A website for dancers, dance teachers and others interested in dance
We just had to share these amazing photos of dancer Todd Fox at Miami Marine Stadium, which has become somewhat of a haven for artists of all kinds.
Be sure to visit their Facebook page for more of these…they’re beautiful!
Hopefully they will raise the funds to do some work there and be able to continue supporting dance and the arts!
Brock Clawson is an interesting mix–both a choreographer and a landscape designer. His work with dancers can be seen in the Joffrey’s upcoming Contemporary Choreographers series, running February 12th-February 23 at Chicago’s Auditorium Theater. We asked Brock some questions about his process and his current work, which we’re pleased to share with you today…
What is your background in dance?
I started my dance training when I was about 12. I am trained in ballet, modern, and jazz. I moved to Chicago immediately after graduating high school and continued studying dance at Columbia College Chicago as well as taking classes with various studios like Lou Conte, Ruth Page and through the scholarship program at Giordano Dance Chicago.
How did you wind up choreographing?
I was dancing with Thodos Dance Chicago and began choreographing through their New Dances program which provides company members with a budget and gives them the opportunity to create their own works on professional dancers. It really made sense to me and I saw a level of dedication and passion in myself that had been lacking in performing. The company recognized my talents and began providing me with regular choreography opportunities as well as a promotion in the company to become their Artistic Associate. It all sort of snow balled from there and bigger and better jobs started coming my way.
What is your process like when you make a dance?
When I am working on a new creation, I generally come up with a concept first, and then start the difficult task of finding music that I want to create to. That generally leads to me moving around a lot at home (in my kitchen) to come up with some thematic movement that I can take to the dancers. I tend to draw out a lot of patterns and have partnering ideas and movement phrases all put together before I even start working with the dancers. I like to be as prepared as possible in order to keep things interesting and moving once I am in rehearsal.
Joffrey is performing one of your pieces, Crossing Ashland, as part of their Contemporary Choreographers series this month. Can you describe how the idea for this piece came about?
This isn’t a short and easy answer, but I will do my best. It’s more of a series of events that lead into the idea.
I recently finished a 3 year program at the Regenstein School of the Chicago Botanic Gardens studying Landscape Design and horticulture. I wanted to study another form of design that would further my choreography. In horticulture school there is a common phrase that you hear all the time, “Right Plant, Right Place” – which basically means that a plant can survive in it’s non ideal environment but it will never really be at its best unless it is given the proper elements it requires to help it truly thrive.
I started to relate it to humans and began thinking about how many of us go through our lives in either the wrong relationship, job, location, etc., and what happens if we actually challenge ourselves to find our “right place”.
My partner and I live in a neighborhood that is split by Ashland Avenue. While walking our dogs we would often say to one another, “Do you want to cross Ashland?” Most of the time we would choose not to, but every once in a while, when we were up for something different and feeling like going somewhere new and unfamiliar we would cross. It sort of became a metaphor for change.
How did you select the music for Crossing Ashland?
I listened to so much music that I thought I was going to go crazy. I knew that I wanted to be able to have multiple pieces of music that would help the piece move but they all needed to fit together in order to create a through line for the work. It’s not easy to do if you aren’t going with classical music which I knew I didn’t want to do.
What is a typical day like when you are working on teaching the choreography to the dancers?
I tend to work pretty quickly because I always have this terrifying fear that I am going to not finish something. It has never actually happened but I always want to make sure that I have more time at the end of a process than at the beginning.
Generally the first week is just teaching the dancers the movement and working on the style. It’s different than what a lot of them are used to but because they are such gifted athletes and dancers they have been welcoming the challenge and doing a fantastic job adapting. What’s the day really like? Move, move, move! Go, go, go!
It barely stops until you go home.
How long will it take to set Crossing Ashland on the company from start to finish?
Well, that’s the magic question.
I am only one week into the process and I have 2 more to go. I am hoping that It will be completely finished at the end of week two so that my final week can be all about really digging in to the cleaning and the style and talking about the emotion behind the piece. I love coaching dancers through the emotional ride that works should carry from section to section. That’s where it gets really fun for me.
What do you enjoy most about the process of making dances?
I love being in a room with talented people that share the same passion. I love relaying my vision to the dancers and feeding off of the energies of the dancers in the room that are really clicking with me and that are on board with what I am doing.
The creative process is always full of ups and downs for me…that’s just how it has always been. I have my great days and I have my days where I wonder why I am even doing this…but it is always incredibly rewarding in the end. Nothing else in life challenges me to grow as much as choreography has.
Do you have any advice for aspiring choreographers?
This is always a difficult question for me to answer, but ultimately I would say…make yourself vulnerable, and never lose sight of the fact that you are creating for a paying audience.
What is coming up next for you?
Hawaii to relax for two weeks after the Joffrey ends. My favorite place on earth. After that…more choreography and landscape design jobs.
by Lucy Vurusic-Riner
Over the past 15 years, I have choreographed over 30 high school dances. Everything ranging from the 3 minute, pas de bourree heavy jazz dance to the Basement Jaxx (most of us high school teachers have been there) to the epic (meaning long) 10-minute modern piece about feminism. How do we keep it fresh?
So I have compiled some thoughts on what has helped me keep things fresh as I embark on making dance 37 this month.
Resolution #1:
Find a classic. This is my own advice that I have never taken. I have never re-staged the same dance twice.
I’m not saying that this is smart. After all, if you really feel you have made a “classic” than allow it to grow into that! But as each new school year starts, and I begin to think about what I could possibly try to come up with next, I still can’t bring myself to recycle dances. It’s not that I don’t think it’s a great idea. It’s more that I just don’t have the memory to recall old work. I hate trying to remember movement from video and although I’m sure I have students that can video learn circles around me I hate to ask them to do that. I really enjoy the process of teaching them a dance and seeing what they bring to it. Sometimes we lose that bit of magic when they have to learn someone else’s part. Nevertheless, we all have that one dance that we look back on and say, “Dang, that was a high school masterpiece.” So one of this year’s choreography resolutions is that I will go back and dig through the good stuff!
Resolution #2:
Allow my students to shape the work more! It’s no secret to my students (and husband) that I am a control freak. I’m always amazed when I’m in a process where the choreographer gives the dancers a large amount of artistic freedom. I teeter back and forth on this point. If I give them too much material to make on their own they’ll think I’m lazy or don’t know what I’m doing; but if I don’t give them any artistic license they don’t feel any ownership over the final product….plus, I get crazy trying to do everything myself.
The latter is what generally happens to me. I just can’t let go of what I want to see and how I want to see it. The problem with this is that I sometimes end up not satisfied because the end product doesn’t look like I thought it would. So this year my students will get to put themselves into my work in some way (let’s hope it’s not in the form of a toe touch to the splits)!
Resolution #3: [Read more…]
TuTu Much! Follows nine female ballet students through the audition process for Canada’s Royal Winnipeg Ballet School. These girls are pushed to their physical and emotional limits over the course of the four-week summer school, which serves as an audition for the RWBS year-round professional division. They compete with friends, classmates, and roommates, but most intensely with themselves. They’ve taken to heart the message that dance is hard work and not for the faint of spirit, the indifferent, or the undisciplined. They’re regular kids with big, serious ambitions, and they handle themselves with poise where there are careers are concerned. To balance the solemnity of the studio, there’s plenty of levity in endearing shots of the girls video chatting with family, mock-fighting with water sprayers, and raiding the school vending machines.
This film is an honest look into one school’s selection process, and the nine young subjects, their teachers, and their families are all very candid about the ups and downs of professional ballet training. The film hit selected movie theaters across Canada in 2010, giving the general public a peek into this foreign, mostly inaccessible world. Producers Vonnie Von Helmolt and Merit Jensen Carr and Director Elise Swerhone deserve kudos for presenting to the public a much more realistic look at professional dance training—what it actually takes to “make it”—than any American TV program ever has.
TuTu Much! made me root for all parties involved. I wanted these young women to succeed. I felt for their parents facing tough financial and family decisions. I sympathized with the teachers’ demands that every student bring her full effort into the work. Though most appealing to a dance audience, the film is important in a broader sense because it presents a set of highly driven young people, something that seems to be increasingly rare. It’s mostly straight talk about the sometimes harsh realities of the dance world, with just enough sweetness and charm to be satisfying.
“Mirror, Mirror on the Wall……..”
I’m happy to introduce you to our guest author, Sally Radell, a faculty member at Dance at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. Sally has been researching the use of mirrors in the dance classroom –how they can help us, and how they can hinder us. I first saw her present her work in this area in 2004, at the Taiwan International Dance Medicine Conference in Taipei. It is fascinating research, and well worth knowing about, both as a dancer and a teacher. Her article this month is geared towards what dancers need to know –coming in March: what teachers need to know, to promote the healthy use of mirrors in their students!
A personal note here — like most dancers, I grew up with mirrors in the studio, and never thought anything about it….it was a part of the dance world. But at American Dance Festival, in the 1980’s, I encountered Betty Jones, the world-famous Jose Limon dancer and teacher, who literally changed my dance life in many ways — including the use of mirrors in teaching. Betty was firmly against using them constantly — she had a small one in the studio, to use if necessary to point out something to a student. But her mantra was “Mirrors put you outside your body, not in it” –
knowing what I know now about the science of movement, and neurology, I completely understand what she meant.
I studied 10 years with Betty, and started integrating many of her classroom techniques into my own teaching, including the use (or not) of mirrors. I would make the dancers face away from the mirrors (we did not have drapes to cover them) for much of the class. It was fascinating to see the gradual change in their bodies, facial expressions, and movement.
Something to think about…..!
Aloha –
Jan__________________________________________________________
by Sally A. Radell, MFA, MA
When I reflect on my own time as a student training in dance I see myself staring at my image in the ever-present classroom mirrors. I recall a nagging voice in my head telling me that I was never thin enough, that I was not sufficiently strong, or that I was not as fluid as the other dancers. The mirror is indeed a potent tool in the dance classroom. Each dancer develops a personal relationship with the mirror, a relationship that is influenced by various factors including the technical level of the material taught, years of training, previous experiences in the art form, and comparison to others in the classroom. Often this relationship is combative, and it becomes a common part of a dance classroom culture.
Advantages of Mirror Use
There are positive reasons to use a mirror in dance training. The mirror provides dancers with immediate visual feedback and is helpful in self-correction. It allows them to evaluate the height, shape, and line of their movement, and to adjust their placement. It enables them to easily see the performance of the movement from several perspectives, which can help dancers learn a new movement phrase more quickly.
Disadvantages of Mirror Use
When dancers spend too much time looking at themselves in the mirror, however, they can become overly self-conscious and self-critical. This presents several problems in a dancer’s training.
Sally Radell is professor of dance at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She holds a BA in dance from Scripps College in Claremont, California, an MA in dance from The Ohio State University, and an MFA in dance from Arizona State University.
She came to Emory in 1987 to start a degree program in dance. The substantial growth of the program and success of this endeavor is one of her proudest professional accomplishments. Ms. Radell has been active as a choreographer, teacher, performer, administrator, dance critic, and somatic educator. Over the past twenty years she has conducted research on dancers, body image, and the mirror and has published in professional journals including Journal of Dance Medicine & Science, Research in Dance Education, and Perceptual and Motor Skills. Professor Radell has also presented nationally and internationally on this topic with different organizations including the International Association of Dance Medicine and Science. She is committed to the promotion of psychological wellness for dancers.
