More Personality than Pirouettes, Please:
How contemporary pedagogies of choreography could be more responsive to contemporary practices in choreography (but are stymied by pathways to “success.”)
National Dance Education Organization Conference, October 2013
For artists such as Bebe Miller, David Dorfman, and Tere O’connor, making dances is a way of enacting philosophies—of playing with ideas—not a project of assembling a dance with a series of choreographic devices. We, however, still teach those devices. Many existing pedagogic models for teaching choreography no longer reflect the way contemporary dance professionals actually work. These, among other established and emerging choreographers, are much less interested in a dancer’s developpé than in working with thoughtful, mature, contributing artists.
This paper examines the relationship of current choreographic practices to pedagogies in higher education. Citing a series of interviews conducted between Summer 2011 and the present, it turns a critical eye to pedagogies in the US, and explains those by problematizing notions of—and possibilities for—success. Chrysa Parkinson, for example, an American dancer working and teaching at DeKeersmaker’s school, in Brussels asserts: “the most significant thing [affecting PARTS student’s highly experimental choreography] is that [they all] assume that they will be professionals and have a career—basically everybody works when they leave this school.” And by “work,” she means: paid work, full-time in dance. In the US, by contrast, for many dancers “work” means bartending, scrambling enough together to go to class, and doing unpaid work in loft spaces, hoping to “get noticed.”
The model of graduating college, getting hired by a company, dancing for several years, then moving on is now, largely, defunct. The current state of “the field” in the US yields a complicated relationship to institutions of higher education that “prepare” dancers for this unstable field. Do we rely too much on teaching dance students trusted methods or tools and, in the process, ignore teaching the “art” of independent thinking? Margaret H’Doubler founded the first dance program in higher education with strong influences by American Pragmatist John Dewey. How does our pedagogy cycle back to those principles and empower students to weather an unstable field and become compelling performers, choreographers, or—dare I say it—attorneys, visual artists, urban planners, politicians, or professors? Teaching choreography has the capacity to teach the art and craft of thinking, of synthesizing experience in varied ways, versus a limited articulation of a particular form or technique. What kinds of pedagogies acknowledge that capacity?
For artists such as Bebe Miller, David Dorfman, and Tere O’connor, making dances is a way of enacting philosophies—of playing with ideas—not a project of assembling a dance with a series of choreographic devices. We, however, still teach those devices. Many existing pedagogic models for teaching choreography no longer reflect the way contemporary dance professionals actually work. These, among other established and emerging choreographers, are much less interested in a dancer’s developpé than in working with thoughtful, mature, contributing artists.
This paper examines the relationship of current choreographic practices to pedagogies in higher education. Citing a series of interviews conducted between Summer 2011 and the present, it turns a critical eye to pedagogies in the US, and explains those by problematizing notions of—and possibilities for—success. Chrysa Parkinson, for example, an American dancer working and teaching at DeKeersmaker’s school, in Brussels asserts: “the most significant thing [affecting PARTS student’s highly experimental choreography] is that [they all] assume that they will be professionals and have a career—basically everybody works when they leave this school.” And by “work,” she means: paid work, full-time in dance. In the US, by contrast, for many dancers “work” means bartending, scrambling enough together to go to class, and doing unpaid work in loft spaces, hoping to “get noticed.”
The model of graduating college, getting hired by a company, dancing for several years, then moving on is now, largely, defunct. The current state of “the field” in the US yields a complicated relationship to institutions of higher education that “prepare” dancers for this unstable field. Do we rely too much on teaching dance students trusted methods or tools and, in the process, ignore teaching the “art” of independent thinking? Margaret H’Doubler founded the first dance program in higher education with strong influences by American Pragmatist John Dewey. How does our pedagogy cycle back to those principles and empower students to weather an unstable field and become compelling performers, choreographers, or—dare I say it—attorneys, visual artists, urban planners, politicians, or professors? Teaching choreography has the capacity to teach the art and craft of thinking, of synthesizing experience in varied ways, versus a limited articulation of a particular form or technique. What kinds of pedagogies acknowledge that capacity?