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Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: A Dance Teacher’s Perspective

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Happy March! I hope spring is making a welcome appearance in your part of the country / world!

We recently had an article on Mirrors in the Classroom, by Sally Radell, of Emory University in Atlanta, GA. The first
article was written more for the dancer — Sally has now written one for us which focuses on mirror use from
the teacher’s perspective.  

It’s so important for teachers to understand the effect mirrors can have – both positive and negative – and how to best integrate them into classroom teaching, for the students’ best interests. As I mentioned in my intro for Sally’s
first article, I always remember the great Betty Jones (Jose Limon Company dancer and world-famous Limon teacher) saying, “mirrors put you outside your body, not in it” — good words to take to heart, and now we have recent research, such as Sally Radell’s, to give scientific support to them!

Happy Spring 🙂

Jan

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137_3791by Sally A. Radell, MFA, MA

It’s easy to develop a “mirror addiction” when teaching dance. This is particularly evident when teaching beginning level technique classes. I primarily use the mirror as a classroom management tool to visually “bring all of us together” in the learning of new phrases. I usually have the whole class face the mirror. I stand in front, also facing the mirror, as I demonstrate the new material with the dancers behind me following along. This enables me to watch the students as I guide them through the phrase while simultaneously calling out movement cues to help them through the challenging portions of the material. This can be a particularly efficient use of time in short dance classes where I am always pushing myself to make it through my lesson. However, I have noticed a certain level of dependence on using the mirror in my teaching; too much reliance on the mirror can create problems that are detrimental to students’ technical development and body image.

What are the drawbacks of mirror use in the dance classroom?

  • Especially when I work with beginning dancers, I see that the visual reflection of their bodies in the mirror is a more powerful experience than the proprioceptive muscular sensation of performing a movement. Under these circumstances, a dancer “removes herself from her body” to the point where she cannot learn to fully trust her proprioceptive self. Yet without full access to this movement information, a dancer’s growth can be impeded.
  • Research shows that mirrors in dance classes can contribute to the development of a poor body image for dancers.  Often more advanced students will be more critical of their body in the mirror because they have a more highly developed eye for identifying technical weaknesses. They struggle to negotiate between the two-dimensional reflection of their body in the mirror and their three-dimensional body in motion.  This heightened self-consciousness may cause a dancer to see her body as an object to compare to others in the room. This whole dehumanizing process can cause stress, negative self-evaluation, and ultimately a poor body image.
  • Teaching with mirrors can slow down the development of a dancer’s technical skills, especially in the slower adagio phrase where students find plenty of time for mirror-gazing. The more they focus on individual positions, the less likely they are to learn the flow of movement and the muscular connections a dancer needs for smooth technical advancement.
  • Remember that not all students have the maturity and objectivity to use the mirror constructively. Dance counselor Julia Buckroyd, who is an emeritus professor from the University of Hertfordshire in the UK, reports that most teenage students are unable to see an accurate image of themselves in the mirror. They cannot detach themselves from their reflection in order to benefit fully from the information the mirror provides.

So what’s a dance teacher to do? [Read more…]

Review: Modern Ballet Studio Melodies – Sounds Of Christmas

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by Catherine L. Tully

What a delight! Christopher Hobson has really come up with lovely arrangements that work for ballet class here on “Sounds of Christmas“. I doubt it was an easy task to make these songs fit for barre and center, but the way he has done it–they sound totally natural.

51yOUBVxM+L._SL500_AA280_I can see this being a great fit for classes at any level. Children may recognize familiar Nutcracker tunes such as Waltz of the Flowers or the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. They’ll certainly know favorites such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Jingle Bells!

There is certainly plenty here for adults as well, with tracks such as Santa Baby and O Holy Night. Some are fun, some are beautiful–and all are extremely well crafted. Where a collection of Christmas music tends to make one worry about it being a campy bunch of poorly arranged tracks, instead Hobson has done the opposite and delivered a treasure trove of melodies for use in any ballet class.

Get yourself this Christmas gift–or give it to a teacher you know for the holiday. It’s terrific.

Available on iTunes.

Disclosure: MBSM advertises on 4dancers

“Studio Thinking” In Dance

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brain_largeby Janet Neidhardt

Throughout the school year I teach my students how to choreograph dances as works of art. We work on movement invention and manipulation, creating phrases, and finding form in movement. We discuss the elements of space, time, and energy, and how they facilitate the creation of climactic moments and communication within movement.

No matter how much we practice exploration and play as a class, when it comes time for small group choreography projects, it always seems that my students are so eager to get to the product that they pass by the process in the blink of an eye. I feel like a broken record sometimes when I say “explore, play, try it one way and then try it five more different ways to make sure you discovered what you feel to be the strongest way to dance it.” Placing greater emphasis on process verses product is something that I am constantly reinforcing with my students and the assignments given to them.

I try to create rubrics that are more open to interpretation however I find that if I do not give some specific instructions/structure then the students get confused. I recently assigned a small group choreography project to my students and while the rubric requires the use of various choreographic elements, it also said it had to be two minutes long. After one week of working in groups (they have three weeks to get this done) almost every group had close to two minutes of choreography done and they looked around at each other like “Wow we are almost done!”

This is when I stopped them and said “Now you need to explore, play, edit, and layer your movements with variety.” I told them week two needs to be about exploration and discussed what it meant to be in the process of dance making. I have started to discuss the studio thinking approach with my students in order to help them enter a fresh mindset of expectations. [Read more…]

CD Review: Modern Ballet Studio Melodies Vol 4

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by Emily Kate Long

Modern Ballet Studio Melodies, Volume 4 by the talented Christopher Hobson is a standout for its variety in style and its inspiring energy. The album contains thirty-six tracks of music with no repeats for the seventeen barre pieces. Hobson plays something for everyone, from Debussy and Prokofiev to the themes from “South Park,” ET and Indiana Jones.

859710286835_cover.170x170-75All the music on the disc is dynamic, and the adagio tracks, seven in all, are especially sensitive and lyrical. The two grande allegro tracks are on the slow side, but the rest of the allegro music has a wide enough range of length and tempi to make this CD work for many different class levels. The same is true of the music for barre: most exercises have multiple choices of music. The versatility offered here comes as no surprise; in addition to composing and arranging music for the studio and the stage, Hobson has been commissioned to compose music for the International Dance Teachers Association’s entire ballet syllabus.

Overall Christopher Hobson delivers a delicious mix of brightness, weight, attitude, and spice on Modern Ballet Studio Melodies 4. It’s suitable and inspiring for many levels from intermediate student to professional.

Dancing to Feed the Body…Not Starve It

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modern dancer
Lucy Vurusic Riner

by Lucy Vurusic Riner

As a high school dance educator you can’t really avoid the issue of body image in your dance class.  There are ways to skirt around the issue, maybe even make light of it at times when things are tense, and there is always the batch of us that quite honestly, make it worse.

So I’m suggesting we face it head on.  Some thoughts on how we as dance educators can start turning this horrible phenomenon around:

1.  This point is number one for a reason.  Dance Educators need to check their own personal opinions of body image at the door.

We all, at some point in our careers, have bought into the stereotype of what the dancer body looks like no matter how hard we try not to.  Our own images of our bodies may have even prevented some of us from following a dream we had in dance because we assumed our bodies needed to look a certain way.  We also all know a teacher that said something mean or inappropriate to us (and we remember it don’t we?); those teachers that said it in our best interest right?

Being a woman in this world is hard enough; being a dancer can add a whole other layer to our insecurities if we aren’t taught in an environment that is safe and nurturing.  How do we address body image in our classes to let young girls, especially many at the middle and high school level that are experiencing puberty, know that they have to love and respect the bodies they are in?  How do we talk to our students about being healthy without looking like we are passing judgment in one way or another?

I try to emphasize that we have different bodies and that they benefit us all in different ways.  I want my students to focus on their strengths.  That doesn’t mean that I don’t want them to work on the things that are challenging for them but I want them to be able to look at their bodies and point out the things that they love about them.

I do an ice breaker exercise early in the year where everyone has to share one thing about themselves as a dancer that they love.  You would have thought I asked them to help raise the debt ceiling.  Blank stares.  But if I asked the opposite question, “If you could fix one thing about yourself as a dancer…” we could spend an entire semester in group therapy.  I actually think some of the girls in my classes do like themselves more than they let on–they just think it’s taboo to let anyone know they like themselves…..Geesh.

I always try to point out the benefits of how each of my dancers is built and how that is special to who they are as movers.  That doesn’t mean I don’t give corrections or feedback, it just means that talking about their physical bodies is irrelevant.  Sadly, there are plenty of places in our society that try to keep us down as women by focusing solely on our bodies and how they SHOULD look.  My job is to continue building my students up regardless of that.

2.  Use your body as a way to show young girls how to appreciate who THEY are. [Read more…]

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