teaching statement: expert and ordinary

My teaching practice asks how dance studios might become safer social spaces where individuals can gain knowledge of their bodies and movement through enriching processes of self-cultivation and collective experience.

My classes reimagine the disciplinary values of training and skill-building in contemporary culture. Teaching Western classical dance must be a reflexive artistic practice. I bring my expert knowledge of ballet to bear on the vast range of embodied experiences and creative impulses of my students. How can historical practices support dancers today? 

As a contemporary dancer and performer, I work with multiple creative desires and crafting procedures. I am continuously exposed to processes of movement research and choreography. The classes I offer anticipate the ways in which performance brings about an excess of emotion. My teaching envisions technique as a rigorous mode of embodied practice, a place of sedimented knowledge that supports dancers in a variety of performative and expressive situations. Borrowing from academic traditions that value transparency of information, personal honesty, and social accountability, my classes offer ballet as a somatic mode of study. Can dancers be true to themselves and enjoy ballet? I think it is possible.

Time and again, dancers who train in ballet encounter cringe-worthy situations where they are expected to fake being happy whilst being asked to do things in profoundly uncomfortable ways. Using methods of queer futurity and detour, my pedagogy is about finding ways to make ballet a pleasurable inquiry. I believe that ballet and sensual discovery are not mutually exclusive. My creative challenge as a teacher is to promote technical dance study as a situation of pleasure, curiosity, and criticality. From this perspective, the pursuit of embodied knowledge is copacetic to a broad range of aesthetics and creative processes. Working with Western classical dance, my project aims to interrupt preconceived notions of bodies as hierarchical and ballet as “high art”. What would ballet practice make possible if these prejudice-laden aspects were rendered insignificant?

My work is an extension of the work of my mentor Janet Panetta, who infuses humor into her ballet pedagogy as a way of easing the situation of learning “linear” dance forms. Following Panetta’s enlivened coaching, which encourages students to experiment with form as a mode of self-discovery, I have learned how to transform Cecchetti ballet technique exercises to suit a variety of bodies and training goals. 

Becoming a teacher is an ongoing process: I pay close attention to how the exercises I propose are taken on and taken in by students. Encountering students in a wide variety of contexts, from semester-long courses, to intensive workshops, daily training, and one-on-one coaching, I commit to putting my embodied knowledge to the service of others. While accepting that I cannot presume to know precisely what others experience, I bring my knowledge as a resource from a situated perspective that is constantly evolving in dialogue with artists and ordinary people. I see myself as an artist and an ordinary person. I am an expert and I am a beginner, a professional and an amateur simultaneously, which is the complex mindset I obtain in all areas of my life and work.

We cannot deny that perfectionism has created inadequate conditions for social relations. Dancers become much more at ease with their bodies when they understand that I care that they have less injuries, that they watch and listen to each other, or help each other find their placement through hands-on peer-to-peer assistance. When students accept my invitation to shed perfectionist postures, quality learning processes can take shape. Quality work is the awareness of how to do something sustainably with renewed interest. Because ballet asks for an incredible amount of reiteration and rhythmic clarity, it is my responsibility to offer limits and be as precise as possible when structuring a field of experimentation with an historical form.

A teacher can guide students to find successful movement pathways in their body by encouraging them to use specific timing and precise measures of strength and release. Giving students individual feedback about how they approach the movement offered in class creates an environment where everyone is understood as unique. This is the environment I want to study in, and this is also the ethos of environments where I feel comfortable sharing my expert knowledge in an ordinary historical form.