Learning from the Best

This week has been eventful for me. I have been reading Teaching Dance Studies, chapter one by Bill Evans, the former artistic director of the Bill Evans Dance Company and professor emeritus at the University of New Mexico. I was also fortunate enough to host Ailey II dancers for a performance, master class and lecture demonstration at the college where I teach.

Chapter One’s title is “Teaching Movement Analysis” and it highlights the Laban/ Bartenieff Movement Analysis. In this chapter the reader is reminded how important it is to encourage students to dance with “their whole selves engaging the four functions of the psyche – thinking, sensing, feeling and intuiting.” Reading this particular chapter while Ailey II was visiting our campus could not have been better timed. Indeed, the Ailey dancers exemplified this process during their performance and demonstrated perfectly how artists can transcend that invisible wall that sometimes exists between the stage and the audience. All the Ailey dancers were truly and fully alive during their performance and consequently so were we as members of the audience.

This was an important event for our community, our college and quite a revelatory experience for my young students. Consecutively, in my next Choreography I class, I combined the essence of Bill Evans’ text with the echoes of the Ailey II performance. I had my students examine the relationship between shape, space and effort and I encouraged them to focus on coming up with some appropriate movements and to realize these movements to their fullest potential.  Afterwards I asked each student to make an entry in their choreography journals reflecting on what was difficult about the process, how they felt and what changes they would like to make for the next class.

The outcome was positive as I could clearly see that after having observed the Ailey II dancers over a 48-hour period in multiple aspects of their daily routine, my students understood better the basic concepts of choreography that we regularly discuss in class. They were more willing to take risks, less afraid of failing and more willing to engage fully in the creation of movements that were more in tune with who they are.