“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.)