Learning and embodying classical dance forms, contemporary artist/practitioners face the mythology of pedagogy.
I understand this because I started training in classical ballet at age four. One of my early memories of ballet class was my teacher who told us to that dancing the most challenging exercises in class we should “suffer with a pleasant face”.
Ballet training requires people to appropriate a mask. And teachers as well.
What happens when feelings aren’t masked? When anxieties and vulnerabilities of the somatic body of dancers are laid bare in the pedagogical context of ballet?
Once I talked with a student from Croatia about her experience working with ballet as a university student. She said to me I feel ashamed because I started dancing at seventeen and did not have that experience of suffering she understood to be fundamental to ballet skill.
These responses are not actually about technique or knowledge, but rather perceptions of human relationships and their willingness to frame their labor as rigorous or not depending on how they can bear systems of domination.
Which physical, mental, or cultural boundaries within ballet technique need to be transgressed for students to experience learning (ballet skills) as liberatory?
“To enter classroom settings in colleges and universities with the will to share the desire to encourage excitement, was to transgress.”
“Teaching is a performative act. And it is that aspect of our work that offers the space for change, invention, spontaneous shifts, that can serve as a catalyst drawing out the unique elements in each classroom. To embrace the performative aspect of teaching we are compelled to engage “audiences,” to consider issues of reciprocity. Teachers are not performers in the traditional sense of the word in that our work is not meant to be a spectacle. Yet it is meant to serve as a catalyst that calls everyone to become more and more engaged, to become active participants in learning.”
bell hooks
hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress. Routledge.
“The dialogue is in opposition to monolithic rhetoric. It proposes ‘openness and incompleteness, becoming rather than being, the created rather than the given, the unfinished rather than the finished’.”
Guy Cools, with quote by James P. Zappen
Cools, Guy. 2016. Imaginative Bodies: Dialogues in Performance Practices. Valiz.
“Form in its radical sense should address the formless as it ultimately refers to the processes of life and death. Affirming form is recognizing the important contribution of each vibrant life as a continual creative process. All the while, letting form go is our own acknowledging of mortality or the necessity to work with the limits of every instance of form.”
Trinh T. Minh-Ha
From a lecture at Tranzitdisplay, 21/11/2014
“In a dialogue there is no attempt to gain points, or to make your particular view prevail. It is more a common participation, in which people are not playing a game against each other but with each other. In a dialogue, everybody wins.”
David Bohm
Bohm, David. 1996. In On Dialogue, pg. 32. London: Routledge.
“2. Start in the Middle
When we make study the way we enter into the pact of collective learning, we must unlearn the habit of stopping thought in order to start it again. Think of all of the times you’ve entered a classroom where a lively discussion is taking place only to close it down. We, teachers, tend to stage the classroom that way, marking our entrance as the start of learning. What is lost in this gesture? What is left unheard?”
Erin Manning
Manning, Erin. 2015. “‘10 Propositions for a Radical Pedagogy, or How To Rethink Value.,’” Radical Pedagogies, Inflexions (8): 202–10.