How do you sustain fun and creativity in dance teaching? Meredith Fages asks six teachers and choreographers.
Dancing is hard work.
We live in a culture that valorizes youth, ambition and productivity. With so many prizes, competitions and the advent of sharing on social media, there can be a distorted focus on more, more, more. The physicality of dancing is not easy. Art-making is serious business. The buzzword “rigor” has become synonymous with “integrity.” There are many reasons why we work hard, but what has gotten lost, or, at the very least, obscured?
It can be easy to undervalue the love, joy and playful nonlinearity that underpin the creative journey. In a recent conversation I had with choreographer Jimena Paz, for instance, she lamented the number of her university students who arrive “with so much disillusion that their enjoyment decreases. They say, ‘I don’t enjoy dancing anymore,’ and this is criminal.”
Given that the number of hours we spend in the studio far outweighs the number of hours we have in performance, could we improve the quality of our time in process by reconnecting to some good old-fashioned playtime?...Keep reading on Dance Magazine.
Dancing is hard work.
We live in a culture that valorizes youth, ambition and productivity. With so many prizes, competitions and the advent of sharing on social media, there can be a distorted focus on more, more, more. The physicality of dancing is not easy. Art-making is serious business. The buzzword “rigor” has become synonymous with “integrity.” There are many reasons why we work hard, but what has gotten lost, or, at the very least, obscured?
It can be easy to undervalue the love, joy and playful nonlinearity that underpin the creative journey. In a recent conversation I had with choreographer Jimena Paz, for instance, she lamented the number of her university students who arrive “with so much disillusion that their enjoyment decreases. They say, ‘I don’t enjoy dancing anymore,’ and this is criminal.”
Given that the number of hours we spend in the studio far outweighs the number of hours we have in performance, could we improve the quality of our time in process by reconnecting to some good old-fashioned playtime?...Keep reading on Dance Magazine.