into choreography projects, I am intrigued by the possibility of introducing more elements and more creative dance work into the “in-between” times. Perhaps this will turn out to be a new way of finding opportunities to infuse creative work into the curriculum!

learning about cultural appropriation

We're currently in our historical social dances unit, and today I showed the segment from the old (and ever-useful) PBS series "Dancing" on the Lindy hop and the Savoy Ballroom. I love this one — it was made at a time when they could still get two of Lindy hop's real pioneers, Frankie Manning and Norma Miller, to talk onscreen about the dance and their own experiences (and then I get to tell my students that, while I never got to study with Frankie Manning myself, I did learn from one of his students... Always nice when you can pull out that dance family tree!).

There's a section in which the narrator speaks of how the dance changed once it was taken up and taught in (white) dance studios — with accompanying archival footage making it obvious how this wild, grounded, lightning-fast African-derived dance was tamed into something bouncy, upright, rigid, and contained. At the end, when I asked students to share what they had noticed or felt was significant, T____ spoke up (I'm paraphrasing here, of course): "I thought it was interesting how when the white people took the dance, they made it all stiff and completely different from what it was... It was as if they liked the style but they didn't like the way the people who made it were, so they took parts and changed it into their own thing..." Good observation, of course — and all I could think of when she was saying this was wow, what a great introduction to the whole concept of cultural appropriation! I hope this will be the first of many more interesting discussions...

Reflections on the Shapes project — open minds...

We finished the Shapes project last week — using symmetrical and asymmetrical group shapes, transitions, and various levels, danced to amorphous background music. The last journal entry before Thanksgiving break asked students to reflect on their experience creating a dance starting from still shapes rather than steps to music, and whether it helped them to discover anything new about dance. This is often a difficult project for high school dancers — so many students think of dance as what they see on music videos, and the idea of creating a dance that is not responding to a particular song is completely foreign to them. Even so, I found almost universally positive responses in the journal entries — here is a small sample:

"I did discover new ways of dance forms. Dance really just expands further and further..."

"This project was interesting for me because I never really had to create shapes in a choreography before... [it] helped me learn that there is more to dance than just steps."

"I'm used to fluid, constant movements to the beat of a song — it was almost eye-opening trying to come up with this choreography. It made me realize that dance isn't all about the leaps and turns. I always forget that dance is a form of creativity and not always a competitive sport."

"Every dance that I saw was beautiful. The dances reminded me of nature... Like the wind, trees, and so on. Every dance was unique and original. I discovered that there can be a dance to anything, whether it's the wind blowing in the trees or a song."

Hooray for minds opened to new ways of making dance!

little things I'm thankful for…

Of course the big thing I am thankful for this year is a functional dance program in a school close to home — but here are a few of the little things that are a part of that:

Students who greet me with smiles on their faces when I walk down the hall in the morning…

One of my guys writing on the bottom of his last journal entry “I love this class!!!” (with a big heart scrawled alongside)…

A dance studio I can decorate with all the photos I’ve pulled out of dance magazines over the decades...

A wonderfully congenial fellow teacher in the girls' locker room...

And last but not least, enthusiastic students whose minds are open to new experiences!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Mills Repertory Dance Company

Last Friday we had a field trip to Mills College to watch a performance of the Mills Repertory Dance Company (MRDC), a company of dance department undergrads and graduate students. The MRDC makes the Friday matinee of their fall performance complementary to students from east bay schools — a wonderful opportunity and a great community resource. This was my fifth excursion there, with  five different schools now; with forty-one students, it was certainly the biggest group I have ever taken!

It is always a bit of an adventure, organizing my first field trip in a new school district, figuring out all the procedures and regulations... But it got done and Friday morning we got on a bus to Oakland. When we arrived the performers were still warming up, so my students scattered to explore the campus (especially the cafe in the quad), making it even more exciting when I had to round them all up in time for the performance. they did all make it back, and were a lovely audience, respectful and attentive (after some of my experiences over the past couple of years, being able to watch the performance without worrying about what my students might be doing was quite a treat).

The company performed four pieces — two by resident choreographers/professors, one by a visiting choreographer from New York, and one a re-staging of a Merce Cunningham event. It was a nice mix of pieces — all modern dance with one more in a dance-theater vein, involving benches as props and the dancers’ voices as the score. It was a pleasure to see the Cunningham piece, as the movement style was so distinctively Cunningham I could have guessed the choreographer without the program.

I was curious how my students would react to modern dance and dance theater, as most of them are beginners with little experience of dance beyond what they see on TV or videos — and those with experience are studio-trained in ballet, jazz or Hawai’ian — so what we were seeing would be entirely new and well out of their comfort zone. I have not yet seen all their reviews and reflections (many are coming in after the Thanksgiving holiday); but from what I have read so far, they seemed quite impressed by the technical expertise of the dancers and had some perceptive observations on the choreography (although many were somewhat bemused by the dance theater piece). All so far were glad they were able to see the performance (I haven’t read any opinions that “it was all boring,”which is what I would be afraid of with teens). It is gratifying to know that my beginning students can already appreciate some fairly sophisticated abstract choreography — in all, I was very pleased at a satisfying trip!