5 Questions

Do you know you are normal?

Are you courageous?

Do you respond more to color or texture?

Can you jump directly from a sitting position?  How does it feel when you try?

What is the best garment you have ever owned?

Anna Halprin’s Blank Placard Dance

This is a picture from Anna Halprin’s Blank Placard Dance from 1968.  I don’t know much about it, but that the performers held blank protest signs.  This at a time when protest was everywhere.  I think this was one of the best protests I’ve ever heard of.

Anna Halprin

I’m inspired by Anna Halprin’s move away from the world of dance in New York in the 1960’s to work on her own in California.  Something about this really speaks to me.   That must have taken some courage.  I like the idea that her radical innovations in dance could have come right out of her own life and relationship to her geography there in Northern California.  Her move, and her work, means that there is one story to recent dance history that is not about New York.  To me, that says that there does not just need to be one story of culture.  I feel emboldened by Halprin’s story to find my place and my own right work.

The Mischief of a Renegade Dance Notator

Impossible Scores: The Mischief of a Renegade Dance Notator

A process of generating movement with creative Laban dance notation scores repurposes this system of movement description while challenging its traditional use as a tool for documentation and preservation of choreographic works.  This paper describes my work with creating, dancing and disseminating scores that convey indeterminate choreographic ideas.  I discuss the initial inquiry, sketches, subsequent challenges, final product, and proposed next steps with attention to the conceptual aspects.  I draw from firsthand experience; my own thoughts, discussions and studio practice as well as writings from music, dance, and cultural theorists support and situate the work.

This project arose as an idiosyncratic response to several factors.  I was inspired by salient facts about the history of dance notation and perceived attitudes among dancers about the system.  Experiences reading and writing dance notation and a personal interest in destabilizing the predominant, positivist approach to dance reconstruction found in my field were also factors that led to this particular investigation.

Dance notation has historically had a mysterious polarizing effect in the culture of Western concert dance.  Practitioners who feel that notation of dance legitimizes, proliferates, and supports the work of dance argue with those who view notation as a reductive activity that eviscerates dancing of its ephemeral essence.  Many students in my dance department resist the required coursework in Laban studies, as they would mathematics classes—only more vehemently.  Students are offended by the static appearance and reductive nature of structured notation.

Moreover, dancers in the pro-notation camp have responded to predominant anti-notation sentiment with defensiveness about their practice that seems to deepen the divide.  Notators discuss among themselves the benefits of their practice with a sense of being misunderstood and underappreciated.  In a discussion of the demise of Feuillet notation, Ann Hutchinson Guest sides with Angiolini in criticizing Noverre, with his strong sentiments of opposition to that system (Dance Notation 66-67).

Dance notation is also the site of conveyance of power within the field of dance. Hutchinson Guest links the fall of Feuillet’s popularity to the ascendancy in dance among the uneducated, here with a tone of lament:

Thus the traditions of dance literacy were broken and dance moved again into the still present oral-visual tradition.  Dancers were trained and choreographic works were handed on and dancers were trained merely by being told what to do.  Books were no longer connected with the physical activity of dancing, and the advantages of written dance were totally lost.

However the benefits of written dance are not to be assumed.  Activities of dance preservation and reconstruction spark lively discussions of the location of original dance and issues of ownership and copyright (Cohen, 1-18). The relationship of Feuillet’s work to the increase of nationalistic identity France is an example the use of dance writing to exert political control (Louppe 82).

Dance practice is also characterized by constant, intentional change in methods of making, performing and seeing dancing.  Systems of movement notation fit the dance styles they describe (Marion 139 – 147), and thus rapidly adapt or are thrown out for new ones (Hutchinson Guest, Dance Notation 78-116).  Laban notation is a highly comprehensive, rational system of movement notation in which the space, time and body aspects of movement are most aptly recorded (Hutchinson Guest Labanotation 11).   Imagery and process driven choreographic methods are prominent in contemporary dance as exemplified by William Forsythe and the Gaga technique method of Batsheva.  Dances in which the motivations are more determined than their results call for new systems of notation.

Despite the decreasing utility and popularity of Laban dance notation, I am not ready to give up its use.   The system is comprehensive and deterministic, but it is also emergent.  Rudolf Laban left it open to be developed by other users (Hutchinson Guest Dance Notation 87).  In Laban theory classes at the Ohio State University, I have found that working with Laban notation deepens and enriches my understanding of meovement, adding layers of conceptual complexity that I feel, rather than reducing the experience.  In particular, I developed a curiosity about my own attempts to literally read mistakes in written Labanotation.  In a respectful spirit of repurposing and recoupment I decided to explore the ways I could adapt and undermine Labanotation towards my own interests.

Initial research

Brian Ferneyhough is a composer who writes musical scores so intricate as to be impossible for the performer to accomplish.  I wasn’t able to determine what difference this complicated notation made in the sound of his music.  I found it important to look for a specific effect Ferneyhough’s use of notation had on the outcome of the music that set it apart from traditionally notated music.   I looked for critical writing on him to help me make sense of this work.  This led me to contemporary composer and writer Trevor Wishart’s theory of musical gesture (126-129).

To paraphrase this theory, Wishart backgrounds his critical analysis of music and its notation with a short history of the written word in Western thought, beginning with the work of Plato.  He also draws on the Marxist theory of praxis to call for a theory of sound based not on the written symbols of what he describes as the “scribal culture”, but on the “musical gesture” (Wishart 45-70).   He discusses the dialogue between musical notation, instrument technology and Western music common practice, and uses the term “lattice” to describe music notation – it is a system of recording time and abstracted pitch. Wishart discusses Ferneyhough’s scores with ambiguity as to whether Ferneyhough subverts or enhances the performance of musical gesture.

Parallels can be drawn between dance and music and their respective traditions of practice and notation. Labanotation, though it can describe elements of movement such as relationships between body parts, or anatomical motivation, focuses primarily on directional motivation of movement, omitting information about the inner and outer stimulus for movement and the muscular response to that stimulus (Hutchinson Guest, Labanotation, 12) Overall, the impression is of a critique of ossification in Western music and political control through, and the loss of a purpose for the music itself. While dance has not progressed in service of its notation system, analogies can be drawn between instrument technology and dance style.  Style in dance (my own definition) is the result of specific technologies in dance practice, which can place limits on choreographic outcome.

Still unsure of the mechanics of my proposed scores, I began to sketch dance phrases and try to perform them.  I used several approaches; I could write movements that were logically or anatomically incorrect.  I could include symbols for images in my notation to create physical relationships to images.  I could also, like Ferneyhough, write logically sound scores that would be so physically intricate as to create the opportunity for the performer to enter a state of attention that in itself would be a compelling movement expression.   As a way of addressing choreography and techniques driven by specific states of attention, such as that of Meg Stuart or Ohad Naharin, I could use relationship signs and symbols creatively to notate these states of attention.

Challenges

My sketches revealed practical and theoretical problems.  Some had to do with the intricate and comprehensive quality of Laban notation, and other problems arose out of my own conditioning as a dancer.  Conceptual problems arose as to how these dances addressed issues of power and how they would be conveyed to an audience.

The first challenge I came up against was the great amount of detail that can be described using Labanotation.  Almost any physically possible movement I could conceive of is describable using structured movement description.  In addition, motif description already allows for open-ended scores, which can be solved with consideration of individual process.  I was immediately forced to refine my process to focus on highly intricate notation and physically or logically impossible tasks, as well as motif description of poetic images rather than spatial, temporal, and anatomical information.

In the writing of illogical scores I thought of the score as notation poetry – however the comparison to poetry breaks down in that notation symbols do not convey meaning visually as words do, (even when the syntax of the words is illogical).  Movement notation must be reassembled into movement to give access to the meaning of the movement.  Louppe describes Fuillet’s notation system using Rousseau’s terminology: “. . . we can say  that the language of Feuillet is a ‘geometer’s tongue,’ not a ‘poet’s tongue’” (82).  And the dances I was creating, once reassembled, were not necessarily things of beauty, as you can see in this silly video:

In addition, my intent to transgress rules of Labanotation was undermined by my own rudimentary understanding of this amazingly complex system.

My attempts to create scores based on visual beauty brought me to similar challenges.  Was I creating an object or a dance?  I find a well-written, hand-drawn notation score to be a thing of beauty, but even some of the most beautiful notation scores are written on graph paper that shows their utilitarian purpose.   I became interested in repurposing dance notation as visual art and considered whether pencil drawings or Labanwriter symbols, refined in Photoshop, would be more appropriate.  Here I came up against a conflict between formalism and attention to fuction.  The scores I created out of primarily aesthetic concerns left out direction symbols (also the primary unit for describing movement in the Laban system) and were written in motif to give a more spacious, sinewy design.  But they seemed without much content.  The best feature of these “aesthetic scores” is that they address dancers’ complaints about the ugliness of the blocky, modernist direction symbols.

At this point it seemed the illogical and anatomically impossible scores were potentially the most generative of ideas.  Attempts to describe my process led to the question, “aren’t you just writing bad code?”  It seemed that writing something illogical with a system based on logic might just cause the system to fade away, and create a piece of nonsense.  It became apparent that I would need to be judicious in the scores, attempting to break only one or two rules of the system at a time and keeping the scores as tidy as possible outside of that.

I was challenged by my own dancing, which while keeping me generally safe from accidents and injury, also serve to limit possibilities of movement open to me.  I approached the scores with as much determination to accomplish what was written as I could muster, but my body’s self-protective mechanisms took over at times.  I was also concerned not to further the rationality and abstraction of the system of notation that I was attempting to repurpose and undermine.

As I worked I could not quite imagine the purpose of these scores.  While the project called for bodily application to bring it to its completion, nothing that I generated particularly merited stage performance without further development.  I thought the scores had potential to address the story of the power structure in dance, and to further destabilize the idea of notation as a tool for fixing dance, preserving “original” works, and making present the “aura” of individual choreographers through fetishizing of their work through scores (Thomas, Helen 129).  I would have to refine my idea of the final product and audience for these scores or the dances they created.

Generative Experiments

In order to address the challenges, I conceived of two separate ways of packaging and conceiving of the scores, and separated the types of scores I was creating by method.   I rehearsed in order to develop a sense of play within rigorous compliance to the scores.

I found the scores provided parameters that pushed beyond my own techniques.  Fuillet’s notation may have done the same for French dance (loupe 90 – 91).  The most appropriate mode for developing movement based on illogical scores would require a development of a technique of honest and rigorous exploration of what was written.  In this sense I count these scores as useful compositional tools.

The scores were interesting in that they have reliable and repeatable aspects, therefore they retain the structural support to for solving abstract or multi-level choreographic problems.  While improvisation is an extremely useful tool for cultivating awareness and exploring unknown movement, the results can be as unreliable as the situation of the improvisor, which contributes to the exploration.  However, since the scores are not performable in an exactly reliable way in space and time as such, there is an aspect to them which must be created with each performance, a usage of dance notation which Jeschke calls for (Jeschke 4).

The issues of purpose and audience for the scores resulted in several different iterations of the actual documents.  I solved this problem with one project which will move towards a greater sense of refinement in the object of the score itself, and which is not necessarily designed for utilitarian purposes, and one product that is a cheaply reproduced pamphlet designed to emphasize the use of mechanical reproduction and focus on dissemination of the score.

Helen Thomas considers that scores may be a way of cheaply reproducing dance on a mass scale, with the implications of mass distribution discussed by Benjamin (Thomas 130):

One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition.  By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.  And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition, which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind (Benjamin 74).

One iteration works with the idea of creating an aura for an original handmade art object in the form of a screenprint of handwritten notation on fine paper, presented on the white space of a gallery wall.  This brings the visual aspect of the symbols forward, but sets up a double bind in which the dance becomes identified with the score and loses its embodiment, as well as heightening the sense of the artists’ hand, and thus, aura.  The other iteration is a pamphlet inexpensively Xeroxed on newsprint.  Newsprint uniquely conveys the greytones of the pencil drawing, but the graph paper lines are retained.  This method highlights inexpensive mechanical reproduction as inspired by Benjamin.  This form of reproduction and dissemination are appropriate for my agenda for dance experience and notation.  The irony in this expression is the dearth of actual audience members who could make heads or tails of the scores within.

Next Steps in the Process

The results of the process to this point were rough drafts in terms of both the dance phrases and physical scores.  The next step in the process would be refining the scores themselves with a focus on clarity of grammar for the sections that do hold to the rules of labanotation.  Further iterations might drop the use of notation of imagery through made-up symbols due to the lack of any real need for notation of these movement motivations (words seem to work fine for the practitioners of Gaga, and Forsythe’s improvisation technologies make use of words, video and animation very clearly.)  The aesthetic score could benefit from further development of its visual appeal.  I would also like to explore scores designed around aesthetics but that use structured description.  These concepts could also be further developed in a course integrating composition and Laban theory.  As a whole, the pamphlet of scores would need more detailed notes on performance of the scores, as well as references to direct non-readers of Laban notation to resources for deciphering the scores.

Conclusion

Writing these scores was a cathartic exercise in focused mischief.  The scores were interesting in that they have repeatable aspects.  Therefore, they retain structural support for a process of solving abstract or multi-level choreographic problems.  While improvisation is an extremely useful tool for cultivating awareness and exploring unknown movement, the results can be as unreliable as the situation of the improvisor and extremely fleeting.  However, since the scores are not performable in an exactly reliable way in space and time as such, aspects of them must be created anew with each performance, and become “texts of performative knowledge” (Jeschke 1).  The project allowed me to take aspects of Laban notation that I consider valuable and (at least for a time) throw away the rest.  While the end results were rough, the process of inquiry led to a pragmatic methodology for examining issues of political power in systems of dance notation.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Visual Culture: The Reader. Ed. Evans, Jessica and Hall, Stuart. London: Stuart Hall, 1936. 72–79.

Cohen, Selma Jeanne. Next Week, Swan Lake. Middletown: Wesleyan, 1982.

Hutchinson Guest, Ann. “Historical Development.” Dance Notation: The Process of Recording Movement on Paper. London: Dance Books, 1984.

—. Labanotation: The System of Analyzing and Recording Movement. 4th ed. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Jeschke, Claudia. “Notation Systems as Texts of Performative Knowledge.” Dance Research Journal 31.1 (1999): 4-7.

Louppe, Laurence. “Feuillet’s Thinking.” Traces of Dance: Drawings and Notations of Choreographers. Paris: Editions Dis Voir 1994: 81–90.

Marion, Sheila. “Toward a New Paradigm for Exploring Dance Notation.” International Council of Kinetography Laban Proceedings of the Twentieth Biennial Conference.  Hong Kong: ICKL, 1997.

Thomas, Helen. “Reproducing the Dance: In Search of the Aura?” Preservation Politics: Dance Revived, Reconstructed, Remade. University of Surrey, Roehampton, Nov 8-9, 1997.

Wishart, Trevor. On Sonic Art. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty. . .

. . . and frightened.  Don’t open the door to the study

and begin reading.  Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

–Rumi, “Soul, Heart, and Body One Morning” The Book of Love. Trans: Coleman Barks.  San Francisco: Harper, 2003.

The Pocket Reader

Here’s the cover of the little pamphlet I wrapped my impossible and illogical scores into.  I think the design of the cover is still awkward.  But it is a start.  Laban scores for dance inside. . . to follow.

illogical and impossible scores

A page from the score of Brian Ferneyhough's fourth String Quartet

Brian Ferneyhough addressed the limitations of traditional music notation and its impact on music theory. He wrote dense music scores that were difficult or impossible to perform, bringing the performer into a state of heightened tension beyond what is usually asked of a traditional music performer.

In On Sonic Art, Trevor Wishart credits Ferneyhough with finding a meeting place between rationalized theoretical music and what he calls “musical gesture”

These music scores are a point of reference for me in my current project.  I am working with what movements can and cannot be described by Laban notation, and exploring the states I have access to as a dancer when trying to solve a logically or physically impossible dance scores.

Other points of reference at present include Butoh, with its intense use of imagery to create a “state of crisis” (a phrase borrowed from Michael) in the body.  I am exploring the way a specific, intricate set of criteria for where the body will go and when might bring a performer to a fruitful state of crisis.

I am inspired by choreographer Meg Stuart’s use of “states” as opposed to “steps”.  Laban notation scores movement according to position of body parts in space and time, without mention of quality.  How can I work with this criteria of space in a deliberately confounding or illogical way, in order to produce a condition which is generative?

 

 

About Dance Studies, From the Dark Side

I have to admit I am slightly suspicious about the push in dance studies to proclaim the territory of knowledge specific to dance.  How is this not just a way to justify dance as an academic specialization, thereby proclaiming the need for more Departments of Dance, more Administrators of Dance, and more lines of funding for Dance?  I am questioning whether this push to demarcate dance serves knowledge –or power structures.

I am really crossing over to the dark side today.

Asking this question has the effect of shooting my own self in the foot.  As a scholar in dance, I am supposed to want funding to justify academic activity in dance.  Plus I would like to have money for groceries.  I would like to have a job.  The practical side of me says, yes, you need to be clear about what dance does and what dance knows so that someone will pay you to work in, and write about, dance.

Another side says, “what is it all for?” This side of me would rather exit stage left and grow my own radishes while dancing naked in the moonlight in my garden than to participate in this circling of the wagons.

I should give some context–several events have brought me to this state.  First of all, I am taking a Ph.D. level class at the moment.  It is the most idea-heavy dance class I have taken thus far and has involved discussion of extensive readings on the history of analysis of movement.  I’ve never been one to argue that we need to just stop thinking about what it means and just dance, but this class is threatening to push me over the edge.  I am suddenly remembering my experience with the  Forsythe Symposium last year – that of being overwhelmed with conceptual thinking, feeling unable to keep up and synthesize, and starved for sensory experience and information, which feels so much more real to me personally.

There is also the fact that I personally miss performing, and creative activity in general.  I have whined enough about this and will leave it at that for now, and add that this is getting better.  I’ve got some things in the cooker.

Then there was something Norah Zuniga-Shaw mentioned in her presentation of Synchronous Objects to my PhD class the other day.  She told an anecdote of a presentation of her research to a group of musicologists, whose initial reaction was to wonder why the dancers in “One Flat Thing Reproduced” were not dancing to the music.  To me, this, and other exposure I have to the field of musicology, causes me to think of that field as a closed, antiquated, self-referential academic dinosaur.  Is this really the direction that dance wants to go?

I also had a talk this morning with someone who attended the discussion at the Wexner last night between painter Luc Tuymans and curator TJ Clark.  The discussion apparently turned to the idea of painting as a site of knowledge in itself.  From the sounds of it Clark credited Tuymans with reinvigorating painting after the postmodern breakdown of the form.  I am fine with the idea of using and reusing a form for the layers of information it can then convey.  I do not hold with any evolutionary ideas that say we must always push to the next form, new forms, and thus discard painting.  But something about the story makes me wonder if these two had other motivations to justify painting as a valid and living art form?

I am suspicious of the academic need to maintain existing forms for the sake of power structures.  I would rather see dance as a tradition die off than to have it be preserved in formaldehyde.

In my flair for the dramatic, I may be setting up an unecessary dialectic again.  Is it really vitality and creativity vs. academic specificity, or can I reframe this as a both/and situation?

Proust was a Neuroscientist

I’ve been doing a lot of reading.  Because I think of myself as some kind of creative artist, I think while reading about my aesthetic values and what I’d like to create.  I think about the themes and ideas presented in the books and then try to imagine performances that will “express” them.  Then I usually decide these ideas are uninspired and discard them.  I find this process to be depressing and unproductive.  Why not begin making things by making instead of starting with an idea I’ve read and then translating into performance?

Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist helped me to come up with this question about my practice.  As I’ve mentioned many times in this blog, I don’t actually do a lot of creating in dance or performance anymore.  I write some, and analyze dances, and do coursework, and did a little reconstruction, but I think there has to be more with my involvement in dance.

So while reading this book, I found myself interested in the idea that writers, chefs, and composers could all know things about reality that are kinds of knowledge we usually credit to science.  I thought “yes” and then, since dance is my medium “I should make a dance about dancers knowing things without needing hard science to prove it” –and then I thought “BLAH!”   No one needs me to make a dance like that.  It’s been said quite nicely with words here in Lehrer’s book.  What’s more I suspect the characters profiled in this book are so inspiring because they deeply explored what they were drawn to, rather than writing or composing to illustrate the latest philosophical idea.

I need to develop a practice that helps me make things from a different, less “propositional” (to use Johnson’s terminology) place.   This takes time, and a sense of risk.  I have known this, in a sense for too long without pursuing it.  It is time to make things or get off the pot!  Maybe it will help if I stop whining about how busy grad school and parenthood and work are and just go into the studio, or out into the yard, or the woods or pick up the video camera, and make something.

Does it seem like I’m eschewing rigorous thought and research in the creative process?  I feel a little that I am, and I’d hate to do that.  It is good to study structures of ideas and organize and synthesize them.  I have found thematic footholds in the work of Rudolf Laban this year like I never before, because I read and read and read, and thought about his theories, and compared them to other theories.

I just think I’ve swung a bit far in that direction lately.  I have spent so much time sitting, reading, typing, that I have shut down whole parts of my body.  Muscles have begun to atrophy.  I don’t know the state of my sacrum at all times anymore.  This is sad to me.  I’d like to get back on the horse, try to make things, and continue to be a scholar.  Look for more posts when I fall off the other side.

Embodied Meaning and Freedom in Dance Class

I’m wrapping up my first quick round of teaching for the summer.  Friere’s Pedagogy of the Opressed, Johnson’s Meaning of the Body, and Dixon-Gottschild’s Black Dancing Body are sinking in, challenging the way I see my students and myself.

Friere posited that the student-as-object model is oppressive and that true learning, and freedom, happen in relationship.  After reading Friere, I was primed to think about Johnson’s embodied meaning in terms of the classroom.  In Johnson’s view, babies make sense of their world holistically, beginning with their experiences, which are wrapped up in the experiences of their caregivers.  Babies begin by experiencing themselves, their caregivers, and their environment as one, and then slowly differentiate.  Furthermore, humans are all “big babies”; our perception of experience still arises holistically.

Friere’s ideas about learning and Johnson’s about perception are related; Friere proposes deconstruction of the the subject/object relationship, and Johnson declares that the subject-acting-on-object model of meaning-making is secondary to that which arises viscerally.  These arguments support a class structure that is relational, egalitarian, and open-ended.

On July 3 I blogged this quote and some notes from Dixon-Gottschild’s Black Dancing Body:

“Figuratively speaking, dancers as a group are a subjugated “race” – destabilized as a matter of course, as a prerequisite inherent to the field.” –Brenda Dixon Gottschild, The Black Dancing Body. p. 10-11

This, plus the entire description of a dance class . . . hit very close to home for me.  I spent ten of my formative years engaging in serious dance training that fits her description . . .  I have chosen not to walk away from this tradition, but I feel squeamish about demanding the same “destabilization” from my own students that my teachers asked of me.  And yet, I want the training I offer to “work”, and often so do my students.

In the beginning jazz and modern dance classes I just finished teaching, I pretty much followed the traditions I’ve inherited, ones much like those described by Dixon-Gottschild.  I stood in the front of the room.  Wherever I was standing became the front.  I performed movement for my students which they were expected to imitate and perform for me.  I then scrutinized their performance and gave specific critical feedback on their performances to help them imitate me more closely.  No one talked; even when I asked questions they were generally treated as rhetorical.

I am aware that the way I teach right now structures a classroom where students are very much passive objects to be acted on by me, the active subject.  The model I currently follow is very effective in creating the ability to do certain movements in certain personality and physical types – those who are kinesthetic, visual learners, and are passive enough to submit to whatever the teacher says to do, and who have cooperative bodies.  It is a very defined outcome available to a small number of people.  I love western dance techniques, and believe this training does work in a sense, but maybe the outcomes and beneficiaries are too limited.  Dance can be meaningful in many ways to many different people.

It’s one thing to want to change the way a thing is done in your culture, and quite another to actually change it.  There is a good amount of risk involved.  (I notice the same thing in the way I parent.  My philosophy tells me to do things differently than my parents did, but in the moment of truth, I often send my own experience forward, because it is known.)

Still, as I pile on the ten-week sessions of technique classes, with different students each time, I can’t help but feel a little sad for the way I hardly know them,  and I just deliver these skills to them.  Many don’t even learn much of those for one reason or another.  I need to redefine a classroom that works, and the relationship between me and the students.  There is so much possibility for what could happen.  I’d like to experience a dance class in which people relate to each other first and students feel they have a voice.  I’d like to help students experience what I have in terms of discovery that arises out of their own embodied experience.  I’d like for humor and laughter to have a part in the process without feeling that I, as the teacher have to entertain and tell jokes.

I’m not sure what I’ll do differently this next round of classes, how I’ll think differently of my students.  I’m afraid of the arguments that can be levelled against teaching-as-an-experiment in freedom.  Classes may seem unplanned, indefinite.  Students may hate the class or resent that they’re asked to be active when they have already been conditioned to be passive.  We are after all in a culture of oppression.  They may stare at me sullenly.  Nothing might happen.

(In some sense, isn’t that always the fear?  In everything?  That if I don’t do it, it won’t happen? Ha ha.)