Attack of the Clones!

I think the main premise of dance education must be “balance.”

The idealistic constructivist teaching ethos and rhetoric of “movement” based dancing, or “do what you feel” or “just have fun” or “do it your way” that many throw out into the wind like flotsam is flawed because it is imbalanced. It makes dancers think that there is no need for dance pedagogy or a kinesthetic understanding of root, vocabulary and nuance(groove). Although it would be great to have people solely creating, there first has to be an establishment of foundation. Upon learning the foundations, then one can branch out and experiment with the fine tuning of their own technique or style. Repetition and drilling is necessary to instill muscle movement memory for both choreography and foundational elements.

The objective is to get dancers to assimilate movement quality not mimic it. The mimicry part comes about as a result of “instructors” showing, but not teaching. The only way to assimilate is to comprehend it’s inner workings.

i.e. How do I do this? How can I do it better? Why does my body not look like your body? What angle is that? What body part am I using and how does it connect to how your body looks? These are all things which lend themselves to a more organic understanding of movement and foundation.

The two-way transfer of information comes once the students are invested in the critical thinking process. Without the process of higher order thinking (analysis—>evaluation—>creation), the dance studio environment is skewed, biased and pretty much a wreck of the Hesperus which creates clones, not dancers.

For students to create their own knowledge they must see value in the knowledge that they already have and then see the ways to interconnect this baseline pedagogy with the things they learn in the future. Understanding one’s value leads to a better sense of empowerment, however knowledge without a sense of value leads to entitlement and elitism.

So balance is the answer, both in teaching ethos and in receipt of knowledge.

Safi A. Thomas

Artistic Director

The Hip-Hop Dance Conservatory

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