With many young people returning to school in person this week and hopefully to dance studios after the Easter holidays, there’s been a lot of discourse around ‘catching up’. Absolutely I think we all acknowledge the disruption that the past year has had on our working and learning (whether still a student or not!) but I wonder whether reframing and noticing the learning that has been able to take place was different instead of lesser than could be helpful.
In September 2020, I returned to the studio to lead several classes each week in contemporary dance. For the first 3 weeks everyone was able to attend in person, from week 4 individual students started having to isolate due to positive cases in their bubbles at school and the studio set up became blended with some students attending in person and others attending simultaneously on Zoom from their homes. Subsequently, we have encountered various national restrictions resulting in the entire class being delivered remotely via Zoom. The majority of classes in this 6-month period have been conducted online.
In adapting to this everchanging scenario, I am very thankful that I do not deliver syllabus classes – I feel that I can be really responsive to the needs that I see evolving without having to worry about covering set exercises or exam material. Through my observations of the learning that has been taking place in this way I start to wonder:
One recent highlight in my online teaching was having a student vocalise a request not to include a turn which I had incorporated into a sequence – turning on the floor on which she found herself was hurting her foot - which I gladly adapted for her. I think there’s something about each person being in their own unique space which grants a validity, permission and confidence to make a request for an adapted movement offering – it absolutely can’t be one size fits all. I have joked about how it seems to me that students are ‘wearing’ their rooms for online class, what follows this observation is that both I and them respect the uniqueness of their spaces and the demands for translation that are apparent because of that extra part of their experience that can be seen by me and felt by them. The development from here is surely how much each student can value their own bodies as individual landscapes with their own needs and demands, especially when we return to a shared studio and common spatial conditions, and that I as a teacher can remember, understand and encourage that there is still time and importance for any requests to adapt a moment that is not sitting comfortably within an individual’s body on a particular day. Or equally, to see and celebrate choices being made which cater to each person’s individual experience without permission being sought – that each person is an expert in their own needs and shouldn’t always disregard them in service to a desire for conformity, movement unison or a particular aesthetic.
What I have also come to realise more clearly in my teaching this year, is how important it is to me to allow time for students to delve into their own understanding and creation of movement – I don’t want to be the only voice in the room literally or figuratively. To this end, I have been allocating about a third of class time to give space for improvisation in response to proposed themes and to really enable students to prioritise their bodies and thoughts ahead of an attachment to the screen. The reward in this is that I see students begin to grasp their own potential to shape their physical movement language beyond replicating taught shapes but also an emerging confidence to organise their thoughts, finding appropriate language to articulate or approximate their experience and share verbally. One such instance came about via an improvisation where I asked students to imagine they were in a room sized chocolate fountain and the aim was to cover as much of their body surface in a layer of chocolate, and then to play with the idea that instead of having a body they were a strawberry, a grape, a marshmallow or a chocolate brownie and noticing if being any of these foodstuffs changed how they moved or thought. In a moment of reflection immediately after, one student unmuted and observed that ‘being’ a chocolate brownie was their favourite exploration because being already made of chocolate it seemed there was a possibility that rather than just being coated with the liquid chocolate from the fountain, they could absorb it and so there was an internal shift alongside the external – a change in their relationship with the boundary/ permeability of their skin in that moment. That kind of creative learning and the ability to express it really excites me.
For me, I don’t want to push the narrative of these students as needing to catch up or having missed out. Instead, I admire them as ground breakers in disrupting learning systems based largely on tradition and nostalgia. There has been some incredible learning going on and I for one feel a responsibility for ensuring it is not brushed aside or diminished but that it informs my practice in facilitating going forwards. Hopefully by writing it down here, I will continue to hold myself accountable to that aim.