Mentoring for creative projects that require an outside perspective grounded in ballet technique, contemporary aesthetics, and body politics.

Writing as non-embodied means to communicate embodied things.

FASCINATED BY

How contemporary dance students* find support for their ambition to move more comfortably (and purposefully) through studying historical movement systems like ballet and social activism.

*STUDENTS

We do not know who desires to be addressed as a student, but I can speak from my own perspective as a student, performer, and teacher.

HOW I POSITION MY SELVES

As a freelance dance performer, I feel a sense of responsibility towards repetitions. Training is a phenomenological situation: to repeat exercises is to continually ask where you are in space and time. In seeking more specific answers to this basic question, you elaborate your sense of embodied place (exactly how this part of your body is here and that part of your body is there). A sense of certainty emerges from the activity, producing a perception of being oriented to yourself by yourself. 

PERCEIVING YOURSELF AS OTHER

The paradigm I described above can become a technique practice: a deepening way of knowing. Returning to the same exercises again and again, you develop a familiarity with the self as multiple, complex. This complexity is what draws me to practice. My ambition is to be a student of my body’s knowledge and bring that knowledge in relation to systems that pre-exist my body in the world. 

EXERCISES IN EMBODIED TECHNIQUE

The embodied pathways I have come to know well are constituted in a cosmology of information, a diverse set of teachings or methods and the contexts (geographically, sociopolitically) that they exist inside. These teachings are like a crowded family gathering with lots of voices vying for primacy. Technique practice can be quite dramatic. For my experience with technique, the matriarch of the family is the voice that challenges me the most. In this metaphor that voice is ballet, which I started first and which constitutes the root of my embodied knowledge. It is sedimented, operating at an unconscious level that I try to bring into consciousness by questioning it and experimenting with it in physical and conceptual ways.

BALLET IN 2021, EUROPE

In the late spring of 2020, amidst infinite revelations of a global pandemic and the rise of racist sentiments shaping policy in the United States government, the group Black Lives Matter responded to the disproportionate killing and suffering of Black bodies, during the pandemic and beyond, guiding a resurgence of anti-racist activism across the nation and around the globe. The activism reminded those situated across artistic fields that inequality persists in the institutions that purport to give equal access to knowledge. A renewed contextualization of knowledge production and Black excellence is needed in the spaces where art is taught. With roots in Europe, the concepts and practices of ballet have traveled to the United states where racial segregation and discrimination–perpetuations of slavery, racial capitalism, and the power dynamics therein–produce what Brenda Dixon Gottschild has called, “the systematic denial and exploitation of powerful influence” of Africanist aesthetics and practices. Gottschild claims that these influences “significantly shape European American experience”.

TAKING CLASS IN EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES

As a freelance performer, I maintain my physical competences through continuous acts of training in multiple geographic contexts. Through the pandemic I have been taking classes and teaching classes via Zoom. These classes have been positively sticky. Resuming classes I knew from before, online, I am familiar with most of the exercises from my memory. Still, there are glitches in the technology and frustrations that my apartment’s wooden floor is breaking and my body craves the studio. Sometimes I wander off the side of the screen to sneak a bite of a sandwich in the kitchen. In isolation from the community of practitioners, the process of knowledge transmission is continuously interrupted by technological performances that distract from the culture, or what I thought it once was. The interruptions offer me slices of time to think about successful transmission and what could be different. I ask: how does this structure perform?

THIS PART OF YOUR BODY IS HERE AND THAT PART OF YOUR BODY IS THERE 

My embodied knowledge of ballet technique takes shape inside of an artistic practice that involves methods of embodiment, transmission, and reflection. In this practice, I ask how technique information is context-specific, traveling along paths of oral history, relationship, bodies, and assembling in studios where it constitutes a culture or microcosm of society and its politics. 

MAKING CLASS: A METHOD FOR LEARNING

As a ballet teacher I have followed the path of another ballet teacher’s teachings. Studying movement is a method for teaching movement. I draft classes on paper. I write in shorthand notations how the exercises fit into musical structures (a ¾, a waltz), and specify the order of how the class unfolds in a series of parts. For years I wrote little notes to remind myself of the specific technical aspects, reliable pathways I could impart to the students through verbal communication (telling the body’s path) so that beyond my physical demonstration they could have some language to work with. When I deviate from what I have written, I feel the necessity of the detour in the relief I sense from students in the moment of choice. Sensing relief is powerful to me. When it comes I understand the potential of experimentation and the fact that a class cannot be carried out as it exists on a piece of paper. 

THE EXCESS: JAM SPILT OUT THE SIDE IS MEANT TO BE EATEN 

Class is never carried out exactly the way I write it down beforehand. Something more urgent comes as an essential response to the way I perceive a field of phenomenological experiences unfolding before me. What is the relationship of training to research and training to communities of research? 

URGENCY IN THE STUDIO 

On the topic of urgency, I return to BALLET IN 2021, EUROPE. If the studio is a location of research and artistic practice is a place of embodied knowledge production, how can interruptions become opportunities for social change? How do we come to the studio? On what basis? How do we borrow and spread techniques? How is the way we do technique, as a practice, furthering our embodied or disembodied experience in the world? 

COLLABORATION: A METHOD FOR TEACHING

How does the room work? Testing ways of knowing, I invite collaborators from other fields to experiment with me as I transmit ballet knowledge in a temporary container that is open to interrupting mainstream notions of success in ballet practice and commercial studio environments. Reflecting as a group on who has been dispossessed by imperial techniques, I co-teach courses that ask about fringe innovation: Black feminism, class consciousness, abolition, and queer theory. Goal: reflect on our relationship to competitiveness, how we might create a sense of belonging in a ballet class that does not require sexual exploitation or homophobia in order to function.  

OFFERINGS

The ballet teacher who mentors me in teaching technique exercises, “my teacher”, tells me it is not what I teach (she says that if there was another technique she knew a lot about she would teach that, only, for her it happens to be ballet). Her point: it is not just the form practiced but the practice of the offering. If I am to teach what I know well, also ballet in my case, how I teach matters. How do people do ballet differently? Difference is constituted in the way of doing as a way of being different.