Reflections Archives - Page 3 of 7

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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Becoming Nobody

Online chess. Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. It is a stretch to say that I like losing but I consider myself game. Gamey? Gamer. Willing. Much more willing to lose than not to play. Grow or at least have the experience. That will pave the way one pebble at a time.

So often you will hear in a conversation or read in a blog or social media outlet that someone considers themselves a “lifelong learner.” I wonder what they are learning? In my informal survey of these statements, it is typically a statement about one’s willingness to improve or change their current skills. Is that not what everyone does or is expected to do? Formally, I would enjoy gaining more information about genuine levels of objective growth and change rather than anecdotes about life-changing events and decisions that “really moved (institution X) forward.

As one who enjoys martial arts, I look at all areas of my life to reveal my training partner. It changes by day and by context but the function is the same. By working together, each one has the goal of improving their skill and they cannot do it alone. Regardless of your training partner, you can only have one competitor. Self. Choose how much practice takes place, quality of food, level of hydration, and intensity of work. Make the decision to be present. Aware.

Before I step onto the mats I determine my attitude and I am sure that it influences who obliges when I offer to pair up for a session of training. So many would love to say that “any given Sunday” I may win a match or lose a match; have an up day or a down day. That is not the case. My training session begins the night before when I decide to get a decent night’s sleep and moves forward with decisions throughout the day. There are not many decisions to be made. There is one. Then another one.

Me and Relson — Mugging for the camera with Relson Gracie

Watching the documentary “Bobby Fischer Against the World,” I heard David Shenk saying that there were 40,000 moves on a chess board after the first move. If you know anything about chess, you know that this is inaccurate. From both a mathematical standpoint as we as a meaningful standpoint, it is inaccurate. The only one with thousands of moves before them in a chess match is a fool.

Every decision made through the day determines an analog success or failure on the mat that evening. However you may score it. We all score it somehow. That is how we measure growth. I will not pretend to be one of the “all for fun” types. I will not claim to be a technician or analyst of the game but I know this–there are necessary and sufficient conditions in order to achieve growth and most of them depend on me.

Become nobody. Be humble. Serve. Give. Leave your ego at the door. I will take it one step further…maybe several steps. Those decisions that you make all week determine the type of training partner you will be for someone and reciprocally, they will then be for you. Rather than simply preparing yourself to respond and react, prepare yourself to be your best for someone else.

4’8½”

Imagine you are standing on the rail of a set of train tracks and your best friend is standing on the other rail. You face each other and smile. If you are are lucky, perhaps you can touch or even hold hands. Not likely. You see, train tracks have a purpose. They are for travel. They have a destination. If you are on them, you are going somewhere.

eyes on the prize — Mind the gap, Jacques.

I like to think about relationships this way. Work, learning, love. All about relationships. All about perspective. Goals. Finding commonality.

You see, whether you are standing on those tracks with your friend, co-worker, or the love of your life you will notice something. If you focus on where you are, you will see the distance between you.

Four feet and eight inches.

Raise your eyes and see what happens when you focus on the destination. That distance closes and those parallel lines meet. Next time you find that there is distance between you and the important people in your life, ask yourself if you have lost focus on the things that you had in common when you first met. Set your eyes on those loves that you had at first, those things that drove you to be what you are. Those things that drew these wonderful people into your life in the first place.

Look to the goal and close those distances.

oh the trains they have the numbers
the nicknames and the nights
they know it’s ok
to run away and cry

Working together is how we meet.

A shared mission is how we understand one another.

Pedagogy and its Discontents pt.2, Lead me where?

“It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement–that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.”

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

Let us not make any bones about the situation. The teacher is at the front of the room and hold the keys. There are places that students cannot go. There are places that students can go. There are places that students may only go if the teacher takes them there. Say what? This is the 21st century. This classroom is flipped. We are unlearning. Delearning. Relearning. It is our new pedagogy. You can’t front on that.

Or can you, Biz? Will you front on that? Is it the content, the context, or the process that is of value in the classroom? Some mix of the three, perhaps. Maybe, even, a fourth entity–the interaction of them all. In the same way that you may not separate nature and nurture, it is unlikely that you may separate the content from the context or either of them from the process that brings them to light. Further, it is unlikely that by explicitly valuing one part of the mix that a teacher or student will be sure to have the desired influence over those components.

Do you follow? If I, as a teacher or student make explicit statements of value, the reaction of students may be to value or devalue or, perhaps, to have no change in their valuation of the component. Some rebel while some draw near. It depends on how that serves their needs for safety, belonging, esteem, or actualization. Remember Maslow? Not to oversimplify, but if you have ever tried to teach a hungry student, you are probably missing more than my point.

Getting back to the matter at hand, students respond to the content, context, and process–along with the demonstrated valuations by the instructor in a given manner. They may follow, rebel, or have no change in their value of the experience. The teacher, assessing the response, may ‘course-correct’ mid-stream-of-thought BUT what may happen is not entirely predictable! Change on the part of the teacher–either re-emphasis, over-emphasis, or a decreased emphasis–may result in a different overall response.

The most significant (read risky) overall response may be an overarching loss of interest should the instructor effectively abandon ship on the premise or the beliefs that were held at first. Any teacher still holding the torch of pedagogy as a method of a priori distribution of information should probably have a widow’s walk built and learn a new lament. The kids are alright.

“And yet, in making any general judgement of this sort, we are indanger of forgetting how variegated the human world and its mental life are.”

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents