Teaching practice Archives - Page 3 of 13

Supporting creativity Pt. 6

The first time I have been moved nearly to tears by dance was in college. I have explained the tunnel vision of audience participation before. This lucid state was, is, like a drug to me. Attention. Do I have your attention? Yes. Now don’t anyone mess it up. Life became exciting. Busy. Graduation. Work. Busy. Life. Love. Things forgotten, lost, new concerns and tunnel vision around necessity.

Spooky Action was the first evening length piece that MiRo had developed since Pitch Black. It had been a few years and they, I, we had grown so much. It was based, deeper now, around their work at Fermilab. Extended and researched. There was sponsorship and beautiful video integration showing off the technology of Green Hippo–live manipulation of multiple video streams and sources. It was perfect. Enthralling and at no point were you distracted with figuring it out. It was a character of its own.

This was about the time that the students really started to get deep in the practical understanding of quantum entanglement. You know. Like sixth graders tend to do. MiRo is more than a dance company. The research they do for a piece is one of immersion. Pasteurized. Almost completely underwater. They expect the same from their students who embrace the focus and the exploration. They see that complexity and depth of expression comes from knowing the reason and the rationale; the process of embracing the chaos and making it beautiful.

This was about the time that I started to get deep in the practical understanding of working closely with dance. Something that I had not done in decades. Seeing Spooky Action in the basement performance studio of the Kimmel Center brought back the tunnel vision. The music by Peter Wyer fitting as always. A narrative about relationships. The piece, furious with all the passions I would expect from all those bodies on stage and projected. Pixelated. Picked apart. Accelerating. Becoming.

Tragic.

That’s how I explained it to Amanda. It was so sad.

The first time I have been moved nearly to tears by dance in decades was that day. A few years since MiRo Dance Theatre began working with students at the school and suddenly I felt very vulnerable. Aware that fast friends were capable of reaching into me. It is very much like sitting across from a Jiu Jitsu black belt or a sharpshooter. Potential lies within but never lies without.

I am grateful to my friends Tobin and Amanda and the ways they have changed me. I am writing every day this week and I am dancing like a disco fool on Saturday night to support and sustain the work that they do. If they can change me and they can change students and they can change…

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Supporting Creativity Pt. 2

Our first year was a “learning experience.” In typical parlance this means that it was a failure. It was not.

We encountered MiRo Dance Theatre as they were developing a piece called Pitch Black. They met, appealed, auditioned, and werked a group of interested, curious, and some disbelieving students. MiRo did not spend time drilling technique though their director was a former ballerina. They did not spend their time watching video though their producing director was an award winning video artist. They worked and treated these students as members of a company.

Students started saying they danced with MiRo Dance Theatre. They were.

When we traveled to see the premiere of the work at Altria, MiRo delayed its start while they waited for the student company to arrive.

They had arrived. We all had.
This is how education works.

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Supporting Creativity Pt. 1

Several years ago I was in a beautiful position. As the chair of a small fine arts department in an urban independent school I was able to push, pull, advocate, and influence. The faculty around me were supportive. The administration was trusting. Our budget was enough and our facility gave us room to grow.

Times like these you learn to live. Again and again we would consider our methods and how well we served the students, the mission of the school, the faculty, and one another. We were open and looking for ways to make everything meaningful and memorable for our students. One gaping hole in our curriculum was dance.

Now everyone knows that there are standards for dance and that they are never fulfilled for many reasons. If you can imagine that, historically, arts programs are the first to be cut you can trust me that dance may not be an area that even gets onto the schedule. How could we make this work? Another challenge is that the certification process for K12 dance is essentially a technical certification–categorized with shop classes and the like. Earning the certification is one thing, maintaining it is nearly impossible. For this reason, many dancers and dance educators do not even bother. As an independent school, this was no real concern but this meant, from a practical standpoint, that there is no significant pool of dance educators to draw from in the same way that you may be able to tap into student teachers or practicum students in other content areas.

Having been a co-founder of a NYC dance company and having worked with professional dance companies in 5, 6, 7, or 8 past lives, I knew a little bit about the field. I knew that dancers had a few things in common. One of those things was a love of available space–often the more austere and forgotten the better–and a need for space. My company used to rehearse in a Julliard studio on odd weekends when classroom reserves were thin. We rehearsed in loft bedrooms with furniture stacked on end. We rehearsed in performance spaces like PS 2 in between performances of popular theatre programs, in church basements, and in performance venues–they thought we were performing but we ran it like a rehearsal.

The final frontier.

Our students needed opportunities to express themselves creatively.
Dancers needs space. We had space. I started searching. Alphabetically.

Miller Rothlein–then Miro Dance Theatre–was the first company who had a functioning web presence, a functioning phone number, and a functioning director who answered it. I told them what I had in mind. We have space and you have dance. We want to share. And that, as they say, was the beginning of something beautiful.

Years later, we reminisce on the amazing work they have done with our students.
It is nothing less than beautiful.

This year, at their annual fundraiser, two of their first students will be presenting a duet.
Seniors. Going where no man has gone before.

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the seed, the soil, the water,

the care, the shoot, and the growth.

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On Dance

For the last few years I have served as the president of the board of directors for a dance company in Philadelphia. I am often asked how I became involved in dance. Some ask not knowing about my life as a musician, performer, and composer. Some ask knowing me only as a musician.

In my third year of college I was asked by a friend of a friend if I would be willing to play for a dance performance. They needed the guitar part of Susanne Vega’s Song of Sand and wondered if I could learn it and play it live on stage with them. It seemed like a simple enough request and I obliged as we were all friendly and what else did I have to do? This experience became like many of my experiences in dance. Dance begins with an invitation.

We rehearsed a few times. Most of the work was done without me as I learned the tune as was on the record. The evening of the performance came and I was asked to remove my shoes. This was a matter of fact due to the marley flooring but it was not explained to me that way. It was explained as a manner of stepping into the dance space. I will not say ‘sacred ground’ but ground, no less. Lights dimmed and bodies rushed. The buzz of audience behind the thin muslin curtain. Funny that I remember the audience being behind the curtain as if they were to perform for us somehow.

We began, that is, I began and was taken with the movement to my playing. With my playing. This was not moving to a flat line but to a pulse. It became immediately clear that this was necessary. I describe nearly every experience in dance as my having tunnel vision. It is not so much that I become alone as an observer but that periphery disappears.

Such a powerful expression. It does, with intent, what you assume individuals are doing all the time–part of the reason that you may watch people at all. As you approach one another. As you speak. When you mention a sensitive subject. Strong words.

Dance purposely speaks through motion. If observation is how we interpret the intentions of those around us, then dance closes the emotional gap that exists between verbal communication and the physical tell that is telegraphed to us.

Make no mistake.

Dance is saying something.

To you.