Musings from a teacher who still thinks of herself as a student and probably always will

Photo courtesy of Dancewave

I think a lot about teaching. I am constantly questioning what it is I am teaching.

How. Why. How to keep doing it. Why I keep doing it.

Dance. My students. My students as dancers.

As artists.

As people. 

A few weeks ago, while I was waiting for my laundry to finish at the laundromat on Knickerbocker, I finally cracked bell hooks’ “Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom”. And there I sat, in the laundromat, reading, and then, suddenly, crying. Crying in the laundromat because of the words I was reading.

I spend my time on the subway, on the train, walking from place to place, with my headphones in. I bury myself in the sound and escape---not necessarily into the music, but into the classroom. When I have a moment alone, often in transit from job to job, I find my mind wandering to the studio. I curate, and re-curate, and curate again the type of environment I desire my classroom to be.

I think a lot about movement.

Not so much about dance.

About movement.

As a teacher, I prioritize risk-taking, choice-making, and getting so warm we feel like our legs can take us anywhere if we just dig deeper, get lower, reach longer. This does not always result in easily quantifiable skills to check off for mastery, but it does lend itself to a heightened feeling of self-worth, a sense of belonging, a penchant to keep moving and to keep dancing in a boundless way. 

I want to teach my students to be movers first, dancers second.

I want them to value the skills that are inherent to dance training but are not always explicitly emphasized. I want them to be confident. To recognize they are an integral part of a community. To problem solve. To take risks. 

(Dance) Education as the practice of freedom.

I can’t help but think about the inherent value system imposed by the training model that keeps these students coming back to dance as a form. I think about where, as an educator and student, I fall within that. I think about how I can challenge patterns without dismissing values.

I think about my own training.

The good. The bad. The ugly. The gritty.

The fulfilling.

The joyous.

The empowering.

Through teaching I have realized the deep-seated anxieties that have been omnipresent in my life and training since a young age. An underlying fear of not being good enough, an embarrassment surrounding the appearance of trying too hard, a heavy self-consciousness about feeling too big to justify inhabiting myself fully. My dance education was soaked in these things, never explicitly by one teacher (in fact, quite the contrary), but subliminally through the deep study of the lineage and history of the form(s) we share, relish, love.

I think this, in many different manifestations, is quite common.

These things crept into all the empty spaces, and as a result I began shielding myself from risk-taking, from physicalizing joy, from really moving, out of fear. I was learning to execute skills and string together steps, but something was holding me back from really moving- from really dancing. 

Teaching changed that.

When I began to realize what I wanted to spark in my students, I realized what I also wanted to spark in myself. And in an attempt to make it work in my classroom, something clicked in my physical body. I felt confident, in charge, felt like I was growing into not just the teacher, but the mover, I always aspired to be.

It is easier to give my best when it tangibly benefits those around me.

Teaching helps me figure out what my ‘best’ actually is--- activates my movement practice in a way that brings me there. It is challenging, it is vulnerable. When teaching, when encouraging young artists to come with you, to trust you, to do what you ask, there is no place to hide. In order to give my students the greatest means for growth I have to step outside myself, push myself to practice what I preach, define exactly what that is. 

Teaching as the practice of freedom.

I am 24. I am no master. But, I realize now, I have a lot to offer, have so much more to offer when I invest/commit/deeply investigate the risk that comes with dancing during the improvisation of teaching. Mastery feels fleeting- something to spend my whole life chasing.

Right now, it is an active practice of working on it, of trying things on, of cultivating an environment that allows the class to move to its fullest because we are all going there. Me included. The work in the laundromat and on the subway becomes practical during the live improvisation that is teaching, seamlessly adjusting exercises, prompts and cues based on the needs of the students in that moment. Regardless of what our collective pursuit of mastery is that day, the work (the magic) of teaching happens in real time.

When I feel myself step into this fully invested and fully investigated way of teaching, I can feel the whole room shift. We all drop a little lower, all reach a little higher, all try maybe one thing that scares us. There is a trust, an unspoken agreement. An owning up to not knowing and then committing right then and there to figuring it out. Together.

I could spend my whole life watching the ways this manifests, unique to each beautiful individual. The seemingly shy student quietly starts dancing louder than everyone in the room. Someone swallows the lump in their throat and boldly attempts to put words to the feeling of being on the inside (of the movement, of the community). Her head knocks her off balance and she no longer associates this momentum with being wrong, with being bad. It is simply just new. Exciting.

Together, we laugh with (at) each other and our absurd pursuit of excellence, our absurd passion for this artform, always re-entering the practice more rigorously than before.

Moving together. Exploring together. Inquiring together.

Being, together.

We find it easier to fall into community.

A permeating warmth emanates and subconsciously fills the dark caverns of doubt that live in our guts/brains/hearts because of years of training, years of being a plain old person, and fills them with a little bit of color, a little bit of light. 

We don’t lose the hierarchy embedded in us - but we do loosen the grip.

I am still figuring out how this idea of education falls into the landscape of the training, the skills, the desire to become a dancer who is masterful at movement and at dance, a dancer who is an artist and a technician. How as an educator do you teach artistry, encourage creativity, and cultivate community without completely ostracizing the vocabulary that eventually becomes the fodder for choice-making, composition, improvisation, choreography, etc., etc., etc.? How do you reconcile the two and create a standard of excellence in the classroom that puts the two on equal footing? 

I think I will always be figuring this out.

Right now, it feels like continually and frenetically executed weight shifts. Finding suppleness in my teaching self that calls upon being able to seamlessly transfer modalities of movement. Supporting growth and discovery through acquisition of technical skills and through an emboldened capacity for choice making. Redefining which steps we highlight as the ones that make us ‘good,’ make us ‘better,’ make us ‘best’. Being inside that current as a teacher, but also having the finely tuned awareness to the needs of the student’s skillset and my responsibility as a dance educator to help fill it.

This shift in priority within my classroom, within my own training and history, is something I am, again, still figuring out. I am at an age where I have spent my entire life in the classroom with ever-changing roles. I see myself in so many of my students because I am not so far away from them. Which, I am continually learning, does not mean I have nothing to offer them. On the contrary, I have quite a bit.